White supremacy was the mainstay of Australian federation. Little has changed
It was heartening to see federal parliament roundly condemn the latest psephological boundary rider to demand national attention with an inflammatory Senate speech invoking the worst crimes of the Holocaust, praising the white Australia policy and proposing a ban on migration for Muslims.
Nobody much had ever heard of (let alone voted for) the racist barnacle, Fraser Anning. So that’s a box ticked for him and his “leader”, Bob Katter, whose praise for the speech now stands as a full stop between his name and political decency.
Parliament condemned Anning. But he has an audience (we don’t really know how big or small but it’s there) and he’s reached it. The media – hang on, no, not the “the media”, but News Corp outlets Sky and its biggest Australian papers – have been assiduously provoking the ugliest sentiments on race and Australian national supremacy in recent times.
Meanwhile, a number of senior government types have been out there race baiting (albeit marginally more subtly) almost weekly for most of this parliamentary term.
There was no broad parliamentary condemnation of either Andrew Bolt’s column decrying the “foreign invasion” of Australia (and more) or of Sky hosting a threatening Nazi whose views carried roughly the integrity of Anning’s.
They say these things – about Muslims or Jews, about Africans or people from the Middle East – because they know some people want to hear them and will vote and click.
White supremacy was, after all, the mainstay of the new federation – the very DNA Commonwealth of Australia.
We might learn a little in school about how the last vestiges of the white Australia policy were done away with in the early 1970s. But few of us ever stop to think about what the policy meant, how the first parliament of the new commonwealth clamoured to introduce the racist immigration laws and, not least, how the notion of white Australian supremacy impelled Australia into the first world war at such onerous cost.
So it’s timely that Australian historian and novelist Peter Cochrane has just released Best We Forget – The War For White Australia 1914-18. It details the lengths Australia went to (including the loss of 62,000 dead and 300,000plus wounded) to pursue the multiparty objective of racial purity.
Indeed, as the title of Cochrane’s book suggests, a cult of national ignorance and forgetfulness – much like that which shrouds the truth about British continental invasion and massacre of Indigenous people – stands in the way of understanding just how solidly the myth of Anzac is built on white Australian racial purity.
Cochrane writes:
Australia was terrified of the Japanese (who were in alliance with Whitehall) while deeply distrustful of the mother country’s willingness or ability to defend its dominion at the bottom of the world. Australia had resisted granting special exemption for Japan from the white Australia policy under pressure from Britain. But, as Cochrane’s book points out (quoting EL Piese, director of military intelligence), then prime minister Billy Hughes, pursuing a second (ultimately defeated) conscription plebiscite, made an “authoritative statement” to a closed session of both houses of federal parliament “that Japan would challenge the White Australia policy after the war, that Australia would then need the help of the rest of the Empire, and that if she wished to be sure of getting it then she must now throw her full strength into war in Europe”.
Cochrane’s book gives compelling insight into how both the forces for and against conscription used arguments of racial purity to bolster their case. Those opposed said the war would deplete the nation of white men. Many prominent conscription proponents argued the best and strongest white men must fight to protect Australia from the hordes.
At a pro-conscription rally in Sydney, Hughes said, “The spirit of Australia, the spirit of our race, the spirit that has made us free men, that has carved out the Empire and that alone can hold this country a White Australia and a free government ... If Britain wins and we stand with her, the White Australia policy is ever safe.”
Cochrane recounts how Hughes, imploring able bodied men to “fight for White Australia in France”, said, “every institution we cherish, White Australia, the power of the people, all these things are in deadly peril”.
While such sentiments are no longer so pervasive, they still – as recent events highlight – have a resonance that is advanced by the cynical and hateful. How pitifully, shamefully little the rhetoric of white Australian supremacy and racism has changed in 102 years.
In reference to the continent’s Indigenous people, Hughes, then attorney general in Andrew Fisher’s Labor government, said at the foundation of Canberra in 1913: “Here we have a symbol of nationality ... the first historic event in the history of the Commonwealth we are engaged in today without the slightest trace of that race that we have banished from the face of the earth. We must not be too proud lest we should, too, in time disappear.”
If you want to know about the roots Australian racism and its reverberations today, you can read frontier history, certain contemporary columnists, listen to the latest barnacle to espouse hate in the Senate and re-read Billy Hughes.
Or you can go speak to an Indigenous person.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist