A Town like Alice

was a loss of over two hundred pounds -two hundred and twenty-seven. But all the others-oh my word." He showed me the figures for the ice-cream parlour, the beauty parlour, the swimming-pool, the cinema, the laundry, and the dress shop. "They're doing fine. The fruit and vegetable shop, that's all right, too." We totted up the figures and found that the seven of them together had made a clear profit of two thousand six hundred and seventy-three pounds in the previous year. "It’ll pay her to run the workshop at a loss," he said. "She gets it back out of what the girls spend to make themselves look pretty for the ringers, and what the ringers spend in taking out the girls."
    I was a little troubled about the workshop. "Can she expand it?" I asked. "Can she lower the overhead by doing a bigger business?"
    He was doubtful about that. "She's using just about all the alligator skins Jeff Pocock and two others can bring in," he said. "Wallabies, they're getting scarcer than they were, too. I don't think she can get much bigger in the workshop. She doesn't want to, either. She's got a kind of hunch that in a few years' time the workshop won't be necessary at all, that the town will be so big that a workshop employing twenty girls won't be neither here nor there."
    "I see," I said thoughtfully. "How big is the town now?"
    "There's about four hundred and fifty people living in Willstown," he said. "That's not counting boongs, and not counting people living out upon the stations. The population's trebled in the last three years."
    "Is that just because of the workshop?" I asked.
    He said slowly, "I think it must be-everything comes back to that, when you look at it. It's not only the workshop, you see. She's got two girls employed in the ice-cream parlour, and one lubra. Two in the beauty parlour, three in the dress shop, two in the fruit shop, three in the cinema. She employs quite a lot of people."
    I was puzzled. "But can twenty girls in the workshop provide work for all these other girls?" I asked.
    "It doesn't seem to work that way," he said. "We were totting it up the other day. She's never employed more than about thirty-five girls at any one time, but since she started there's been forty-two girls married out of her businesses. They mostly marry ringers. Well, that's forty-two families starting, forty-two women wanting cinema and beauty parlour and fresh vegetables and that, besides the thirty-five girls that she's still got employed. It kind of snowballs." He paused. "Take the bank. There's two girl clerks there that there never were before, because of the bigger business. The AMP have started up an office, and there's a girl in that. Bill Wakeling's got a girl in his office." He turned to me. "It's a fact, there's something like a hundred girls and married women under twenty-five in Willstown now," he said. "When Jean came, there was two."
    "And the babies!" he said. "There's more babies than you could shake a stick at. They've had to send a special maternity nurse to the hospital. That's another girl. She got engaged to Phil Duncan, the copper, last month, so there'll be another one."
    I smiled. "Are there enough men to go round?"
    "Oh my word," he said. "There's no difficulty in getting men to work in Willstown. I've had ringers coming from all over Queensland, from the Northern Territory, too, wanting a job round about Willstown. There was one chap came all the way from Marble Bar in Western Australia, two thousand miles or so. The labour situation's very different now from what it was three years ago."
    I went to bed early that night with plenty to think about. We had a conference next morning with Mr Hope, the solicitor, in his office, and wrote a letter to the Queensland Land Administration Board suggesting a meeting to discuss the lease of Midhurst. That afternoon we spent in driving around Cairns to see the sights; it seemed to me to be a pleasant little tropical town, beautifully situated. On Sunday we drove up on to the Atherton Tableland, high rolling downs farmed somewhat on the English style.
    We flew to Willstown on Monday morning, in a Dakota. We landed at places called Georgetown and Croydon on the way and stayed on each aerodrome for about twenty minutes, picking up and setting down passengers and freight, as we circled Georgetown for the landing I was able to study the place. It was pathetic in a way, for you could see from the air the rectangular pattern of wide streets that once had been busy and