Cotton in Australia: the Possibilities and the Limitations of Australia as a Cotton-growing Country

Abstract

THE author describes this book as the result of eighteen months' investigation made in Australia, when secretary of the British Cotton Delegation, 1922. He sets out to prove that great areas of that continent can produce cotton commercially; of course he succeeds. At first one is inclined to resent the facile optimism of the fourth chapter, which is especially devoted to this proof, where the author openly omits a drought year from his averages and guesses the available resources in six significant figures; but having duly discounted his rather uncritical attitude, we can welcome this book as the first available general statement of the Australian cotton position. That the country has large potential cotton areas is clear; the Government proposes to face the basic difficulty of getting labour for the picking season (from white men in a cotton-growing climate) by planting many small areas, each on one man's small holding. Whether the plan will work remains to be seen, but Mr. Harding certainly puts his finger on two essentials; one is the cultivation of a big boll type, since the labour of picking a given weight of crop is almost inversely proportional to the boll weight; the other is the advisability of insisting on quality, though we think he perhaps overrates here the agricultural virtue of the white as compared with the coloured man.

Cotton in Australia: the Possibilities and the Limitations of Australia as a Cotton-growing Country.

By Richard Harding. Pp. xviii + 270. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924.) 12s. 6d. net.