Some columnists only write about the little things going on in their little lives but others go for the Big Picture.
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Big Pictures don't come any bigger than the one Fred Broomfield painted for the Queensland Worker, 100 years ago this week.
"Romance Of An Inland Sea.
"The scheme propounded . . . to carry the waters of a river in New Guinea, across the 1400 miles breadth of Torres Strait to the Northern Territory, and thence by gravitation to form an inland sea in central Australia, is a dream . . . beside which the achievements of the past like the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China . . . are the accomplishment of a feeble and pigmy race.
"[At present, most of inland Australia] is practically a desert. Riverless, sterile, sun smitten, it glares back at a glaring heaven in hopeless suffering."
It was time, Broomfield urged, to go for the problem of the uninhabitable inland with the same "great imagination" that had brought us wonders like
"X-rays, the telephone, the aeroplane and the Zeppelin airship".
"To make Australia a great nation, the continent must undergo physical transformation. We might divert river systems that today are pouring priceless millions of gallons of water wealth into the ocean."
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