AUSTRALIA: DEATH OF HONEST JOE

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In Sydney last week Australia's Prime Minister Joseph Aloysius Lyons, 59, contracted a chill in the damp autumn weather; two days later he lay dead of a heart attack. His death ended his administration at seven years, three months —just two weeks short of the record made by Prime Minister William Morris Hughes in 1915-23.

Simple, clear-thinking Joe Lyons, who was endowed with all the homely virtues, left a record of accomplishment that might have been envied by what many Australians considered more brilliant predecessors. "Honest Joe" abandoned teaching school for a political career at the age of 30; energy and courage made him a Labor Premier in ultraconservative, mountainous Tasmania, smallest and loveliest of the Australian States.

In 1931, straightforward Joe Lyons broke with his party and resigned from Australia's Labor Cabinet, when inflation and debt repudiation, which he thought dishonest, were proposed as the way out of Australia's financial crisis. Taunted for betraying his party, he replied that he would rather desert his party than his country. The Labor Cabinet fell, and he became Prime Minister as leader of a Conservative Coalition. Ruthless slashing of expenses, increases in taxes and refunding of the debt at lower interest rates prepared the way for a real recovery from Depression.

Honest Joe had never left Australia until he represented his country at the Royal Jubilee in 1935, where he was so awed when he first saw Queen Mary that he could but exclaim: "Magnificent! Magnificent!" Last week he left his country for good, leaving behind his wife, whom he called "his right-hand man," and his "cricket team": eleven children.