Why did White Australia end?

Neville Meaney on Australia muddling out of its Britishness

Neville Meaney wrote an excellent essay, The End of ‘White Australia’ and Australia’s Changing Perceptions of Asia, 1945 — 1990. Indeed the entire anthology of essays contained within Australia and the Wider World: Selected Essays of Neville Meaney are superb.

Had I read this essay first, my own piece on Australia fumbling for an identity would have been better.

I looked up Meaney after he came recommended by Hugh White. I regret to discover he died in 2021 in Adelaide. I’d love to have spoken to him.

In his essay, Meaney traces the arc of White Australia. How it was foundational to Australian Federation, and how that broad political consensus then dissolved. The same men and institutions that embraced White Australia also dismantled it. There was no battle of a righteous few. As Meaney notes:

There can be no plausible Whig history of progress which can link that past with this present. There are no heroes who from the beginning of ‘White Australia’ fought against great odds and so brought us to this point…

Meaney begins with a powerful portrait of just how heartfelt the White Australia sentiment was. Australia’s de Tocqueville, Charles Pearson, predicted the rise of the ‘coloured’ races against their European imperial masters, and how they would inevitably need to be treated on an equal footing. And yet even he resented his own prophecy:

Thus after predicting the rise of the ‘coloured’ races he had to admit that, ‘Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think that we shall have passed away before that day arrives.’

For him it was a question of preservation of the West:

For him the Australians were guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher civilisation. And in this context, “The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes, and which Englishmen at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience.”¹

Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmond Barton, did not think that “the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality.”

Australia’s second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, and perhaps its most intellectual, wrote:

We here find ourselves touching the profoundest instinct of individual or nation — the instinct of self-preservation — for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake.

Following World War II, Australia’s famous External Affairs Minister Dr Evatt, wanted to establish a series of Australian bases to its north in the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, and French New Caledonia to prop up weakened European administrations. Post-War anti-colonial movements kiboshed this proposal. And whilst Australia softly supported such movements, Australian immigration took a boost under the ‘Populate or Perish’ mantra, and became more strictly white than ever before.

This took a sudden turn in the late 1960s. South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth of Nations and the UN adopted a ‘Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’. There was a new bipartisan zeitgeist under the new Prime Minister Harold Holt, following the long and more traditionalist Menzies reign. Why the change? Holt said:

Australia’s increasing involvement in Asian developments, the rapid growth of our trade with Asian countries, our participation on a larger scale in an increasing number of aid projects in the area, the considerable number of Asian students receiving education in Australia, the expansion of our military effort, the scale of diplomatic contact, and the growth of tourism to and from the countries of Asia which made it desirable for Australia to review its immigration procedures.

What is odd about this — isn’t it a non-sequitur to acknowledge all of the above and to then insist on non-white immigration? Plenty of countries engage with other countries without accepting their immigrants.

Note the requirement is entirely asymmetrical. There is no demand for European immigration to Asian countries. The presumed flow of demand runs in only one direction. It is assumed that Australia is an advanced and desirable civilisation where the world aspires to migrate, and that the Asian nations above her are not. Perhaps there is an underlying accommodation to a perceived threat: if Australia did not let some prospective Asians in on her own terms, they would force their way in on theirs. Nevertheless, surely it’s not simply a question of immigration but of demographic composition. Australia demanded of herself that it become less British, less white so as to avoid awkward conversations with its neighbours. And yet there is no equivalent demand of them. It was preposterous then and it’s preposterous now to demand that China, India, Vietnam, Japan become less Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese.

This fundamental question, the true underlying why, the essence of what drove the Anglo nations alone to abandon racial homogeneity, is unasked and unanswered by Meaney.

One might read this as a national sacrifice. To enter a new covenant — the Global Liberal Order under an America acutely attuned to questions of race — one must sacrifice the old idol (British homogeneity). And so as Australia pivoted from Britain to America, it laid its founding principle at the altar of its new god.

The Holt government’s new policy was not felt as a break. It was presented as an evolution. Truth is, it was a muddle. Meaney continues:

Yet both government and opposition stressed that these reforms were not a deviation from or a rejection of past policy. As the prime minister expressed it, Australia’s ‘basic policy has been firmly established since the beginning of our Federation’… The minister for immigration assured the house that ‘the basic aim of preserving a homogeneous population will be maintained’… Settlers had to be assimilated. They had to ‘fit in’. They had to be absorbable. Since this objective assumed an essentially mono-cultural, if not absolutely monochrome, society, it meant that Australians still viewed their nation as a community sharing one heritage of language, law, religion and mores, that is, a predominantly White British Australia…. Bill Snedden, Minister for Immigration in 1968, anticipating an alternative that was beginning to creep up on the country, asserted that the new immigration policy was certainly not a policy which is directed towards the creation of a multi-racial society.

(My emphasis.)

At the same time Australia established language departments to study Japanese and Indonesian at its universities to better prepare its military and intelligence services in potential conflicts with them.

The end of the Vietnam War soothed Australia’s fears: Asia seemed much too divided to pose a threat. The Whitlam government publicly repudiated the White Australia policy. The percentage of non-Europeans in Australia rose from 0.5% in 1947 to 2.5% in 1984. Under the Hawke government Asian migrants came to represent a third of the total intake. Today around a third of Australians have non-European origins and around half of Australians have non-Anglo-Celtic origins. Holt’s toe-dip reforms set off an avalanche.

A series of government reports touted the importance of learning an Asian language and considering Australia as an Asian nation. I recall this sentiment even in my youth through the ‘90s. They turned out to be largely false. It’s the hangover from this era that Hugh White was recently waxing lyrical about.

One of Meaney’s concluding comments:

It is clear that while new national and international circumstances, especially the end of ‘White Australia’ and the changing perceptions of Asia, have led to the abandonment of the ideal of a homogeneous British ‘White Australia’, all attempts to redefine the contemporary nation have been ad hoc and confused and have failed to produce a satisfactory substitute.

I could not have put it better myself, a very nice summary of my piece Fumbling for An Australian Identity.

Meaney first published his essay in 1994. He could not have predicted the huge run Aboriginal identity has had in this country over the last decade, which seems to be about a collective yearning for a national identity and to plug the gap Britishness left behind.

It’s bizarre that even in a clinical detailing of the dismantling of the White Australia policy, it all just looks like a big vibe shift. As I’ve written before, I suspect it’s to do with America. The cultural revolution there in the 1960s changed what was acceptable across the empire. A White Australia policy was just too KKK-coded for our Yankee pals, and it was too out of kilter with the liberal zeitgeist in the imperial capital. (As examples of ethno-classist counterpoints, Indian caste, Gulf Arab citizen exclusivity, Han supremacy, and white Mexican industrial dominance are not so easily legible to American racial sensibilities and all persist to this day.)

Universal liberalism became synonymous with progress and modernity, replacing the racial purity of the prior century. To explicitly aspire to remain white became gauche, backwards, provincial. Australia wanted to keep up with polite New England society, not be dismissed as an Alabama.

It also wouldn’t do to have an Anglo lieutenant implicitly subordinate an unaligned-Third World whose hearts and minds the US was fighting a Cold War for.

Maybe that’s the most Australian thing of all. Just not thinking about it too much, awkwardly getting on to get along.

1. There is a beautiful example of a Chinese Australian who more than integrated, he was a paragon of Australian virtue:

‘White Australia’, as Pearson had forecast, became a foundation policy of the Federal union, a fundamental principle of national life. The social trauma created by rapid modernisation at the end of the nineteenth century caused the mass democracy to seek security in a homogeneous community of interchangeable and indistinguishable individuals. And race became the badge of all that was familiar and the barrier against all that was foreign. When an individual Chinese was able to assimilate himself completely into British Australia, he could be accepted, even popular. Mei Quong Tart, a wealthy Sydney merchant, had grown up in a European family and become a Christian. He was naturalised in 1871 and in 1899 volunteered to fight for Queen and Empire in the Boer War. He was much in demand on festive occasions to sing Scottish airs and he was, according to the native-born Scotsman George Reid, the only man living who has got the true original Gaelic accent. On his death in 1903 the Mayor of Ashfield had the flag on the Town Hall lowered to half-mast and forty of his fellow Masons and many other notables attended the funeral. Tart was being honoured for having rid himself, or so it seemed to White Australians, of all marks of his Chinese culture and taken on a persona which made him one with the British colonists.

But Tart’s case was highly unusual. In general skin colour difference was an absolute impediment to inclusion.