Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/136

 the natural resources of that colony, entitle his observations to great consideration, seems, in his work on New South Wales, to entertain a sanguine opinion of the possibility of forming establishments for the cultivation of tropical productions at Port Macquarie or Moreton Bay. From the great number of experiments which have been made in these two settlements, there is no doubt whatever of those productions succeeding, if largely cultivated, especially at Moreton Bay. Specimens of cotton, grown in the colony, have been manufactured into yarn at Glasgow, and pronounced of superior quality. The coffee shrub grows very well, and as I have already observed elsewhere, sugar has been made at the plains on the Wilson river, at Port Macquarie, during the time that that place was a penal settlement; and I have myself seen sugar-cane growing luxuriantly in Mr. Rudder's garden, at the village of Kempsey on the MacLeay river.

Having read in some of the late Sydney journals some remarks on the practicability of establishing an overland communication with Port Essington on the north coast of New Holland, to facilitate the introduction of Chinese into the colony, it may not be out of place here to quote the following observations made by Dr. Lang ten years ago, on the advantage of inducing Chinese to settle in New South Wales. "It appears to me," observes the Doctor, "that if a tract of land, say from ten thousand to twenty thousand acres, were purchased from the