The Girls of Australia

Picture a land upside down, where summer is winter, north is south and even the constellations belong to an unknown universe. The countryside is not given but red; rivers flow inland to disappear in the desert; zinc-gray trees keep their leaves but shed their bark in snakelike coils, while impossible creatures, from antediluvian to apocalyptic, lurk in the bush beyond. Centuries before it was discovered, geographers decided it must exist, because without it the globe would be top-heavy. The very name they gave it—terra australis incognita—appropriately cloaked it in mystery.

While no longer the unknown southern continent. Australia today retains the uniquely seductive allure that has drawn northern adventurers since the days of Abel Tasman. Though the languid largo of the didgeridoo is now backed by the insistent rhythms of the electric guitar, the all-too-familiar patina of civilization—with its neon metropolises, sprawling suburbs and transistorized pop addiction—only underscores the strangeness beneath. This fusion of space age and Stone Age, of the commonplace and the extraordinary, is evident not only in the Australian countryside but in the females who populate it. The Australian girl is a delicate amalgam of the familiar and the bizarre; like the sun-warmed island continent that surrounds her, an engagingly beautiful paradox. Her exterior—eye shadow by Helena Rubenstein and small talk courtesy of Time—would blend delightfully with the female scenery between Fifth Avenue and Sunset Boulevard; but beneath her well-tanned complexion breathes a spirit as Australian as Waltzing Matilda. To try to understand (text continued on page 225)Girls of Australia(continued from page 181) her on any but her own terms is to fail to understand her at all.

Of course, even on the surface, she has her distinctive characteristics. The first of these likely to be noticed by the bachelor fresh from Stateside and buffeted in the noontime surge of sun-bleached, cerulean-eyed femininity along Sydney's teeming George Street is her sheer number. No city in the world, New York, Stockholm, Paris and San Francisco included, boasts a higher ratio of really wizard girls per 1000 population. The Australian men tend to be rather blasé about this embarras du choix, but visitors usually require acclimatization. The real smasher, the girl you might encounter twice in a lunchtime stroll around Madison Avenue and 52nd Street, is so common here she hardly draws a glance.

Most striking, our man will immediately note, is her figure. The Australian girl has a superb body, at once full bosomed and lissome, firmed and toned by a lifetime of sunshine and swimming. Her superior muscle tone means she reaches form early and keeps her shape well into middle age. The world of dress designing—usually a brier patch of disagreement—evidences surprising unanimity in its opinion that perfect figures are most often unveiled on the girls from down under. Bearing this out, a manufacturer's survey disclosed that the most popular bra size among young Australian women (and presumably young Australian men) is a respectable 34-C; and an investigation by Sydney University physiologists revealed that 57 percent of Australian teenage girls have a waist at least ten inches smaller than their bust or hips.

Besides being chesty, the Australian girl is generally tall, averaging a statuesque five feet, six inches—fully three inches taller than her British cousins and almost an inch up on her girlfriends in the States. As he takes this all in, our discerning man about Sydney might also observe that the influences of sun and surf that combine to produce her standout figure—magnificent bust line, hourglass waist, sculptured stomach, slim hips and firm derrière—breed ankles, calves and bone structure slightly more robust than the wraithlike European standard.

For her compact hips and affluent bosom the bikini was invented: It's her apotheosis and the badge of her uniqueness. Bikinied. you'll find her every sunny weekend from September to May on any of the magnificent beaches that are within an hour's drive for the vast majority of Australians. Even the jaded roué from the Côte d'Azur will concede that more Australian girls wear briefer bikinis, and wear them better, than any other of the world's women. On the yellow sands of Sydney's Bondi Beach—the Riviera of the antipodes—the visitor will encounter acre upon delightful acre of opulently endowed (and generally unescorted) femininity, clad in arrestingly insignificant swimwear whose glorification of form leaves only function to the imagination. And he'll immediately remark that while she is acutely aware of her body's attractiveness, the Australian girl displays it with a peculiar detachment, as if she were pleasing not others but herself, sensuously exposing near-naked skin to the soothing rays of the southern sun.

And what skin it is. A wise diet, the spray of salt water and a benign climate bereft of the extremes that exact their dermatological toll in most northern cities combine to give her the unpowdered, unlotioned complexion usually encountered only in sonnets. Even in winter, she'll be tan—a rich, honeyed caramel, which in the summer deepens to sienna. As a result, cosmetic alchemy is something of a lost art in Australia, where the typical girl needs no more than a hint of light lipstick to set off her full mouth from the radiant color of the flesh surrounding it. Should she attempt to bedaub herself with more devious potions, the result can sometimes be garish.

When she wears clothes, she wears them well—not with the haut monde chicness of Paris or Mayfair but with good sense, taste and an instinctive appreciation of color. Mornings on the lime-and-lemon Sydney harbor ferries, lunchtimes in the formal green elegance of the Domain, Sydney's Central Park, or after five at one of the fashionable cocktail lounges in the Menzies Hotel, our man will find a formidable phalanx of well-groomed young womanhood—stylish without being obtrusive, neat but not dashing, understated but not anonymous. Simple sleeveless shifts, in gay, primary colors, seem best to suit her tanned, self-confident figure. Certainly it needs no further adornment.

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Though it may appear small, dwarfed on the underside of the globe by the enormity of the surrounding Pacific and Indian oceans, the nation the Australian girl inhabits is immense. In general shape and total land area, Australia is comparable with the United States. As with America, it is simply foolish for the tourist to try to take it all in in one vacation.

The continent's vastness gives rise to the myth—perhaps strengthened by the koala-and-kangaroo image with which the Australian girl is sentimentally reluctant to dispense—that her country is predominantly rural. In fact, Australia is the most urbanized nation in the world, with two thirds of its population living in cities of over 100,000. A study of Australia's females is made considerably less fatiguing by the fact that over 80 percent are to be found in the boomerang-shaped coastal crescent bounded by Brisbane and Adelaide, and fully 40 percent of them live in Sydney or Melbourne. If a peripatetic male wished to investigate the choicest of Australia's girls in their natural habitat, he might well undertake a bird-watching expedition through this populous wedge. The trip would not be completely comprehensive, of course; no trip (or account thereof) could be—but it would be eminently enjoyable.

Besides a soupçon of wanderlust, a modicum of loot and a few weeks of time, our man would need passport and visa (the latter can be processed in about 24 hours at the local Australian consulate) and the standard vaccination booklet. Thanks to the jet age, flight times have dwindled to a still-imposing 24 hours from New York to Sydney, 17 from San Francisco. The round-trip tariff from New York is about $1735 first-class and $1246 tourist, for which the traveler may choose from a delectable smorgasbord of exotic stopovers: Hawaii, Tahiti, Pago Pago, Fiji, Nouméa and Auckland.

Once he reaches Australia, a suitable address for his research might be the languid, tropical area of Brisbane—and the Gold Coast resorts around Queensland's Surfers Paradise. Queensland girls, as a rule, are slightly leggier and less full busted than their cousins farther south. Even with a population of 700,000, Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, is hardly more than an oversized bush town; and most of its girls, along with a fair sampling of the rest of Australia's distaff population, find themselves drawn to the Catalina-cum-Waikiki atmosphere of the Gold Coast. By Stateside-resort standards, entertainment facilities on the Gold Coast—including the holiday islands along the Great Barrier Reef—are minimal, but the lack is more than compensated by a breathless, year-round whirl of informal beach-and-bungalow get-togethers. Especially during the June-to-August southern winter, the visitor will encounter the tan-breasted, pleasure-seeking surfer girl who is rapidly becoming the international image of Australian beauty. Gold Coast waves are fast, well-formed and easy to catch; so are its girls.

An easy 600 miles down the Pacific Highway, across the Hunter Valley and through industrial Newcastle, brings one to Sydney. A big city by anyone's standards, with a population of over 2,500,000, Sydney owes much of its verve to the schizophrenic diversity of foreign-born inhabitants who have settled there since 1945. Golden Teutonic Fräuleinwunders from Berlin; sultry Lorenesque signorine from Rome and Naples; provocative demoiselles from Paris and Nice; even darkly mysterious Iron Curtain émigrés —each with her distinctive national stamp and an accent straight off the Orient Express—ably populate and staff a kaleidoscope of tiny restaurants and cappuccino cafés all over Sydney. The city probably boasts more foreign-language newspapers than any other in the world, and the New Australian girls lend an élan reminiscent of New York in the Twenties.

In addition to the foreign-born, of course, the Manhattan effect lures the native-born from all corners of the continent. From the steaming, half-Asian tropics of Darwin to the dust-reddened shanties of tiny Alice Springs, the girls of Australia stream to Sydney in quest of cultivated companionship, exotic avocations and a cosmopolitan dreamworld of other dimly visualized scintillations.

Despite the spate of newcomers, Sydney's style still owes a tarnished, patrician glitter to the established community of Old Australians, which inherits both influence and pelf from the convicts-turned-land-barons of the early 19th Century. Watching the great-granddaughters of ax murderers and whores contrive to look like British aristocracy over harbor-side gibsons at the downtown yacht club is one of the palpable pleasures of girl watching in Sydney.

A date with a Sydney girl, old stock or new, will invariably take you to King's Cross—a mile or so from downtown Sydney and the few blocks of Australia's 3,000,000 square miles that in any way savor of the cosmopolitan. With its night-swinging drag shows, topless revues, strutting prostitutes, ultrablue night clubs and restaurants in which you can actually order a drink (something of a rarity down under), the Cross is the antipodean response to Soho, Greenwich Village and Pigalle. Of course, you've seen it all before, but as your charming escort is sure to point out, you won't find it anywhere else in Australia, so enjoy.

For homo solus, the Cross offers an abundance and variety of accessible females unrivaled in the Southern Hemisphere. In a walk down Macleay Street—through an area allegedly boasting one of the world's highest population densities—the foot-loose bachelor is likely to encounter (and, if fancy please him, to engage): a white-lipped, black-stockinged folknik sipping espresso over her 12-string; a barefoot, bronzed beachnik whose string-mesh frock does little to conceal her superbly carved calves and diminutive bikini; a well-scrubbed legal secretary, primly awaiting adventure over a shandy, consisting of cold beer mixed with, lemonade; a black-jeaned university beatnik, hip in the demonology of pop existentialism from astrology to Zen; a gorgeous and intense young Communist detachedly eating an American-style doubleburger as she pores over the galleys of her latest incendiary monograph; and even a few painted professionals, in plastic wigs and Day-Glo stretch pants, forlornly superannuated amid the profusion of amateur competition. Prostitution is discouraged in Australia, less by law than by the edict of a free market; as a result, those who still ply the oldest profession tend to be, literally, the oldest professionals. (In the past two years, however, a new breed of semipros has arisen—younger and considerably more attractive than their washed-out elder sisters. The traveler who is willing to forgo the pleasures of the chase will find these girls any evening, standing in front of their flats on the side streets between King's Cross and central Sydney.)

One of the true delights of King's Cross is its restaurants. Here, in almost impossibly authentic conditions (the waiters may not speak English), you and the girl of your choice can savor anything from Hungarian goulash to Neapolitan osso buco.The French Restaurant and Le Trianon are especially favored for fine Gallic cooking, while The Bombay offers top Indian cuisine. For Australian seafoods, try The Contented Sole. Your accompanying wines—especially the lighter varieties, from unfamiliar-sounding houses such as Dalwood, McWilliam's or Lindeman's—are superb. After the repast, you may wish to stroll round Sydney's lovely harbor, whose shores are lined not with industry and its foul wastes but with forests, parks and red-roofed homes. Or you may wish to sample the after-hours entertainment, usually American or British, featured at such King's Cross cabarets as the Silver Spade and Les Girls and at the big downtown hotels. (Unfortunately, as in South Africa, many of the imported acts touring Australia are either over the hill or still struggling for recognition.) But whatever diversion you choose, you will soon discover, probably without disappointment, that Australia is a nation early to bed. Public drinking ends at ten and most everything else is closed long before. The happy result is that dates invariably terminate at your pad or hotel over a late-evening aperitif and improvised entertainment à deux.

Having seen Sydney, you've seen much of the best of Australia. Farther south and inland is the capital city of Canberra: circular, rational, open and empty, planned with such foresight that it can easily accommodate ten times the people who have so far been induced to live in it, probably because it has little to offer save its grimly bellicose War Memorial and humdrum drone of federal politics. The girls of Canberra are generally very bright, mostly students or daughters of university or government personnel. Like their parents, they raise much red dust in their haste to get away each weekend. During holidays, the best place to meet Canberra girls is King's Cross. If you should decide to stay in the capital for more than a few hours, you'll want to sample such wining, dining and dancing spots as The Pigalle and The Carousel.

Four hundred and fifty air miles southwest of Sydney lies the second city of Melbourne—regular, stratified and occasionally elegant, a slightly tarnished show place of quaint Victoriana. Though the girls of Melbourne closely resemble their Sydney sisters, they tend to be a bit bustier and to dress more conservatively. Melbourne is, appropriately, the capital of the state of Victoria and is generally regarded as the fountainhead of spoilsport do-goodism—wowserism, as it is called—in Australia. Billy Graham joyfully found Melbourne one of the most moral cities it had ever been his pleasure to visit, and Ava Gardner, starring in On the Beach, declared it an appropriate setting for a film about the end of the world. Until recently, it was inadvisable for any novice to attempt to secure spiritous potables after teatime in Melbourne (the witching hour is now ten P.M.), and literary censorship in Victoria is still a standing sick joke. As in Victorian England, the superficial prudery of Victorian Australia thinly veils a jet-set night life worthy of La Dolce Vita.However, an engraved introduction is all but essential to penetrate the icy isolation of this exclusive society. With an inside friend to open the right doors, you may find yourself charmingly accompanied in the members' pavilion at Flemington for the Melbourne Cup race, and equally well favored for the dazzling, weeklong array of parties that surrounds this Ascotlike affair. Appropriately, The Stagecoach Inn, one of Melbourne's best restaurants, is designed to capture the atmosphere of the country's colonial days.

An overnight boat trip from Melbourne takes you to Tasmania, a sleepy, green and beautiful little island reminiscent of Old or New England. The local girls—almost exclusively of handsome British and Scottish stock—are overwhelmingly friendly: They rarely see males from across the Bass Strait, let alone from overseas. During the December-to-February summer vacation, the island additionally abounds in mainland girls—mostly students—atlracted by holiday fruit-picking jobs, in casual, toed conditions that usually mean all play and very little work.

There's much more to Australia than the coastal crescent, but for girl-watching purposes, the game's not worth the plane trip. Adelaide, in South Australia, is formal and meticulous, even more superficially inhibited than Melbourne, but vibrant with an electric aura of booming technology. Isolated in the far southwest corner is Perth, sunny and relaxed, whose pert, perky girls remind one of the sun-bleached nymphets of Surfers Paradise. There's also Darwin, a perfect setting for a Joseph Conrad novel, and Alice Springs, dry and desolate, both, like Everest, offering inaccessibility as their major attraction. In outback areas, men decidedly outnumber women; and since the combined population of Darwin and Alice is just 26,400, pickings here are slim, indeed.

Since few nations have ethnic origins as homogeneous as Australia's, much can be said about the present girls of Australia by examining their past. Australia is a middle-class country, founded on the large-scale import of the habits, prejudices and eccentricities of what—until the end of World War Two—were overwhelmingly working-class British migrants. These are the Old Australians—as distinguished from the original Australians, who, like the American Indians, are seldom seen and still constitute a great, unsolved national problem; and as distinguished from the New Australians—European migrants who have been arriving at a rate of 66,400 a year since the realities of world war brought Australia abruptly to the awareness that she cannot forever remain an Anglo-Saxon paradise in the Pacific. The New Australians are a source of some irritation to the Old, many of whom, if they care to, can trace their ancestry all the way back to the criminals whom Britain began transporting to Australia after the American Revolution closed her penal colonies in the New World. Its convict origins are a significant and still recent page in Australian history; it was only in 1938 that the last transportee died in an old-men's home in Perth.

The transported convicts were a tough lot to begin with, and the incredibly squalid conditions in which they arrived assured that only the hardiest survived. Since only 20,000 of the 160,000 convicts were females, it's not surprising that many of them fell into prostitution—or embraced it eagerly. As one historian observed: "When, by ill fortune, a woman guilty of a petty misdemeanor, but still retaining some moral standards, found herself aboard one of the earlier convict ships, her chances of reaching her destination undebauched were exceedingly slim. A woman of virtue who managed to retain it deserved canonization."

The arrival of the First Fleet women at Sydney in 1788 signaled a spectacle of license that has no equal in the annals of colonial history—and is certainly a far cry from the Pilgrim piety that christened Colonial America. The journal of surgeon Arthur Bowes of the ship Lady Penrhyn records that "the men got to the women soon after the landing, and the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night might be better conceived than expressed."

Thus the origins of Australia. By the 1820s, the native girls were already developing the characteristics that modern observers still remark in them. While several of the colonies were already cities in the rough, morals still were those of the transport ships. A visiting minister, not given to hyperbole, noted that "almost the whole of the Australian population is living in a state of unblushing concubinage," and a New South Wales government official described his colony as being "little better than an extensive brothel."

Another girl-watching surgeon, Peter Cunningham, observed, in his Two Years in New South Wales(written in 1827), that Australian females "grow up tall and slender, like Americans, and are generally remarkable for that Gothic peculiarity of fair hair and blue eyes. They have complexions of reddish yellow and can easily be picked from those born in Britain. They are a fine, interesting race. The young girls are of a mild-tempered, modest disposition, possessing much simplicity of character; and like all children of nature, credulous and easily led into error. They do not commonly appear to class chastity as the very first of virtues, which circumstance arises partly from their never having been tutored by their parents so to consider it, but more especially from never perceiving its violation to retard marriage."

Happily, this attitude still prevails among the girls of Australia, probably in keeping with the widely credited myth that they are far outnumbered by their men. In fact, while the most recent census showed a population of 11,751,000, divided into 49.5 percent women and 50.5 percent men (hardly a significant deviation), it showed that the imbalance is entirely confined to the desolate outback, where a foot-loose bachelor, or any other reasonable person, is hardly likely to find himself. In metropolitan areas, women actually outnumber men by a considerable margin. Moreover, since the average Australian girl marries, in her early 20s, a man four years older than herself, the relatively scarcer males born in the austerity of the Depression are now confronting the teeming, charming minions conceived in the heady affluence of world war. The resulting preponderance of females is clear to anyone willing to accept the evidence of his sense of sight on the crowded noonday streets of Sydney or Melbourne.

The notion of a vast continent bereft of females works to such advantage for the Australian girl that one suspects she is largely responsible for perpetuating it. Supremely confident in her attractive powers, firm in the belief that mere demography will eventually fling her together with Mr. Right, she does not instinctively assume the predatory crouch that can characterize a girl on the make. She inherits her great-grandmother's distrust for chastity, accepting sex with the same casualness with which she regards the other natural blessings—health, good food and sunshine—in which Australia abounds. Few nations in the world are better equipped to meet—or satiate—the demands of corporeal existence; an aura of languid self-gratification pervades the countryside and its females.

Considering the heady, anti-puritanical elements in Australian history and the strong, positive emphasis its society places on the physical side of life, it seems certain that the Kinsey statistics for American women, at least regarding premarital sex, would be quite conservative if compared with any for Australia. Its per-capita consumption of birth-control pills is the highest in the world. Presumably, a large percentage of the users, probably a majority, is unmarried, since the typical Australian family is a large one and, in a nation whose unspoken motto is "Populate or perish," the economic pressures for birth control among the married are relatively slight. The widespread use of the pill among Australian girls is quite in keeping with their straightforward tendency to regard sex as a pleasant and therapeutic recreational diversion—as gratifying and worth while as an afternoon of mixed doubles or body surfing.

As in Sweden, though perhaps not as extensively, it is becoming increasingly common for an Australian girl and her beau—whether contemplating marriage or just seeking kicks—to set up housekeeping without benefit of clergy, usually with the tacit or overt approval of their parents. And surprisingly common, indeed, is the young thing who cannot leave her mother, yet enjoys such a happy home life that she has no qualms about inviting a date home for the evening to share cordials, coffee and bed—and to enjoy a hearty steak and eggs with Mum and Dad the next day, totally unabashed.

The easygoing Australian girl appears to enjoy a position of sexual equality and sexual independence. Her insistence on "shouting" (i.e., buying) you a drink after you've bought her one, her casual mastery of the hail-fellow banter of Australian-rules beer drinking, the nonchalance with which she discusses her past love affairs and the straightforwardness with which she initiates new ones—all seem to support the notion that she has fully entered the world of men. But Australian appearances deceive. In fact, the evidence foreigners have taken as betokening her admission into male society is just a part of the Australian temperament. Like blonde hair, blue eyes and a suntan, it shows itself in the males as well as in the females, and has little bearing on relations between them.

The Australian girl has never struck her men as particularly independent, and they have saved her the risk of identity crisis by setting up a society that spells out quite clearly when she is to be equal and when she can be different. She is completely and in many instances joyously dependent, willing and even eager to sacrifice to the traditional ideal of Kinder-Küche-Kirche, secure in her role as a lesser but still essential component in a society fabricated by men for their own glorification.

One of the dominant themes in Australian social history has been a strong, intrasexual loyalty among men, an inheritance from the cell-block isolation of the penal days and the outback desolation of the pastoral era, which has led more than one sociologist to suggest it drowns male sex lives in a subliminatory sea of heavy drinking, aggressive masculinity and loyalty not to mistresses but to mates. And since from the earliest days there was no zoom in Australia for weak women, the notion of the Victorian heroine, all silks, swoons and smelling salts, was never enshrined. As a consequence, Australia today is an unromantic—even an anti-romantic—country. Australian girls are treated by their own men with a casualness that seems to border on sheer neglect. Except among the very young, public displays of affection are rare. Though the streets of an evening teem with couples, rarely do they exchange the rapturous glances that characterize lovers round the world. The typical relationship between the sexes in Australia strikes foreign observers as a singular combination of Neoplatonism and bondage—based more on mateship and convenience than on emotional or sexual attraction. Bearing this out, Peter Michaels, in his well-written and perceptive guidebook Australia, has described it as an "anti-sexy" nation.

To a degree remarkable in a country so progressive in its social institutions, Australian law and custom emphasize sexual inequality and the dependence of woman upon man—attitudes so ingrained that they are rarely questioned or even discussed. Sexual segregation is enforced by law at schools and in some public bars, and by mutual consent elsewhere: Men go with other men to races and rugby, and banter almost exclusively with other men at parties. While the economy is running at full employment–plus and crying out for labor, girls are excluded from all but the most menial service, clerical and teaching jobs. The universal assumption is that every young girl will soon marry and so be rendered unfit for employment. Frequently, this becomes a self-defeating prophecy, because with career advancement precluded, the typical Australian girl has few alternatives but to marry. For her to hold a job after her wedding is vaguely scandalous; she may be keeping a family man from employment, and she's either shirking her patriotic duty to reproduce or, through her neglect, fostering an untidy bungalow full of juvenile delinquents. In this light, it's quite understandable that the career girl—in the New York sense—is a rare bird, indeed, in Australia, regarded with something akin to suspicion by both sexes.

Though education at every level is effectively free for all who qualify, more than half the girls of Australia leave school between the ages of 14 and 15. Fewer than ten percent enter the groves of academe; and while many of these get their bachelors, only half wind up with a degree. Yet the huge state universities perennially disgorge ever-increasing numbers of attractive coeds with specialized training they have little hope of ever using. This is one explanation of the delightfully large numbers of peripatetic Australian girls one encounters the world over: Once their education is complete, travel (or an overseas job) is the only alternative to boredom for those unready to marry. It also explains why the brain drain—the constant exodus of Australian creative and technical talent—involves beauty as well as brains.

Whenever she thinks about all this, the Australian girl tends to accept it as the natural order of things. If the ambition of the American girl, as some commentators have opined, is to capture a man and use him, the inclination of the Australian variety is still to snare her man and let him use her. In a world of increasingly hazy distinctions between male and female roles, she retains an unadorned, unafraid and largely unarticulated sense of inviolable identity. The future may not hold much glamor for her, but it guarantees security and comfort; for her, the gain justifies the sacrifice.

Yet sociologists detect undercurrents of dissatisfaction. While nine of every ten Australian girls will marry before the age of 30, two thirds of all high school girls list success in a career—almost an impossible goal for Australian females—as their chief ambition. This disparity between the realities of Australian society and the aspirations of its girls gives rise to a startling proliferation of ladies' do-good organizations and culture-hunting clubs; it provides the powerful weekly women's magazines with a huge, diversion-hungry audience and fills their letters columns with endless complaints of frustration and neglect.

All this is understandably perplexing to the visiting American bachelor. The Australian girl is accustomed not to being trod on as much as just being ignored. And she appears to enjoy it. Give her a compliment and you may succeed only in embarrassing her. She's probably quite pretty, but she's not used to being told so. The thrust and parry of heterosexual repartee is decidedly not her forte, and even small talk is unfamiliar to her. If she thinks you're sincere, she may smile at you, blushing and hesitant; but if she thinks you're putting her on, she may just disappear. The obverse, of course, is that the casual treatment to which she's accustomed makes her something of a pushover—once the initial barriers are overcome—for the male who takes a sincere interest in her as a human being. The smallest gesture—the held-open door, the proffered bouquet, the concession to girlish vanity that is S. O. P. in the U. S. A.—is a cherished treasure for this unspoiled female, precious acknowledgment of her individuality as well as her femininity, appreciated if not in words, then in thoughts and deeds.

He who is willing to make the effort will discover a charming, affectionate and interested individual, anxious to please and ready to be led. If the chemistry is there and her beau succeeds in arousing her gamboling fervor, he'll almost certainly find her game for a chance on love—even if onward reservations stack the deck against the probability of formalizing the partnership. For she is, above all, a kinetic creature of many appetites, disarmingly direct in voicing her mating call, candidly preferring being chased to being chaste. In her straightforward acceptance of her own natural impulses, her easy willingness to submit to thoughtful male direction and her implicit security in her own femininity, many visiting bachelors find welcome relief from the ritualized Punch and Judy show of courtship, American style. The Australian girl asks so little from her men, and brings so much, that the newcomer is likely to feel rewarded beyond all bounds. When her swain's sojourn is at an end, chances are he'll be as regretful as she is, and she'll bid him adieu not with unseeming scenes or strings but with shared regret mingled with affectionate equanimity, always content with keeping love in the present, cherishing the happy afterglow of evanescent ecstasies past and serenely seeking more of the same in the sunny Australian future.