Australian Writers

nd ambition. The journalists are more or less drenched with politics all the year round, and they, too, occasionally find it an easy matter to vary their occupation by assisting in the active business of law-making. The tension of their daily lives, severer than that of the majority of press writers in Great Britain, leaves them little or no leisure for literary work of the higher kind, and generally the prospect of being compelled to send whatever they might write to the other end of the world for the chance of publication discourages effort. It may safely be said that there are young men on the editorial and reporting staffs of a dozen of the principal journals who possess ability that would secure them distinction in the wider fields of England or America. To their skill and spirited rivalry is due the universally high quality of the Antipodean press. Mr. David Christie Murray, writing after considerable experience of the colonies, and as one who had been an English journalist, said that on the whole he wa