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Updated: June 23, 2025
In 1909, following Australia's example, Canada established a department of External Affairs for 'the conduct and management of international or intercolonial negotiations, so far as they may appertain to the government of Canada. In introducing this measure Sir Wilfrid declared: 'All governments have found it necessary to have a department whose only business will be to deal with relations with foreign countries.... We have now reached a standard as a nation which necessitates the establishment of a Department of External Affairs. On Sir Robert Borden's accession to power one of his first steps was to increase the importance of this department by giving it a minister as well as a deputy, attaching the portfolio to the office of the prime minister.
See Bishop of Australia's Letter, dated June 1840, in the Report of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, for 1841, pp. 148-9. For the particulars here stated see the Australian and New Zealand Magazine, No. 1, p. 51, and No. 2, pp. 111, 112.
Practically every book written on Australia by an Englishman or an American has said the same thing, that we were a lovable, easy-going race, but did not work very hard, and in a serious crisis would be found wanting. The whole nation brooded over these young men, guardians of Australia's honor, and waited anxiously for them to wipe out this slur. That explains Australia's pride in "Anzac."
With Stokes the list of those who have visited and benefited Australia by their labours from the sea must close; my only regret being that so poor a chronicler is giving an outline of their achievements. I now turn to another kind of exploration and have to narrate deeds of even greater danger, though of a different kind, done upon Australia's face.
The men marched on undismayed, however, crossed Australia's largest river, the Murray, and came to its tributary, the Darling. There a permanent camp was pitched, and the larger part of the caravan was left there. Burke, Wills, and six other Europeans went on with five horses and sixteen camels towards the north-west, and in twenty-one days reached the river Cooper, which runs into Lake Eyre.
Ever and anon we alarmed the Turk by nibbling a piece nearer to his sacred city. Never did men live under worse conditions than in those eight months of hell, yet never was an army so cheerful. "Bill-Jim," which is Australia's name for her soldier-boy, always makes the best of things, and soon made himself at home on that inhospitable shore.
It had got mashed pretty flat under the collapse of a land boom a while before." There it is again; picturesque history Australia's specialty. In 1829 South Australia hadn't a white man in it. In 1836 the British Parliament erected it still a solitude into a Province, and gave it a governor and other governmental machinery.
At this remote and previously unvisited spot one of the crew named Forby Sutherland, who had died on board the Endeavour, was buried, his being the first white man's grave ever dug upon Australia's shore; at least the first authenticated one for might not the remaining one of the two unfortunate convicts left by Pelsart have dug a grave for his companion who was the first to die, no man remaining to bury the survivor?
I'll guarantee that there are scores of such places in every continent in the world. Australia's got just as many as any other place. What made you want to hunt it up again after all those years?" "Old associations, I suppose," Cumshaw said half-ashamedly.
In cockle-shells of little ships what dangers did they not encounter from shipwreck on the sunken edges of coral ledges of the new and shallow seas, how many were those who were never heard of again; how many a little exploring bark with its adventurous crew have been sunk in Australia's seas, while those poor wretches who might, in times gone by, have landed upon the inhospitable shore would certainly have been killed by the wild and savage hordes of hostile aborigines, from whom there could be no escape!
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