Why did White Australia end?

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

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