According to act-test-centers, the value of agricultural production, which in 1871 was still lower than that of mining and pastoral production, in the following decades not only exceeded it, but was approaching that of pastoral production itself: in 1901, it will exceed for the whole of Australasia,2 / 3 roughly the value of pastoral production in that year and nearly one and a half million more than mining production. The same secondary or manufacturing industries, despite the youth of the country and the presence of fields of employment much more profitable for capital and for labor, benefited in a short time from the new state of things, after 1855 in particular, when the fields gold had become prosperous cities and the demand for artifacts came from large masses of consumers rather than a small circle of the wealthy alone. In 1862, the number of people employed in manufacturing industries could be estimated at 32,000 or a little more for Australia and Tasmania: in 1901, for the whole of Australasia, it was 241,750, employed in 14.
Nor did the new economic developments of agriculture and industries detract from the ancient and almost exclusive production of Australasia, pastoral care. If not more exclusive, pastoralism still remained throughout the century. XIX, the by far prevailing base of the entire Australian economy. The very discovery of gold, which seemed for a moment to strike her heart by taking away the bare minimum of necessary manpower, ended up directly or indirectly becoming the cause of further expansion. In fact, not only did the local demand for meat for slaughter increase with the increase of the population (while waiting for the refrigeration industry to open the world market for it too, in the following century); but, as the breeding for the higher price of pastoral labor, the breeders made up for it by giving it an even more extensive character, almost abandoning the flocks to themselves over ever larger territories, organizing geographical-economic expeditions for the discovery and exploration of ever new pastures from south to north, east to west, across an entire continent. Thus, in the remote interior, those salty pastures (salt – bush), which were providential for the improvement as well as for the reproduction of the rams; and, while the alleged great Australian desert was shrinking to economic effects every day, the rams covered in a few decades all of Eastern Australia and a considerable part of Tasmania (as well as of New Zealand). From an increasing 17 million, which were in all of Australasia by 1851, rams rose by 1901 to over 92; large livestock, from 2 million cattle scarce in 1851, to almost 10 in 1901, not counting horses, just under one million and a fifth in 1901. Breeding in general, including wool, meat, dairy products, horses, honey, etc., gave Australasia in 1901 a total annual production worth almost 47 million pounds: income from a pastoral property valued (excluding land) at around 241 and a half million pounds. The total production of the whole of Australasia, only half a century after the first discovery of gold, exceeded 141 million pounds in 1901, for a total population of less than 5 million residents; or £ 30 per head, an unparalleled higher figure than that of any of the most advanced countries in the world at the same time. Trade, the synthesis and exponent of an economic development that is not matched by the history of the new countries themselves, due to its speed and grandeur, relative to the number of the population, rose in 1901, in the whole of Australasia, to almost 167 million and two thirds of pounds sterling, of which over 58 of internal interstate trade and over 109 and a half of foreign trade: a commercial movement, that is, in which Australasia was overtaken, relative to the population, by Belgium alone, and also by this more in appearance than in substance, being half of the Belgian trade trade in transit from the NO. to Central Europe.
This rapidity and grandeur of progress is partly explained by no small amount of its explanation in the exuberance of available capital, capital saved and accumulated on the spot, capital even more inflowing from abroad, mostly from the motherland, attracted by the mirage of interests and amazing profits (like wages and honoraries), in that new Eldorado of the antipodes with legendary prosperity. The exuberance of capital became such, as to soon produce dangerous traffic jams, and to feed, in the imbalance between available capital and healthy normal use of it, a general movement of banking, mining, especially land speculation, promoted by the depository banks of the unemployed gold, which blossomed after the boom or economic turgidity which culminated in the year 1891, in the formidable crisis of overcapitalization of 1892-93, which enveloped an entire continent in its coils. A wind of madness swept over Australasia, especially the colony of Victoria, when every square meter of land in the center of Melbourne had reached the dizzying price of 1500 and even 2000 pounds. Thus there was profusion of grief and economic ruin in the whole population, from the highest to the lowest social strata, but this lesson did not remain sterile of beneficial teachings for the future of the Australian economy and society; which thus learned to earn its prosperity through production, rather than speculation, and on the basis of that proceeded to the fastest of economic reconstructions.
