Manning the Outpost

There are twice as many kangaroos as there are people in Australia. This is reassuring for marsupial buffs, but worrisome for the men who are struggling to develop and hold their rich, empty western outpost in an Asia seething with unrest. With only 11 million humans in a land as big as the continental U.S., Australia is rushing to completion $4 billion worth of industrial projects over the next five years. The labor shortage is so severe that in some skilled occupations there are 15 jobs for every applicant. Despite an influx of 1,800,000 immigrants since 1945, and a record 142,000 in the fiscal year that ended last week, Australia, says Labor Minister William McMahon, "is still crying out for more migrants."

Bratwurst & Bordelaise. The cries can be heard from South Australia, where migrants are hard at work on a new zinc-recovery plant at Port Pirie, to remote eastern Queensland, where they are helping build Gladstone's $117 million alumina refinery. New workers are most urgently needed in the far-out outback of Western Australia, where some of the world's richest iron-ore reserves have been discovered since 1960 and are being developed in company with a whole clutch of vast new enterprises, notably a $100 million steel complex, bauxite mines, $100 million worth of oil refineries at Kwinana, a 500-mile railroad to Kalgoorlie. In the southwest's ambitious Esperance project, foreign labor has also helped turn 14 million arid acres into promising farm land that will boost the nation's biggest export crops, wool and wheat.

Until now, in line with the country's traditional "white Australia" policy, all but a handful of the migrants have been European. The most numerous (and sought after) "New Australians" still are "Pommies,"* meaning Britons. But it has been the arrival of 1,000,000 Continental Europeans in two decades that has most profoundly influenced the way of life Down Under. Once stolid menus now offer Bratwurst and steak Bordelaise, Australian football stars have names like Ditterich and Silvagni, and Danish modern furniture comes all the way from Melbourne or Sydney. This week Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman returned from a six-week tour of Europe, jubilant at having signed new immigration treaties with Malta, as well as labor-short West Germany and The Netherlands.

Asian Acceptance. Realizing that European migration alone can never adequately populate the land, many leading Australians now advocate selective Asian immigration. A Gallup poll reported recently that 73% of the population (v. 44% in 1958) would approve at least a small annual quota of skilled Asians. Apart from the economic strain, the government is all too aware of the strategic perils of underpopulation. With 3,000 fighting men in Malaysia (see story above) and a battalion in Viet Nam, half of Australia's combat-ready forces are already tied down in the widening struggle for Southeast Asia. It is a sphere where Australia has only recently begun to extend its economic and political influence. As a noncolonial nation, it is now accepted even by Indonesia as a legitimate Asian presence--and one to be reckoned with.

Many business and government leaders today fear that Australia's beneficent role as a major Asian power could be seriously diminished if other democratic nations such as Japan--which has now replaced Britain as Australia's biggest trading partner--come to resent the all-white continent as a racist preserve--which it is not. Declares Melbourne Mining Tycoon Sir Maurice Mawby: "We must live by geography today, not history."

*So called because their pink complexions originally reminded suntanned Australians of pomegranates.

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