Page:The Coming Colony Mennell 1892.djvu/149

 XXII.

question is often put to one, Why, if Western Australia be all that its champions (and they have been but few in the past) would have the public believe, has it not long ago gone ahead in something like the same proportion as the Eastern Colonies? The question, it must be admitted, is something of a "poser." The worst thing in my opinion which Western Australia has had to contend with has been the "bad name" which she unfortunately got at the start, through the mistakes and follies which characterised her early colonisation. This is only just now ceasing to stick to her. Then she had to struggle against the convict stigma, quite a sufficient explanation in itself. The unwieldiness of her territory, as compared with the means of exploitation and administration at her command in those crucial early days, was also a huge drawback. Then, too, she had an unprogressive next-door neighbour, and even from that neighbour her settled areas were cut off by eight hundred miles of practically impassable desert. Had she had the good fortune to be set down between Victoria and New South Wales we should not have heard much of her inferiority to the other colonies in soil and products. So far did the evil influence of her bad name extend that she was pronounced, ex cathedrâ, to have no mineral wealth, and it is the disproof of this assertion in the slow course of time which, more than anything else, has given a new turn to her fortunes and attracted towards her the not wholly disinterested regards of the adjacent colonies.

It is often charged against Australia as a whole, that in the case of mining and other ventures she sends only her leavings to London. It cannot be said, however, that in the case of Western Australia the British public are being asked to go to a country which those on the spot do not think good enough for