which it is better known than by its parliamentary title, county of Stanley, would produce sugar and cotton; but that those crops would be remunerative to capitalists at the present or probable price of labour in Australia is more than doubtful. Whether any tropical cultivation could be successfully carried on by families of small freeholders remains yet to be tried. At some future period when New South Wales has the power of promoting colonisation without consulting Downing-street, perhaps families of Germans, of the class that have at times settled in Brazil, may be induced to try the experiment.
Moreton Bay is forty-five miles in length, and twenty in breadth, enclosed between the two islands of Stradbroke and Maitland. This harbour is rendered unsafe by numerous shoals and narrrow winding passages.
Moreton Bay Island is nineteen miles in length, and four and a half in breadth. It consists of a series of sandhills one of which is nine hundred feet in height, quite barren in an agricultural point of view, but producing a cypress which is a good furniture wood.
The river Brisbane flows into the bay about the middle of its western side, with a bar on which there are not more than eleven feet of water at flood-tide. Large vessels have to anchor about five miles off? under the shelter of one of the islands.
The towns of Brisbane, north and south, are fourteen miles from the mouth of the river, and thirty-five miles from Ipswich, on the River Bremer, an inland port for shipping wool from the Moreton Bay district.
Steam communication is maintained between Brisbane and Ipswich, and between Moreton Bay and Sydney.
From Moreton Bay a considerable trade is carried on with Sydney, and other less-favoured settlements, especially in the Moreton Bay pine (Auracaria Cunningliami), which is of the same quality as the Norfolk Island pine, as well as wool and tallow, the staples of the country.
In the bay and on the coast the aborigines eagerly pursue the dugong, a species of small whale, generally known to the colonists as the sea-pig. The head of the dugong is small in proportion to his body, and is most singularly shaped. The upper lip is very thick, and flattened at the extremity. It is to this queer looking snout, we presume, that the animal is indebted for the swinish cognomen by which it is ordinarily known. The dugong has a thick smooth skin, with a few hairs scattered over its surface. Its colour is bluish on the back, with a white breast and belly. In size the full-grown male has never, we believe, been found more than eighteen or twenty feet long; but those commonly taken are much less than this.
