THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 495.-JANUARY, 1928.

Art. 1.—THE SPIRIT OF AUSTRALIA.

1. The Official Year Books of the Commonwealth. Melbourne, 1908-26.

2. The Australian Encyclopædia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1925-26.

3. Australia in its Physiographic and Economic Aspects. By Griffith Taylor. 4th Edition. Clarendon Press, 1925. And other works.

THE significance of the Commonwealth of Australia, both in itself and as a Dominion of the Empire, is nowadays being continually emphasised for the benefit of the British public. Its representatives, official and other, on this side of the globe explain at every opportunity the Imperial value of its products and its enterprise. British visitors returning from its shores retaliate by explaining with equal volubility what a great country it would be if only it would take their advice. Any one who cares to look for it may obtain at any moment a plethora of information about the Australian climate, timbers, dried fruits, labour troubles, industrial legislation, White Australia policy, and unswerving loyalty to the Empire. The resident in Clapham, if he keeps his eyes open and reads his newspaper regularly (with special attention to the paragraphs in small print), will probably acquire more knowledge of the Commonwealth than he has of Golder's Green. What he will not acquire is the slightest knowledge of Australia itself, either as a highly individualised continent or as an assemblage of oversea Britons with policies and principles and beliefs Vol. 250.-No. 495.

that are not mere replicas of his own. He will, no doubt, accumulate quite a mass of information about what has been happening, what is happening, what certain interested parties hope will happen soon; of the motives and fears that lie behind those happenings, as of the slow, irresistible currents of popular feeling that bear events along on their surface, he will gain no knowledge whatever. The onlooker to-day, gaze he never so intently, cannot see the wood for the trees.

A recently published handbook dealing briefly with the several Dominions illustrates this vague ignorance of Australian conditions by making confidently the following remarkable statements:

'Australia: A practically empty continent with millions of square miles of fertile unoccupied land. . . . We could comfortably accommodate two hundred millions.'

'I confess a sense of horror at the Americanisation of Australia during the past few years. . . . The feeling in Australia is that England is slow and effete, hopelessly oldfashioned and antiquated. Young Australia is apt to give its admiration to America for its wealth, hustle and efficiency. ... I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that Australia is looking in the direction of America.'

Add to these allegations one frequently made or implied in the reports of British companies interested in Commonwealth produce-that Australia is almost wholly in the power of its Labour parties, and that they represent a populace verging on Bolshevism-and you have as misleading a picture of conditions in the Dominion as could possibly be painted by its worst enemies. With regard to the alleged leaning towards the United States (presumably writers who talk loosely about 'America' really mean the United States), it is safe to say with all possible emphasis that, outside a small circle of commercial folk in Sydney and a negligible coterie of 'society' folk in a couple of big towns, the leaning does not exist. Australians go to see 'American films because they have no chance of seeing any others; they use 'American' tools-especially axes and other farming implements--because those tools, designed for up-country conditions in a half-cleared land, are better suited to their needs than those of British manufacture. But, sad as the confession may appear, they do not

admire the people of the United States, or their hustle, or their political and social institutions; and they would no more lean on the States for, say, defence against Asiatic invasion than they would look to China for defence against a renewed attack by Germany. In 1908, it may still be remembered, a United States cruiser squadron visited several Australian ports, and the pressmen who accompanied it filled columns of the New York press with descriptions of a populace panting to be hugged by its 'big brother,' seeking eagerly the shelter of America's fleet against a 'yellow peril.' What Australians said and thought was something very different. The moral they drew from the visit was the need of providing their own protection. This was what the Governor-General (who dare not publicly talk politics except with the full assurance that he speaks the mind of the whole people), and State Premier after Premier, and the Prime Minister himself, insisted on; 'we live in hopes,' said Alfred Deakin, 'that from our own shores some day a fleet will go out not unworthy to be compared with the fleet that is now visiting us'; and the most enduring memorial of the visit is possibly the song that begins

'Jonathan is visiting the lonely Kangaroo,'

and ends, arrogantly perhaps but with frank independence of alien shelter,

'We're hanging out the sign from the Leeuwin to the Line, "This bit o' the world belongs to us.'

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There is no need to enlarge on this subject. Australia has many faults, but pro-American she is not; that said, we may pass on. What follows here is an attempt -necessarily brief and possibly dogmatic, but founded on more than forty years' experience-to re-state the essential facts about physical and political Australia so that readers may have some basis upon which to build up their conception of the Commonwealth, some framework into which to fit the mass of unco-ordinated data supplied to them week by week by the press, the lecture-hall, and the advertisement hoarding.

In the first place, Australia has not millions of square miles of fertile unoccupied land, and could not in any circumstances yet conceivable accommodate two hundred

millions of people. Any excited young writer who thinks of the Commonwealth in those terms should study carefully the terse but excellent geography mentioned at the head of this article. He may then discover that the greater part of the imposing area across which AUSTRALIA looms large in atlases is quite incapable of supporting close settlement of any kind, white or other. Prof. Taylor (whose facts have been discussed and sifted and controverted and re-established during the last fifteen years) shows that out of three million square miles-the Commonwealth's total area-a fifth is useless for any purposes, more than half is fit only for pastoral use (which does not involve much settlement), and barely a quarter is fertile and well-watered enough to provide homes for a large population. Instead of millions of square miles inhabited by 200 millions of people, we must envisage Australia as comprising at most threequarters of a million square miles of comparatively good soil, and affording shelter for perhaps 62 million people. The greater part of central and western Australia is merely the stump of a continent, a very badly-watered palæozoic plateau between one and two thousand feet above sea-level; a large inland area of eastern Australia is an alluvial plain of rich but loose soil, lacking in permanent rivers because the small and very intermittent rainfall (usually below 10 inches a year) rapidly disappears hundreds of feet underground or evaporates still more rapidly under the summer sun. Taylor's latest estimate (in 'Foreign Affairs' for July 1927) is less optimistic than that of 1925:

'Forty-two per cent. of the continent of Australia is arid; of this about 20 per cent. has so far proved useless for stock, while about 22 per cent. is capable of sparse stock occupation. Another 34 per cent. is good pastoral country. About 21 per cent. is fair temperate farming country, though containing almost all the rugged mountain areas. Perhaps 4 or 5 per cent. in the north-east may be used for tropical agriculture. There is probably room in the east and south for another 20 million folk engaged in agriculture and manufacturing before any congestion can arise.'

Insistence on these facts is in no way a criticism of the efforts now being made to develop the huge unutilised resources of the Commonwealth. As Taylor

says in his next sentence, Australia is perhaps the most promising field for settlement now available for the growing white population of the world.' Of the 716,000 square miles capable under present conditions of cultivation in some form only 27,000 were (according to the 'Official Year Book' for 1926) actually under cultivation in 1925; the margin would seem wide enough to accommodate all the immigrants and all the natural increase of population for some years yet. Indeed, the first thought of English students confronted with these figures is apt to be Why, then, does not the Commonwealth attract immigrants by the obvious and satisfactory method of giving away some of it?' The reason is simple-the Commonwealth has none to give away. All the soil of Australia (except the tiny Federal Capital Territory and the huge but purely pastoral Northern Territory) is controlled by the several States; and the best areas do not now belong to them, but to private citizens who either bought the more fertile patches long ago or have leased them on a long tenure. a long tenure. Of the soil of Victoria, for instance (and Victoria is just now in disfavour because it has refused to take more immigrants), over 60 per cent. is privately owned, and less than a quarter remains at the State's disposal-unless it acquires more by re-purchasing fertile but unused land from the present owners. (The quarter, it should be noted, is practically all mountainous and largely inaccessible.) In New South Wales a third of the area, including every yard of fertile and well-watered soil, is alienated, a good deal more than half is held under lease (this comprises most of the good pastoral land out west), and the State is left with 9 per cent. of its own. The trouble is not that the good land is unoccupied, but that it is used for purposes which do not fully utilise its goodness. The Federal Labour Ministry of 1910-13 attempted to correct this by imposing a tax on the unimproved value of land, so that owners should be encouraged to make better use of their property and give agriculturists, either as sharefarmers or as small purchasers, room to settle and bring up families. The immediate results were encouraging; between 1910 and 1914 the area under crop increased by nearly 50 per cent. Since then, in spite of a sudden war-stimulus that in 1915-16 gave the Commonwealth