VII.
Katanning—The Show-place of the West Australian Land Company's Concession—Marvellously rapid Growth of the Settlement—The Messrs. Piesse—Model Colonial Pioneers.
One hundred and eighteen miles from Albany one comes across a settlement which is not only the sample one on the West Australian Land Company's concession, but is destined, it is to be hoped, to be the model for many such another all over South-western Western Australia. Katanning is not only the central station of the Great Southern line, but it is the centre of what bids fair to be in the near future a splendid agricultural district, supplying any amount of corn for conversion into flour at the newly erected roller mills, which are the boast and pride of the township. Without being over-sanguine, one may assert that this district in the course of a few years will do great things towards reducing and, in fact, altogether obliterating that humiliating import of £150,000 worth of rural produce which stands recorded against the colony in its truth-telling statistics. It is not to be supposed that everything in this district is virgin in the shape of agriculture. On the contrary, some of the oldest farmholds in the colony are situated in this vicinity, and I should be accused of exaggeration if I were to put down precisely as I was told them the yields of wheat per acre which the settlers hereabout have drawn year after year, for a score of years past, from lands wholly innocent of manure and only rarely recuperated by fallowing. Twenty-three miles to the westward of Katanning is the old settlement of Kojinup, on the now little-used main road from Albany to Perth. Here, too, are a number of settlers to whom the innovations of the Land Company and the rapid rise of Katanning can be little less than revolutionary. As yet, of course, Katan-
