Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland (1871-1880) — John Shaqi
Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland (1871-1880)Weitemeyer, Thorvald Peter Ludwig
History
Missing Friends: Being the Adventures of a Danish Emigrant in Queensland (1871-1880)
Weitemeyer, Thorvald Peter Ludwig
Queensland -- Description and travel
This is, I am sure, quite a faithful picture of my wild ideas of
Queensland after I had elicited all the information I could get.
The Government of Queensland spends yearly, I do not remember how large
a sum, in promoting free emigration. They prepared at great cost, and
with elaborate exactness, statistics to show the commercial position of
the country. Then they trust all this to the care of some office at
home, whose officials know little or nothing about Queensland. The
principal in such an office puts a clerk at the counter who has,
perhaps, no other qualification for the work than a facility for
talking. Fancy a home-bred peasant coming into such a place with the
care of a family on his shoulders, and a little money in the bank, and
think of the clerk talking to him about gold-fields and firearms and
statistics, all the time admitting he never was in the colony himself! I
think it is quite enough to prevent any one going out. And yet people of
that class are the only class of poor men who really can do well in
Queensland, and they are almost the only desirable sort of emigrants for
the country itself. The reason is that such a man can, after a very
short spell of colonial experience, go on to a piece of crown land, and
by residing there for five years, and making certain improvements
thereto, very soon get a living out of the soil, and while keeping his
children round him, be independent of everybody. But such people are at
a premium in Queensland. On the other hand, the towns out here are
crowded with men who seek for light work, and I have no hesitation in
asserting that for certain people, such as junior clerks without
influence, grocers' and drapers' assistants, second-class tradesmen,
&c., it is quite as difficult, if not more so, to obtain a living in
Queensland as in Copenhagen. The land order I obtained, and which
entitled me to eighty acres of land wherever I chose to take them, I did
not consider of any value--in fact I threw it away; so did all the other
emigrants on the ship: one might have bought a whole hatful for a dozen
biscuits!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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