Looking Ahead On Australia Day

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31587, 26 January 1968, Page 9

Looking Ahead On Australia Day

On January 26, 1788, a fleet of small ships from England, 12,000 miles away, sailed into Port Jackson to form an English colony in the new discovered land of Australia—and the people on the ships shuddered at their future.

Today—January 26, 1968—is Australia Day, commemorating that first landing 180 years ago. Port Jackson is the site of Australia’s biggest city—and its people no longer shudder at thoughts of the future. Between that first glimpse of the rugged, inhospitable shores of Botany Bay and Sydney Cove which greeted the First Fleet, and the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Sydney today, stretches the whole history of Australia.

In less than 200 years it has changed from a scarce-believed sailors’ tale of a Great South Land beyond the horizon of his furthest southward voyage to the threshold of a potential development that is as yet merely glimpsed on the horizon.

In these intervening years much has happened. a whole way of life has changed. What was first a granary, then a woolstore, then a food supplier to much of the world, with a purely agrarian economy, has—since the 1940’s —left its adolescence behind and is on the verge of a future that would have been considered an impossible pipe dream even a hundred years after the pioneers of the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson.

For 128 of these 180 years Australians and New Zealanders have been, if not quite full partners, at least very good friends and neighbours. Their history has run roughly parallel. They had fought together in two world wars. They have lived through the vicissitudes of the Empire and the British Commonwealth together, with common interests, a common heritage and a common loyalty. A New Zealander and an Australian in partnership— Anthony Wilding and Norman Brookes—laid the foundation for Australia’s domination in Davis Cup tennis and many New Zealanders have had a hand in Australia's economic, industrial, and cultural development. Some people to whom Australia owes much, and who are generally considered to be Ausralians, are in fact New Zealanders. They include Sir Douglas Copland, noted economist and the first vice-chan-cellor of the Australian National University; Sir Frederick White, chairman of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which has a world reputation in research; Sir William Hudson, First Commissioner of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Authority, Australia's most ambitious hydro - electric scheme. And in the arts—Joan Hammond, noted woman golfer and internationally famous soprano, who, although she was educated and lived most of her life in Australia, is in fact New Zealand born. New Zealand racehorses are, of course, justly famous in Australia. Looking Ahead But this is Australia Day, and although Australians today look with a certain justifiable pride on their past, their attention is on the future and what it holds. In this future. New Zealand is inextricably woven if only by its geographical position—nearer to Sydney or Melbourne than is Perth, capital of Western Australia —and bound by ties which are more than those of mere geographical proximity, and which must inevitably become closer.

Signs of this are already evident in the existing Free Trade agreement between the two countries and in a proposal to manufacture aluminium at Bluff, in the South Island, from alumina produced at Gladstone, Queensland, using the vast bauxite deposits being developed at Weipa, a desolate region on the Gulf of Carpentaria in Australia’s far north. New Zealand has the enor-

omus quantities of low cost electricity needed for the production of aluminium while, in Australia, only Tasmania has resources in any way comparable. Bright Prospects Australia’s prospects are bright. This decade has started the greatest and most diversified development of its history. Within the last five years—almost overnight it seems— Western Australia, the biggest and probably the least developed of the Australian States, has been found to have deposits of iron of such vastness that it would seem the whole State is one enormous field of iron. But there are other minerals too—manganese, nickel in large quantities, mineral sands, copper—most of the basic minerals needed by the world, including the metal titanium, used for the nose cones of space rockets. Perhaps it is fitting that Western Australia should be the source of this newest and probably most potent upsurge of development in Australia It was the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie gold rushes late last century that pushed Australia into the modern world with an influx of population from all parts of the world seeking riches in the “Golden Mile”—the richest gold bearing mile the world has seen. Now it is certain that the iron ore and other mineral fields will prove richer in the long term view—production of at least BAIOOO million a year has been forecast within the next few years and that is only the beginning. Oil Strikes Oil has been discovered—after 75 years of searching with fluctuating hopes and many disappointments—and the experts think Australia may be self-supporting in oil within the next decade. Natural gas has been a side dividend—and a valuable one —of the increased tempo in oil search. Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, and probably Sydney will all be using natural gas for at least part of their home heating and cooking requirements in a year or two. Work on the pipeline to supply Melbourne with gas from the Bass Strait fields has already started. Technologically Australia is not far behind the leaders, in some fields well ahead. Its space research with radio telescopes is well known, its co-operation in space launchings and satellite tracking, its first launching of an Australian designed and manufactured satellite, using a United States rocket to put it into orbit, is only a month past. Design, manufacture and launching of the rocket was completed in less than 12 months. Its cities grow apace and create then- own problems. Its resources are attracting a new influx of overseas capital so necessary for development.

This harsh land which terrified the first settlers on January 26, 1788, dry and in parts desolate as it still may

be, is slowly and still somewhat reluctantly releasing Its treasures as a reward for 180 years of struggle and as a hope for a future that, like the sailors’ glimpse of the Great South Land on the far horizon, is shot with signs of glory.