National Observer Home > No. 65 - Winter 2005 > Articles
Keith Windschuttle on White Australia
Max TeichmannKeith Windschuttle1 has given us the
best and certainly the most comprehensive
account of the White Australia
Policy since Myra Willard’s history,
which was produced in 1923 by
Melbourne University Press. In between
these two there was a steady
drip of books on the Policy and then,
as the multiculturalists took over the
best places in our education and information
sectors, a flood of taxpayerbacked
publications purporting to tell
us the true story of “The Policy” and
how racist and ruthless our forebears
were, and how most Australians still
have not really rid themselves of these
dirty habits.
A few comparisons with
the Nazis turned up, but many more
with South African apartheid systems.
These “histories”, this “information”
from the new breed of radical historians,
dominates school syllabi, our
university departments and research
institutes, the public media and the
utterances of left Labor activists, helping
to explain why so many ordinary
Australians have turned away from
Labor. Few of them will return until
the slanderers and falsifiers of our history
and our society, depart. That is a
job for the A.L.P.
Normal Australians judge their
countrymen by mixing within their
society and by remembering their parents’
attitudes, and quite often their
grandparents’. So they know by direct
acquaintance that most Australians
are neither racist nor callous, and that
most settlers from other lands agree
with them. Also, large numbers of Australians
travel and live and work for
periods overseas and encounter varieties
of racism and exclusionism which
have never gained a foothold here.
They return, often expressing surprised
pleasure at the fact that this is
one of the most tolerant and easygoing
societies on earth. So the New Class
have, in a sense, been ploughing the
sea. Nevertheless, they have muddied and in some places polluted the waters
of enquiry and legitimate discussion,
such that Windschuttle had to
spend much time researching their
numerous utterances and pronouncements
and trying to trace these to their
source.
One envies him his persistence
and his industry.
Time and again he found that our
new revisionists had not gone back to
the primary sources but been content
with quoting one another, or scraps
from newspapers — especially the undoubtedly
racist Bulletin — or particular
politicians or people on the margins
of the political and quite often, the
social system. When a primary source
had been purportedly accessed by the
writer, Windschuttle too frequently
found the quote wrong or truncated by
leaving out a sizeable or important
part of the original utterance: cooking
the books, so to speak.
So, the overall conclusion that
Windschuttle is obliged to draw, is
that the main body of the
attitudinising of the New Historians
concerning the history, origins and
motivations of the White Australia
Policy and the tendentious conclusions
which they have drawn and insistently
disseminated, is fallacious
and professionally incompetent.
This new or revisionist history
might best be described as agitmythology.
In particular the author singles out
and examines Henry Reynolds’ North
of Capricorn and describes it as a travesty
of the truth. “He has scraped together
comments from what was
clearly a minority opinion within Parliament
to claim that everyone thought
that way. Reynolds, of course, is not
alone. He has done no worse than
other members of his generation of
historians who have dominated this
debate since the 1970s and who have
presented the same kind of selective
and skewed evidence to reach the
same conclusion, while carefully keeping
from their readers any opinions or
information that might suggest a different
interpretation.
They have betrayed
their responsibility to tell this
story in all its dimensions.”
Strong words these, and the occasion
is the examination of the long
debate in the new Australian Parliament
at the end of which the legislation
was passed. This debate occupied
more than 600 pages of Hansard, but
a pitiful handful of quotes makes up
the New Historians’ reportage. These
conspire to produce a picture of a parliament
virtually united, roaring to
keep out the Asians, at all costs, and
on primarily racist grounds.
In reality there was a kaleidoscope
of opinions, with the only united body
the new Labour Party. Protectionists
and New Traders split off among
themselves with almost all of them, at
one point or another, insisting that
this was not a debate about race but
about a variety of subjects. The protection
of the wage standards and
working conditions of Australian workers; the cultural gap between the
two groups and the dangers of enclaves
of isolated newcomers unable
to assimilate; the strategic risks of allowing
large enclaves forming in the
far north, possibly providing in the
future some pretext for some outside
intervention (the feared outsider being
Japan); and many other things beside.
This debate, often argued at a level
which puts our contemporary efforts
to shame, revealed a strong liberal
swell which quoted long-held British
views of the undesirability of judging
the members of a worldwide Empire
on grounds of race and colour. Many
members insisted that talk of one race
being more intelligent than another
was nonsense, while one member insisted
that the Japanese were more
intelligent than Westerners. One
Senator said that the Chinese were
more moral than the locals, while another,
refuting statements that many
Chinese were living in insanitary conditions,
invited people to consider the
circumstances under which many
poor Australians were living. And so
on.
Senator Don Cameron, a free trader
from Tasmania, tried to sum things
up. “It appears that two-thirds of the
honourable members of this House
really object to the Chinese, not so
much on the ground of the possible
contamination of the white race as
because they fear that if they are allowed
to come into Australia, the rate of wages will go down.” And they well
might have done.
Although the Labour Party did not
talk about Class but Race, that appears
to have been their concern. Nevertheless,
Labour MPs provided some
pretty forthright arguments. Thus the
proposal to exempt those Asians who
were educated and spoke English well
was attacked by one of the heroes of
our contemporary Left, King O’Malley.
Indeed a play on his career was written
in 1970 by Michael Boddy and Bob
Ellis.
O’Malley, speaking to the Immigration
Restriction Bill, said: “From my
experience in the east, I can assure
honourable members, that the educational
test being proposed will not shut
out the Japanese should they desire to
come to Australia. It will not shut out
the “Indian toff” who becomes a human
parasite preying upon the people
of the country, it will not shut out the
intellectual Afghan. We have more to
fear from the educated coloured people
than from the ignorant coloured
people, because the latter will not attempt
to mingle or be associated with
the white race. My experience in the
southern states of America is that a
first class education disqualifies the
black people of any kind of work whatever
in the line of industrial creation.
They at once go forth to the big cities
to settle down and live on their wits
just as some white people do. That
class of people will not be shut out by
the proposed education test. Its adoption will only add to the great volume
of the parasitical element which is now
sucking the lifeblood out of the worker
in Australia.”
But Labour leader Chris Watson did
much better. He told the House, “We
object to them, not alone on the
ground of competition with our own
workmen — though I admit that is one
of the grounds — but also, and more
particularly, on the ground of racial
contamination. ” His strongest statement
was, “The question is whether we
would desire that our sisters or our
brothers should be married into any
of these races to which we object.
If
these people are not such as we can
meet upon an equality, and not such
as we can feel that it is no disgrace to
intermarry with, and not such as we
can expect to give us an infusion of
blood that will tend to the raising of
our standard of life and to the improvement
of the race, we should be
foolish in the extreme if we did not
exhaust every means of preventing
them from coming to this land, which
we have made our own. The racial aspect
of the question, in my opinion, is
the larger and more important one;
but the industrial also has to be considered.”
Watson proposed an amendment
removing the dictation test and substituting an outright ban on immigrants
from Africa and Asia because
he wanted to keep out not only the labouring
classes of these continents but
also their educated compatriots. “In
this light”, he said, “we know that education
does not eliminate the objectionable
qualities of the Baboo Hindoo
. . . with the oriental, as a rule, the more
he is educated, the more cunning he
becomes, and the more able with his
peculiar ideas of social and business
morality to cope with the people here.
I do not think there is any advantage
in restricting the admission of coloured
people to those who are educated;
and, in any case, I contend that
the number that will filter through
under the government’s proposal will
still be sufficiently large to constitute
a great menace to the well-being of the
people as whole.”
None of this turned up at the
A.L.P.’s recent launch of a new biography
of Watson.
Keith Windschuttle has a long and,
I think, important early chapter on Social
Darwinism and the Scottish Enlightenment,
in which the author puts
to rest, once and for all, the story that
Australians and their opinion formers
were Social Darwinists and that this
mindset provided an important element
in Australian racism and the reasoning behind “Australia for the
Whites”. In fact, most intellectuals and
most Australians were not attracted by
Social Darwinism. Books by Pearson
and Haeckel and the like appealed to
but a few and these mainly from the
Left: people like the Victorian socialists,
a small, disputatious group which
lasted until the early 1920s. They also
advocated eugenic selection and preventing
the congenitally unfit from
procreating.
A woman’s wing, led by
Adele Pankhurst, were especially outraged
at the prospect of Asian men
having sexual relations with white
Australian women.
If people were looking for offbeat
theories then, and many were, they
were likely to favour theosophy, spiritualism
or eastern religion. Until the
last war, second hand bookshops were
carrying Annie Besant, Havelock Ellis,
Oliver Lodge, Krishnamurti — there
was the odd Pearson or Haeckel, but
they were of no importance. As
Windschuttle demonstrates, this story
of a Social Darwinist Australia is false.
So was the picture of Broome, where
we had our biggest race riot, as a
multicultural paradise which was callously
wrecked by “the whites”. The
riot was between the Japanese and
other Asians — divers from Kopang,
and some Chinese. The greatly outnumbered
whites had to restore the
peace, keep the peace and regulate the
pearling industry. The Japanese were
the best divers, had the best boats, and
dominated the pearl industry and the town. Some of our multicultural
scribes have praised them for employing
aboriginals on their boats. The
trouble was that they often paid them
in opium. And the whites had to combat
that evil.
In Darwin as in Broome, the whites
were outnumbered — at times, six to
one. The agitation to stop further influxes
from China came from local
businessmen who objected to the iron
grip of Chinese businessmen acting in
concert with, and repatriating much
of their profits to China. They were
rather like Turks and Yugoslavs working
in countries such as Germany, returning
backwards and forwards until
they claimed the right to settle. We
are watching the intractable difficulties
with which Europe is currently
trying to cope.
But the struggles were basically
about pounds, shillings and pence —
or as Marx described them, the infantry,
cavalry and artillery of the bourgeoise.
The other carefully fostered myth
that Windschuttle attacks is that of
Pacific Island blackbirding, with south
sea islanders allegedly kidnapped and
virtually enslaved when they came
here and worked here.
The analogy
drawn was the slave trade from Africa
to the Americas. Although there were
some kidnappings, these were from
the early, unregulated days, but there
appears to be no substance in this
story of racial exploiters. An industry
of indentured labourers working in what came to be a highly regulated
industry, sprang up before Federation
at a time when it was said that whites
could not work in the tropics, especially
on plantations.
This was all untrue. Australians
wanted good wages and unions. So
masses of Kanakars came, worked
their two or three years, and then returned
home with some money and
Western artifacts. Many wished to return
for more, and many did. Soon
they wanted to settle. And many did.
The drive to stop this trade and see
that locals got the jobs, came from the
workers. The real tragedy came after
the White Australian Policy began operating
when many settled Kanakar
workers and their families were repatriated
against their wishes. While
some were exempted on various
grounds from repatriation, many were
not. But the melancholy conclusion of
this story shows how keenly these islanders
wanted to work here, and how
there was no need to kidnap or enslave
anyone. But this is the melodramatic
story that our multiculturalists prefer
to tell to unsuspecting schoolchildren.
It goes too much against the grain to
say that Australia is a better country
than most for people wishing to realise
their aspirations, as it is in fact. There are other chapters — for instance,
on the sociology of shame —
which link with the politics of embarrassment.
In the course of those parts
of his treatise, the author is able to pay
homage to the truly seminal work of
Katherine Betts and Mark Lopez. So
important are their books that, quite
naturally, they do not appear on reading
lists, nor are they used in schools
by teachers dealing with immigration,
multiculturalism, racial intolerance
and early Australian social and constitutional
history. No . . . our students
will get instead the Rabbit Proof
Fence, the Ku Klux Klan in Australia,
and the in-house productions of the
woebegone hacks and bogus radicals,
productions which Windschuttle has
held up to the light for us to see
through.
Windschuttle has himself written a
most impressive book, introducing a
great deal of fresh material — the fruits
of sustained and painstaking research.
This subject — the White Australia
Policy and its history — will never be
the same again. He is to be congratulated.
This is the intellectual
Stalingrad for our New Class
mythmakers. So we are already getting
deafening silence from the bunker,
while they dream up ghost divisions
and secret weapons.
1. Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy, Sydney: Macleay Press, 2004.
National Observer No. 65 - Winter 2005