The World: Australia: She’ll Be Right, Mate–Maybe

You never knew anything so nothing, Nichts, Nullus, niente, as the life here. Australians are always vaguely and meaninglessly on the go. That’s what the life in a new country does to you: it makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner life and your inner self dies out, and you clatter around like so many mechanical animals… Yet the weird, unawakened country is wonderful…

SO wrote British Novelist D.H. Lawrence to his wife’s sister in 1922. Contemporary Australians could justifiably answer Lawrence with the words of another British author, Anthony Burgess, who recently wrote: “This great, empty continent must surely become the New New World, and it is significant that the accents of the disillusioned New World now mingle with the cheerful Dickensian cockney of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney…The country breathes promise, and it is a wonderful place for bringing up big, brown, bare-toed children.”

The fact is that Australia’s reputation has rarely if ever coincided with its reality. In an earlier age it was known as the resettling place for convicts—157,000 in all between 1788 and 1868. Throughout its history, many foreigners have found it to be in Lawrence’s words “so hoary and lost, so unapproachable.” Even a few Australians have agreed. Every year some 6,000 of them leave home, mostly for Europe and America, and even today a large percentage of the best-known Australians are expatriates. Among them: Soprano Joan Sutherland, Dancer Robert Helpmann, Actress Zoe Caldwell, Actors Leo McKern and Rod Taylor, Writers Morris West and Alan Moorehead, Artist Sidney Nolan.

But lately, much of the traffic has been the other way. With the U.S. caught up in momentous internal problems, Australia has become the place that millions of Americans and Europeans consider the last beckoning frontier. A recent Gallup poll reported that 12% of the American people would like to move abroad, twice as many as in 1959. Of that group, a third (about 8,000,000) would choose Australia as their new home; since 1965, no fewer than 14,000 have done so. The same poll revealed that 40% of the British people, 27% of the West Germans and 16% of the Hollanders would like to emigrate. Among the Britons and Hollanders, Australia was again the most popular choice.

What is the attraction? Jobs are plentiful, as usual, and the country is riding the crest of a mining boom in the Northwest. Australia still throbs with zestful materialism. It is an egalitarian land with a relaxed, undemanding lifestyle. The big cities are all on the coasts, and three-quarters of the people live within an hour’s drive of a beach. Sydney, built around three harbors, sometimes seems almost water borne. “All my students seem seduced by sport and sun,” says a professor at the university in Perth, echoing the tribute of Poet Dorothea Mackellar to Australia as “the sunburned country…the wide, brown land.”

If that sounds rather like Lawrence’s description of energetic mindlessness, there is more to the picture. Contrary to myth, Australia has long been largely urban; today it is becoming urbane as well. There are many signs that it has entered an age of self-awareness. Ten universities have been built in as many years, and a sharp debate is under way on the low quality of state-run secondary schools. The country, moreover, is hardly the cultural desert portrayed by its critics. Every one of the six states has a subsidized orchestra, and new centers for the performing arts are being built in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. The most spectacular new home of the arts, scheduled to open next year, is Sydney’s $106 million opera house, whose spinnaker-shaped roofs seem almost ready to sail across the harbor.

Australia, it has been said, is much like California without the extremes; it has neither California’s social tension nor creativity. But it has the same strong streak of conservatism surviving amid change, the same beach culture, the same new suburbs and universities. It tolerates eccentrics and mavericks, has the same need for approval by outsiders and is beginning to show the same obsession with self-analysis. Writes TIME Correspondent John Shaw: “Like California, Australia knows about gold, luck, sport, opportunity, split-levels, the rich strike, the easy buck, the swift rise, the hard fall, the feeling of frontier, the myth of the explorer and the pioneer. Unlike California, Australia does not yet know much about smog, racial tension, youthful radicalism, the barrenness of affluence, the alienation of urbanism. The most obvious challenges to Australia are to avoid these.”

Viable Quorum

Despite an open land and bountiful resources, Australians are, to a surprising extent, “knockers”—a skeptical people. They are accustomed to flood, drought, bush fire and a geography that, except for a few narrow coastal strips, does not encourage facile ideals or visionary plans. With a kind of perverse heroism, they have made the national holiday the celebration of a defeat, the devastating battles in the Gallipoli campaign against the Turks in 1915. Australian nationalists would like to see the country adopt a stirring song called Advance Australia Fair as the national anthem in place of God Save the Queen. The change is resisted not because of monarchist sympathy but a widespread suspicion about pretension and lofty appeals. “Australians are still frightened of success,” says Charles Court, who has played an important part in the mineral development of Western Australia. “They think too small.”

Once, their detractors wisecracked that they did not think at all. But now issues that used to be reserved for “ratbags” (irresponsible eccentrics)—such as the white-Australia policy, the treatment of the country’s 180,000 aborigines, Viet Nam, abortion, the status of women—are discussed widely. An embryonic Women’s Lib movement based in Sydney has just published the first issue of its newsletter Mejane, named for Tarzan’s overly protected mate. Says Daryl Jackson, a young Melbourne architect who has worked and studied in the U.S.: “On all of these issues there is now what might be called a viable quorum. A few years ago there were not enough people concerned with them even to get a dialogue going. Now you can have a debate on any of them. That’s the biggest change here in the past five years.”

What has brought about the change? One factor is the wave of immigration that has helped push Australia’s population from 7,500,000 at the end of World War II to 12.7 million today.

The newcomers, increasingly from Italy and Yugoslavia as well as Britain, have given Australia a much more vivid and varied texture, and have made its society more tolerant through diversity. A fourth of the populations of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth are foreign born. Foreign manners and mores have affected the restaurants, shops, services, styles and architecture; Sydney and Melbourne now have a variety of eating places to compare with New York or San Francisco. Seventy foreign-language newspapers are published in Australia; Italian, Dutch and Greek clubs can be found everywhere, and the outdoor café has become a part of the Australian way of life.

Influx of Newcomers

Mediterranean immigrants tend to shun the traditional pubs-and-beer culture, and have led the way to a three fold increase in wine consumption in the past decade. The new residents are occasionally criticized for working too hard and spending too little, but there has been surprisingly little violence or tension between old and new Australians, or among the immigrants themselves.

The influx of newcomers is remarkable: 180,000 last year. This has put a heavy strain on Australian social services. Accordingly, the government has decided to cut the number to 140,000 this year, of whom 100,000 will pay only $25 for their journey; the rest of the cost is paid by the Australian government. The reduction will give schools and hospitals a breather, but it may lead to a labor shortage and wage increases; immigrants currently account for one-quarter of Australia’s work force.

Despite the temporary curtailment, Australia is likely to remain for the rest of the century a land that is virtually wide open to foreigners—or at least to white ones. Since 1966, the government has even relaxed the long-standing white-Australia policy, which generations of politicians coyly insisted did not exist. Last year, under an informal quota of 10,000 per year, 3,500 non-whites (mostly Chinese from the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia) and 6,000 persons of mixed blood (mainly Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Ceylonese and Anglo-Chinese) were admitted.

There is no prospect, however, that Australia will become an ethnic mishmash like Brazil, as some critics of the new immigration policy have charged; after all, the country still accepts many more whites than nonwhites. Few of the nonwhites are black, although Australia has admitted 250 black American immigrants in the past five years.

Nation of Suburbs

Immigration is only one of the factors that have changed Australia profoundly since World War II. The country still has its bush pilots and grizzled cowboys, its sheepherders who travel around their 100,000-acre spreads by motorcycle, and its “kings in grass castles” who raise huge herds of Santa Gertrudi cattle. But these are mostly the Australians of myth, slightly larger than life. The faces of modern Australia still include the prospector and the cattleman, but they also include the mine worker, the land developer, the labor leader and the successful young mod designer. Actually, the average Australian is not now—and never was—the remote man of the outback, “the son of field and flock …from bold and roving stock,” as Poet “Banjo” Patterson described the pioneer. He is a suburbanite, and his country is one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Australians like to tell a newcomer that if he will go first to the top of Sydney’s tallest building and then to the top of Melbourne’s tallest building, he will see the homes of more than half the Australian population.

Australian literature once consisted of bush ballads about drovers and sundowners, poems to the shearers and squatters, the track and the outback. Today the setting of Australian writing is city and suburb. Patrick White, the country’s leading novelist, achieved fame with Voss, his novel about an explorer; today, in a style reminiscent of John Cheever and John Updike, he dissects the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla, probably modeled after Sydney’s leafy Castle Hill area. Barry Humphries, Australia’s foremost humorist, savagely satirizes what he calls “the pseuds”—the self-consciously trendy Australians caught up in an age of television, jet charters and public relations. But his chief targets are suburban living and Australian respectability, which he lampoons in the form of two characters he plays: Mrs. Edna Everage, a dogmatic, middle-aged Melbourne lady who wears bizarre hats and white gloves, and is wild about the Queen, gladioli and ex-Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies; and Sandy Stone, a middle-aged husband addicted to the Reader’s Digest, radio serials and budgerigars.

The suburbs have proved to be a worthy foil. They are full of nouveaux riches because the country is newly rich. The size of the average car has doubled in ten years; powerboats on trailers choke carports. There are sculptured gnomes on lawns, and almost every front door has a “feature” such as a horseshoe knocker or a flock of stained-glass ducks in flight.

Not far away are the supermarkets crowded with housewives in shorts and minis, the fried-chicken drive-ins and the wig-care salons. The staples of this new life are beer, sports and steak dinners. Power mowers whine all day Saturday, and on Sunday mornings the streets are full of prebreakfast car washers. Every suburb has its lawn bowls club, its public tennis courts and golf course, and many of the young elite are developing such affluent addictions as saunas, big-game fishing, ski weekends and even a little group sex.

Matey Tone

A center of the new Australian culture is the suburban club, which bears about as much resemblance to the typical U.S. country club as the Manhattan telephone book does to the Social Register. The $1,400,000 East Sydney Club, for instance, has 20,000 members who pay $5 a year in club fees. It has been described as a cross between Las Vegas and the Y.M.C.A. On a recent Sunday afternoon it bustled with several thousand boisterous Australians. On the first floor, at least 1,000 members were gathered around 200 slot machines, or sitting in the beer garden or discussing football at the men-only “scrum bar.” Upstairs, 600 men and women were drinking beer at long tables while they listened to a stand-up comic; near by, a self-service restaurant was turning out $2.25 dinners of shrimp, steak and pie. Members who were not exhausted from a day at the beach or sports could swim in the 50-meter pool, enjoy a sauna, or play pool, darts or table tennis. The architecture is brash, the décor early TWA, the tone matey and the turnover tremendous. The income from the slot machines pays the mortgages and keeps the costs down.

For most of its history, Australia’s economy has ridden on the backs of endless flocks of sheep. Today it rests more comfortably on the gigantic power shovels of the new mines. The economy boasts a steady if unspectacular annual growth rate of 3%, and the country has had virtually full employment for 25 years. “Positions Vacant” columns fill acres of newsprint every day, but Australians note that unemployment is on the rise—from .96% to 1.2% in the past year. Such a rate would go almost unnoticed in the U.S. or Western Europe.

Perhaps the most obvious change in Australian life has been spurred by the mining boom of the past five years, which has more than offset the steady decline in farm income. There have been sizable finds of uranium, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, oil and natural gas. A huge bauxite mine is being developed in the remote Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. But the center of the expansion lies in Western Australia, which occupies 1,000,000 sq. mi. and has about as many residents. At Kalgoorlie, where Herbert Hoover once managed a gold mine, vast nickel strikes have revived long-dormant ghost towns. In the desolate Pilbara region, two railroads, two ports and two brand-new towns have sprung up in the past four years, and more than 20,000 people have flocked in. The lure: some of the largest and richest iron-ore deposits in the world, estimated to total as much as 15 billion tons.

Mountain of Iron

Geologists had long known that northwestern Australia contained mountains of ore, but until recently they lacked the technology required for extracting it: chiefly, automated tools and, to make life bearable for the miners, air conditioning. The present boom can be traced largely to the vision of one remarkable man, Charles Court, a Perth accountant turned politician who served as Western Australia’s Minister for Industrial Development from 1960 until this year. “We must develop our great empty spaces,” Court said, “before we can say we really own Australia.”

In three years studded with visits to Japan, the U.S., Britain and elsewhere. Court set in motion a series of enormous deals that have already resulted in the investment of more than $1 billion in the Pilbara. The $336 million Mount Newman Mining Co. (30% of which is owned by American Metal Climax) is systematically leveling Mount Whaleback, an immense lode that rises 750 ft., stretches three miles and is said to be rich in ore for at least 1,000 ft. below the earth’s surface. In the next 15 years, it will deliver 300 million tons of iron ore to steelmakers, mainly in Japan.

The job of carrying off the mountain bit by bit is done by huge 450-ton power shovels that chew off 25-ton chunks of ore in a single bite and dump them into 75-ton trucks. The ore is then crushed and transported by 150-car, mile-long freight trains to Port Hedland, where it is loaded aboard freighters at the rate of 10,000 tons an hour. The boom has turned Port Hedland into the world’s fifth busiest port.

Typical of the Pilbara’s new mining towns is Mount Newman at the foot of Mount Whaleback. Its 2,700 people represent no fewer than 43 nationalities, including one Icelander. Every dwelling is air conditioned, since the temperature runs over 100° F. for two solid months during the summer, and the amenities also include three swimming pools, four tennis courts and a golf course with gravel fairways and sandy greens. The miners are well paid, but the labor turnover nonetheless is 100% a year. The reasons are not hard to find; most ironworkers are after a quick stake and leave as soon as they have saved one. They are also lonely: the town has only 16 single girls.

Quarry for Japan

In 1969 the Pilbara supplied a quarter of Japan’s needs of 82 million tons of iron ore. By 1975, Japan will be using 175 million tons, and Western Australia will be providing 70 million. Some Australians have grumbled that the Pilbara will simply become “a quarry for Japan.” The best answer is provided by Charles Court, who set the great iron ball rolling in the Pilbara seven years ago: “A quarry has no soul, no permanence. Next we have to develop industries in the north. I think the great task for Australia is to develop new northern cities, and not simply grow around the big southern centers. The best defense policy is to settle the north.”

An even greater task will be to redefine its role. Australia is overwhelmingly white, notably affluent (with a G.N.P. of $40 billion) and technologically advanced. But it is perched on the edge of Asia.

In the decades to come, Australia’s development will be closely intertwined with that of Japan, and Australians are growing increasingly aware of that fact. Even now, the country’s best secondary school, Geelong Grammar, where Britain’s Prince Charles was once a pupil, is teaching Japanese to 200 boys. Japan is already Australia’s second most important trading partner (after the U.S.), and that trade has quadrupled in the past ten years. But the nature and extent of the relationship are as yet undetermined. Writes Peter Robinson, the Sydney Morning Herald’s specialist on Japanese affairs: “There has never before been an advanced nation of European descent which has been largely dependent for its economic welfare on an advanced Asian nation. The real issue that now faces both Australia and Japan is a racial one. Can two dramatically different societies evolve a relationship which transcends their historical prejudices?”

Limited Visions

The question has even larger implications. The fact is that Australia is approaching a watershed as profound as the moment at the beginning of the Pacific war when the Japanese had seized Singapore and stripped the country of its British defense shield. Australia’s late Prime Minister John Curtin at that time declared that his country would henceforth look to the U.S. for its security, “free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship” with Britain. Today the U.S. is engaged in extricating itself from Indochina and is unlikely to make new commitments in Southeast Asia for a long time. Yet the Soviet Union, China and Japan are increasing their influence in the oceans that bound Australia. Clearly, the Australians are being challenged to find a new role for themselves in the Pacific. But the response of their leaders thus far has been less than dynamic. Indeed, some critics grumble that Australia’s political leadership is so mediocre that every rosy prediction about the national destiny must be qualified.

The present Prime Minister, William McMahon, is likely to prove a transitional figure. McMahon, 63, is an urbane, cultured man who two months ago succeeded John Gorton as Prime Minister and head of the long-ruling Liberal Party, which despite its name is notably conservative. He was previously known as Australia’s most effective Treasurer. But he is a man of limited vision, and what Australia needs in the 1970s is someone with great imagination. When TIME’S John Shaw interviewed McMahon, he asked, “What are your thoughts on the future of Australia?” All of Shaw’s questions but that one had been submitted in advance, and McMahon, confronted with the unexpected, was nonplused. Writes Shaw: “McMahon shuffled rapidly through his papers. He found no brief on the future, no position paper filed under F, no memorandum on destiny. He said, ‘I’ll have to send you a note on that.’ ” But he never did.

In the next elections, which must be held by November 1972, the opposition Labor Party under Edward Gough Whitlam, a capable but lackluster politician, has its best chance for victory since 1949, when it last ruled. If the Liberals win, however, McMahon will probably be replaced by a stronger figure in his own party. In both parties, the survivors of the era of Sir Robert Menzies are being crowded by a new generation of bettereducated, broader-minded, less complacent men. Among the Liberals are Malcolm Peacock, who at 31 is the country’s Army Minister, and Steele Hall, 40, the party leader in South Australia. Foremost among Labor’s rising stars is Robert James Lee Hawke, 41, the controversial and amply sideburned president of the 1,750,000-member Australian Council of Trade Unions.

Son of a Congregational minister from the outback hamlet of Bordertown, Hawke is a Rhodes scholar who, while at Oxford, set a world beer-drinking record (according to the 1957 Guinness Book of Records, he downed 2½ pints in twelve seconds). Hawke spent twelve years as the A.C.T.U.’s brilliant, abrasive chief lawyer. When he succeeded to the union’s leadership last year, he be gan tackling everyone and everything. He described the national steel monopoly, Broken Hill Proprietary, as rapacious. He called Cabinet Member Billy Snedden, who is considered McMahon’s heir apparent, “an intellectual cripple.” He blasted then-Prime Minister John Gorton as “a coward, a charlatan and a sham” for refusing to debate him on the issue of the 35-hour work week.

Stone in the Pond

His most spectacular effort was his recent triumph over “resale price maintenance,” or price fixing, which had been scrupulously observed by Australian retailers for years. Hawke arranged for his union to buy a partnership in a Melbourne department store, Bourke’s, and promptly began to cut prices. Dunlop’s, the British-based firm that is heavily involved in manufacturing in Australia, at first refused to supply Bourke’s unless the store obeyed price-fixing orders. Hawke retaliated by threatening a strike against Dunlop’s, and the manufacturer gave in within 24 hours. The government quickly pushed an anti-price-fixing bill through Parliament, but it was obvious to Australians that the real victor was the outspoken Hawke. “Bob Hawke has thrown a large stone into the middle of a stagnant pond,” said a Melbourne businessman. A carpenter in Sydney put it more earthily: ” Hawke’s certainly a stirrer, ain’t ‘e?”

There are other noticeable stirrings in Australia these days. Last week the government responded, if a bit tardily, to the problem of easing tension with mainland China. A few hours after Labor’s Gough Whitlam announced that he would go to Peking with a party delegation next month, the Prime Minister hastily announced that he too was trying to start a “dialogue” with Peking. In other steps toward establishing a new posture in a changing world, McMahon gave the Soviet Union permission to establish a trade office and a shipping agency in Sydney, and approved the sale of $2,240,000 worth of Australian sugar-cane harvesting machines to Cuba, despite Washington’s apparent displeasure.

A Labor victory next year would make Washington unhappy in at least one other important respect. Labor, says Whitlam, would take a more independent position on the presence of the 13 U.S.-Australian military and space installations. Hawke takes an even more adamant stand. “The American bases,” he says, “unnecessarily expose us to nuclear attack. The U.S. decision in a potential conflict will be decided on U.S. interests and not on the basis that since we gave the bases, we should be considered in decisions that may involve them.” No longer can a Prime Minister say, as the late Harold Holt did, that he was “all the way” with Washington—and let it go at that.

Stirring Land

Does Hawke expect other drastic changes in the years just ahead? “Yes, for Chrissake. The individual Australian’s capacity to change is the same as anyone’s. In 1960, anyone here who said recognize Red China was called a Communist or a ratbag. That’s changed, and so have many other things.” Among them is Hawke’s once dogmatic approach. “A socialist society would operate better than what we have,” he says. “But I’m realistic enough to see that most Australians don’t want socialism; therefore we must make the system we have work better. Most capitalism elsewhere works better than it does here.”

Hawke has a point. For 20 years, Australia has prospered at least partly because of a generous helping of luck. If wool prices sagged, there was always a new mineral discovery to take up the slack. Small wonder that the Australians still assure each other: “She’ll be right, mate”—meaning that everything will work out.

And so it may, but not by accident. Many experts predict that Australia’s population will eventually soar as high as 25 million—double what it is today—before it stabilizes. Such matters as the new relationship with Japan, the rationalization of mineral development, and the problems of urbanism, education and conservation can no longer be solved ad hoc, or over a few beers, or by trusting to luck. D.H. Lawrence could not call Australia an “unawakened country” today. But if the stirring land is to become as wonderful as Lawrence found it weird, it will need the sort of inspiration, expertise and tough-minded planning that it has rarely had before.