Their Country's Good

From distant climes, o'er widespread

seas we come (Though not with much eclat or beat

of drum);

True patriots all, for be it understood We left our country for our country's

good . . . And none will doubt but that our

emigration Has proved most useful to the English

nation.

In the century and a half since Convict George Barrington wrote these lines on emigrating to Australia, millions of free men have made their homes in the subcontinent Down Under. But the immigrant everywhere is normally suspect of having left his country, if not for his country's good, then out of political or economic necessity. Only in the decade since World War II has Australia, by means of a vast and wisely planned immigration scheme, banished the last vestiges of the emigration stigma. Last week the drums were beating as, with much eclat, bright and chirpy Barbara Porritt stepped ashore at Melbourne. She was Australia's millionth immigrant since 1945.

"Populate or perish." onetime Prime Minister "Billy" Hughes told Australia after World War I, but it took World War II to awaken 7,000,000 Australians to the peril of living in a large, empty country on the edge of Asia. Said Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell. launching a new large-scale immigration scheme: "We may have only 25 years to ... justify our exclusive possession of this continent."

Broken Prejudices. Working swiftly and realistically, giving priority to carpenters and builders, Australian immigration teams took the pick of Europe's D.P.s. When the International Refugee Organization pool dried up, Calwell made bilateral agreements with Italy, The Netherlands, Germany and Malta for a regular flow of immigrants, tried to induce Americans to emigrate, and succeeded in getting some 10,000 of them to settle in Australia (thereby balancing the loss of 10,000 Australian girls who married G.I.s and went off to the U.S.).

A trial batch of 848 young (15 to 35) men from the Baltic states and a promise by Calwell that half of all immigrants would be British broke down Australia's last prejudices against immigrants. Says Calwell today: "We couldn't have cared less about keeping our population predominantly British. What we want are Australians!"

With tickets partly paid for by the government, and traveling on passenger liners, cargo ships and borrowed U.S. ex-Army transports, immigrants soon began arriving in Australia in such numbers that| the problem was how to make them into Australians. British immigrants and all children under 15 automatically receive Australian nationality. The others (one in five) must wait five years. On board ship, foreign immigrants start learning English, continue in government classes in the nationwide network of hostels and reception camps where immigrants live at government expense (average stay: six months) until jobs are found for them.

The New Australians. To banish the old, bitter race names--pommy (Englishman), dago, hunky--Calwell invented the appellation "New Australian" for all immigrants. It stuck. A Good Neighbor movement was launched and hundreds of clubs formed to bring New Australians and Old Australians together. Assimilation has had its failures. The conservative British Medical Association opposes the registration of European doctors. The Trades and Labor Council, jealous custodian of half a century of labor gains, was outraged when hard-working immigrants refused to take "morning tea breaks" and volunteered to work in the rain. The Communists circularized dockworkers: "Most immigrant Bails are fascists opposed to unionism." Crime increased with the rising population, and Australians were disturbed by the addition of a new weapon to the Australian criminal's arsenal: the knife. Biggest setback has been the reluctance of Australian girls to marry immigrants.

But few have returned to their homeland (6% of British immigrants, 2% of the others), and the nation's economists reckon that immigrant labor has played a major part in boosting the generation of electricity by 81% in seven years, the production of black coal by 36%. To take the strain off the country's housing industry, which in the past three years has built enough homes to house 900,000 people, thousands of prefab houses have been imported. In a booming economy that has shown only slight signs of recession, there is only one other serious shortage: labor. There are some 60,000 jobs waiting for new immigrants.

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