My last article, Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs 'be just and fear not' received two replies.
The first from Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative fame who basically gave some more information on Calwell's views before WWII.
Calwell's deep concern for social justice was invariably linked with the creation in Australia of an ethnically mixed society through large-scale immigration.
The second comment was from the world's most prolific author 'Anonymous', who gave a very reasonable and intelligent response. However I think that it is wrong and I will outline why after his comment.
I will attempt to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory positions of Calwell supporting both mass immigration and White Australia.
Calwell (along with many other Australian leaders during World War 2) felt that Australia was precariously vulnerable to being overwhelmed by Imperial Japan due to Australia's small population relative to Australia's land size.
Calwell (along with other Australian leaders at the time) concluded that Australia (for national defence reasons) needed a quick and massive population boost above and beyond what increased birth rates or importing Anglo-Celts from the British Isles was likely to achieve.
So Calwell (and other Australian leaders) expanded the White Australia Policy from English-speaking Anglo-Celts to include the near similar Europeans in general.
Which means that the Calwell era immigration following World War II until the mid-1970s was not in fact the first stage of multiculturalism, but more accurately a continuation of the White Australia Policy with a pan-European population base rather than being limited to mostly Anglo-Celts.
I was surprised when reading Calwell's book, which I have since found out was ghost written by Graham Freudenberg, that not once was the phrase 'populate or perish' used. In the post-war period this was a well worn phrase that was trotted out. It meant that Australia's population was too small to defend it and that we needed more people if we were to do so.
But that phrase and the mass immigration policy that it supported don't really make sense. By the end of WWII Australia's population was about 8 million, Japans was about 80 million. Exactly how many people we needed to 'populate' wasn't talked about and I have never heard a number. What number would allow us to survive?
It was all very abstract, what was never discussed was when would enough be enough?
If our enemy has a population of 80 million, how big does our population need to be to successfully defend it?
140 million, 80 million, 40 million, 20 million?
Our most likely enemy today has a population of over 1,000 million, how many people do we need to defend ourselves against that?
Defending Australia was never the reason mass immigration was started because there was never a population target to reach and it was never designed to be turned off, only started.
The second point that I would like to make is that the term 'White Australia' was always a misnomer. The truth is that the word white did not mean to most people in the English speaking world, European. It meant a particular type of European, someone from Northern Europe. In other words White people were WASP's, White Anglo Saxon Protestants. While this term wasn't used in Australia, it's an American term, it comes closest to what the word White meant when people spoke about the 'White Australia' policy.
Even countries with similar backgrounds and histories are not exactly the same. Unlike America, Australia has always had a high proportion of Catholics. So Catholics from the British Isles were included as White. In the United States people still ask are Italians White?
Similar concepts but not quite the same.
When the 'White Australia' policy was put forward it wasn't just to stop a million Chinese from arriving in Australia. It existed just as much to stop a million French people from turning up. Under the policy non-Whites did immigrate to Australia, but numbers were in the thousands over decades. The purpose was to keep Australia a bastion for the British peoples with other people in smaller numbers also being allowed in. Numbers matter.
Mass immigration after WWII was a half way house between the 'White Australia' policy and multiculturalism. It most certainly wasn't a continuation of that policy, it was it's replacement.
To Help Support My Work
https://www.subscribestar.com/upon-hope
Upon Hope - A Traditionalist Future
Another Article You Might Like
Unions and Traditional Conservatism
I think you're right to suggest that "populate or perish" was not the main factor involved in the change in policy. From the reading I've done, the reasons are the ones familiar to anyone who remembers politics in the later 1900s. Calwell, remember, pushed the "monoculture is boring and stale" idea. He also pushed the idea that the existing policy was discriminatory and therefore an offence against social justice. On the other side of the political fence, you had the technocratic types who saw Australia as an economy, and who therefore measured progress in purely quantitative terms, via growth targets. They believed that the low fertility rates at the end of the long first wave of feminism were there to stay (which they weren't) & that to achieve their growth targets required a broader field of immigration. Finally, when there was hesitation about going ahead with it all, there was external pressure from abroad, notably from the US - who were the new world power that we were allied to.
ReplyDelete