44 Timehri. 
in length running east and west from New South Wales and Victoria to 
Western Australia and shortening the journey from Perth to Melbourne from 
five days to two. A link of 1,063 miles known as the Desert Link, is now in 
course of construction from Kalgoorlie, the mining capital of the West, to Port 
Augusta on Spencer Guli in South Australia. It will cost four millions sterling 
and traverse the thousand miles of blazing waterless salt desert north of the 
Australian Bight, a land over the greater part of which “no man comes nor 
hath come since the making of the world.’ Where gold has cast its lure the 
terrible sands have been faced, as such dangers will always be faced for the 
same object, but the only beast of burden is the camel. The stern determina- 
tion of the Australian patriots to allow no reports of barren desolation to hincer 
the closer union of the provinces is likely to meet with its reward. At first it 
looked as if every drop of water consumed over the entire stretch would have to 
be laboriously conveyed to depots at intervals, but at fifteen hundred feet 
they have found by artesian boring great reservoirs of water free from the 
desert salt. The Australian premiex treats with scorn the prophecies of the 
pessimists. He reminds them that there was a time when the so-called ex- 
perts declared that the famous Darling Downs would not raise a single cabbage. 
The railway will be finished in 1913-14 and apari from its advantages as a 
through route, the leaders of Australian opinion are convinced that it will make 
the wilderness to blossom like the rose. They are moreover determined to 
link North and South by still another transcontinental railway from Adelaide 
to Palmerston across the great Australian desert. 
If we of this colony flinch from our duty to the British Empire and to our 
race and decide to take no risks upon our little shrunken selves in the develop- 
ment of the inheritance won for us by better men, then, in God’s name let us 
draw our frontier-line along the sand-reefs which mark the verge of sugar 
cultivation five miles from tide-mark, and surrender the hinterland to Brazil. 
That youthful and hopeful Federation will know what to do with it. 
