THE GIANT OF THE SOUTH SEAS
The Australians say their country is the biggest thing south of the
Equator, and what I have seen here makes me think that they are right.
Australia is as big as the United States without Alaska, twenty-five
times larger than Great Britain and Ireland, fifteen times the size of
France, and three fourths as large as all Europe.
It is a country of magnificent distances, being longer from east to
west than the distance from New York to Salt Lake, and wider from north
to south than from New York to Chicago. By the fastest trains, Brisbane
is thirty-six hours from Sydney, and Sydney is eighteen hours from
Melbourne. It takes three days and eighteen hours to make the trip by
rail from Melbourne on the southeast to Perth on the southwest coast.
Australia is also a land great in its resources. Since gold was
discovered there in 1851, it has produced five billion dollars’ worth
of the precious metal. Gold has been found all over the continent--in
the mountains, on the farms, and in the sands of the deserts. Yet the
greater part of the country has never been prospected, vast areas have
not even been explored, and new gold mines may be discovered any day.
It is known that the continent contains great quantities of iron,
and tin has been extensively mined. There is coal in every state and
the deposits of New South Wales, the only ones that have been well
surveyed, are estimated to contain more than one billion tons. The
coal beds of the state of Queensland are believed to be inexhaustible.
Silver, too, is found in all the states, and the Broken Hill mines of
New South Wales are among the richest of the world.
More important than its mineral wealth, however, are the pastoral and
agricultural riches of Australia. Enormous flocks of sheep pasture
on the sweet grasses of thousands upon thousands of her acres. She
produces some of the best wool on earth and exports a quarter of a
billion dollars’ worth annually. Her wheat lands produce enough for the
needs of her five and a half million people and furnish one hundred
million bushels for export. It is estimated that with close settlement
she can raise one billion bushels, or sufficient to feed a population
of one hundred and fifty millions. Dairying is now one of the largest
of her industries and sixty million dollars’ worth of Australian butter
goes overseas every year.
In Australia there are great fertile tracts of land, but there are also
vast areas of desert. The well-watered eastern part of the continent
is rolling and hilly for about one hundred and fifty miles back from
the coast. West of this region lies the country of plains, the first
part of which is a belt of prairie lands three hundred miles wide,
where there are fine sheep and cattle ranches and wheat and fruit
farms. Here, too, is the only real river system of Australia, the
Murray-Darling. Near the western border of the plains is the salt Lake
Eyre sunk in a depression below sea level. Beyond Lake Eyre, extending
almost across the continent to within three hundred miles of the
west coast, and to within about the same distance from the ocean on
the north and south, is the Great Desert. This has an estimated area
of eight hundred thousand square miles, or about one fourth of all
Australia. Except in the southwest corner, where gold is mined, there
are said to be less than one thousand white people in this arid waste.
The air is so dry that one’s fingernails become as brittle as glass,
screws come out of boxes, and lead drops out of pencils. I am told
there are six-year-old children living in this region who have never
seen a drop of rain.
Australia is a land of strange things as well as big ones--queer
plants, queer animals, and aborigines who are the most backward
members of the human race. There are lilies that reach the height of a
three-story house, trees that grow grass, and other trees whose trunks
bulge out like bottles. In the dense “bush” are mighty eucalyptus trees
rising two hundred feet high. They shed their bark instead of their
foliage, and the leaves are attached to the stems obliquely instead of
horizontally. There are towering tree ferns such as disappeared from
the rest of the earth before the Coal Age and are now seen elsewhere
only in the fossilized remains of prehistoric times.
Two thirds of the animals of Australia, like its famous kangaroo, are
marsupials; that is, the females have pouches in which they carry
their young. Except for the opossum, and the opossum rat of Patagonia,
marsupials occur nowhere else. Stranger than the kangaroo, stranger
even than Australia’s wingless bird, the emu, is the platypus, which is
found only on this island continent. It has a bill like a duck’s, fur
like a seal’s, and a pouch like that of a kangaroo. It is equally at
home on the land and in the water. It lays eggs, yet it is a mammal;
though a mammal it has no teats, but nourishes its young by means of
milk that exudes through pores into its pouch.
As for the natives, when William Dampier, the first Englishman to
land on the shores of Australia, came here in 1699, he described
the aborigines as “the miserablest people in the world, with the
unpleasantest looks and the worst features of any people I ever saw.
Setting aside their human shape, they differ little from brutes.”
Whence these natives came and how long they had been on their island
continent none knows. All agree, however, that the bushman, or
blackfellow, as he is generally called, is the lowest form of man.
Throughout uncounted years he has made no progress. He is without
history and without tradition. Contact with civilization kills him. The
aborigines of Australia are a dying race, numbering now a scant fifty
thousand.
For centuries after the rest of the world was making history, Terra
Australis, or the South Land as it was called, was also a _terra
incognita_, a land unknown. This does not seem strange when one
considers how isolated it is. It is so far from the other land masses
of the globe that it deserves its name of the “lonely continent.” It is
eighteen hundred miles from Asia, forty-five hundred miles from Africa,
and more than six thousand miles from the west coast of North America.
Even New Zealand, which on the map looks so close to it, is twelve
hundred miles away. It takes the best Pacific steamers nineteen days to
go from Sydney to San Francisco, and for the fastest mail boats it is a
five-weeks’ voyage from any Australian port to Liverpool.
[Illustration: Australia produces enough wheat for her 5,250,000
people, and has 100,000,000 bushels for export. With close settlement,
it is estimated that she can raise 1,000,000,000 bushels, or sufficient
for 150,000,000 people.]
[Illustration: Half the world is kept warm with wool from the flocks of
sheep pastured on tens of thousands of Australia’s acres. She produces
some of the best wool on earth, and exports more than any other
country.]
[Illustration: Fifty years ago Brisbane was a village, and before that
a British convict colony. To-day it is the fourth city in size in the
Commonwealth, and the capital of the progressive state of Queensland.]
[Illustration: Brisbane is cut in two by the Brisbane River, a wide
stream navigated by ocean vessels, which come here for cargoes of
frozen beef, wool, and grain.]
When the United States was an infant among the independent nations
of the earth, the history of Australia began. And just here the
story of the “lonely continent” is linked with our own. There were
a number of persons in the American colonies who remained loyal to
the King throughout the Revolutionary War. When independence was won
they found this country an uncomfortable place in which to stay. So
it was planned by the British to make Australia a new home for the
American “Loyalists.” This scheme failed, but another took its place.
In colonial days the British had used America as a dumping place for
undesirable citizens, especially political prisoners, and had sent
them across the Atlantic at the rate of one thousand a year. Now that
this human riffraff could no longer be shipped to us it was decided to
transport them to Australia. Accordingly, in 1788 a thousand convicts
were landed at Sydney Cove, and this was the beginning of the British
occupation of the great South Land.
One hundred and thirteen years after that initial settlement there came
into being the Commonwealth of Australia. In the birth year of the
present century, the half dozen different Australian colonies, some as
widely separated as any parts of our own country, became a federated
union of the six states of Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, South
Australia, West Australia, and Tasmania. Before this these states had
quarrelled frequently over matters of trade and internal development,
and each had gone its way without regard for its neighbours. With
federation, the tariff barriers between them were removed, common
policies were agreed upon, and all joined hands in the determination to
work together to create a new nation of white men within the British
Empire.
Besides the six states, there are the Northern Territory, the Federal
Territory, and the territories of Papua and New Guinea. The Northern
Territory is the tropical area of some half a million square miles
ceded by the state of South Australia to the central government. The
Federal Territory corresponds nearly to our District of Columbia; for
it is the nine hundred and forty square miles set aside for Canberra,
the new capital of the Commonwealth. During the erection of the
necessary buildings at Canberra, the capital remains at Melbourne. The
territory of Papua, or British New Guinea, is the southeastern part of
the island of New Guinea and is administered by officials nominated by
the Governor-General of Australia. The Territory of New Guinea consists
of those lands formerly embraced in German New Guinea, which Australia
governs under a mandate from the League of Nations.
In many ways the constitution of the Commonwealth is like ours.
Each of the states has its separate government, with great latitude
in the management of its own affairs. The British Crown appoints a
Governor-General for the whole Commonwealth, but his authority is
merely nominal and the real executive power is in the hands of the
Premier of Australia and his nine ministers. The Prime Minister is the
leader of the majority of the Federal Parliament of which he and his
cabinet must be members.
Parliament consists of a Senate and a House, organized much like
our own Congress. The Senators are elected for six years and the
representatives for three, but under certain conditions the House may
be dissolved by the Governor-General before the three-year term is
up. There are seventy-six representatives elected in proportion to
population, and thirty-six senators, six from each state. Senators and
representatives get the same salaries, each receiving five thousand
dollars a year. It is provided that no member of Parliament can hold
office if he has been bankrupt and failed to pay his debts, and if he
takes benefit, whether by assignment or otherwise, of any bankruptcy
law during his term of office his seat will at once become vacant. He
cannot have any interest in any company trading with the government,
nor can he take pay for other services rendered to the government. The
state governments are organized like that of the Commonwealth, each
having its premier, who is the leader of the majority in the state
Parliament.
Following the World War many countries experienced political upheavals
and radical ventures in government. But it was in Australia years
earlier that a working-man’s party first gained control of a national
government. As we go about in the several states of the Commonwealth
we shall find many evidences of the part played in public affairs
by the labour unions. They have frequently held a majority in state
legislatures, but are especially anxious to dominate the federal
Parliament so that they may put their ideas into effect on a wholesale
scale. Woman suffrage, adopted in Australia almost without opposition,
has added strength to the labour element, for it is generally agreed
that nearly every workingman’s wife goes to the polls, while many of
the women of the well-to-do classes stay at home.