66,000 km of railway and a hugefleet of ships able to navigate the inland
waterways.
13.6 Why Were There No Grain Elevators in Australia?
By contrast, wheat handling in Australia at the start of the twentieth century
was a laborious, wasteful, and piecemeal process. Wheat was shovelled in
hessian sacks imported from India, sown by hand, and then loaded and
unloaded multiple times in their journey from farm to mill.
Among the factors inhibiting the introduction of bulk handling was the lack
of a sophisticated grading system. A trusted and reliable wheat multiple-grade
system had operated in the USA since 1856 and in Canada since 1900. In
Australia there was just one grade, fair average quality, or f.a.q., adopted in
Victoria in 1891, NSW in 1899, and Western Australia in 1905. The stubbornly
egalitarian measure of f.a.q. referred not to the grain’s baking quality but the
milling quality, which tolerated a level of dirt and impurity. Despite its
obvious failings, opposition to its replacement by a multi-grade system was
still ferocious in the mid-1920s. In their 1926 book,The Wheat Industry in
Australia, Callaghan and Millington seem sympathetic to the arguments in
favour of retaining f.a.q.:
If a new system were adopted, it is argued, oversea millers would want to buy only
one or two classes for blending purposes and in consequence our wheats would
immediately come into open competition with‘graded’wheats of other origins.
This could quite easily react to the detriment of Australian growers. There is a
possibility that the classes wanted by oversea millers would command a premium
on present f.a.q. prices but this advantage could be more than offset by the
discount it would be necessary to accept on the other classes.
(Callaghan and Millington 1926, p. 363)Yet the failings of the measure had been clear. Professor Lowrie, the principal
of Roseworthy Agricultural College, writing more than a quarter of a century
earlier, claimed:
The standard is generallyfixed so low that good farmers suffer...I have heard
many farmers express surprise and disgust when shown the‘standard sample’
going out as representative of the Colony’s wheat. It has certainly contained a
percentage of rubbish that should not be there—drake, wild oats, chaff, shriveled
and broken grain and also other impurities such as barley, small pellets of stone,
etc. If wheat merchants in London pay attention to this sample it must affect
disadvantageously the reputation of our wheat. (Lowrie 1899, p. 572)In 1915–16, according to one estimate, £216,720 was spent on transporting
waste, dirt, and screenings mixed with wheat to export markets. As Griffiths
Nick Cater