470 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [lL Juxx, 1902. 
IRRIGATION AT BUNDABERG. 
Amongst the most ancient aids to agriculture employed by man must be 
reckoned irrigation. This important work is alluded to in ancient Egyptian 
and Jewish records, and evidences are plentiful in many parts of the East and 
in Italy, Greece, Spain, and Northern Africa. It is unlikely that we shall ever 
know who it was that first made a study of the theory and practice of artificial 
irrigation. It is, however, established that reservoirs and distributing canals 
existed in Egypt in the reign of Sesostris, or, as he was called, Usurtesen I. of 
the XIIth Dynasty of Theban kings. It was an immediate successor of this 
king, Amememhat III., famous for his great engineering works, who conceived 
and carried out the most successful enterprise of its kind ever attempted in 
Egypt, until the great irrigation works of to-day were begun by the British. 
He constructed the vast artificial reservoir, Lake Moris, which received 
and retained the waters of the Nile after the annual inundation had spread 
them over the land. 
Ina rainless country like Egypt, such a magnificent reservoir would prove 
of incalculable benefit to agriculturists, for it may easily be imagined that the 
sweet waters were not left to stagnate, but were conveyed by aqueducts over 
many miles of country, which otherwise would have received no moisture 
beyond that derived from the annual overflow of the Nile, but which, by the 
foresight of the king, joined to the skill of the engineer, were made to bring 
forth abundant crops of grain and other products. 
When we consider that the importance of and necessity for irrigation were 
recognised more than 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, we can but marvel 
that in the twentieth century men are content to depend upon the uncertain 
rainfall to sow and harvest their crops. In this country there are thousands 
of acres lying idle and worthless, so far as the needs of civilisation are concerned, 
which have yet to be won to remunerative agriculture by judicious irrigation 
and drainage. The rainfall, in many districts, is so capricious, the amount of 
water needed to produce heavy crops so great, the difficulties in the way of 
making our soils retain enough of the cloud water which falls to meet the 
demands are so many, that it must be plain to every practical man and student 
of agriculture who has devoted much thought to the subject that the time 
must come when the waters now running to the sea, with their tons of unused 
fertility, will be turned to use in irrigating large tracts of the country through 
which they flow. 
If 12,000,000 acres of the barren sand of the Sahara Desert in Africa have 
been rendered fertile by French enterprise, notwithstanding the absence of fresh- 
water rivers and lakes, what could not be achieved in our richly endowed State 
—richly endowed with vast tracts of fertile lands, numerous rivers flowing full 
in wet seasons to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the North, to the Murray in the 
South, and to the Pacific along our extended coastline ? 
The one thing needful is the priceless boon—water. Although we have 
‘numberless rivers, yet many are but rivers in name, for in dry seasons they are 
either quite dried up and become mere sand beds, or show at best a chain of 
stagnant waterholes. 
It is here, then, that the capitalist and the engineer have such an ample 
field before them in the way of conserving the vast bodies of water which 
penodteally flood the country, and are, as before said, borne away to the sea, 
eaving the rivers to gradually dry up and once more resume their normal state. 
Have we the men and the money to lead the way in this vital matter ? 
Fortunately, there are some enlightened’ agriculturists who have early 
recognised the enormous value of irrigation. On the Burdekin River the 
planters have for some time past been irrigating their crops with great 
advantage. So sure are they of the profit to be derived by irrigation works, 
that no land is placed under crop which cannot be irrigated. 
