Title: The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Otago & Southland Provincial Districts]

Author: Cyclopedia Company Limited

Publication details: The Cyclopedia Company, Limited, 1905, Christchurch

Part of: The Cyclopedia of New Zealand

License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence

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The Future.

The commercial and financial prosperity of New Zealand is and must be founded upon the natural resources of the country. More especially does it depend upon the extractive industries—those directly based upon the soil, and all that it produces. With all the conditions of permanent affluence Otago is singularly well provided. In other sections of this work, detailed particulars are given of her capacity for wealth production on the pastoral and agricultural side, and of the variety and amplitude of her mineral resources. For many years after the boom of the early sixties the value of the soil for raising grain and cattle was obscured by the importance attached to gold mining. Even within recent years the baneful influence of excessive speculation has done much to retard more solid and substantial progress in Otago. But when the worst has been said that can be page 31 said for mining, sluicing and dredging, the fact remains that in all these industries, and more especially in the last, Otago possesses a source of wealth that would alone ensure prosperity for many years to come. Otago, however, has not to depend solely upon the precarious and temporrary aid of gold mining. In grain, in dairy produce, in wool, and frozen meat, she is a worthy rival of any of the Australian colonies. The continuation of the Otago Central railway will not only bring large areas of isolated country into direct communication with the coast; it will establish and develop the fruit growing industry, for which the dry interior of the province is splendidly adapted, and will thus add a most lucrative pursuit to the long list of Otago's resources. The timber, except in the least accessible parts of Southland, has been largely cleared away; but on cleared land sheep and cattle are thriving, and the future of Otago, like that of the rest of the colony, is involved almost entirely in the prospects of grain, wool, frozen meat and dairy produce. In all these particulars Otago can well hold its own in competition with any other part of the colonies. But Otago will always enjoy special advantages in connection with intercolonial trade. The possession of the Bluff harbour, which must always be the first New Zealand port of call on the southern route, has been a very important factor in the province's commercial growth. Then the fact that the Union Steam Ship Company, the most successful and most enterprising line on this side of the world, is domiciled at Dunedin, is a fortunate accident that makes the chief twon of Otago the natural head and centre of the New Zealand coastal and over-seas shipping trade. With all these circumstances working in her favour, it would be strange, indeed, if Otago were not prosperity were not well founded and permanent. Happily for the province, its founders were men of a race proverbially shrewd, industrious and business-like; and the course of Otago's growth, though occasionally distrubed by crises in which even Scotch caution and foresight have been temporarily eclipsed, has been steady and rapid in the past, and promises no less favourably for the future.