AUSTRALIA: Out of the Dreaming

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Amidst the dry, gum-tree scrub of Rum Jungle, 60 miles inland from the Timor Sea, miners clad only in boots and shorts drilled uranium out of soft slate. At Woomera, where the waterless South Australian plain stretches endlessly off to the horizon, romantically named drones and missiles—Jindiviks, Blue Streaks and Black Knights—soared over the free world's largest land rocket range. In beach-girt Sydney, schoolteachers and tram conductors exchanged stock market tips, and in stately Adelaide, where Australia's first major Festival of the Arts was in full swing, T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral played to capacity.

These—and the industrious bustle of a hundred once-sleepy towns with names like Toowoomba, Yeerongpilly and Cool-angatta—were tangible evidence last week of the biggest news to come out of the South Pacific vastness since the end of the war. The news: Australia, rawest and least favored by nature of the English-speaking countries, is savoring a real prosperity and discovering a national maturity.

The speed with which Australia is coming of age astonishes Australians themselves and bemuses even the ruddy, self-assured man who has presided over the process. "When I was a boy," says Prime Minister the Right Honorable Robert Menzies, "there was a distinctly colonial flavor to Australia. Now we are developing an outlook peculiar to Australia. We are becoming more significant."

As any of the hundreds of thousands of G.I.s who passed through Australia can testify, it was not always like that. The outbreak of World War II still found

Australia a British dependency emotionally and economically. Australians whose families had left Britain generations before still referred to England as "home," still looked to London for their literary, social and international opinions, and if they sometimes rejected this guidance were still marked by it. Remote and provincial, a kind of British fly in Antipodean amber, Australia was a complacent mixture of Victorian respectability at the upper levels and a rough-and-ready bush socialism below.

Today, after a decade of unabashed wooing of free enterprise by Menzies and his government, Australia (pop. 10.2 million) is the biggest industrial nation in the southern hemisphere, boasts an industrial output three times as great as Brazil's (pop. 64 million). Australia's gross national product has rocketed from $5 billion in 1949 to $13.8 billion. Aided by a bold immigration scheme that has brought 1,500,000 Europeans into the country since 1947, Australia is no longer a backwater, but confident of its dynamism and independence. "Nowadays," says a senior Australian diplomat, "we can talk to anybody in the world without any sense of innate inferiority."