REVIEW OF THE YEAR
temporarily elsewhere. Before the fire breaks were made, over 50,000 people lost their homes in one fire and over 20,000 in another. Once the fire lanes were in existence the largest number of persons affected by any single fire was under 6,000 in spite of the fact that there were six separate fires in this period By Septem- ber, nine months after the Christmas Night fire, it could be said with confidence that a catastrophe on that scale could not recur. This was a valuable advance, if negative.
In the meantime the land problems of resettlement were being examined. An average squatter family, living in an insanitary, overcrowded and precarious hut, occupied perhaps eighty square feet of land. The only virtue of the squatter's hut, apart from its roof, was that it was within, or near, the urban area where employment and the necessities of life were to be found; but to reprovide the estimated 260,000 squatters, even on a basis of their existing illegal holdings, would have required at least 150 acres. It was estimated that within and around the urban perimeter there was at best 20 acres of land available or on call at short notice, and perhaps a further 50 acres which could be freed if squatter shacks could first be removed. In the first place it seemed doubtful whether the whole area of available non-rural land could justifiably be reserved for a single section of the community, many of whom were recent immigrants and none of whom had any legal rights to land. There were many other citizens whose claims on developed land were undeniable. In the second place it was clearly impossible to effect resettle- ment even on a basis of reproviding the tiny holdings into which the squatters had compressed themselves.
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