POPULATING AUSTRALIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 January 1942, Page 4

POPULATING AUSTRALIA

ROOM FOR MANY MILLIONS. One of Australia’s most urgent questions is undoubtedly how to populate her vast empty spaces, writes Sir Evelyn Wrench of his recent observations in the Commonwealth. Informed opinion varies in its estimate of the country’s absorptive capacity, but even conservative authorities think that Australian could support a population of twenty millions. Even if the country were to plan an organised immigration of a hundred thousand settlers per annum there would have to be a system of national development, both on the land and in the direction of a further extension of secondary industries. Australia, even more than Canada and the United States, has it's “dustbowls.” A steady increase in immigration will entail vast irrigation plans, vast schemes of reafforestation, for Australian trees have been slaughtered ruthlessly, and the calling-in of science to deal with the greatest problem of all, the lack of water in the centre of the continent. Those who want to keep the country predominantly British —90 per cent of her present population is British—hope that the Motherland will provide the muchneeded human material. Others think that a serious effort should be made to obtain youthful migrants from Scandinavia, Holland, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe. There is also a scheme afoot to settle carefully selected Jewish migrants in the Wyndham district of North-west. Australia, a vast and practically uninhabited territory, but old prejudices die hard, and much educational work will be needed before the scheme becomes a reality,