Was White Australia an aberration?

Australia has deep liberal roots that reject racial particularism

“One of the lessons which it teaches us is that science is annihilating space, and that as progress and development proceed, that isolation which surrounds Australia, and which has been to some extent its protection, is rapidly disappearing—that the time has gone by when Australia could proceed ‘forgetful of the world and by the world forgot.’ We are daily being brought closer to those great movements which may tend to disturb that of other countries. Australia has undertaken a peculiar mission, and one which has never before been attempted—the mission of establishing a western civilization amidst Oriental surroundings. There is no need to be an alarmist, but if history teaches us anything at all, it teaches that where racial feeling is aroused, friction sooner or later must result. We all hope that Australia will never know anything but peace. At the same time, I am unable to shut my eyes to the fact that ‘East is East and west is west, and never the twain shall meet’.”

— Senator E.D Millen, NSW, 1908

“Australia is and always will be a British nation”

— Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 1954

Australians ceased to proclaim themselves white and British, ideas that had become anachronistic and embarrassing. The world that had supported them had disappeared. Circumstances beyond Australia’s control had eroded their meaning. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s almost all the remaining links with the imperial age were severed. Appeals to the British Privy Council were ended, imperial honours were replaced with an Australian honours system and instead of God Save the Queen, Advance Australia Fair became the national anthem. ‘British subject’ was dropped from Australian passports. By 2000 the monarchy was the only surviving symbol of Australia’s earlier allegiance to the British national ideal.

— Neville Meaney, ‘Australia and Japan’, ‘Australia and the Wider World’, 2001

White Australia was foundational to Australian Federation in 1901. Then in the 1960s, Australia fumbled out of it. Australia’s subsequent embrace of multiculturalism has been more or less popular. By the 1990s Australians distanced themselves from the idea of Australia being British or white.

Perhaps rather than a sudden fumbling enlightenment, or an economic or cultural entanglement, the dismantling of White Australia was a return to form — a reactivation of Australia’s core classical liberal tradition that had been suppressed by sixty years of acute geopolitical anxiety.

Despite Australia’s birth as a dumping ground for convicts, it was surprisingly liberal. Convicts were granted a freedom unheard of in Britain. Convict or gaoler — scarce food was rationed equally to all men and thieves hanged regardless of status. The regime’s posture towards the natives was deeply enlightened — to the point where the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, refused to retaliate when speared in the shoulder. A pragmatism settled in, one borne of hostile natural conditions. Just getting along.

As well as its birth, Australia’s maturation was also steeped in liberalism. Australian colonies gained self-government in the 1850s at the peak of British classical liberalism. The increasing numbers of free settlers brought with them not only British culture but the new ideals of the time as embodied in the Chartist and Utilitarian movements.

Why did Australia embrace a White Australia in the 1890s? A confluence of reasons: it was the local manifestation of rising nationalism across the world; the rise of China and then especially Japan following its defeat of Russia, a Great European empire, in 1905; and the perceived shrinking of the world and Australia’s natural moats by technologies such as the steamship and the telegraph. Australia’s sparse population across the continent and her suspicion that Britain would be too tied up in Europe in the event of war left her feeling vulnerable. All this led Australians to embrace a virulently race-based nationalism. A posture that was impressively generative, one might add, having resulted in Federation.

White Australia began in legislation against Chinese prospectors attracted to the gold rushes, and found itself perfected in its fears of Japanese invasion in WWII — which, too often overlooked, proved perfectly prescient. Japan did ultimately bomb Australia, sink its ships, and enslave and kill her men. Australian history is taught in a way that mocks Australia’s founding fathers for their anxiety around the ‘Yellow Peril’. But, whilst tinged with racial enmity, it was predominantly a geopolitical concern — that turned out to be correct. Not only was it correct, but it was the inconvenient and courageous stance to take at the time. Japan was an ally of the British — of which Australia was a political and cultural limb — and fought on the side of the British during WWI, and the British consistently brushed off this threat, focusing instead on the European theatre. Hence the subsequent catastrophe of the Fall of Singapore in WWII. The Australian founding fathers were exactly correct in seeing through the flimsiness of this relationship.

With respect to the Chinese gold diggers, there is considerably more nuance than first meets the eye. Neville Meaney has this to say in his essay Australia and Japan:

With the influx of large numbers of Chinese following the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria these apprehensions took on a palpable form. By the end of the 1850s there were some 42,000 Chinese in Victoria and 15,000 in New South Wales; that is, the Chinese comprised one in seven of the Victorian and one in fourteen of the New South Wales adult male population. The European miners, resentful at having to compete with the celestials, often resorted to violence to expel them from the diggings. But the diggers could not easily reconcile their Chartist belief that ‘all men are born with free and equal rights’ with their demand that the Chinese be excluded from the goldfields. At the hearings of an 1854 Victorian Royal Commission one of their leaders maintained that this principle did not apply to the Chinese because ‘they were not civilised’. When it was pointed out that they regarded themselves as highly civilised and the question was asked as to who was to judge civilisation, the miners’ representative could only offer the ethnocentric answer that the whole of European history and history of parts of Asia has shown us as to what is civilisation.

European Australians had difficulty in accepting this argument. Though the three most affected colonies, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, did pass discriminatory laws, they did so only after fierce debate and with some reluctance. The legislation was neither general nor absolute and these measures applied to the Chinese and no other Asians. And they did not exclude Chinese. They limited the number who could be landed from any one ship and levied poll and residence taxes on those who did enter the country. Within a few years, as the Chinese population began to decline, all these discriminatory statutes were repealed. These Acts did not represent the acceptance of a racially based definition of society. They were a liberal era’s pragmatic response to a particular problem of social order.

(My emphasis.)

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1894, which provided for reciprocal residency rights between Japanese and British citizens, raised the question of Japanese immigration to Australia. Britain let its colonies decide whether to adhere to it themselves. Australia said no. This was a direct trigger for Federation and for the White Australia policy. In the 1880s the Japanese came to dominate Queensland pearl-diving and to work as indentured labour in North Queensland, and Australian workers rejected this.

So the White Australia policy arose from a general and conflated fear of Asian migration and invasion.

Later at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 Prime Minister Hughes refused to accept Japan’s proposal to include a racial equality provision in the League of Nations Covenant. Frederic Eggleston, one of Australia’s great public intellectuals and a political figure and liberal of the time, noted he had been unhappy with the Australian leader’s stand. He wrote in the The New Statesman that racial tolerance was a time-honoured tradition of liberalism. Yet he supported the White Australia policy. He did so because he attributed Australia’s democratic success to “the purity of [its] Anglo-Saxon base,” and that it would need more homogeneity, not less, as it grew in order to prosper democratically. He did not want to replicate the racial conflict that arose in the US.¹

The official journalist for the Australian Imperial Force in WWI, CEW Bean, wrote that the Australian soldier “knew only one social horizon, that of race.” He believed it was for their British race that Australians fought in WWI. As Neville Meaney writes in Australia and Japan:

They gave themselves such names as the King and Empire Alliance, the Old Guard, the New Guard, the White Guard² and the League of National Security. Though there was among their numbers some who were disenchanted with parliamentary government and sympathetic with the Italian fascist movement, most professed – insofar as they had a coherent ideology – a desire to defend against Bolshevik revolutionaries and Irish republicans Australia’s allegiance to the British empire and to the British tradition of constitutional monarchy.

Sir John Monash, the Jewish Australian hero general of WWI, was approached to head up an authoritarian regime in Australia. Monash rejected this and wrote “the only hope for Australia is the ballot box, and an educated electorate.” Australia’s reactionary elements never really threatened Australia’s liberal roots.

Once Japan was defeated and trade with Asia replaced the pre-eminence that Britain once held, and once Britain turned her back on her colonies in favour of European integration, Australia had no alternative but to excise its British soul and return to the universalist (and very British) classical liberal ideals with which she was birthed.

In this telling, White Australia was a six-decade nationalist aberration, peaking with global nationalist sentiments, in an otherwise classical liberal polity. Even at its most virulently racist, it resisted the worst violence and political turmoil of reactionary polities elsewhere at the time.

This answers the question I previously posed — why did the White Australia policy end? And the answer might just lie in Australia’s deep liberal roots. There is nothing more Anglo than universalism, and so being so racially particular just didn’t jibe with the Australian character.

This also explains why it’s so asymmetrical with other nations like China and Japan that were quick to be offended at Australia but you will notice are much more racially homogenous. It’s because they don’t have this liberal tradition. It’s an Anglo thing. You wouldn’t get it.³

A more honest if muddling reality is probably that Australia’s liberal tradition and its reactionary elements have lived side-by-side from birth, as they lived side-by-side in Britain. Hence Eggleston's simultaneous liberalism and support of a White Australia. But it’s difficult to understand the shape of Australian history, and its crucial White Australia period that covered Federation, WWI, and WWII, without understanding how it emerged from and was constrained by its deep liberal tradition.

1. An iconic part of Australia’s immigration policy through parts of the White Australia period were dictation tests. When racial tests were scrapped as too internationally embarrassing, dictation tests were introduced. In Australian schools and history books this is taught as a kind of embarrassing joke. Famously, a Scottish Gaelic dictation test was administered to Egon Kisch in 1934 — a Czech Jewish communist invited to speak in the country. He ultimately spoke to a crowd of 20,000 in Sydney’s Domain. How ridiculous, the story goes, that he was given such a dictation test — of course he wouldn’t pass it. But…. isn’t that the point? It was not in fact embarrassing to put a Scottish Gaelic dictation test to a communist undesirable to keep him out! Of course it wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t yet the Cold War, but the government had sense enough to be suspicious of communists. Communists should be grateful to be administered inscrutable language tests and barred from entry rather than strung up from street lamps.

2. It was a member of the New Guard who stole the premier’s thunder by galloping to the fore on a white steed at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and slashing the ceremonial ribbon with his sword.

3. Funnily enough, Eggleston did suggest that Asian offence at Australia’s discriminatory immigration policies could be assuaged by reciprocal agreements allowing Asian countries to discriminate against European migrations. Classic Anglo. But Japan objected less to exclusion per se than being “treated differently from Europeans and grouped with the less civilised, such as the ‘Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians, and other Eastern Peoples.’” (Neville Meaney, Australia and Japan)