Was White Australia an aberration?
“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 ...
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