AUSTRALIA is a weird country," P: Novelist D. H. Lawrence once wrote, a country with "a wonder and a far-awayness." To put together this week's comprehensive report on Australia--the cover, color picture spread and cover story--TIME called on a team that erased the farawayness.

To paint the cover portrait, the editors chose one of Australia's most illustrious painters: William Dobell, 60. whose bold, imaginative style has won him the New South Wales National Art Gallery's Archibald Prize for portraiture three times. Painter Dobell found Prime Minister Menzies a "good sitter," reports that they chatted about friends, other artists and a mutual lumbago during their sketching sessions. Viewing the finished product, a friend remarked that Dobell had captured Menzies' "supercilious look." "No," corrected Dobell, "I've got his disdain-for-critics look." Gruffed Menzies himself: "I see you've got my damned chins in."

For the eight pages of color pictures, New York Photographer Jerry

Cooke trekked 3,500 miles by helicopter, light plane, car and Jeep.

Reporting on the land of wonder in 1960 was the task of Brisbane Stringer Fred Hubbard, a transplanted Chicago newspaperman who has spent 13 years covering Australia, and Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow. They spent three weeks in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra interviewing scores of businessmen, actors, writers, architects, economists and government officials. Says Karnow, "I personally was so impressed with the country's potential that before I departed, I left material proof of my faith in Australia's future: I invested a modest sum in four Australian companies."

In New York, Associate Editor Robert C. Christopher took all of the assembled research and molded it into the cover story, and even as he sat in Rockefeller Center, the land did not seem so far away. He had come to know it in World War II, when he served as an Army intelligence officer in Brisbane.

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