Taranaki Herald. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 1911. AUSTRALIA'S TASK.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 14398, 4 January 1911, Page 2

Taranaki Herald. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 1911. AUSTRALIA'S TASK.

A touring cyclist wlio has just completed a journey round Australia has brought back with bim strange stories of the existence of civilised communities in the far north of the island continent

of whom the people of the Commonwealth know nothing. Until further details and some tangible proofs are furnished it is impossible for us to say whether these are “only a traveller’s yarns” or whether there arc actually settlements on the north coast of civilised people, perhaps Japanese or Chinese. The mere unsupported statements, however, will serve to direct attention more closely than ever to the risk Australia runs of being peopled, in the northern parts at any rate, largely by an alien race. Tho average Australian, like the average New Zealander, is apt to regard his own immediate surroundings as his country. To the Melbourne man Victoria is Australia, the Sydneyite sees little beyond the Blue Mountains. They have some indistinct idea that in the “never never country” there are more or less vast tracts of land, unoccupied and unfit for occupation. But that this is a misconception is daily becoming more and more evident. Explorers have brought back reports of fertile regions in the Northern Territory, with a climate quite suitable for white settlement, and there is little doubt that there is an enormous area in the northern part of the continent in which the brown races would thrive. The question then arises, what is Australia going to do about it? One thing is quite certain, that Mel-, bourne and Sydney cannot indefinitely keep the north empty. They must endeavour to settle it with people of their own selection or throw it open to the overflowing population of whatever countries choose to use it as an outlet. Apparently the older Australia grows the more careless it becomes of filling up dhe waste places. The Sydney Morning Herald pointed out the other day that while in the ten years between 1851 and 1861 there were added to the population by immigration 576,328 people and

38(5,900 ljetTTGe.il ISBI tmtl 1891) yet iii the flrol tea years of IstUration only 75,000 people hove bccfi brought la. It is “Australia for Australians’* carried to an extreme. Hut it cannot Lust, No law, human or divine, can justify five millions of people, aecunyinp a comparatively insignificant arco of that luigo continent, in declaims that the rest of the country is reserved for themselves and their natural progeny. Further than that, there in no power that can prevent the overflow of other countries, when the pressure is great enough, from pouring into those unoccupied regions. If Australians do not take energetic steps to people the country someone else is certain sooner or later to do so. They talk about defences against invasion, but they little understand the difficulty of keeping people out who may be driven from other countries so seek new homes. Japan is not at present in need of an outlet for emigration, but she may be in fifty or a hundred years, and Australia will find it almost impossible to keep them out of a region which provides room for many millions. There is only one course open to Australia, and that is to take active steps to extend settlement further and further northwards, and to freely admit and encourage suitable white immigration. The penalty of neglect of this very obvious duty may not be felt in the lifetime of the present or the next generation, but it will surely have to be paid some day.