Niet Bang Voor Werk

The Dutch sailors were looking for a land of ivory and spices and gold. What they found was a barren country inhabited by terrifying savages and startling kangaroos. They named the place "New Holland," but except for a few explorations, the Dutch abandoned Australia to the savages, the kangaroos and the British.

Last week, three and a half centuries later, 1,500 Dutch immigrants were on their way to Sydney on the liner Volendam. The last of some 13,000 who left Holland in 1949, they were looking only for land, for Holland is crowded to the dikes with energetic Dutchmen. With the highest birth rate in Western Europe, and the lowest death rate in the world, Holland has doubled its population in the last 50 years, now has 10 million people for an area little larger than Maryland. Grumbled a Rotterdam cab driver: "This country gets so it isn't any fun any more. When you take a vacation, you can't find a place to go because everything is full. There's people and rules and regulations everywhere, and when the army comes back from Indonesia next year, there'll be another 10,000 men looking for jobs." Holland's government planners are hard put to find jobs for the 40,000 new workers who glut the market every year.

"Emigration can never be the complete solution," says Prime Minister Willem Drees. "We absolutely have to industrialize if we want to prevent mass unemployment in the future. Nothing hurts people's happiness so much as unemployment or the fear of unemployment."

For Holland's farmers, expanding industry is just one more problem: as fast as they reclaim fertile land from lakes, marshes and sea, the land-hungry Dutch find other acres swallowed up by growing cities, new roads and airfields. Farmers lucky enough to find land are often caught without a market. One of them, 49-year-old Truck Farmer Simon Eygenraam, summed up their problem: "Look, we Dutchmen together produce much more than the home market needs, and we export, mostly to Britain and Germany. But we're hampered by trade restrictions and quotas . . . I cannot get foreign currency, therefore I cannot buy the freezer units I would like to have. I cannot get more land for my sons . . . That's no kind of future to offer my children."

To people like Eygenraam, emigration--to Australia, Canada, South Africa and other countries that have room--seems the best solution; because of the tight quota (3,153 a year), few Dutch emigrants get to the U.S. Some, like Harrie Lamers and his twelve children who headed homeward last week after 18 months in Canada, are too homesick to stay in foreign lands. But while the twelve Lamers children were coming home, the 14 Branderhorst children, and others like them, were leaving Holland. Said Simon Eygenraam, en route with his wife and four children to "New Holland" on the Volendam: "There must be opportunities for people like us die niet bang zijn voor hard werk [who are not afraid to work hard], and at least we won't be crowded out of a living. Sure, it's a big risk to go off like this, but it would be a bigger risk to stay."

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