Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  Australian labor is militant on the point. They say, “We don’t want an American speed-up system here. We don’t want millionaires. We don’t want chrome and we can do without night clubs. What if it did mean an extra three quid a week? We like Australia just as it is.” And questions have already been asked in Parliament about baby-sitters. “Is this a device to exploit the worker?” There is a strong movement on to unionize baby sitters!

  The under-utilization of Australia’s industrial capacity would be all right if it concerned only Australians. But directly north and east of the great continent lie many islands and the mainland of Asia, all crowded with millions upon millions of brown people who can scarcely scrape together enough to eat.

  In 1942, Japan could easily have invaded Australia. No one in the crowded islands will forget that. Since population often determines history, it is certain that the brown races will sooner or later challenge Australia again. The hot breath of Asia is upon Australia’s neck, and only good fortune will keep her free.

  One answer to the menace has been the White Australia policy, which almost every Australian, regardless of other commitments, defends with fanaticism. This policy demands that no one with colored blood be allowed citizenship. It is enforced with brutal consistency. On passport applications, white travelers are warned that any colored servants brought into the country must possess a return ticket. Chinese men who married Australian girls and who reared large families were thrown out of the country. An Englishman who had married a Tongan girl of royal blood was told he’d have to send her back. A priest came to the moment of marrying a couple when he discovered that the girl had Martinique blood. He could not proceed with the ceremony. Not even Maoris were permitted to take residence until New Zealand officially protested at such an insult to her citizens.

  The white Australia policy started as an answer to the Chinese influx into gold fields and to the Solomon Island slaves in the sugar fields. The former were repatriated in shipload lots. The Islanders were crammed into schooners and evacuated. Says a white captain, “We put them ashore at any convenient island. They landed in strange places, wearing strange clothes, and with gold. For many it was instant death.”

  Along with the White Australia policy goes the acknowledgment that unless white people fill up the empty spaces, brown ones must. Therefore the Commonwealth maintains offices in Europe which beg settlers to emigrate. Considerable inducements are offered, but the number of takers is disappointing.

  The quality is even more so. What Australia seeks is five or six million Englishmen with college educations, money in the bank and impeccable appearance to join them. Failing that, they’ll accept Scots, Irish or Americans, in that order. If pressed, they’ll accept settlers like the German Templars, a religious group who emigrated to Palestine in 1860, from where 540 moved recently to Australia, bringing with them $11,200,000. Obviously, there aren’t many such emigrants.

  The ones they do get come mostly from the Baltic States or from Central Europe. And they aren’t much liked. Australians are not anti-Jewish. Their first native-born governor-general—the direct representative of the King—was a Jew. But they are anti-foreigner. They do not comprehend that America grew strong from a mixture of many nationalities. They insist Americans are English. A popular joke concerns the ranting American who cried, “You’re on the wrong track, wanting only English settlers! Why, in my veins there runs the blood of Armenians, Russians, Turks, Irish, Germans and Czechoslovakians.” From the rear of the audience came a whisper of admiration: “By Jove! His mother was a sporting sort, what?”

  One of the amusing aspects of the Australian attitude is the fact that the kind of Englishman they want would probably never consider emigrating to Australia. For years, the British stage has had a stock character: the Australian sheep millionaire, uncouth and barbarous of speech.

  This question of speech is a great misfortune, for Australian pronunciation is hilarious. A train that is late again today is reported as “Lyte agyne todye.” It is so repugnant to some ears that in New Zealand books have been written calling for a national commission to keep Australian pronunciation out of that Commonwealth. Educated Australians, of course, speak a most pleasing language, far removed either from the massacred A or the amusing affectation of their radio announcers. It is quite a relief, after a daytime of bastard Oxford, to hear a politician cry in the Parliamentary broadcasts, “It’s a disgryce for Astrylia to tyke such a stand on immigrytion.”

  The whole problem of occupying the vast emptiness is highlighted in the case of Frank Jang. In 1930 he arrived from China and later on took up a farm that no white man had been able to make pay. In a few years, he had it out of the red. Then the Dominion Government ordered him deported. By this time, he had a wife and five children, the oldest nine years old.

  Although Australians approve the White Australia policy, many of them condemn its heartless operation. The neighbors of Jang refused to let him be deported. Said they: “We need men desperately here in the empty North. Here’s one who has proved he can farm.” School teachers reported that no Jang child ever failed a subject. Businessmen informed the Government that when Jang’s deportation order came through, the Chinese took all his money out of the bank and went personally to each of his creditors, paying all bills in cash. Conservative farmers circulated petitions begging the Government to make an exception in Jang’s case. Reluctantly, the Government agreed to a six month’s stay, providing Jang would leave the land and work in town.

  This provoked a greater storm. Much of Australia that now lies idle could support human beings; and if the population increases, Australia might have a chance to withstand Asiatic aggressors. The men of Jang’s district wanted him kept on the land. The Government said it would restudy the case.

  Frank Jang illustrates all aspects of the struggle for population and the fight against Asia. Farmers see in him a man who can bring land into profitable cultivation. Neighbors see him as a fine citizen. But others see those five children, those ten yellow people under one roof—Jang also supports his younger brother, his step-mother and an old Chinese friend—and they recall how Asiatics have absorbed one island after another. Jang or no Jang, Australia shall not make that mistake. Out they must go! All of them!

  The Australian is adamant only on labor freedom and the White Australia policy. In other respects, he is a generous, kind, reliable friend. Until you have stopped at some Outside station, you have not known hospitality. Australian friendliness—“Put on some tea! Open the beer!”—is the frontier type that once made the American South famous.

  And the Australian is surely one of the best-fed human beings on earth. Everything is abundant. Steaks so thick, so rich that they seem unreal. Lemons as big as grapefruit, oranges as big as cantaloupes, paw paws that look like watermelons! Fruit of all kinds, cereals—pronounced sireals—lamb chops, fowl and wonderful fish. Australian oysters are good all year round and in the North have to be cut into four pieces, they are so monstrous. Lobster tails are common food, and roast beef is so ordinary that guests at hotels say, “What! Again?”

  Only tea is a problem. Australia has no national anthem. If one is ever written, it should feature the tinkle of a tea cup. One gets tea seven times a day; in bed at 7; breakfast at 8; morning at 10; lunch at 1; afternoon at 4; dinner at 7; night cap at 10. I have been in amazing parts of Australia, including the front lines at Bougainville during the war, and I have never seen an Aussie miss his tea. Picnic grounds, zoo, race meetings and all outdoor events maintain a stand with the sign: “Hot Water. Fill Your Billy.”

  The Government pays a subsidy of 40 cents a pound for tea which sells for 46 cents a pound. Australians care very little for politics—you are fined if you don’t vote—but it has been said that a government which dared to revoke the tea subsidy would be tossed out overnight.

  The indifference to politics is hard to understand. Of seventeen married women from all levels of society, fifteen said, “I don’t bother about elections.
Except on late closing of saloons, I vote with my husband.”

  It is believed by many Australians that compulsory voting is a mistake. But others point out that Australia has many powerful Communists, and the compulsory vote at least ensures large democratic majorities. Critics remember the last national election. It had the bad luck to come during the big spring horse races. You hardly knew there was an election on!

  Food is plentiful because of men like R. J. Doolin in Myall Downs. He has a small station of some 44,000 acres. (A big one would contain that many square miles. The biggest are as large as Colorado.) He runs 15,000 Merino sheep, two acres to the sheep, and feeds 800 short horns, seven acres to the steer. He grows 3,000 acres of Gabo wheat, a hard miller rich in gluten, 1,000 acres of sorghum, and another 1,000 of lucerne (alfalfa).

  Mr. Doolin is known as a squatter, the proudest title in Australia. Squatocracy is made up of those families that went beyond the hills and settled vast farms. His station is one of the richest, and although he would pass for a small Indiana farmer, he is a wealthy man.

  Myall Downs lies in flat to low-rolling land. Fields are immense, broken at intervals with broad bands of trees to halt erosion. They get 26 inches of rain a year and experience temperatures from 20 to 110 degrees. Doolin uses eight tractors, six reapers (called headers), four trucks and a jeep. The latter is used to reach the railhead fourteen miles away, for there are few roads here, only tracks across the bush.

  Doolin runs this station with the help of four big, tough sons. Two of them were commissioned in the field during the last war and a fifth was killed in New Guinea. As his sons marry, Mr. Doolin builds each one a handsome, low, rambling home, complete with kerosene refrigeration, 32-volt electricity and all conveniences.

  Myall is a busy station. Lambs begin to drop in September. Winter wheat is planted in May and June, harvested in the late spring (November, December). In August, eight skilled shearers are brought in with their helpers. And there is always the job of tending cattle, cutting sorghum, and keeping the place tidied up.

  At night, the Doolin boys like to get out the jeep and hunt wild pigs that root through the wheat. With a powerful light, they spot the animal and crack at it with their rifles.

  Mr. Doolin, who is technically a pastoralist—if he had a small holding, he would be a cow cocky; if he grew sugar cane, an agriculturalist; never a farmer—has not worked at Myall much in recent years. He serves on the Federal Wheat Board, an authority which buys local crops and sells them abroad. Through his efforts a fair price is maintained ($1.04 a bushel) and foreign markets are sought.

  Easter is the time at Myall Downs. Then the squatters move their entire families into Sydney for the autumn show of the Royal Agricultural Society. The Doolins stay at the Metropole, known as the Bushman’s Pub. Here, in bleak splendor, a trio of elderly women plays classical music, while the squatters discuss the Show, which is a cross between a rowdy state fair and a sedate carnival. “But,” says Doolin, “I’m always happy to get back home. It’s the best land in the world.”

  He is right. The land of Australia is magnificent. It is grand in the manner that excites the imagination. At dawn the sun breaks out of the Pacific and speeds across the coastal plains. To the north fires are still burning in the vast sugar fields. To the south apples are ripening in Tasmania. Sydney and Melbourne are beginning to stir. A flood is roaring down to wreck the edges of a city. A continent is beginning to waken.

  Soon the sun is upon the Dividing Range, where snow accumulates in winter. Then it dips into the country of a million sheep and flashes on to the scrub lands where gold was found, where silver and lead stood free in broken hills.

  Now it races into the central deserts, vast empty spaces where lakes and rivers show on maps, but where there may be no water for years at a time. Children born here may reach seven before they see rain; their homes are washed away in mighty floods. A jackrabbit springs from his nest and leaps across the barren wastes. Soon another follows. They are Australia’s scourge. In three years, a litter of six can increase to 9,600,000. Now a train of camels moves slowly with a store of goods for an Outback station. A lonely train puffs its way north to the middle of the continent, where even it surrenders.

  The sunlight flashes on the poles of the Overland Telegraph Line. It was built against superhuman obstacles in the 1870’s. By the time a section was completed, termites had eaten down the poles of the previous stretch. It was the lifeline of Australia, crossing from south to north, Adelaide to Darwin, for the code of the Outback permitted lost or exhausted wanderers to cut the telegraph wires. That meant the repair crews would reach them within a day!

  Now the light strikes the great road, the Bitumen (called bitch-a-mun). It was built during the war and connects Alice Springs with Darwin. Before it was surfaced, clouds of dust could be seen for twenty miles. It was no use speeding to get out of the dust. It wasn’t made by the car ahead of you, but by the cars that went by last week.

  Beyond the Bitumen, there is nothing—nothing but sand and lonely desert. Yet as the sun rides west, it picks out, even here, a station or two where some mad soul is trying to run a few cattle. With him are the aborigines, the half-castes. These are the people who were described by the first white man who studied them as “the miserablest on earth,” an opinion that has never been challenged. They were so primitive that they did not even associate pregnancy with intercourse. They blamed night spirits!

  Then the racing sun strikes the ultimate dead heart of the continent. From the Nullarbor Plains, in the south, through the Victoria Desert and the Gibson Desert, in the center and on northward, to the useless tropical wastes of the Leopold Ranges the light reveals—nothing. Heat is intense. There is no water. (At Kalgoorlie, they pipe it 360 miles to the mines.) To the south the lone railroad track runs for 800 miles with rarely a bend. You must remember this part of Australia when you hear, “It’s as big as America! It could support a hundred million people.” Men died on these plains when they tried to penetrate the limitless deserts. Looking at them, a wise Australian said, “There is only one difference between Australia and America: the Mississippi.” Yes, if you could rip out that magnificent system—Missouri, Platte, Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Red—and throw it into the heart of Australia you would have a wonderland, rich beyond compare. But there is no Mississippi There is no river that always carries water. This is the heartbreak land.

  With a rush of relief, the morning sun bursts upon the beauty of the western rim where Perth rests near the ocean. A bright poster announces: “Tonight. The Lovely Musical. Oklahoma. New York Cast.”

  In this mighty land strange animals live. For eons, Australia lay cut off from all other lands, so that its animals did not develop along customary patterns. They are all marsupials, who carry their young in pouches. The kangaroo, and its smaller cousin the wallaby, are pests, yet the kangaroo appears on the national seal. They are delightful creatures with faces much like rabbits. They hop about on huge hind legs, beg for peanuts, spar with their attenuated front feet and have a roistering good time. A mother, if chased when she has a joey in her pouch, will toss him in the bush and try to lead her pursuers away from the baby. But for all their attractiveness, the kangaroos eat too much grass and they are shot by professional hunters who sell the skins. Say the sheepmen, “When my beasts are starving, the ‘roos are fat. They grub the grass out with their under teeth. I pay 70 cents a head, the same as I do for eagles.”

  “The platypus,” says one naturalist, “must be seen to be believed, and when you see it, you believe it even less.” It lives in eastern rivers, digging tunnels from below the waterline up into caves along the bank. It’s a mammal, lays eggs, suckles its young although it has no teats—milk oozes out from the pores through the skin—has a bill like a duck, webbed feet, a beaver’s tail. It carries poisonous spurs on its back feet, eats a pound of worms a day and produces a fur that is supposed to be the equal of sable.

  The koala bear is, of course, not a bear at a
ll. It’s a crazy and wonderful comedian, perhaps the most completely winning of all animals. It has a flat, rubbery nose, pin-point eyes that seem perpetually startled, and hairy ears that stand at attention. It was the pattern for the teddy bear, and no more proper model for a child’s toy could have been devised.

  At birth, the koala climbs into a pouch and occasionally thereafter thrusts out an unconcerned head that nibbles at eucalyptus leaves. As he grows older, he climbs onto his mother’s back to survey the world. It is difficult not to laugh when a group of koalas climb aimlessly from branch to branch, stopping now and then to nudge one another, while they stare at people with innocent wonder.

  They live only upon eucalyptus, eating the tips of leaves and thus acquiring an unpleasant odor which protects them from predators. They are joyous creatures, protected by the state. And they are no longer threatened with extinction.

  Less fortunate are two rare animals living in Tasmania, the island state. The Tasmanian devil is a small scavenger, about the size of a badger. The Tasmanian tiger is more formidable, a carnivorous marsupial that looks like a jackal. He has a long rat’s tail, a zebra-striped rump and a face like a wolf. Each of these creatures may soon become extinct.

  If they do so, they will follow a tragic pattern, for the original wild men of Tasmania also found it difficult to get along with white civilization. They were fierce, relentless enemies. They perpetrated retaliatory murders until white settlers had to root them out. Bands were organized to hunt them, and they were rounded up into compounds, where they refused to have children. In the early years of this century, the last Tasmanian native died. A unique race of human beings had become extinct.

  A happier fellow is the kookaburra, a fat, gross brown and white bird that perches upright on rails or telephone wires. Occasionally, he throws back his head, opens his oversized bill, and emits an outrageous burst of raucous laughter. He is a rough and clumsy clown.