AUSTRALIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21159, 16 April 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIA.

BY KOTARE

MEN AND PROBLEMS;

The best study of the Australian type was written by the New Zealander Arthur H. Adams. That is natural enough. A man born and nurtured all his days in New Zealand is not necessarily the most reliable authority on New Zealand achievements and standards. He has never been able to stand outside and see things in their true perspective. What do they know of England that only England know ? A man formed wholly in one place has no satisfactory standard of comparison. He cannot easily determine relative values. He is too easily moved to the expressions of approval that are merely the reflection of his selfsatisfaction, his delighted contemplation of his own virtues. Actually an observant sympathetic outsider is much more likely to notice trends, to assess values in any nation's life, as the spectator sees most of the game and the war correspondent knows better what is happening all along the line than the soldier tied by tho necessities of battle to the urgent tasks and the limited area before liiin.

So there is nothing surprising in the fact that Arthur Adams the New Zealander has understood the Australians better than they perhaps had understood themselves. He sees the Australian without traditions, with nothing in the past to hold him, his foot on the Future's verge. He strides a spacious continent— Above the level desert's margo Looming in his aloofness large. No flower of fragile sweetness graced— A lank weed wrestling with tlio waste. Pallid of face and gaunt of limb, The sweetness withered out of him. Sombre, indomitable, wan. The juices dried, (he glad youth gone. Bitter beneath a, bitter sky. To nature he has no reply. Wanton, perhaps, and cruel. Yes, Is not his sun more merciless? .Toy has such niggard dole to give, .He laughs a, child, just, glad to live. So drab and neutral is his day. Ho gleans a. splendour in the grey. The Pioneer. Adams is obviously writing of the continental Australian, the pioneer, the man out-back grappling with cruel nature. And he conceives that it is the man of the vast spaces, the conqueror of the desert, the grim fighter solitary in the waste, who represents (he highest type of Australian manhood, who gives its distinctiveness to the Australian type, who puts the iron into Australia's blood. Although the vast majority of Australia's population huddles near the coast, where the sea brings a more or less abundant rainfall, and only a small proportion of Australians could be to-day included in the pioneer class, one judges that Adams is right. The pioneer is the typical Australian. Much of Australian life takes its essential character from him. The standards beaten out in the wilderness beneath a pitiless sun have to a considerable extent been adopted by the nation at large. The Australian in the -war proved himself a magnificent fighting man; and New Zealand soldiers will testify that no man is a more staunch comrade, and no man carries more sunshine in his heart to make his own light and warmth in a dark place. He hates discipline or anything else that puts what he judges to be artificial limits on his independence or selfassertion. He hates frills and convention. There is a touch of cynicism about him. He finds pompous dignity the funniest thing in the world. The sun has dried all sentimentalism out of him. There is a curious strain of sensitiveness in him, though. He is far quicker to resent any reflection on his country or its people than a New Zealander would be. Take him for all in all, he is as fine a national type as any nation has ever had the honour of breeding.

Contrasts. Of course, there are all sorts of contradictions in him. One remembers that during the Great War, while some wero trying to undermine his Imperial patriotism and were claiming that Australian citizenship was a thing apart and had no necessary relation to Imperial citizenship, that a man could ho a loyal .Australian and own no allegiance to the British Empire, the Australian troops wero proving the quality nf their loyally on a dozen stricken fields. At the very time when the disloyal clamour was loudest at home, Australian valour and military genius were making that tremendous thrust through the German lines that more, perhaps, than any other factor broke the German resistance and brought so dramatically the swift end of the war.

And the noise and bluster of one section of Australia to-day need not blind us to the fact that over the great continent the sound common sense and integrity and fighting quality of (he nation at largo are facing up to their tremendous problems and already are finding the way through. The shrill shoutings of voluble disloyalist groups are no more characteristic of Australia to-day than they were in the days of (he war. Australia is as sound at heart as any other part of the British Empire.

The Inland. I have just read " Flynn of the Inland," a book that reveals in most human fashion what Australia, can do when she tackles a big problem. A vast area of Australia is usually written off in public opinion as barren, useless wilderness. A considerable portion of the back country of New South Wales and Queensland, most of South Australia and the Northern Territory, are wild and waste country, but all over them the pioneer has dug himself in. In West Australia considerable areas are hopeless desert, but there are even greater areas that can support human lifo and that in time will probably carry a considerable population. The problem that the pioneers had to face was complicated by the extraordinary difficulty of communication and transport. A few years ago a sick man might have to be carried anything up to two thousand miles over roadless desolation (o the nearest doctor. A valiant, missionary named Flynn dreamed a dream. There ought to bo hospitals established and maintained by the people of Australia at strategic points all over the vast area of inhabited back-lands. Australia rallied to his call. Now there is practically no pioneer who is more than three hundred miles away from a hospital controlled by competent nurses. In many of them there is a resident doctor. T!y 1932 " baby transmitters " with a range of over 500 miles had been installed over an area of 300,000 square miles, and there is wireless communication possible at all times with the radio base. Linked up with this is the, Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service. There are three doctors who travel to their patients by aeroplane over a wide experimental area on the Queensland frontier. Flynn's idea is to establish six other aieas to be served each from its aerial base. He has achieved so much that with Australia behind him he will certainly make his last great, dream come true. The grimmest shadow of fear that haunts the lives of the solitary pioneers in the wide spaces of inland Australia is already lifting. There, just across the Tasman, one of the greatest romances of missionary enterprise is being written before our eyes.