“Snell”: “Australia for the Australians!” [The Bulletin, 19 October 1905]

[Editor: This untitled item was published in the “Society” section of The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 19 October 1905.]

[“Snell”: “Australia for the Australians!”]

“Snell”: “Australia for the Australians” is a fine cry, and has been in circulation a good many years now, and yet how few Australians one meets who think Australian and feel Australian as a Frenchman thinks and feels for France, or a Spaniard for Spain, or a German for the Kaiser Bill country!

The other day, in a Melbourne city hotel bar, a big sailor, with a thick foreign accent (he might have been Russian, Dane, or Finn), was cursing Australia from Geelong to Cooktown and the Swan to Port Jackson as a land of cows and be-devilled wasters. There were seven men present, five of them Australian born, but none of them seemed to feel himself called upon to put in a word or a blow for poor Australia.

Then the sailor man branched off, and said profane things about King Edward, and disrespectful things about England, and instantly an irate young man forsook his beer and smote the foreigner in the wind and tumbled him under a seat.

The avenger was an Australian.

Source:
The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 19 October 1905, p. 10 (column 3)

Also published in:
The Bega Budget (Bega, NSW), 25 October 1905, p. 1

[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]