and cereal products. Fruit-growing has been undertaken on a considerable scale, and with every prospect of success. The pearl fishing industry in the north is an important source of employment This great colony stretches from temperate to tropical latitudes. It was in the north of Western Australia that Grien, otherwise "De Rougemont," laid the scene of his romantic adventures. I can vouch for it that no credence was given in the colonies to his stories; and as the cable messages came from London announcing one marvellous fabrication after another the whole continent laughed in derision. As soon as the man's portrait was published he was recognised at once.
It was only in 1890 that constitutional government was granted to Western Australia. The history of the colony before 1890 has yet to be written, and will indeed, recent as most of it is, take some writing. From the mutinies, wrecks and maroonings of the early Dutch navigators on the Abrolhos and the like, to the rescue of Fenian prisoners from Fremantle by the American ship Catalpa in 1876, and even to the doings of the late Mr Deeming at Southern Cross, it is full of startling episodes, though they are mostly tinged with that sordidness which is somehow a characteristic of Australia—the Whitechapel of the colonies. Originally considered a dependency of the Dutch East India Company, and, like New Zealand, nearly annexed by the French in the early decades of this century, the colony was planted, at the instance of Captain Stirling of New South Wales, and Mr Peel, an adventurous capitalist related to the statesman, in 1829. The plan of their syndicate was to settle 10,000 emigrants in the country, who were to grow beef and pork for the Royal Navy, horses for the Honourable East India Company, and cotton and tobacco for the world at large, each on his two hundred acres of land. In return the
