Progress seems always to involve a trampling underfoot. It is a Moloch whose chariot-wheels spurt blood at every turn. Many of the Victorian landowners are not only indignant, they are genuinely aghast; heart-sick at the deprivations of the Land Board, their grievance being aggravated by the undoubted fact that there is still a great quantity of land which is literally no man’s ground, as far as settlers are concerned. I heard one story of a very well-known family in the Western district, the founders of whom, a Scotchman and his wife and two children, journeyed up from Melbourne by waggon, in the days when the whole country was infested with dangerous blacks, and, finding a pleasant, fertile pastureland in the Western country, with rich volcanic soil, well watered, determined to settle there. It was necessary, however, for the man to go back to Melbourne for implements, provisions, and stock, and all the other necessities of life. If they all went someone might come and snap up the land; in any case, it would be a long and weary journey with the bullocks, and he could get there more quickly and easily alone on horseback. So the waggon was made into a temporary house, and, with ammunition and food enough to last till her husband’s return—which at the quickest would not be before a month were well passed—the woman, an English gentlewoman, with her two tiny children, settled down to hold the land against the possible encroachments of other white settlers; above all, to hold her own life and that of her children against the more than probable onslaught of the blacks, and all the horrors of which they were capable. Some day, for the good of Australia and the Australians, the history of such people ought to be written. Yet it is to land so won and so held that every casual “rouse-about” or street loafer feels that he has a perfect right. One can in some ways understand the feeling against large landowners better in England, where space is so limited; where people literally heat into anarchy with being packed so closely together; where land was acquired, for the most part, centuries ago, and the proprietors are nice and clean, alike of blood or sweat. But out here it is different. Old men remember the hand-to-hand fight with the desert; the danger, the almost incredible difficulties of transport; and, above all, the self-sacrifice and privation of the women whose sons now hold the land. [Picture: Milking time on a dairy farm]