Sixty-four per cent. of Australians live in cities and towns. Half of them live in the State capitals. Australia, with a population of only 6,700,000 has 60 cities and towns of more than 5,000 people, 16 of more 4 than 20,000, and two—Sydney and "Melbourne—of more than 1,000,000, states H. C. Fenton in "The Neder-land Mail."
Man is gregarious and especially so in such unfamiliar surroundings as the Australia of its first half-century of civilization, If the invention and development of agricultural machinery and the absence of winter rigours permit enormous tracts of land to be worked and farmed by practically a handful of people, the rest are forced to become even more gregarious.
4 Besides, the balanced development of any young country, ambitious for economic power and prestige—and Australia is ambitious—must include 4 industrial progress. i Such are the explanations for the amazing metamorphosis of Sydney x from a few tents and huts to the hub of the southern hemisphere; for the growth of sufficient dignity and spaciousness in Melbourne to permit the absorption of the skyscraper and 1 the super-cinema; for the celebration, this year, by Adelaide of its first century of civic existence; for the virile development of Brisbane, Perth and Hobart; and for the lustiness of that particularly attractive infant, Canberra, And so has a new British nation, fully of age, become highly civilized, highly industrialized, Cities are the self-expression of the citizens who give them life, and it is these pulsating centres of civilization themselves, these Seven Lamps of Australia which the casual observer or visitor is not concerned The poet's epitome of Australia, 1 Am opal-hearted country—A wilt lavish land, y is equally applicable cities, to Its capital Whatever their faults Australians are not a niggling people. They have built spaciously, and they are adding spaciously, perhaps because they have four or five generations behind them whose minds and instincts became more and more attuned to the great open plains of their country.
Sydney's central streets, evolved irom the original bullock tracks to Australia's first wharves, are narrow, but her parks and gardens, her suburbs and what artificial develop. ment was necessary in the imcomparable surfing beaches, have been planned with that same sense of space, Sydney's Harbour Sydney's harbour gives the city the aesthetic advantage over her sisters that the tail of the peacock gives him over his mate, and the famous bridge is a fitting complement.
It is a hüfbour of fine, free movement, Linérs and freighters steam up and down, white sails tack and put about, ferries carve white foam paths hither and thither on their speedy 7 and lawful occasions, At night, under the warm stars, and from the balcony Of a waterside home, it is a twinkling, fascinating, and fairy sea of ultramarine and fireflies.
And the people of Sydney? They are the essence of Australia—just as are the people of Melbourne or Brisbane, They are perhaps a little more sophisticated and cosmopolitan; they scintillate a little more, But they think as the people of Adelaide and Hobart, and (unlike Londoners and Mancunians and Glaswegian) speak with the same accent 1 and broadening of vowels as do the people of Perth and Canberra and the rest of Australia.
They have their huge department stores, their modern hotels and their clubs, their taxis, their electric trains, and their traffic signals. Neon lights proclaim their theatres, cabarets and i3 cinemas, Superficial differences exist in Australia's Seven Lamps, but they are r more of circumstance than of the Character which each in cynically humorous rivalry strives to exaggerate. Melbourne's immediate attraction is her wide streets and boulevards and her artistic triumph over an originally unpromising site. Adelaide's is much the same, though she chad and has the advantage of a ring of bush-clad hills, Perth is a very cheery and modern small edition of Sydney, with the Swan estuary substituted for the latter harbour. Brisbane has the colour and palm profusion that border the tropics. Hobert, magnificently situated at the foot of Int. Wellington, reminds one most of England Canberra Growing On the stock runs of yesterday Canberra is growing as Washington grew. Everything from the mil of broad boulevards and thoroughfare to the most secluded path, from Parliament House itself to the smal-
Jest dwelling, conforms and will conform, to plan, Suburbs are growing up on their preconceived sites, and more than 1,000,000 trees and shrubs have been planted with painstaking exactitude. Already it is a huge bower of blossom and leaf. Here possibly the embryo of the world's most beautiful garden city. All the public buildings are of dazzling whiteness.
Canberra is above all the unmarred expression of Australiarism at best. It is the expression of unshaken able confidence of a people which has attained distinctive nationhood in a great partnership; of a people which has begun to glory yin its cities and evolve a culture.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.