we listen with unending interest

There is an open-handed hospitality about Queenslanders that one seldom meets with elsewhere; a simple introduction, and often not even that, is sufficient to serve as a pretext for showering kindness after kindness upon visitors you find limited . Before we have been an hour in the place we are made to feel quite at home, and have accepted numerous offers from kind-hearted residents to make our stay pleasant.

After lunch we walk out and inspect the town. The main street is a fine thoroughfare flanked by good buildings, in many instances of quite imposing architecture. It follows the windhigs of Ross Creek, and lies on the flat between that watercourse and Castle Hill. It is too steamy to hurry, so we stroll leisurely along, noting as we go how even in this little out-of-the-way spot everything is up to date. In spite of the much-talked-of depression in trade, business seems brisk enough; clerks hurry in and out of merchants’ offices, most of the shops seem to have their fair share of customers, telegraph boys run hither and thither at speed quite unsuited to the climate, a labour agitator is gesticulating wildly to an attentive audience at a street corner, while now and again bronzed and bearded bushmen loiter by with every sign of being down on a much appreciated holiday Cloud Hosting .

Thanks to the courtesy of a resident, we are introduced to numerous influential citizens, to whose ideas on important subjects affecting North Queensland, and more particularly Townsville, One thing strikes us, and that is the wonderful unanimity that exists in every mind on the vital subject of Separation, of which movement, be it remembered, Townsville is the head centre. The word is in everybody’s mouth, and we, who are strangers and but little posted in such matters, wonder what on earth it all may mean. When we are more conversant with the subject it evolves itself into something like the following; but perhaps it would be better if I give the views of the special correspondent of the London ‘Times’ on the subject, who is better qualified to speak than I.

The politics of Queensland are so entirely the outcome of the development of its natural resources that to speak of them intelligently without first describing the country as it is, would be almost impossible. With few exceptions, the best men in the colony are employed in developing it. They are not in politics, and take little interest in political movements, unless the prosperity of the industry in which they are engaged is in some way affected. Most political questions have their origin in the material necessities of at least one section of the community. If these are or seem to be at variance with the interests of other portions of the community, the movement which springs from them becomes a subject for contest, which is more or less hotly and generally maintained in proportion to the number of people affected. No political interest is long sustained unless it involves material loss and gain. None can touch material advantage without becoming a matter of importance. A theory of federation falls dully on the public ear autism treatment . The mass of the electorate is just as indifferent as it is willing to vote either way. But a question of coloured labour, which involves the life or death of the sugar industry, will bring a number of the most influential men in the country at fighting heat to the polls. Planters, of course, desire it; the mass of the mining population living and working in districts where white labour is perfectly possible are opposed to a practice which will, they believe, tend to lower alike the dignity of labour, and the rate of wages. The introduction of coloured races becomes a question between labour and capital, and is fought on that ground with certain modifications. Some of the labourers are beginning to promise the double advantage of encouraging a thriving industry which gives employment to a great deal of skilled white labour in the factories, and of passing individually from the condition of employed, in which they now are, to that of employers of the new cheap labour, which under the small fanning system they can easily become. On the other hand, some of the capitalists, who are not personally interested in tropical agriculture, are disposed to vote against the introduction of servile peoples upon a continent of which the population and the customs, notwithstanding the existence of a few aborigines, are for all practical purposes purely European. They fear that the small beginning may result in complications of such magnitude as those with which the United States are now called upon to deal dermes.