he most
important necessities in civilisation. He has prospered in the past, but
the future holds still greater and richer prospects. And in no country
in the world are those prospects brighter than in the Commonwealth of
Australia. The world's surface is gradually filling up, and most of the
older countries have reached sight of the limit of cultivation, so the
world's millions have to look to newer lands to provide them with food.
The great island continent in the southern seas possesses a vast area of
proven wheat land, as yet untouched by the plough. It lies dormant,
fertile, and responsive, awaiting the union of labour and land to yield
abundance of food.

[Illustration: BREAKING UP NEW GROUND.]

Australia has many rural industries, but of agriculture wheat is the
most important, just as it is the most important of the world's crops.
Wheat is the king of cereals--the prime essential of civilised life.
Nearly half the inhabitants of the globe are wheat-eaters. And the
number is growing, for the Eastern races are becoming consumers of
wheat, which is significant of a higher standard of living. For as races
rise in the human scale wheat becomes a more important part of their
food. This alone shows the increasing importance of the cereal, and the
importance of the men who grow it. Indeed, the food value of wheat, its
ease of cultivation and preparation for human use, the fact that it will
grow and flourish in so many different soils and climates, and can be
made into so many and various products, combined with its quick and
bountiful return, all go to enhance the value of wheat grain, and the
prospects of the man who grows it.

Science is teaching how to produce more wheat from the same area, is
improving the varieties of wheat and the methods of cultivating it, and
teaching how to restore impoverished lands. And there is still an
enormous area as yet untouched, while land is being utilised now that
twenty years ago was deemed incapable of growing wheat. Who can tell
what the future will find?

Australia alone has many millions of acres of wheat land as yet unused
for that purpose. One of the youngest of nations, yet one of the oldest
parts of the world geologically, it can house and feed millions more
than its present population. There is room for the extension and
continuation of the magnificent progress that wheatgrowing has already
made. The story of wheat cultivation is the story of progress. In
Australia, wi