The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Australia

FOR the Australians “survival” look on a new meaning when in May, 1942, a Japanese invasion force Was turned aside in the Coral Sea only a few hundred miles from Queensland. It was the first time in its 162 years that the country had been threatened by invasion. And for the first time every Australian knew exactly what it feels like to defend a huge island continent with a population the size of New York City’s. The people realized that their rather glamorous isolation no longer existed and that hundreds of miles of unsettled territory could be a liability.

The Second World War brought industry to Australia, but stripped the nation of its manpower by putting nearly a million men and women into uniform. The labor shortage that resulted has never been adjusted, because the servicemen came back to far more opportunities than they had left in 1939. A potentially great nation was getting nowhere simply because there were not enough hands to support it, so the Australians decided to save themselves. They have begun an immigration drive to raise the country’s population from its present 8 million to 10 million by 1960.

Ten million people, of course, isn’t much of a population, but because of Australia’s physical peculiarities the total capacity of the country is not very large. Australia is a shade smaller than the Cubed States, but where our central states are a breadbasket, central Australia is an unlivable desert. It consists of hundreds upon hundreds of miles of flat, baked wasteland, broken only by abrupt, barren rock piles.

The livable area of the continent is a narrow strip of fertile land which starts in the jungle of the north and snakes down the eastern coast; it then jumps the Great Australian Bight and appears in patches up the west coast. This green belt is best suited for sheep and cattle grazing and has certain areas given over to crop farming, especially wheat. All these agricultural activities demand large landholdings. The “small farmer” is almost unknown.

In fact, when the early squatter settlers first reached the green valleys inland from the coast, they would climb a hill and claim all the land they could see. They prospered so spectacularly and funneled so much wealth into the country that it was actually uneconomicto break down their huge private properties. Even now there are stations in the outback with a million or more acres. Until recently the cities have existed merely as distribution centers for the primary produce of the land. Only today is there enough industry to absorb a. growth in population.

There seems no hope for years to come of reclaiming any of the desert —the “dead heart” of Australia. Much of it has never been visited by man, and there is no indication of subterranean water which could be used for irrigation. But even allowing for the cattle and sheep ranges, the fertile belt of Australia could hold comfortably 20 million people. Immigration leaders plan on 200,000 migrants a year in order to reach their goal of 10 million by 1960.

Houses for the newcomers

Two factors stand in the way of Australia’s plans: the housing shortage and the attitude of the “old” Australians. The first difficulty, of course, arises from the post-war labor shortage. Without adequate labor there are not adequate houses — and it is impossible to entice laborers to come and build houses in Australia unless they can be assured of housing facilities for themselves, Australia’s population has always consisted of nearly 100 per cent British stock. Migrants were offered an assisted passage, a large proportion of their fares being paid by the Australian government. Australians were urged to sponsor relatives and friends from Britain, guaranteeing them jobs and temporary living quarters.

The British migrants began coming in 1947, but not fast enough or in sufficient numbers to achieve the country’s ambitious population goal. There was only one thing for the government to do: give the nod to the International Refugee Organization. The Commonwealth therefore agreed to accept 12,000 displaced persons from Germany yearly so long as refugees anxious to make the trip were available.

To the Australians it has always been uncomfortably obvious that the people who want most to settle in their country are those with a lower standard of living. The White Australia policy was designed to maintain an Anglo-Saxon standard by keeping out the colored races. The old “dictation tests” were adopted by the Immigration Department to exclude 1 hose white Europeans who were deemed unworthy to bask in Australia s Anglo-Saxon sunlight. Tests were given these undesirables in any language which they obviously didn’t know — Sanskrit if necessary.

The decision, then, to solicit European D.P. migrants was a complete turnover of traditional Australian policy and was greeted with predictions of disaster by many of the “old" Australians. All the small-town bigotry of the blue-bloods became apparent, to the embarrassment ol the newcomers and of the thinking members of the community who realized that these Europeans were just what Australia needed.

it was whispered in some of the best clubs that the “dirty reffos” would bring hoarded gold with which to corner all the modern Hats and expensive cars. They were prematurely accused of either never doing a decent day’s work or else working with dangerous and immoral enthusiasm for vile profit. Politically, it was obvious that they would sell the country out to the Reds or install 1 heir own Fascist leaders. Gangsterism would undoubtedly flourish and good Anglo-Saxon decency would give way to Continental depravity.

From the D.P camp to sunlight

The first large shipment of D.P.s surprised everyone. Either by accident or with an unusual display of tact by the then Minister for Immigration, the hotheaded Arthur Calwell, the first “new Australians were carefully selected, vigorous voting Latvians and Esthomans. Blond and blue-eyed, husky and handsome, they beamed cheerfully from the front pages of every newspaper. The nativeborn were delighted with them. After all, a Northern European was almost as good as an Englishman.

As the flow increased, the racial selection became less discriminating. Along with the Baltic peoples were Poles, Hungarians. Austrians, and Russians. Finally even Southern Europeans began to come. By means of good publicity, consisting of heartbreaking news pictures and constant reminders of the great immigration era in the U.S. and its salubrious effects, these utterly un-AngloSaxon types were also accepted.

Today shipload after shipload of quiet, pale people with carefully acquired poker faces reaches Sydney and Melbourne each week. The passengers are efficiently hustled into trains for their journey to the Commonwealth Immigration Camps.

Australian officials who accompany them never quite become accustomed to their soulless docility, their deference to the uniform. The train journey is long and hot, but these people know better than to complain. When the trip is broken for lunch at a railway restaurant, the passengers automatically form queues and file obediently past the long tables bearing fresh salad and cold meat, loaves of bread and chunks of yellow butter. ’They stare at the food quite an ordinary meal by Australian standards — but have to be ordered to eat it. They think it is for the Kommandant and his staff.

At the camps, the D.P.s are taught the fundamentals of English and study the history of their new country. They are built up physically with good food and pleasantly strenuous farm labor. Most important of all, they gradually learn what freedom means.

For the children it is easy. They need only enter a state school, and before their parents know it they have turned into freethinking little Aussies. But the older people must be carefully spoon-fed in the art of making decisions, the ability to accept a good idea and reject a bad, the redevelopment of long-forgotten creative and judicial facets of their minds. ’They must also be taught to tolerate each other, for these are refugees of war, and hatred has motivated them for many years. The Lithuanian must learn to live with the Pole, the Finn with the Russian.

When the period of training is overand at best it can only be a sketchy training — the “new" Australians are released to lend for themselves. Then their most difficult period of readjustment begins, for the native-born have not been similarly educated in how to live with “foreigners.”

The apalogetic air

The Australian has a national habit of selfdepreciation which conceals his sensitive patriotism. An American dismissing his country with an Englishman says, “Our roads (houses, laws, girls) are darned good, aren’t they?” And the Englishman presumably says yes. The American invites praise and expects agreement. But the Australian says, “Our roads (hotels, morals, horses) are not very good compared with yours, are they?" And if the Englishman agrees, as he may be tempted to do, he gets a punch in the nose. The Australian invites condemnation and expects disagreement.

This subtlety of the Australian character is important in assessing the attitude of the native-born towards the migrant. The British migrant, who still makes up half the monthly quota of new arrivals, is forever getting himself into trouble by giving the wrong answers. He has a certain proprietary interest in Australia and he imagines he has a certain right to point out its faults.

But when the trap was sprung on the first European migrants, the results warmed the Australian heart. The D.P.s could honestly assure the native-born that everything in Australia is indeed wonderful and beautiful. The Australians were so pleased that the D.P.s were at least partially forgiven for having dark hair and chewing garlic.

Since they have begun to settle into the community, the Europeans have scored another unexpected success. Most Englishmen come to Australia for the primary purpose of getting rich quick. This tends to lead them to the cities, where they only add to the congestion, aggravate the housing shortage, and make themselves and everyone else miserable. But the D.P.s, who migrate in order to survive, contract to work for the Australian government for two years after their arrival. During this period they are employed chiefly in the building of houses, in public works, and in industries producing basic materials.

The unsettled areas of the outback, plagued as they are by fire, flood, and drought, seem like the Garden of Eden compared with what the D.P.s have known for the past ten years. They are overcome with happiness at the thought of eventually owning their own land, however poor, and working it for their own profit, however distant the reward and grueling the job. The “old" Australian knows this kind of settler is what his country needs most.

The Yank and the Aussie

Where do the American migrants fit into the picture? In 1946 there were rumored to be 20,000 young exservicemen waiting for transportation to Australia. The transportation never arrived for most of them. Out of the 2000 or so who did get across the Pacific, many are already home again; many more tire waiting for the chance to go home.

Their trouble has been much the same as that of the British. They came across for quick profit and they do not have the interest in the Australian future to see them through the disappointments. Another curiously American complaint is the position of women in the Australian community. To an American, the old idea that women exist to bear children, cook food, and wash clothes seems a little pagan. He expects his wife to do her shopping in her own car, to slide through her housework with the help of innumerable amenities, and to have time to take her j place in society on the same footing as her husband. But in Australia an American must draw a very large salary before he can keep his wife in the manner to which she is accustomed.

Moreover, in spite of all the wartime assurances that the Yanks and the Aussies are brothers under the skin, there is actually quite a difference in their ideologies. The American focuses his mind on the near future. He pictures himself, in a few years’ time, close to the top of the tree, able to indulge himself and his family in all the futuristic mechanical aids to good living which he has been taught to expect.

In Australia he finds a more static community with a more down-toearth outlook. The Australian wants to earn enough to keep himself clothed and fed and happy from day to day. He lives for his holidays, and whether they come annually or through a strike he welcomes them, He has no particular desire to climb the tree as long as his present limb is comfortable.

The best migrant is the one who has the ability to cut away the past completely, meet the present unfalteringly, and keep his faith in his grandchildren’s future — not his own. So far, the D.P.s of Europe have come closest to filling the bill, and the Australian, to his own surprise, feels ! confident that they are proving themselves the right answer to Australia’s problem of survival.