Flo’s Reviews > The Tyranny of Distance > Status Update

If one can select any year which marks Australia’s transition from its traditional role as echo and image of Britain and an outpost of Europe, the year which stands out is 1941. […] the end of a time when heredity ceased to be so powerful, when Australians ceased to have nearly all their emotional, commercial, military, financial and human ties with Britain.

Years usually elapsed between the flights of the pathfinders and the opening of regular air service. Early aeroplanes were like early steamers.

Though Melbourne and Sydney were bitter rivals and their railways were competing for the traffic of the same region along the border, the rail link between the cities called for a small celebration.

The average Australian even then drank more tea than the average person in any country outside China. When the gold rushes increased Australia’s population, Australia became the fourth largest tea importer in the world.

Australia gained enormously by using land revenue to subsidise migration. The gain, however, had its penalty. Of all the countries in the new world to which Europeans in midcentury were flocking, the two where new land was dearest were Australia and New Zealand, the two countries most distant from Europe.

The sea was more a line of communication than a barrier.

Australia was becoming useful, not so much as a dead-end house for English criminals and a half-way house for English ships, than as a source of Britain’s raw materials – wool from the land and whale oil from the sea.

(Chapter five – Whalemen
I hope it doesn’t get too Moby-Dickish.)

The first settlements had been based on the hope that convicts would soon grow all their own food, and that hope had rested on the days which Cook and Banks had spent at Botany Bay in 1770. Their discoveries in those eight days proved to be a delusion. If England had been much closer to eastern Australia, detailed investigation would probably have preceded the decision to colonise; but distance...

Sheer distance, even without adding the dangers of a voyage in unknown waters, demanded a price.