Australia

The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Norman Corwin's One World Flight, by listening to the call of the bird known as Laughing Jackass or Cookaburah, one of the many sounds and voices recorded inside Australia.

To be heard tonight on this 11th of a series of 13 broadcasts, based upon Norman Corwin's recent Global Tour as first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Flight Award. This is Norman Corwin. Last September I had the experience of flying from the first day of autumn into the second day of spring.

To a four-engine American troop carrier shuttling between the Philippine Islands and Australia, this is a routine run, a pushover taking only a day and a night to reverse the seasons. I was especially curious about the country we were heading for, because most of Australia is as little known to America as the call of the Kukubura.

All I knew sitting on these bucket seats were the easy facts, that it's the biggest island on the globe, almost the same size as the United States, with a population equal to New York City, that one-third of the country is desert, as hopeless as the Sahara, that the climate ranges all the way from what you'd get in the Congo

to what you'd find in Ireland. I had also heard of the toughness and bravery of its fighters and the beauty of its women, both of which were cheerfully admitted by Australians aboard the plane. As for politics, I had an idea from Australia's record in the United Nations that its people were solidly in line with Britain and America on world issues

and had no division of opinion about such things as peace, unity, the atom bomb, Russia, the United Kingdom, and themselves. In any case, the troop carrier was steadily narrowing the distance between my questions and the answers to them.