AUSTRALIA: Rank Heresy

Snug in Canterbury, Very Rev. Dean Hewlett Johnson pursues puttering studies in everything from geology to Japan and from hydraulics to Australia. Last fortnight these studious ramblings got him into trouble. He had noticed that about 3,000 Australians inhabit the Commonwealth’s Northern Territory which is nearly twice the size of the Empire of Japan. Since 90,000,000 Japanese are well known to be overcrowded in their Empire, it occurred to the Very Reverend Dean that the 3,000 Australians might make room for at least a few Japanese. Speaking diffidently at Guildford, puttering Dean Johnson said: “I have great sympathy with Japan, a vast industrial country seeking an outlet for her population and still more for her goods. She sees so much empty land; the United States struck me as an empty country and so did Australia. I should like to have seen a great English gesture—and I know it is rank heresy—in presenting to Japan that part of Australia which we cannot colonize ourselves. I believe that would change the whole atmosphere of the East!”

The Very Reverend Dean’s little speech changed the whole atmosphere of Australia. Roaring with rage, the Commonwealth’s high-blood-pressured politicians forgot their local strife last week in attacking Dean Johnson’s “outburst of ignorance.” Cried Premier Forgan Smith of the Australian State of Queensland which adjoins the vast and almost vacant Northern Territory: “As a means of smashing the British Commonwealth of Nations no more effective scheme could be devised!”

Strictly practical Australian politicians like Commonwealth Premier Joseph Lyons, “The Man from Tasmania,” realized that they must make some effective answer to Dean Johnson’s charge that His Majesty’s subjects “cannot colonize” the Northern Territory and should therefore let Japanese at least try. Mr. Lyons revealed a secret. His Government, he declared, has about completed negotiations with two groups of British financiers ready to invest between them £200,000,000 ($972,000,000 at par) in developing roughly half a million square miles of northern Australia.

Each capitalist group would be a chartered company, like the famed East India Co. which wrung so much wealth from Indian natives between the reigns of Charles II and William IV. To make the proposition more attractive Premier Lyons is willing to let the half-million square miles on hundred-year leases exempting the chartered companies from Australian duties, land taxes and income tax for that period.

In Australian cities, where income taxes are terrific, these revelations promptly started a second furor. Shifting their attack from Dean Johnson to Premier Lyons, irate Australian editors warned him “not to dare to create within our Commonwealth something like a foreign country!”

Stoutly Premier Lyons retorted that he would do no such thing. The chartered companies, he said, would be “properly regulated.” As confidence in Premier Lyons quelled the storm of opposition, Sydney’s Morning Herald gratefully declared that development of the Northern Territory by chartered companies would be “a great service to the Commonwealth economically and a great assistance in the defense of an empty, defenseless region.”