CHAPTER II
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.