Part 1

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COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA.

WHEAT GROWING IN AUSTRALIA.

ISSUED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, 1915.

By authority: McCARRON, BIRD & CO., PRINTERS, 479 COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE.

Information Concerning AUSTRALIA may be obtained on application to--

IN AMERICA:

THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION, PANAMA PACIFIC EXHIBITION, SAN FRANCISCO.

NIEL NIELSEN, Esq., Trade and Immigration Commissioner for New South Wales, 419 Market Street, San Francisco.

F. T. A. FRICKE, Esq., Land and Immigration Agent for Victoria, 687 Market Street, San Francisco.

IN LONDON:

The High Commissioner for THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA, 72 Victoria Street, Westminster.

IN AUSTRALIA:

The Secretary DEPARTMENT OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS, Collins and Spring Streets, Melbourne.

CONTENTS.

Introduction 5

Australian Wheat Area 12

Factors Governing Wheatgrowing 18

Securing a Wheat Farm 22

Working Plant Required 23

Working the Wheat Farm 26

Cost of Production 34

Share Farming 38

How the Settler is Assisted 43

Social Life in Australia 49

WHEATGROWING IN AUSTRALIA.

With the growing scarcity of foodstuffs that has become a world-wide feature of the last few years, the wheatgrower is one of the most important necessities in civilisation. He has prospered in the past, but the future holds still greater and richer prospects. And in no country in the world are those prospects brighter than in the Commonwealth of Australia. The world's surface is gradually filling up, and most of the older countries have reached sight of the limit of cultivation, so the world's millions have to look to newer lands to provide them with food. The great island continent in the southern seas possesses a vast area of proven wheat land, as yet untouched by the plough. It lies dormant, fertile, and responsive, awaiting the union of labour and land to yield abundance of food.

Australia has many rural industries, but of agriculture wheat is the most important, just as it is the most important of the world's crops. Wheat is the king of cereals--the prime essential of civilised life. Nearly half the inhabitants of the globe are wheat-eaters. And the number is growing, for the Eastern races are becoming consumers of wheat, which is significant of a higher standard of living. For as races rise in the human scale wheat becomes a more important part of their food. This alone shows the increasing importance of the cereal, and the importance of the men who grow it. Indeed, the food value of wheat, its ease of cultivation and preparation for human use, the fact that it will grow and flourish in so many different soils and climates, and can be made into so many and various products, combined with its quick and bountiful return, all go to enhance the value of wheat grain, and the prospects of the man who grows it.