Each and all of the branches of cultured industry mentioned (with the exception of the growth of sugar-cane) were at disposal for trial here. Soil, climate and aspect are extremely favourable when not approaching absolute perfection, while the advantages of direct communication with the markets are unique. But my disposition, "that rash humour which my mother gave," impelled me to disregard all the encouraging prospects of fortune, and to easily tolerate circumstances and conditions under which few would remain content. True it is that some few acres of jungle have been cleared and various sorts of fruit-trees planted, that corn and potatoes are grown, and that there are evidences of work; but no one is better qualified than I to realise the insignificance of the results of my labours in comparison with what they might have been, had the accomplishment of them been undertaken with harder hands and more determined purpose.

SOME DIFFERENCES

"The weather may be extremely fine; but not without such varieties as shall hinder it from being tiresome."

What higher or better reward could be desired than the reflection that one had attempted to assist in the dispersion of the mists of ignorance which obscure some of the aspects of the land of his adoption? Australia is vast and of infinite variety. The efforts of an individual isolated by remoteness and the sea, must necessarily be circumscribed.

No Australian is able to affirm that his knowledge of the country is entirely satisfactory to himself. There are some points upon which the best informed stand to the correction of others whose general knowledge may be admittedly inadequate. We who are scattered about in odd and out-of-the-way corners, pick up in the school of experience scraps of local knowledge, and may without presumption present them to others to confirm and to conjure with.

The term "Australia" as generally used ignores most of the continent out of sight of Melbourne and Sydney, though both Victoria and New South Wales could be stowed away in little more than half the area of Queensland. Do we reflect that Australia includes some of the driest tracts in the world, as well as areas in which the rainfall approaches the phenomenal--that not very much more than half of the territory of the Commonwealth lies within the temperate zone--that there are as marked differences between Tasmania and North Queensland as between the South of England and Ceylon? That the one is the land of the potato, apple, apricot, cherry, strawberry and blackberry, and the other the land of sugar-cane, coffee, the pine-apple, mango, vanilla and cocoa; that though there exist no imposing geographical boundaries, such as chains of lofty mountains or great rivers to emphasise climatic distinctions, these distinctions nevertheless exist, and that they imply special policies on the parts of Government and Administrations.