AUSTRALIA'S PART

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1941, Page 5

AUSTRALIA'S PART

IN LIFE OF EMPIRE DEFINED BY MR CURTIN. STEEPED IN BRITISH WAY OF LIVING.' (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) (Received This Day, 9.50 a.m.) MELBOURNE, This Day. The Federal Prime Minister, Mr J. W. Curtin, said yesterday that his statement at the weekend, regarding the extent to which Australia looks for United States co-operation in the Pacific was not prompted by any desire to weaken the ties of Empire, but rather by the view that Australia is an alternative home for the British people. "I did not put Australia in the position of being a colony,” Mr Curtin said. “Australia is a Dominion. With New Zealand, we constitute nine million Britishers, the greatest congregation of Britishers in the world south of the equator. I ask everybody to look the facts in the face, look at the language spoken south of the equator and who is speaking it. There is no part of the world so steeped in the British way of living as Australia. Our loyalty to the King goes to the core of our national life. I do not consider Australia a segment of the Empire. It is an organise part of the whole structure. Australia faces strategic problems of its own defence with sheer realism.”