and around the 5 principal cities, and almost 9 out of 10 live in the heavily populated coastal area stretching from Brisbane around through Adelaide. Outside this area, except for Perth, it's a long way between people. Scatter the population of Cheyenne and Laramie in an area about 40% as large as the United States and you've got the picture. So we find Australia is a small country connected by vast distances --long on land and shy on population, and an understanding of this inter-relation ship between its geography and its population is fundamental to appreciating the problems and the opportunities of mining down under. Whatever the country, mining requires management, manpower, money, markets, and materiel, and these 5 M's in Australia are all in short supply. Mining management has not been able to keep the pace with the number of new mines being brought into production. Men to man the mines are hard to come by, for mining is the smallest employer of the major industry groups, accounting for only 1. 3% of employment in June 1965, and mining employment dropped 16-7% in the last 10 years. The local market is limited by the size of the population and the export markets are far away. Money is hard to obtain locally and expensive by United States terms. Materiel of local origin is also limited -- much that is needed must be imported and the supporting infrastructure for new mines is often simply not conveniently available. Given these difficulties, how then do we account for the fact that the number of foreign companies active on the Australian scene has swelled from the handful of us there in 1960 to 86 today, with 33 of these entering the scene in the past 13 months? The answer is the sixth and most important -3-