Problems of the Pacific

by Frank Fox

There was work to do there in the Pacific, there is further work in the future, which calls for elements of audacity, of contempt for convention, which are being worked out of the average British type. There could be no greater contrast between, say, a London suburbanite, whose life travels along an endless maze of little gravel paths between fences and trimly-kept hedges, and the Australian of the "back country," who any day may ride out solitary on a week's journey into a great sun-baked wilderness, his life and that of his dog and his two horses dependent on the accurate finding of a series of water-holes: his joy in existence coming from the solitude and the desert, the companionship of his three animals, his tobacco, and the thought of his "mate" somewhere, whom he would meet after six months' absence with a handshake and a monosyllable by way of greeting, and yet with the love of a fond brother.

That London suburbanite gives the key to his kindly and softly sentimental character in his subscription to a society which devotes itself to seeing that the suburban house cat is not left shut up without food when a family goes away on holidays. That Australian shows how far he has reverted to the older human type of relentless purpose when, in the pursuit of his calling, he puts ten thousand sheep to the chance of death from thirst. It is not that he is needlessly cruel, but that he is sternly resolute. The same man would share his last water with his dog in the desert to give both an equal chance of life. He feels the misery of beasts but says nothing, and allows it to interfere nothing with his purpose.

There is a story of a clergyman coming to a back-country station in Australia during the agony of a great drought. He asked of the squatter permission to hold prayers for rain in the woolshed. The squatter turned on him, fiercely gripping him by the arm.

"Listen!" he cried.

From all around came the hoarse, pitiful lowing and bleating of thousands of animals dying of thirst and hunger.

"Listen! If the Almighty does not hear that, will he hear us?"

That is the type of man, bred from the wilder types of the British race, who is the backbone of the Australian population, and who will be the backbone of the resistance which the White Man will make to any overflow of Asia along the Pacific littoral.

The Australian took instinctively to his task in the work of White civilisation—that of keeping the Asiatic out of Australia. In the early days of the goldfields, the Chinese began to crowd to the continent, and some squatters of those days designed to introduce them as cheap and reliable shepherds. The mass of the White population protested, with riot and rebellion in some cases. At one time it seemed as though the guns of British warships would fire on Australian citizens in vindication of the right of Chinese to enter Australia. But maternal affection was stronger than logic. The cause of "White Australia" had its way; and by poll taxes and other restrictive legislation any great influx of Asiatics was stopped. At a later date the laws regarding alien immigration were so strengthened that it is now almost impossible for a coloured man to enter Australia as a colonist, even though he be a British subject and a graduate of Oxford University.

Around the ethics of the "White Australia" policy there has raged a fierce controversy. But it is certain that, without that policy, without an instinctive revolt on the part of the Australian colonists against any intrusion of coloured races, Australia would be to-day an Asiatic colony, still nominally held, perhaps, by a small band of White suzerains, but ripe to fall at any moment into the hands of its 10,000,000 or 20,000,000 Asiatic inhabitants.

Instead of that, Australia is at once the fortress which the White Race has thinly garrisoned against an Asiatic advance southward, and the most tempting prize to inspire the Asiatic to that advance. There is not the least doubt that, given Australia, Japan could establish a power threatening the very greatest in Europe. Her fecund people within a couple of generations would people the coast-line and prepare for the colonisation of the interior. Rich fields and rich mines put at the disposal of a frugal and industrious people would yield enormous material wealth.