The Challenge of Tropical Australia

Abstract

THE LONELY PLAINS of tropical Australia still support only a sprinkling of people. Not more than 360,000 live in the great expanse of its ,I150,000 square miles-38 percent of the continent with only 4 percent of its people-and most of these are concentrated in the lush coastlands of northeastern Queensland. Each inhabitant in the tropical portions of Western Australia and Northern Territory together has an average of 37 square miles of land. Many Australians tend to adopt a defensive attitude in discussion about the continued absence of close settlement in the tropical north. There is the apologetic view which deplores the fact that the ratio of people to land is so low. There is aggressive pride that the ratio of productive capacity to people is so high. Some believe that northerners have made a go of it in a harsh environment where the settler wages a constant battle against drought in a lonely, remote and generally infertile region. Others blame the Commonwealth Government for failing to finance more and larger public works projects and development schemes. These viewpoints are readily comprehensible. They are most strongly impressed upon the traveller in northern Australia, driving uncomfortably for hundreds of miles over unmade roads through silent, empty plains. It is the writer's opinion, however, that this defensive attitudethis assumption that Australians have failed where they should have succeeded-is generally unwarranted and that its basis is much more strongly emotional than rational. It arises mainly from Australians' awareness of the sharp contrast between the abundance of land and high living standards in Australia generally and the land hunger and poverty in many parts of the neighbouring lands, and from the feeling that, if these Asian neighbours do not aspire to occupy this incompletely settled continent, they must at least covet its resources. Above all, Australians fear that nine million people constitute a perilously slender manpower resource to defend their continent and preserve their