It is not difficult to understand why Australian women should regard themselves as beautiful. You know the Papuan natives who stain their teeth with betel nut think white molars hideous. When any country sets up its own style of beauty it takes a good while to convince it that any other style can be beautiful, let alone to force the admission that the local gods are false. So few Australians have travelled that a restricted horizon is natural. I don't say that your women have anything to be ashamed of in having abnormal busts, flat hips, and thick ankles, but when they arrogate to themselves the right to set up a standard for the world I really must protest.
Chapter V.
AUSTRALIA FOR THE AUSTRALIANS.
This watchword is the motto of "the national newspaper." It is also the top note of all the Labour party screeches.
The national weakness of Australia it shows is instinctive. There is a distrust of its own capability; self-reliance is totally absent; there is no vital growth.
Never was the confirmation of such wretched defects in a people so complete as in this confessional clamour, this lack of combating power of pride of race.
Ostensibly it is to exclude inferiors, but it really argues against the incoming of superiors. In striking contrast is it from the "Let 'em all come" policy of Great Britain.
The screaming farce of the whole business, however, is the education test immigrants are subjected to. They must be able to write a line of some European language. Why, official figures show that there are in Australia nearly 400,000 persons over the usual literate age who cannot read and write.
"Australia for the Australians" is merely the cowardice shriek, "Preservation for the incompetent." To exclude is to fear, disguised howsoever it be.
Such widespread self-deceit as to its being anything else is impossible of credence. It is the craven state of pampered workers that has infected all classes in Australia. Periodically the country gets an attack of delirium tremens, and then it sees the black man, the yellow man, and variegated mankind generally with the upper hand.