174 NUMBER OF ROOMS. Number of rooms. The number of rooms is given for all houses, whether occupied or unoccupied, except in the case of New South Wales and New Zealand, where the figures given refer only to occupied dwellings : Total No. of dwellings 216,219 241,560 80,697 63,887 10,530 29,801 123,851 In Queensland the habitations were enumerated under the Quinquennial Census Act, which does not provide for a statement either of the materials from which houses are constructed or of the number of rooms they contain. The only return yet available for South Australia is that of the total number of houses. Leaving that Colony out of the calculation, in the rest of Australasia there are nearly 54 persons to every occupied house. A AGRICULTURE. tural products. USTRALASIA may, as a whole, be considered as in Value of agriculthe first phase of agricultural settlement, indeed several Colonies have not yet emerged from the pastoral stage. Nevertheless, the value of agricultural produce, estimated at farm prices, is considerable, and amounts to £22,506,080, which is about twothirds the value of the pastoral produce. The return from agriculture in each Colony for the season 1891-92 was, approximately : different From this estimate it would seem that the value of crops, Value in per acre cultivated, is much larger in Queensland and Tasmania Colonies. than in the other Colonies, which, in the case of Queensland, is due to the proportionately large area under sugar-cane, while in Tasmania the area devoted to fruit and hops, and the higher returns of cereals, account for the average per acre which the province shows. In point of gross value Victoria occupies a position much in advance of the other members of the group, the produce of that province having a value little short of one-third of that of 176 Value of principal crops. VALUE OF PRINCIPAL CROPS. all Australasia. The value of the principal crops, and the percentage of each to the total production, are given in the following statement :— Value of produce per head. The average value of agricultural produce per head of the population in each of the Australasian colonies during the season 1891-2, is represented by the figures below which also illustrate the fact that in the colonies of South Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Victoria, the development of agricultural resources is attracting the attention of the colonists to a greater extent than is the case in the other provinces of Australasia. COMPARED WITH OTHER COUNTRIES. 177 other countries. Compared with the principal countries of the world Australasia value of crops in does not take a high position in regard to the gross value of the produce of its tillage, but in value per inhabitant it compares fairly well; indeed some of the Colonies, such as South Australia and New Zealand show an average equalling that of Denmark and France. The following figures, designed to illustrate this, are taken from various places in Mulhall's latest issue of the Dictionary of Statistics: cultivation in 1861-91. The following figures, giving the areas under the principal grain Area under and other crops, and the total extent of land under cultivation in Australasia, each of the Colonies at different epochs since the year 1861, will serve to illustrate the progress agriculture has made. In this Agricultural table, as well as throughout the whole of the chapter, the years 1861, 71, '81, and '91 embrace the periods from 1st April in those years to the 31st March subsequently. M year. |