AUSTRALIA: Populate or Perish

A happy-go-lucky country in the first 40 years of her national life, Australia awoke with a shock one morning in 1941. The date was Dec. 10, and in the space of a few hours the British navy ceased to be a power in the Pacific. Through the fall of Singapore to the Battle of the Coral Sea, Australia became acutely aware of her isolated geographical position and, in the face of Asia's agitated masses, her own lack of people. "We must populate or perish," sloganed Arthur Calwell, the Labor government's Immigration Minister. "We...

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