The AFR View
The 1950s: when Australia was a developing economy
The Australian Financial Review looks back at the decade that opened Australia up to foreign capital, European migrants and even the possibility of joining the Atomic age.
Seventy years ago, at the start of the 1950s, eight million Australians prospered on an island continent at the foot of Asia. From the world’s biggest sheep paddock, they supplied the world’s biggest exporter of woollen textiles.
Yet, after World War II, Australia lost the security blanket of a declining British Empire amid Korean War fears of communism from the north. It needed a new source of security. It needed “to populate or perish”.
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