NOTES AND COMMENTS

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 3890, 3 December 1919, Page 2

NOTES AND COMMENTS

The Flight to Australia

There is romance and thrill as well as national speculation in tho aviation race across tho Pacific Ocean between Poulet tho Frenchman and Ross-Smith the Australian. Tho Parisian bi-dman has had much delay, but tho Australian has had a good run; so that, if his good fortune holifa np, he should win easily. There is not only national pride to urge him into taking those risks which aro part of the game in the air, but there i.s . .£'lo,ooo prize for the aviator who first reaches Port Darwin, at tho top of Australia, the capital of the Northern Territory, and the first placo of landin_- in the Commonwealth as the crow flies across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. From Darwin the aviators take the bee-line to Melbourne, at the other extreme of the island continent.

The Pacific's Stepping Stones

When Ross-Smith Hies oil' tho toe oi Asia (.Singapore), he enters upon the retcioiii unknown to aviation. But although it will be all ocean flight, there will be no gap between islands greater thuu .00 miles. It is said that the greatest problem will bo landing places, as tho islands are so densely wooded. From Singapore, tho flight is over tho corner of Sumatra, "the aviator avoiding Borneo (on.his left). Ho will bear down along the length of Java, stopping at Batavia and Samarang; and then will swing over tho Dutch East Indies, calling en route at Suinbawa and Timor. Tjience he has a straight flight across the 300----uiile gap to Port Darwin. If Australia had its interesting ethnological equivalent of our problem of the Maori, the savants over there would bo arguing just now that the men in the air wore showing by their flight tho voyaging of the aborigines along the stopping stones from India to Australia.

Control of Communications. Our Motherland has not taken to heart the lessons of the war in the matter of control of the means of swift communication, particularly in having a grip upon the enemy in the day when he might again want to use those means for getting ahead of us. It is cabled that the British Government, which is spending hundreds of millions sterling without qualm upon engines of war, will not definitely secure in the hands of tho State the system of wireless telegraphy. We believe that every component part of the Empire would bear its share of installing an all-British wireless system. Indeod, New Zealand has already done so by erecting a big plant at Rarotonga. Australia, like New Zealand, owns all the telegraph, telephone, and wireless means of communication". So should the Motherland and every other State within the Empire. When the war broke out in 1914 it was discovered that tho British Government did not control even one of the 17 lines of cables across tho Atlantic. Germany had seen to that, and what lines were not German were owned by Americans, with Germanic infiuenco on the directorates. John Bull is slow to learn, but the colonial mind cannot understand why the Motherland, which is so efficient in her mail services, does not own all the other sister conveniences, such as the telephone, telegraph, cable, and wireless systems.