of another sort, who came to Queensland from Essex forty years ago, to work on a station at 15s. a week. He contrived to take up a selection, which has grown into his present fine property; some of which has been cropped for thirty-four years continuously with wheat, without manure, and some of which again, under lucerne, is valued at £50 the acre.
There are drawbacks, of course, to unmitigated agriculture; faults inherent, apparently, to a population of small farmers, unrelieved by the civilising, or supervising, influence of a landlord or larger landed class. It is often remarked by Australians that, while their upper classes of pasturalists or commercial men, and successful men generally, are largely Scotch, the colonial Irish, when not policemen, publicans, or professional politicians, are generally small and rather thriftless and disorderly selectors.
In Queensland, as we have seen, there is a large element of Irishmen (11 per cent, as against some 3 per cent, in Tasmania), who have shown a certain tendency to congregate in particular country sides, to which their inherited ideas in some measure give the prevailing tone. The Gatton murders, for example—perhaps the most horrid crime of this century—struck terror, in the early part of this year, into the rural population of the northern end of the Darling Downs district, not so very far from Brisbane itself. And in their investigation of the Gatton murders the police were baffled by a conspiracy of half-cowed and half-sympathetic country-folk, which almost seems to have imposed itself on the very relatives of the unfortunate victims. The state of society near Gatton has points in common with that obtaining in the purely agricultural parts of Gippsland, in Victoria; a district where the squatter has been improved out of existence, and where, consequently, the young bloods among the selectors, who
