Survival of a Nation

SURVIVAL OF A NATION: FROM ASSIMILATION TO REACTIONARY NATIONALISM CHRISTOPHER NAYLOR MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY THESIS JUNE 2010 Department of Modern History Macquarie University CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Survival Strategies-Assimilation and Integration 34 CHAPTER 2 Multiculturalism-unifying strategy or threat to the nation? 86 CHAPTER 3 Survival of Anglo-Australian Culture 132 CHAPTER 4 From Hanson to Cronulla 181 CONCLUSION 240 This thesis has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution anywhere, other than in this manuscript __________________________________________________Christopher Naylor Thesis abstract During the period from the end of World War II to the early 2000’s Australia was forced to adapt to the migrant presence if it were to survive as a modern liberal democracy. Migrants were necessary to the economy and the building of the nation after World War II. Immigration was conceived as a mechanism of national survival. But immigrants needed to fit into Anglo-Australian culture, the existing template. Our society thus had two driving needs: a desire to increase population through migration, and a desire to preserve the existing society that had been derived from Great Britain. This thesis argues that one of the central themes of the story of immigration after the war has been the working out of a fundamental dialectic between the demands of the ‘body’ and that of the ‘soul’. These produced, or were propelled by, different conceptions of survival. Evolving settlement policies became ways of resolving the emerging conflict between the numbers and background of migrants and the need to preserve an Anglo-Australian culture. Assimilation and integration were designed firmly to preserve the latter, but multiculturalism had shifted towards maintaining migrant culture and migrant survival within the larger society. But many thought that multiculturalism wasn’t a solution, that it undermined Anglo-Australian culture. The pendulum then swung back the other way with John Howard’s retreat from multiculturalism and the rise of nationalist reactionary sentiment surrounding Pauline Hanson, Tampa and the Cronulla riots. This thesis charts how Australia attempted to resolve this dialectic, to manage large-scale immigration and at the same time preserve the existing Anglo-Australian nation. The greater immigration influx brought a structural tension to Australian society, between maintaining that White Australian culture and incorporating migrants into society. The further settlement policy moved away from White Australia the greater the tensions in society became, witnessing the advent of Pauline Hanson and the Cronulla riots. It became an issue of how the nation might survive that process, and remain viable. ABBREVIATIONS ACMA Australian Council on Multicultural Affairs AEAC Australian Ethnic Affairs Council ANA Australian Natives Association CPD: HR Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives CPD: S Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates: Senate IAC Immigration Advisory Council NACCME National Advisory Committee on Multicultural Education ACPEA Australian Council on Population and EthnicAffairs APIC Australian Population and Immigration Council ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis began as a response to the Tampa episode and Hansonism, to place them in the context of Australian history, particularly White Australia. I had believed, like many, that White Australia had died in 1973, but these events and the Cronulla riots showed otherwise. I had a great deal of encouragement and support initially from Emeritus Professor Frank Clarke, who offered good suggestions and advice, and gave some direction to the project. Dr. Alison Holland, however, has guided the project to completion, giving tireless support and advice, as well giving technical advice on the thesis structure. Dr.Tasman Parsons and Dr. Michelle Arrow also offered some assistance. I also thank my family, particularly Ria, who has encouraged me in the project, and has given me a clarity of insight on the nature of White Australia today. Introduction Australia will not continue to be a white man’s country even if we win this war unless it has a population of approximately 40,000, 000. Arthur Calwell, House of Representatives, 22 September, 1942 1 We are in danger of being swamped by Asians…They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country….[quoting Arthur Calwell] "Japan, India, Burma, Ceylon and every new African nation are fiercely anti-white and anti-one another. Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no and who speaks for 90 % of Australians." I have no hesitation in echoing the words of Arthur Calwell. Pauline Hanson, Maiden Speech to House of Representatives, 10 September, 19962 Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech above echoes the words of Arthur Calwell, the architect of Australia’s post-war immigration scheme. During World War II Arthur Calwell feared that Australia could not continue to be a white man’s country unless it drastically increased its population, intimating that it could be overrun in the future by an Asian or non-white nation. Pauline Hanson also feared the white nation would be overrun by Asians, but through 1 A. Calwell, CPD: HR, 22 September, 1942 2 P. Hanson, Maiden speech to Parliament, CPD:HR, 10 September, 1996, p.3862 1 immigration. Both feared that Australia would be swamped by races and cultures that they believed wouldn’t assimilate into the Australian way of life. Both feared the demise of the Australian nation as a result. In the 50 years in between them, Australia witnessed a mass migration program, the ending of the White Australia policy, the evolution of multiculturalism, and a significant influx of Asian and non-white immigrants. However, in the closing decade of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, a resurgent nationalism developed with the rise of Hansonism itself, the Tampa incident and the Cronulla riots. Each of these developments, while manifest in different ways and contexts, were ultimately about who belonged in the nation and, more importantly, who did not. Immigration and developments in immigration policy were underpinning the anxieties. While Pauline Hanson openly targeted all ‘Asians’, the Tampa affair saw the Australian government’s refusal to offer asylum to some 400 Afghani refugees. But it was also about Australia’s right to ‘determine who will enter and reside in Australia’, as the Prime Minister, John Howard suggested. Occurring almost simultaneously to 9/11, the Tampa incident saw the beginnings of a rash of border protection and national security legislation. About four years later, a series of racially motivated riots and mob violence occurred at Cronulla, a southern seaside suburb of Sydney, where ‘Aussie Pride” and “Love the flag or Piss off” were the slogans and chants of the, mostly Anglo, antagonists. 2 Clearly, something had gone awry in the body politic. All was not well. Despite Al Grassby’s desire to bury the White Australia Policy once and for all as far back as 1973, it had not quite died or what it represented had not died in the intervening years.3 Indeed, the desire to maintain an essentially white Australian nation, and to preserve Anglo-Australian culture at the centre of the nation, had resurfaced with some virulence in the dying years of the twentieth century and the dawning of the new century among some in the community. As the historian Gwenda Tavan has more recently argued, continued ‘anxieties about race and immigration confirm the residual influence of White Australia’. She suggests that the changes to immigration policy from assimilationism in the 1950s to multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s ‘did not substantially challenge the notion of Australia as a predominantly white, Anglo-Celtic society’. 4 This thesis explores the nexus between the predominantly white Anglo- Celtic society and immigration from the 1950s to 2005. Calwell’s demand to populate or perish in 1945 set in train a process that was understood as 5 fundamental to our survival as a nation in terms of a viable population base. 3 A.Grassby quoted in G.Whitlam, The Whitlam Government 1972-1975 (Ringwood:Penguin, 1985) p.501 4 G.Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005) p.239 5 The phrase ‘survival of a nation’ needs some clarifying definition. In the context of this thesis, it means a few things, but they are integrally related. The nation is the sum of its parts. If the whole does not relate effectively to its parts then it will falter and be conflicted. In this sense of the meaning, governance was required to provide national cohesion. I’m referring here to way governments evolved migrant settlement policies to fit into or adjust to the existing Australian culture, or to provide cultural maintenance, where the survival of one part, the migrant, was seen as essential to the survival of the whole nation. The other main aspect refers to the survival of the Anglo-Australian culture, the way that various groups, individuals and organizations were concerned about Anglo-Australian identity. 3 But that process brought a structural tension to Australian society between maintaining an existing Australian culture, based on these Anglo-Celtic origins, and incorporating migrants into that culture in a way that would fulfil Calwell’s plea.6 This thesis borrows from Calwell’s notion that the nation might perish without a larger population, but looks at it from a different perspective. It examines the nation’s ability to survive with a large scale immigrant population with its increasing diversity, and the impacts such diversity has had on Australian culture and the perceptions of national identity. When Calwell introduced large-scale immigration in the post-World War II period he did so without understanding fully the structural tensions and dynamics in Australian society that would follow.

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