CONDITIONS OF LIFE IN TROPICAL AUSTRALIA [To the Editor of
the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—To-day in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and perhaps in Queensland, there are fewer white people north of parallel twenty degrees than in 1900. The four main difficulties experienced by white women settling there are isolation, lack of suitable homes, of suitable food, and of domestic help.
Some houses are suitable, e.g., wooden or possibly stone bungalows, with wide verandahs and many doors and windows. But often less wealthy settlers have houses of galvanized iron, and the verandahs are not wide. High wages and cost of transport make good building expensive. Men some- times wonder why a climate which suits cattle is so hard on women. It has been retorted that the cattle do not spend the day in an iron shed with a fire in one corner.
The great lack in the food supply is that of fresh fruit and vegetables, and this is bound up with the question of water conservation and of labour. Even when there is a good annual rainfall it may occur chiefly during a few weeks, and if it is not stored, there may be water shortage later in the same year, while irrigation is impossible. A bishop in Victoria, when asked once during a dry season to arrange for prayers for rain, replied (not in these exact words)- " Not prayers—dams." But dams are costly—labour again.
The aborigines of Australia are nomads, and make good stockmen, but very poor gardeners. White men do not take kindly to the hoe in the tropics, though that is their only weapon against white ants. A high tariff prevents the importation of the abundant fruit grown in Java.
As regards preserving food, icy cold is obtained in dry weather by the principle of evaporation, but in the muggy atmosphere . of summer rains this is impossible, and the manufacture of ice only pays when there is sufficient popu- lation.
Isolation, although attacked by motors, aeroplanes and wireless, is still the greatest trial to be faced, especially if it means say two hundred miles to a nurse or doctor. But. the further a woman is from white neighbours the more likely is she to have satisfactory native servants. If settlement increases, however, there will not be enough of these to go round.
When a- woman pioneer, owing to the wrong house, the wrong food, and loneliness, loses her health, her husband blames the innocent climate and sends her south. As soon as possible he follows himself, to begin his home-building all over again, and lack of labour is the main cause of the
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