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Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 19, No. 3. March 24, 1955

[Introduction]

There is only one word to describe Australia, and that is a, peculiarly Australian use of it—mighty—meaning big, overpowering and essentially nice. From the bulging Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, to the thousands of miles of gum forest, rich grazing land and then scrubby gum and semi-desert—that is how we found it.

The differences we found were not in the behaviour of the people, or (in many cases) in our immediate surroundings (many times we found it difficult to imagine that we were not back home in New Zealand), but in the scale on which life was organised. From the hundred Sydney suburbs to the sheep stations around Broken Hill (one is Go square miles in area), everything was huge and massive—dwarfing anything within our previous experience.

Perhaps I should roll you something' of the organisation of our trip. Early last December, Peter Kemp and I—fellow students from VUC—travelled to Australia on the Mono-wal under NZUSA's travel and exchange scheme arranged in conjunction with NUAUS, the Australian-counter-part of NZUSA. Altogether we spent about two and a half months in Australia, working in Sydney for three weeks at the start, and then hitch-hiking through almost all of New South Wales and Victoria, and parts of South Australia and Queensland. We covered in all just on 4000 miles.