In the district of which I am speaking the sheep are all “paddocked,”--that is to say, kept in by fences,--so that shepherding is unnecessary. I hope that I have already made clear to my reader the difference between shepherding sheep and paddocking sheep. I found that brush fences had been made at the rate of about £23 a mile. A brush fence, made of loose timber and wood, is not so neat as a wire fence, but it is equally serviceable for sheep;--and when fences have to be made by hundreds of miles, the difference in expenditure is considerable. A wire fence that will keep in sheep and lambs, can hardly be put up for less than £40 a mile. Five wires would suffice for sheep, but the lamb requires a lower wire to restrain his innocence. Nothing, I think, gives a surer proof of the wealth of the Australian colonies generally, than the immense amount of fencing that has been put up within the last ten years. A run of twenty miles square, or containing 400 square miles, equal to 256,000 acres, is by no means excessive in size, though it is about as big as a small English county. The squatter who intends to paddock his sheep instead of hiring shepherds to go about with them, has to divide his area into perhaps twenty different paddocks. Should he do this, with the smallest possible amount of distance of partitions, he would have to make 240 miles of fencing. At the station which I visited we had come again upon timber, though the country was by no means thickly wooded. But when there is no timber near, the cost of fencing is more than doubled. It is of course understood that the normal squatter is a tenant of the Crown. In Victoria the great wool-growers now own for the most part their own lands;--and the purchase of pasture lands has become general elsewhere under the pressure of the free-selecter. But the genuine squatter is he who sits upon government land for which he pays a rent to the colony; and in South Australia such is still the condition of the larger wool-growers. Outside of Goyder’s range,--which is the South Australian squatter’s proper region, the rental varies according to the value of the land and the nature of the pasture. A computation is made of the number of sheep the land should carry, and the squatter is charged 6_d._ a sheep on the best land, 4_d._ on the second best, and 2_d._ a sheep on the poorest. If he should keep more sheep than the number computed, he pays at the same rate for the excess. But for the number computed he must pay, even though he should not keep so many. I found that this arrangement gave satisfaction even to the squatters,--a result which has certainly not been common in the Australian colonies generally. On runs within the line of rainfall, this rule as to the rate at which sheep are pastured does not prevail; but such runs have generally been purchased, and are the freehold property of the wool-growers, or are occupied as commonage by the owners of neighbouring freeholds.