acres each, which he has let out to tenants on the co-operative system, the landlord taking a fourth share of the crops and the tenant the remainder. By this equitable system the tenants are not handicapped by having to make up arrears of rent after a bad season. It has also the effect of encouraging the farmer to make the best use of the land. The pity is that this or some similar principle is not more widely followed.
Mr. Phillips is a stock-breeder on an extensive scale, and the land which he has retained for grazing purposes carries some 4,000 head of cattle and 11,000 sheep.
This gentleman, whose family has been associated with the whole history of the colony, strives to advance, not only the district he represents, but the colony at large. His district, the Irwin, covers an enormous area, and has Dongarra for its centre, and also brings in Mingenew, which is close to a point at which the Midland Railway touches. Mr. Phillips is a member of the Irwin Roads Board, to which he was elected in 1883, and of which he has been the chairman on several occasions. When Responsible Government was inaugurated in the colony, he was returned for the Irwin constituency in the Legislative Assembly without opposition, and in the election of 1894 he was also unopposed. Mr. Phillips was gazetted a J.P. in 1885. As far back as the early thirties his father was a landholder in the colony, and his sterling efforts to overcome the obstacles which beset the path of settlers in the initial stages of Western Australian history contributed much to the successful outcome of the settlement. Through the long roll of succeeding years the name of Phillips has been prominent in the colony. Mr. S. P. Phillips has occupied high positions in the colony, both in and out of Parliament, and enjoys a reputation for worth and honest dealing which tends to the glorification of Western Australia. Thus the foundation of a house of landed proprietors has been laid in the colony, and the toils and battles of the pioneer have been as glorious and admirable as any doughty deeds done by an invading Norman or the founder of any English aristocratic family. Separate the trammels and the autocratic power and the lover of history would wish that strong healthy bodied and minded ancestral houses may be established, and go down through the years in the quiet rural arenas of Western Australia.
GEORGE THOMAS SIMPSON, M.L,A.
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Photo by GEORGE THOMAS SIMPSON, M.L.A. Greenham & Evans. |
BARNUM, who climbed high enough to be entitled to speak with authority upon his text, says that success in life largely depends upon the choice of a suitable location. He points out that without a proper environment the aspirant who seeks to get on in the world may hide his light under a bushel, and die obscurely with little more than burial expenses in his purse. This advice is a modern rendering of Shakespeare's dictum that "There's a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and in miseries." Opportunity comes at least once, if not oftener, to everyone; but, if she finds that you are not ready to receive her, she flies coyly out of the window. The opening up of the rich goldfields of the colony has been "the tide in the affairs" of many people in Western Australia. It has given them a stage to display powers which under less fortuitous auspices no one would have given them credit for possessing. Once on vantage-ground, they have had room according to their strength, and have gone on from conquest to conquest. Sir Henry Parkes, while Premier of New South Wales, retorted upon an opponent who jibed him with having once kept a chandler's shop that "the hon. member would have been keeping it still." It is only the determined forceful man of brains who, getting in the thin end of the wedge, can drive it home; the mole-eyed have not perception to see an opening, nor the tact and resoluteness to press irresistibly towards the goal. A helping hand is one thing; to be carried the entire journey is quite another. Some men, on the other hand are like greyhounds straining in the leash; they only need to be slipped at the game in sight to run it down, and for well-endowed indomitable workers of this type who will not accept defeat, the coming to Western Australia—a land that is full of adventitious potentialities—has been fraught with the happiest results. Trained in larger communities, which are fervid with intense competition and equipped at all points with the resources of the highest civilisation, the new-comers have seen many gaps in the West which it has been advantageous to them to fill, out of the full measure of their intellectual parts and wide knowledge of the world. There has been plenty of room in the "upper stories" in this awakening community, shaking off the dull sloth of provincialism and laying the foundations of a nation. While
