Babel Inc

by Kerry Bolton

  Calwell wrote of the original Australian Labor tradition, which was more than just ‘reformist,’ and aimed at creating a new European civilisation in the South free of the class divides and exploitation of the Old World:

  . . . I still think that Australia needs the sort of revolution that will produce fundamental far-reaching changes. Every country needs such a revolution every now and then to make some beneficial changes in its social, political and economic affairs. . . . The last thing I want to do is shock native born reactionaries and kill them off prematurely by hinting at the word revolution in this country. Yet what else is there to talk about if man is to survive in the mess that capitalism has made of our society with its wars, its pollution of the air, the sea and the land and its degradation of our moral, social and economic health? . . .

  We need sweeping changes that will result in the creation of an Australian Socialist society. Unfortunately, the great majority of Australians are too smug, too greedy, too slothful to care about the benefits of Socialism.[10]

  As for White Australia, Calwell was quoted in the Australian press in 1971:

  Ninety percent of people of Australia support me in my attitude today. Australians are not going to turn Australia over to those inspired by an angry vocal minority of pseudo-intellectuals. These pseudo-intellectuals think they can promote the cause of a permissive society by flooding this country with people from all parts of the world. I have a tremendous respect for the Chinese who have yellow skins and have pride in their race. I have a tremendous regard to the coffee-coloured Indians who have a great respect for the colour of their race, and for both peoples because of their regard for their cultures, their histories and their achievements. However, Australia has got to be held by people who are predominantly Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian and Southern European. These are the only people who can make an integrated community. Why should anyone be hurt by a recitation of the truth?[11]

  The impetus for change came from a coterie of Melbourne University academics who formed the Immigration Reform Group.[12] Support also came from university students, ever-ready to espouse any cliché-ridden cause that serves the Establishment they think they are opposing.

  The 1963 ALP Conference was pressured into setting up an Immigration Review Committee, which was dominated by the Old Guard, but which eventually compromised by agreeing to recommend that the ALP drop the name of the White Australia Policy from the ALP Platform. This recommendation was adopted by the 1965 ALP Conference. The same Conference also lifted the party ban on the Immigration Reform Group.

  When the Australian Workers’ Union, which remained stalwart in its defence of the White Australia Policy, amalgamated with the internationalist Australian Confederation of Trades Unions, its influence was undermined. The ACTU itself had been filled with white-collar workers and professional administrators who did not identify with the legacy of Australian Old Labor. In 1971 the anti-White Australia faction gained enough influence at the ALP Conference to enable the policy to be removed. After the ALP government was elected in 1972, Whitlam and Immigration Minister Al Grassby set about destroying the White Australia Policy.[13]

  [1] William Lane, The Boomerang, 18 February 1888.

  [2] William Guthrie Spence, Australia’s Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of an Australian Agitator (Sydney: Worker Trustees, 1909), 377.

  [3] Ibid., 53, 54, 243.

  [4] Ibid., 34.

  [5] Ibid., 377, 378, 381, 382.

  [6] Ibid., 281.

  [7] ‘Abolition of the “White Australia” Policy,’ Department of Immigration, Australian Government, http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/08abolition.htm.

  [8] ‘Abolition of the “White Australia” Policy,’ Department of Immigration, op. cit.

  [9] Arthur Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (Hawthorn, Victoria: Lloyd O’Neil, 1972).

  [10] Ibid.

  [11] Cited by Alec Saunders, The Social Revolutionary Nature of Australian Nationalism (2001), Part III, http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/sr-nature/partthree.html.

  [12] Chris Anderson, ‘Academia and the Immigration Reform Groups,’ Section 6: Demise of the White Australia Policy, http://ausnatinfo.angelfire.com/demise3-06.htm.

  [13] Chris Anderson, ibid., Section 11: ‘The Australian Labor Party and the Destruction of the White Australia Policy,’ http://ausnatinfo.angelfire.com/demise3-11.htm.

  Jack Lang Describes the White Australia Policy

  Jack Lang, Labor Premier of New South Wales 1925–27 and 1930–32, is noted as having defied the Bank of England, which demanded repayment of loans at usurious interest during the Depression. In his autobiography I Remember (1956), Lang gives a history of the White Australia Policy, and exposes how British imperial interests conflicted with that policy:

  White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia’s Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere thus. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave. There would have been no need for the Japanese to invade this country. We would have been swallowed up by the rolling advance of a horde of coloured people, anxious to escape the privations of their own countries and prepared to impose their own standards on this country.

  It is necessary only to examine the racial composition of present-day Fiji, where the Hindus have elbowed the natives out of the picture, to visualise what could have happened in this country had the White Australia policy not been fought for doggedly at the end of the 19th Century. We were then fighting for our national survival. Had we weakened, the flood gates would have opened and the natural increase of population according to Asian standards would have done the rest. It would then have been too late. This country would have become a pushover for the Asiatics.

  The first Federal Platform for the Labor Party, adopted at an Interstate Conference held in Sydney on January 24, 1900, was a model of brevity. It was the platform on which the party fought its first Federal election in the following year. There were only three planks. They were (1) Electoral Reform, providing for one adult one vote. (2) Total Exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races, and (3) Old Age Pensions. . . .

  But it was the question of White Australia that knit the first Federal Labor Party together. In 1908 when the party decided to draft a much more elaborate platform, the first plank agreed upon was ‘Maintenance of White Australia.’ It headed the list.

  So the Australian Labor Party was actually brought together with White Australia as its primary objective. Later the word-spinners put it much more elegantly as ‘The cultivation of an Australian sentiment, based on the maintenance of racial purity.’

  That was not, however, the real reason for the development of the White Australia policy. It did not have its origin in any idea of racial superiority, or colour prejudice. From the start it was a simple bread-and-butter issue. Australian workers were trying to defend their own living standards. They were trying to save their jobs. They knew that unrestricted immigration of coloured races would mean the introduction of a kind of industrial Gresham’s Law—the bad wages would put the fair wage out of circulation. The white Australian worker would soon be reduced to coolie levels. Having got rid of convict labour, they did not want to be reduced to the rice bowl. Yet that was the threat that was actually hovering over the people of this country. . . .

  Trouble first started during the Gold Rush. It didn’t take long for news of the strike to reach the gold merchants of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Chinese had flocked to the Californian fields in 1849, so that even today San Francisco has the largest Chinese settlement outside Asia. Then as the Californians pulled up their grub stakes and followed the trail to the new strikes in the Southern Hemisphere, the Chinese followed on. They were the fossickers of the gold.


  Trouble broke out between the diggers and the Chinese on the Lambing Flat fields in July, 1861. The tough diggers attacked the Chinese and used strong-arm methods. There were all kinds of wild threats. The Government ordered troops into the fields, including artillery, and in the riots that followed one digger was killed. The miners then decided to take an interest in politics, with the elimination of the Chinese as their first objective. Lambing Flat is in fact just as significant in the history of the Labor Party in this State as Eureka Stockade was in Victoria.

  Some of the mining companies had discovered that the Chinese were prepared to work longer hours for much lower wages than Australians. That was the chief reason why they were resented. Trouble spread to the shipping companies, and there were strikes brought about by the employment of Chinese on Australian ships.

  Chinese were also coming into Australian ports, deserting and starting their own businesses. [Henry] Parkes[1] saw what was happening in Sydney. He announced that he was against further Chinese immigration. He was attacked by wealthy employers and accused of having a bias against the Chinese because they were colored they said he was treating them as an inferior race. Parkes retorted: ‘They are not an inferior race. They are a superior set of people. A nation of an old, deep-rooted civilisation. It is because I believe the Chinese to be a powerful race, capable of taking a great hold upon this country, and because I want to preserve the type of my own nation, I am and always have been opposed to the influx of Chinese.’

  The Cowper Government was the first to introduce a poll-tax on Chinese. After Lambing Flat it introduced a Chinese Immigration and Restriction Act . . . Parkes further tightened the Act, and made the poll-tax apply not only to those coming in by sea, but also to those entering from another State.

  In 1888 Parkes imposed even more drastic restrictions. He limited the number to one Chinese passenger to every 300 tons, increased the poll-tax to £100, refused them naturalisation and stipulated that they could not work in the mining industry without a permit from the Minister for Mines.

  The fight had only just started. It was one thing imposing a poll-tax, but it was another policing it. . . . Many slipped in without paying the head-tax. Gradually, they started to congregate in Chinese quarters in the city and take up their own occupations. Merchants indentured labour from Canton, and had the Chinese tied up with labour contracts that made them little better than slaves.

  Furniture-making became one of the chief occupations. They were excellent cabinet makers. But instead of an eight-hour day, they were working twelve and fourteen hours, seven days a week. . . .

  Urged on by the Labor Party, George Reid, in 1897, had a Bill for the Exclusion of Inferior Races passed through both Houses. When it reached the Governor, he decided to reserve it for Royal Assent. It was forwarded to Downing Street, and the British Government ruled that it would infringe on Britain’s trading treaties with China, and might even endanger the holding of Hong Kong. So on the advice of her Government, Queen Victoria refused her Royal Assent. Reid returned to the attack, and passed another Bill which authorised the N.S.W. Immigration authorities to apply a dictation test to any intending immigrant, if they so decided. That was the origin of the Dictation Test device, which was later incorporated into the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1901 . . .

  In Queensland they had the Kanaka problem with the sugar cane industry. The sugar mills said they couldn’t compete with sugar grown with coloured labour in the West Indies, or even Fiji. So they recruited island labour from the South Seas, who were called ‘Kanakas.’ Polynesians were indentured for five years at nominal wages. That led to the black-birding of labour in the islands by bullying captains. The Queensland Labor Party under Dawson and Fisher led the fight against Black Australia. Sir Samuel Griffiths, later Chief Justice, took up the cause and agreed to legislate to prohibit the importation of Kanakas from the islands. He won the elections and passed the Act. Then the sugar combine got to work. They told him that he would ruin the sugar industry. Griffiths then repudiated his election pledge, on which he had beaten McIlwraith and brought in a number of regulations regarding how the blacks should be employed. Labor kept up the fight in Queensland and eventually won, after agreeing to the proposition that the sugar industry should be subsidised by a bounty to keep it white. That was not until after Federation. . . .

  . . . Had we listened to the do-gooders and the crusaders for international brotherhood and racial equality, the barriers would have come down long ago. Our living standard would have been destroyed. We would have had intermarriages of races, half-castes and quarter-castes with all the social dilemmas that invariably follow such racial mixtures. We would have had a Black, Brown and Brindle streak right through every strata of our society. Instead we risked the charge that we were drawing the colour line. We decided to keep this country as a citadel of the white peoples. Australia is still White Australia thanks to those who battled against those who wanted to exploit coloured labour for their own ends. We must keep it that way.[2]

  The same situation pertained to New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Today these aspects of the ‘class struggle,’ those of the White workers’ revolt on the Rand in 1922, Canada in 1906, and elsewhere, have been put down the ‘memory hole’ by the Marxist and liberal bosses of the trades unions and socialist parties. The Left finds it opportune to cultivate the backing of ethnic minorities, feminists, and the so-called ‘rainbow coalition,’ since the ‘working class’ has been stubbornly resistant to Marxist overtures.

  Although the first Act to restrict Asian immigration in Canada was passed in the colony of Victoria in 1855, this was not enforced and in 1883 coal miners went on strike for a wage increase.[3] Mine and railway magnate Robert Dunsmuir sacked the strikers and replaced them with Chinese coolie workers at $1 a day, compared to the White’s $2. In response, 2,000 White workers marched on the waterfront at Vancouver and prevented 100 Chinese from disembarking.

  Lieutenant Governor James Dunsmuir, son of Robert, had been premier of British Columbia. His administration was noted for its opposition to union labour and encouragement of Asian immigration. He had entered into a contract with the Japanese-Canadian Nippon Company of Vancouver to recruit 500 coolies to work the coal mines.[4] The Victoria Labour Congress declared its opposition to ‘cheap labour.’ On 27 March 1907 the Vancouver Trades Union issued a declaration deploring the women of wealthy families in British Columbia who wished to import Chinese servants, stating that ‘the women of the working class do their own work; when they need help, they employ their own race.’ If these women however preferred to play bridge and sip tea rather than working, they should decently remunerate ‘girls of their own race.’

  The early labour movement recognised the crux of the immigration problem: the necessity of dispensing with reliance on migrant labour, something that has contributed to the bringing down of civilisations from the Nubian labour of ancient Egypt to the reverse colonisation of Europe by the migrants of ex-colonies. It is a problem that segregation in the Southern states of the United States could not resolve, nor even the bold doctrine of apartheid in South Africa with its aim of separate states. If a society wishes to maintain its cultural integrity, it must have a social and economic system that raises the standards of labour rather than relying on cheap migrant labour. This is something that the labour movement understood over a century ago, but which is now damned as ‘racism’ by the modern labour movement, in conjunction with global business.

  Hence, in 1906 while the labour movement demanded immigration restrictions and the employment of White labour at decent remuneration, Alderman James Fox, representing the Canadian Manufacturers Association, called for two million Chinese immigrants to help develop Canada, stating: ‘We must look at this from a practical and selfish point of view. To the material disadvantage of our workingmen it is intended to help. It is sad to see our laws prostituted to race prejudice.’

/>   In 1905 coolie migrants started coming from places other than China. That year Japanese immigration companies began ‘selling’ workers from India. Dunsmuir’s Canadian Pacific Railways and Steamship Line sent agents to Hong Kong to sell tickets to Indians, and 2,000 Indians came to replace unionised labour at Dunsmuir’s saw mills.

  1907 was a significant year. British Columbia passed two Acts to restrict Asian immigration, but these were blocked by the Federal Government. Dunsmuir’s Wellington Colliery contracted to import thousands of Japanese workers over five years. Unionists and small businessmen formed the Asiatic Exclusion League, which also spread to U.S. cities. Dunsmuir’s railroad company next contracted to import 12,000 Japanese to replace all of the White rail maintenance workers. On 26 July, 1,189 Japanese landed in Vancouver. Many were veterans of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and they marched into Canada military style. Now also Sikhs were arriving, and most White mill workers had been replaced. On 7 September the now 20,000 member Asiatic Exclusion League called a ‘Stand Up for White Canada’ march, and 30,000 (almost half the population of Vancouver) joined the march.[5] Immigration restrictions were introduced, until in 1970 such measures were annulled by the Liberal government.

  In the United States a similar situation developed, where 20,000 Chinese were introduced to work the mines and railroads in California.[6] In San Francisco the American Workingmen’s Party, founded in 1877 and led by Denis Kearney, became a power in politics. Consequently, in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. One researcher, looking beyond the clichéd condemnations of Kearney and the Workingmen’s Party, gets to the root of an exploitive system that worked against White Americans and Chinese alike: