For some months past an aerial mail service has been running regularly in Western Australia, the miles, but a new and interesting adoption of the plane is to start this month in western Queensland. There are three railways running inland from the coast, and the new service will link up the western termini, from Charleville, through Longreach to Cloncurry, a distance of nearly 700 miles. While the Commonwealth will subsidize the service for mail purposes, the actual business will be in the hands of a company, there being 600 shareholders, mostly folks interested either as business men in the towns. or as residents in the lonely bush homes. Those shareholders are making their own private aerodromes, the idea being that they will be used, when the full supply of machines is available for taxi work.
In the ordinary course of railivay travelling a journey from Charleville to Cloncurry would take five days; now it will be done in seven flying hours. Those who do not know the bush will never be able to grasp the true significances of this, the latest, application of modern discovery to the defeat of the inhospitalities of untamed nature. Those who do know the bush will understand how very completely the whole economic, social, and industrial outlook of vast areas of country, measuring hundreds of _thousands of square miles, will be altered. It is a mere question of a decade or so and the very word "bush" will have disappeared from our vocabulary in the sense in which it has been used during the past generations.
STATE CATTLE STATIONS, It is hardly necessary to say that, while private enterprise in the business of rearing cattle is hard hit, the Queensland Labour government is suffering even more severely. It bought stations in the boom times, and made money by selling the stock, while at the same time it commandeered meat from the preserving works in order to show a profit from the many political butchers' shops which it started throughout the State. For a time things went well. Then came the slump, and the preserving works did not want cattle. The Commonwealth stepped in and gave a conditional subsidy upon exports. Now we find the State Government selling its cattle to the works to secure the subsidy, and at the same time buying private cattle in the open market for its shops. As a business concern the cattle stations of the State have been a grotesque failure.
The Auditor-General has entered vigorous protests against the way in which the values have been assessed, practically claiming that the Government has robbed - Peter in one place in order to propitiate Paul in another. When it could sell at a profit it did so, just like any other cattle breeder, but it had the additional advantage of having an Act of Parliament through which it could annex meat for its shops at a figure well below that which it was receiving from Great Britain for its own stock.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.