AUSTRALIA: Tame Tasmanian

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(See front cover)

Racing toward the U. S. this week on the Italian liner Rex was honest, naïve, likable, tousle-haired Joseph Aloysius Lyons, Premier of the Commonwealth of Australia, soon to swap grins in the White House with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and indulge in genial economic horse trading.

Few years ago spendthrift Daughter Australia was Mother Britain's second best customer, and the U. S.'s best customer for motor cars and trucks. Today the exuberant young Commonwealth, much sobered down and striving mightily to pay her debts, is Britain's third best customer and the U. S.'s second best for motor vehicles. Australians are also avid consumers of U. S. typewriters. They expect Premier Lyons to rub these facts into Washington's New Dealers and convince President Roosevelt that he should lower the U. S. tariff to favor Australia's wool, wine and wood.

Meanwhile, Joe Lyons & wife loomed last week as two of the most notable characters to emerge from what uppity Great Britons call ''Down Under." Seven short years ago the Hon. Mr. Lyons was merely Premier of Tasmania, an island which is down under Australia and referred to by Australians as "The Speck." From this insignificant island Joe Lyons bounded with Horatio Alger rapidity to the Premiership (January 1932) of busted Australia whose national credit he proceeded to restore. Australian-born, the Premier and Mrs. Lyons had never been outside Australia in their lives until this spring when they sailed for the Royal Jubilee to ride at London in a State carriage behind King George.

Australia's MacDonald. If Englishmen were not so ignorant of Australia, they might point out that James Ramsay MacDonald's desertion of the Labor Party which had made him Prime Minister and his formation of a National Government was exactly paralleled in Australia by Premier Lyons. Neither the Scot nor the Tasmanian was ever a true toiler in the Marxian sense. Both got their start as schoolteachers. And of Ramsay MacDonald it might have been said, as one of Joe Lyons' admiring biographers has frankly said of him, that "when it came to politics he stood for the Labor cause because there was nothing else he could stand for."