America-Australia
p. 46 · Read in the full issue
"Good Fences Moke Good Neighbours"
C OME 'pertinent remarks on Austral- American relations by Mr. Philip H. Cummings {a well-known American lecturer and publicist, whose home is in Verona, New Jersey ), in a personal letter to the editor : IFIND that many people in Australia are making strong remarks about how popular the Americans are, and how much we shall always be friends.
An old remark or maxim comes to mind: “Friendship is never so thin as where it is thickly professed.” If we’d stop these love-feasts and, in mutual respect, work together, and not worry over each other’s sentiments, we’d flourish more exactly.
Robert Frost, the poet of my native New England, once wrote an excellent poem, “Good Fences Make Good Neigh bours,” from the old localism to that effect. It is very true. Nationalisms must have boundariesT but they must also be visible., and suggest only limitation and not isolation.
We iri the Pacific and you in the Paci fic have certain phases of destiny in common. No one has all the Pacific destiny as his bounden pleasure—unless it be our ugly enemy, the Japanese—and yet we callously ignored the Nanyan Boesho Kaisha for 40 years. That “South Seas Development Company” developed the project which had its first flowering at Pearl Harbour—and further flowers at Port Darwin, and in the miniature subs in between Sydney Heads.
It must be men standing, as the Aus tralians stood near Kuala Lumpur, in Malaya, and Americans standing as they stood at Tarawa and Guadalcanal, and Anzacs as they stood in Crete—in other words, men standing together in peace and in affairs of state as these men stood in affairs of war—that will prove our self-esteem to be less hollow. All this gushing fellowship for each other, and for the Soviet Union, and for Charles de Gaulle is a iip service which comes close to an unrealistic disservice.
You and I like the Islands, and we are concerned with Pacific peoples. I hope, one time, to be invited for a series of lectures in Australia; and on that occa sion I hope you and I may sit down to a long ale or a billy of tea and talk out some of these problems.