APPENDIX No. 10.

South Australia.

Statement by Mr. Robert Kelly, Farmer, and Member of the Land, Pastoral and Advances to Settlers Boards, on the Settlement of Mallee Country.

The subject of how best to utilise the vast belts of mallee country generally is a very big one, and the danger in writing up the various points will be want of brevity and conciseness, but I will endeavour to keep those graces well in hand.

I believe you will receive a wealth of information from the representative men of our mallee districts, the names of whom we supplied you with a little while ago.

Opening up a new areas in isolated districts must necessarily be fraught with many difficulties for the pioneer, and experience has taught that better results follow if the primary factors, i.e., water, and roads of access to port or railway are, in a measure, provided by the Government before actual settlement takes place. If the country lends itself to good hard natural roads, settlement might extend with hope of profitable occupation to say, 15 miles from port or railway, providing the land is of fair quality and within a 10 or 12 inch rainfall, but, if in sandy country, a distance of five or six miles should be the limit of settlement until roads are improved. Pioneer settlers have not the strength over heavy roads.

Of late years on our country east of the River Murray, we have the roads cleared of mallee stumps. etc., and grubbed, and the cost, which amounts to about 3d. per acre on a fair sized block, is added to the capital value of the land. This is a course which is greatly appreciated by the settlers.

Water Provision.—If this can be successfully overcome so that each farmer has it on his own farm, or, in the initial stages, within workable distance, the most essential requirement will have been achieved. On our country east and west of the River Murray, over a greater part of the area, good and abundant water can be obtained by boring, at an average depth of about 200 feet. The bore, with windmill, tank, and troughs, costs from £150 to £200, and the settler can apply for a loan to defray the cost, from the Advances to Settlers Board, for this or for any other purpose in connection with the development of his block, and repay it in 20 annual instalments.

Eyres Peninsula, commonly known as our West Coast Country, where we have very extensive belts of mallee lands, is unfortunately, with but few exception, devoid of natural waters or water by boring, or sufficient watersheds, or suitable soil for holding water. It has cost our Government large sums of money in putting down huge reservoirs, the outlay in connection with witch has been spread over the blocks in the districts benefited, and added to the capital value of each block, but, as the rainfall is limited and precarious, the reservoirs are not reliable. We have tried another scheme which has been much approved by the setters, viz., to erect iron tanks and sheds on the better class of blocks, having four tanks of a capacity of 10,000 gallons, the structures costing about £135, the cost of which is treated as with the reservoirs and the cleaning of roads. The sites for the tanks are selected by the surveyors as suitable for the homestead, and the shed acts as a temporary dwelling until the farmer is in a position to build, also as a shed for machinery.

Clearing and killing of shoots.—In South Australia, various methods of clearing mallee scrub are adopted, and are usually governed by the circumstances of the settler, and the class of scrub being dealt with. It is, however, generally recognised that logging or rolling down is the quickest and most economical method and can be applied in the heaviest mallee, with a sufficiently strong plant. It is of great advantage, of course, to do this work, particularly logging, during a period when the land is in a fairly wet condition, as a vast quantity of roots come up whole in the falling of the bigger timber. This cost of logging here averages about 5s. an acre, and rolling and clearing from 4s. to 7s. an acre. The best time for rolling or logging is after seeding, say June to September, and then, when the scrub is thoroughly dry, a suitable hot day should be selected from the burning. A lot depends on a good burn, both as regards the virtue which such adds to the land, and also the cost of clearing up ready for the plough, cultivator, or drill, for, on a lot of our good sandy loam country, following a good, hot, slow burn, all that is needed to ensure a good crop is to run the rill over it with about three-quarters of a bushel of wheat without any fertiliser. We consider it a great misfortune if we cannot secure a good burn, failing which, the cultivator, with super, must be used to secure a profitable crop. The great aim of our best mallee farmers is to rid the country, as soon as possible, of the mallee shoots, and this is the greatest difficulty the settlers have to contend with. Accomplish that, and, combined with a water supply and fair railway facilities, the success of farming our mallee country is assured. To get rid of the shoots, the system widely adopted is to secure, if possible, a sufficient covering to ensure a good stubble burn by sowing in succession two crops of wheat fairly thick—say a bushel to the acre, and the third year a crop of oats, say 1½ bushels to the acre. With three successful burns 90 per cent. of the mallee stumps will be destroyed. The best farmers are content with treating, say, a third of their holding in that way, and then following it up wit ha good early fallow, and after completion of the fallowing, rolling down another third and proceeding as before. Deplete the farm of mallee shoots and then the farmer can resort to mixed farming, which will less his cost, unmistakably improve the wheat-producing properties of his holding, replenish his banking account, and, instead of farming being a life of drudgery and hard work, it becomes an ideal gentleman's life in time, interesting and profitable. Certainly so much depends upon the man himself. Another important point that mallee farmers, in fact all farmers, have to guard against is the impoverishing of the soil by constant overcropping with wheat. The result of such management is that the land becomes honeycombed with that dread disease "takeall," the cause and cure of which our best scientific men have not yet been able to unravel, but most of our best farmers know that if they can success in getting a good hot burn of stubble disease. If a man wishes to encourage "takeall" amongst his crop let him work the ground when it is dry. The moral is, never work land with a scarifier or cultivator before or during tilling, when the ground is dry and works up roughly.

Limitation of holding.—Our practice has been to subdivide our mallee country into blocks varying from, say, 700 to 2,000 acres, quality of land and facilities of approach to railways or seaboard being the determining factors. If at a considerable distance from these then the larger areas of course. From 1,200 to 1,800 acres is about an ideal holding, even with the mixed farming proposition in prospect. A man should have four good draught horses to start with ( gradually breeding up to 12), a roller, drill, cultivator and harrows, of a value of say, in normal times, about £220, and cash, say £150, to carry him on until he reaps his first crop. Some men would succeed with that start, others would require treble that amount and then fail.

Adelaide, 17th April, 1917.