A RIGHT TO A PLACE IN THE SUN

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 139, 16 June 1930, Page 8

A RIGHT TO A PLACE IN THE SUN

Quite frequently the assertion made in recent cablegrams—that, in ability and willingness to work in the Queensland cane-fields, the Italian is superior to the British subject—has appeared in Australian papers. Two or three years ago a statement published by an Italian consular official declared broadly that the Italian immigrant had proved his adaptability to working out back instead of i crowding the cities; and such statements, as far as we know, have never been rebutted. In fact, the Queensland cane-fields seem to be on a par with the vegetable and fruit growing areas of irrigated California, where the hand labour (for which even America cannot substitute machinery) was done by the Chinese, then by the Japanese, and now by Mexicans. Walter V. Woehlke writes in the America a "Review of Reviews" that the exclusionist spirit ousted the Chinese, then the Japanese, and would now oust the Mexicans. But, he adds, the substitution of American whites is impossible; the whites will do what can be done "with machines or in the shade," but will not do "the stooping, bending, kneeling, crawling in the dust, in the hammering rays of the south-western sun." So Australia and the United States face the same angry racial demand to exclude economically necessary labour, only U.S.A. is a fairly full country well able to talk to the Mexican Government, and Australia is a mostly empty country who has Mussolini "to talk to. From 1921 to 1929 California's output of canned fruits and vegetables rose from eleven to twenty-eight million cases, with Mexicans. In the same decade Australia's sugar has developed an annual surplus sold oversea at a loss. With white labour, where will that loss end?