Mr. Norman Lindsay--whose clever work I admired long before I came to this supersensitive Commonwealth--has done me a service in subscribing himself as the man who has seen more of the Australian girl than any of his envious countrymen. If his knowledge is so extensive, and he is the true artist that we all believe him to be, it follows that his drawing must reflect the local type. And what do we find--the grace and beauty over which so many of your frenzied correspondents have rhapsodised? Not on your life. The Norman Lindsay girl is hardly a girl at all. With the calves of a footballer and the upper limbs of a Sandow, she is a fearful and wonderful example of the female form divine. The faces of Mr. Lindsay's women remind me more than anything else of the religious pictures of my youth, designed to represent the torments of hell, and to frighten people into the narrow way. Your foremost black-and-whiter admires the beauty of strength. Well, a draught horse with whiskers half way up its legs is a beautiful thing to draw a heavy load of turnips or road metal, but no one would think of comparing its ungainly proportions with the symmetrical form of the thoroughbred racer. If Australia is trying to breed a race of Amazons, well and good--you are getting along very nicely. But if you are anxious to match your girls with the comelier women of other countries--you have a perfectly clean palette, as my old friend Charles Dana Gibson would put it.
People who read their history closely are familiar with the evolutionary phases through which most young countries pass. Here is first the halting, apologetic stage, represented in the case of Australia by its early-day subservience to England and everything English. Nothing could be any good that was not imported. The next stage was reached when you began to produce a handful of clever men and women, whose success in science, music, art, and sport laid the foundations of a belief that gradually developed into arrogant big-headedness. If Australia could produce a Brennan, a Melba, a Mackennal, a Trumper, an Arnst, and a Gray, why should there be any limit to the fertility of its genius-breeding soil? The idea tickled your vanity, and you allowed it to grow recklessly. People who came from other countries saw your weakness, recognised it as an inevitable phase in your progress towards national sobriety and staidness, and said nice things about you. It made the visitors' stay more pleasant, and, as you will in time grow out of your folly, it helped rather than impeded your development.