AUSTRALIA, THE STEP-CHILD OF NATURE
SPEAKING of the wasteful methods of Nature and the lack of an apparent purpose in creation, the late Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, the famous German scientist, a specialist in the field of physiological optics, is said to have made the remark that if any instrument-maker should have dared to favour him with a contraption as clumsy as the human eye, he would have denounced the man as an incompetent bungler who did not know his business.
I am glad Helmholtz did not extend his investigations beyond the realms of physiology and electricity for I would hate to repeat what he would have said about the geographical arrangement of our planet.
Take a country like Greenland. There it lies, almost buried beneath thousands of feet of snow and ice. If those 47,000 square miles could be moved to the middle of the ocean, they might support a population of millions of people. Now they offer a scant living to a few thousand ice-bears and a handful of half-starved Eskimos. But as a sublime example of bad executive management, I offer you Australia. For Australia, although officially registered as a continent, is just about exactly everything a well-regulated continent should not be.
In the first place, its location is so unfortunate that although the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch had suspected its existence for over a hundred years and had done their best to discover it, the whole of tat enormous territory of almost 3,000,000 square miles (as large, therefore, as the United States) was not actually seen by the eyes of a white man until the year 1642 when Abel Tasman, flying the flag of the Dutch East India Company, circumnavigated the country and took possession of the land in the name of the United Netherlands.
But this visit of state was perfectly useless from a practical point of view. The Dutch were not interested this wilderness and allowed their little to lapse. When James Cook was sent to the Pacific to observe the transit of the Planet Venus in the year 1769 (a century and a quarter after Tasman’s voyage) the map-makers of Amsterdam and London were still quite uncertain where exactly they must place this Terra Australia Incognita the midst of in the vast expanse of water that went by the name of the Great Peaceful Ocean.
Not only if did Australia suffered from its location, but in the second place it had a very unfortunate climate. The climate is fairly good along the east coast and along the eastern part of the southern coast where Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the four big cities, are located. But the northern coast is uncomfortably wet and the western coast is uncomfortably dry, which means that the most inhabitable part is also the furthest removed from the great trade-routes which connect Asia with Africa and Europe.
In the third place, the whole of the interior is a desert without any rain and its subterranean water supply is so badly located that systematic irrigation will always be extremely difficult.
In the fourth place, the highest parts of Australia are practically everywhere along or near the outer edges of the continent. The interior, therefore, resembles a hollow bowl and since water does not flow uphill, it has no rivers worthy of that name. The Darling River, the largest of all Australian rivers (1160 miles long) takes its origin among the mountain of Queensland, not so many miles away from the Coral Sea, a part of the Pacific Ocean. But instead of running eastward into the Pacific, it flows westwards to lose itself in Encounter Bay and for the greater part of the year (remember that it is winter in the southern hemisphere when it is summer in the northern and vice versa) it consists mainly of a series of pools and is of no earthly use to anybody.
In the fifth place, there were no natives who could be trained to do the white man’s chores. The unfortunate Australians, about whose origin we are still very much in the dark, just as well have lived on another planet, as far as their relations with the rest of mankind were concerned. Left entirely to their own devices, they never rose very high beyond the status of some of our more primitive animals. For example, they never learned how to build houses nor how to raise grain nor how to use a spear or an arrow or an axe. They knew how to handle the boomerang, as indeed a great many other people all over the world had done at one time or another. But whereas the others had eventually graduated from that very clumsy weapon to the sword and the spear and the bow, the Australians had remained exactly where they had been shortly after their ancestors had learned to walk on their hind legs without the support of their arms. The most generous way of classifying them would probably be to say that they resembled “the hunting type” of the earliest period of the Stone Age. And even then we are as a rule a much better artist than any aboriginal Australian has ever been.
And finally, this poor continent had apparently been told to shift for itself long before the earth had been covered by those plants and shrubs which have contributed so much to our own comfort and happiness. It had developed a specific dry-climate flora of its own which is undoubtedly of profound interest to our professional botanists but which offers the white settler, intent upon raising a profitable crop of something or other (anything at all as long as it pays him for his trouble), only very slight prospects for a profitable future. Kangaroo grass and salt bush make fairly good food for sheep, but the common prickly spinifex is too much even for the hard-palated camel. And one cannot very well grow rich raising eucalyptus trees, although some of them will grow as high as 400 feet, the only rivals of our own sequoias in California.
As for the farmers who hastened to this new promised land in 1868 when it definitely ceased to be a penal colony, they found themselves faced by a collection of living fossils which absolutely refused to let themselves be domesticated. Once more it was the isolated position of Australia which had allowed all these curious prehistoric creatures to continue their existence long after they had been exterminated in every other part of the world. The complete absence of all the larger and more intelligent mammals of Asia and Africa and Europe had not forced these Australian quadrupeds to improve their intellectual capacities or die out. From sheer lack of competition they had always remained as they had been on the day they were born.