My Response To Replies to 'Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs'

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.  

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Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs - 'be just and fear not'

Sunday night 27 October 2024 just before midnight I'm reading an article in Quadrant when a writer casually mentions Arthur Calwells memoirs. I thought " Arthur Calwell wrote a memoir!". So I get out of bed and get on the computer and it took me about half an hour to find an actual copy of the book. There are a lot of pages that talk about the book but I only found one copy for sale. So I bought it, over $60 for a nearly 50 year old paperback. 

By the end of the week I had it in my hands.

Why read a nearly 50 year old book? 

Published in 1978 about a man who has been dead for over 50 years, he died in 1973.

Because Arthur Calwell was a quite peculiar man, the man who campaigned for mass immigration into Australia and the last main stream politician to openly support a White Australia. 

How do you reconcile those two things?

I hoped that the book might give some insight, while it does give some insight into other areas, it sadly does not explain at all why he supported mass immigration even though there is an entire chapter on immigration. 

Chapter 12. The immigration saga

It starts with Prime Minister Curtin stating that Australia needs a Ministry of Immigration and Calwell being appointed by Curtins replacement, Chifley as the first Minister for Immigration on July 13 1945, before the war was even over. But it does not say anything at all of the policies prehistory, it just starts fully formed, with no discussion, no debate, nothing. In that sense nothing has changed.

Sir Robert Menzies in his book 'Afternoon Delight' writes on page 59 "It was in the face of these difficulties that Arthur Calwell convinced not only his colleagues but also the Trade Unions that a large immigration programme should be taken in hand. This was a bold and courageous action. It could have been taken successfully only by a Minister who was known as a life-time Labour man of the strictest orthodoxy, and was both well-known and extremely popular at the centres of unionism, the Trades Hall."

Thats more information then Calwell gives, but he does write on what happened once he was Minister. On August 2, 1945 he gave his first Ministerial statement to Parliament of which I have selected the most relevant parts, page 97-98

"If Australians have learned one lesson from the Pacific war....it is surely that we cannot continue to hold our island continent for ourselves and our descents unless we greatly increase our numbers.

...Immigration is, atbest, only the counterpart of the most important phase of population building, natural increase. Any immigration policy, therefore, must be intimately related to those phases of government policy that are directed towards stimulating the birth rate, and lowering the infant mortality rate in Australia itself. It must, further, be related to the whole social service program of creating greater economic economic security and a higher standard of living, as an inducement to young Australian couples to have larger families."

....In view of the alarming fall in the birth rate, and the decline of the average Australian family from six children in 1875 to three children in 1925, and then to slightly over two children at present, our immediate problem will be to hold our population figures without some migration."

Calwell writes about the wish for British migrants, but then he moves seamlessly onto Europe, page 100.

"In forming our immigration policy, we were lucky to obtain the services of an outstanding six-man fact-finding committee which toured Europe on our behalf in November and December 1945. In fact. the mission consisted of representatives of the Commonwealth Parliament and of employers and employees organisations, who went to Paris for an International Labour Office conference."   

So right from the start, the political parties the unions and the employers groups were in. The Australian people were never asked and have never been asked. 

Chapter 14. Black Power and a multi-racial society

Page 117

"Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatize the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm. Those who talk about a multi-racial society are really talking about a polygot nation. Some people talk about a multi-racial society without knowing what the term really means, while others talk about it because they are anxious to change our society. No matter where the pressures come from, Australian people will continue to resist all attempts to destroy our white society."

Chapter 27 Permissiveness destroys society

Page 244

"But the hedonistic doctrine now being popularised is that a women has the sole right over her own body and can alone decide on an abortion for some reason, or no reason. Even's her husbands consent, and he is the father of the child, will not be required, and neither will the opinions of qualified specialists. All this adds up to infanticide, and every nation in history that has practised infanticide, whether with or without the connivance of the authorities, has been destroyed and deserved to be destroyed. God is not mocked. Race suicide does not pay. Those who advocate abortions on demand should not be tolerated in any civilized community."

Obviously in a book by a politician who served for over 30 years in the Australian Parliament there is a lot on politics, events and personalities. Was it worth reading?

Yes but I found it quite frustrating, the central reason I bought the book wasn't addressed. However I did realise that like Menzies who I've also criticised for his failure to see the consequences of his actions, Calwell is guilty of exactly the same thing. He could not see that a policy of mass immigration could neither be turned off or kept small. That instead it forms it's own economy that must be fed. Government and business are now dependent upon immigration.