“I note that you compare our culture with that of America. Thanks! No two countries could be more dissimilar—there is not amongst us the greed, the wild rush, or the boastfulness of the Americans. We do not like them. While we are on comparisons, let me remind you that while you have failed to adjust your Irish question, we have federated Australia, a task of no small difficulty. While you have been talking and spilling ink about conscription, we have a system of compulsory training, both for the army and the navy, in full operation. While you allow strikes in the midst of war, our difficulties are being settled by wages boards and arbitration courts. We are not perfect, but our Press is much superior in tone and culture to yours. It is painful to read some of your Yankeeised London papers. In literature we have given you Mrs. Humphry Ward, though to learn new sins we read the indecent novels which appear to be the chief product of British fiction. And we have given the world—Melba!
“As to our share of the war. I walked down-street in Hobart yesterday to take a ‘billy’—pity your simplicity if you do not know what that is—to the City Hall. It was filled with all sorts of good things for our boys at Gallipoli for Christmas. Outside the newspaper office I read the cable, another ghastly list of Australian casualties. Were they necessary? Could not the Turks have been outflanked and their communications cut? When I reached home my wife and her friend were knitting socks for the soldiers. The lady friend mentioned, be it correct or not, that a ship that declined to carry troops—the Wimmera, New Zealand to Melbourne—was taken possession of and forced to take the men. The streets are full of soldiers ready to sail, and, alas, with many returned from the war crippled for life. And such splendid young men. What an improved edition of the British race the Australians are!
“Enough from stranger to stranger, but as your book seems to indicate gleams of intelligence on your part, and as it interested me, I am humbly—as a native-born Australian now close approaching the Psalmist’s limit—endeavouring to repay the compliment.—Yours truly,
“William Crooke.”
And Mr. Crooke enclosed a poem on the launching of H.M.S. Brisbane at the naval dockyard at Cockatoo Island:
Another link in the steel-strong chain which holds us heart to heart,
Another pledge to the old, old vow which swears we’ll never part;
While life doth last and love doth last we’ll give thee of our own—
Dear Motherland, accept this gift we lay before thy throne.
Forged in the heat of a southern sun, framed ’neath an Austral sky,