Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  FIG. 7 Map of Australia

  CHAPTER 7

  AUSTRALIA: WHO ARE WE?

  Visiting Australia—First Fleet and Aborigines—Early immigrants—Towards self-government—Federation—Keeping them out—World War One—World War Two—Loosening the ties—The end of White Australia—Crisis framework

  I first visited Australia in 1964, shortly after I had been living in Britain for four years. Australia then impressed me as more British than Britain itself—like the Britain of a few decades prior, frozen in time. The streetscape of Sydney, Australia’s largest city, reminded me of England on every corner, with Sydney’s own Hyde Park, King’s Cross Station, and Oxford Street just as in London. Australian people were not just overwhelmingly white in their ancestry; they were overwhelmingly British white. Australian food was boring traditional British: the ritual of the Sunday roast, the preponderance of fish-and-chips shops, and the obligatory breakfast jar of Vegemite, an Australian imitation of British Marmite. British-style pubs abounded, with one room for men alone and another room (the so-called ladies’ lounge) for men and women, and with restricted opening hours similar to those of British pubs in those years. The alternatives to traditional British food in Australia were mainly limited to Italian, Greek, and occasionally Chinese restaurants.

  Since that first visit to Australia, I’ve been back dozens of times and watched Australia change. The changes were symbolized for me by an experience in 2008, when I was taking my son Joshua to Australia to spend a college semester abroad at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. As we walked across the university campus, I felt that I was no longer in the Australia that I had known, but instead on the campus of my institution, the University of California at Los Angeles, because so many of the students were Asian. Australia was no longer white-mainly-British.

  In 1964 the fundamental fact of Australian society was still the contradiction between Australia’s geographic location on the one hand, and its population make-up and emotional and cultural ties on the other hand. Australia’s population and national identity were mostly British (Plate 7.1). But Australia is almost half-way around the world from Britain: in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in the Northern Hemisphere, and eight to 10 time zones east of Britain. The Australian landscape of kangaroos, egg-laying mammals, kookaburras, big lizards, eucalyptus trees, and deserts is the most distinctive (and least British) landscape of any continent inhabited by humans (Plate 7.2). Geographically, Australia is much closer to China, Japan, and other East Asian countries than it is to Europe, and 50 times closer to Indonesia than to Britain. Yet as I walked along Australian streets in 1964, there were no signs of that proximity to Asia.

  By the time that I brought Joshua to Brisbane 44 years later, Asia’s proximity had become obvious, in the large numbers of Asian people (Plate 7.3), and in the Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants. The official White Australia policy that had barred Asian immigrants, and the informal policies that had discouraged white Europeans other than British, had disappeared. But Australia’s language is still English, the Queen of Britain is still Australia’s figurehead of state, and the Australian flag still incorporates the British flag. It’s a wonderful country, consistently ranked as one of the world’s most desirable places to live, with one of the most contented populations and highest life expectancies. It’s one of only two countries to which I seriously considered emigrating. It’s British, yet it’s not British. What happened to produce those selective changes during the decades that I have been visiting Australia?

  As you race through Australian history with me in the following pages, think of where Australia fits among the other five countries whose crises we’ve been considering. Like Germany as discussed in the previous chapter, and unlike the four countries of Chapters 2–5, Australia underwent a crisis that didn’t erupt on one day. (However, three military shocks within the space of 71 days in 1941–1942 stood out in importance.) Instead, Australia’s crisis, like Germany’s, was partly the unfolding of a response to the years of World War Two. For both Germany and Australia, the war proved that traditional national solutions were no longer working, but the proof was much more cataclysmic and quickly convincing in war-shattered Germany than in Australia. The basic question for Australians, more than for the citizens of any other country discussed in this book, has been the issue of national identity: who are we? World War Two started to bring to the surface Australians’ recognition that their long-held self-image of being a second Britain halfway around the world was becoming out of date and no longer fitted Australia’s changed circumstances. But the war alone wasn’t enough to wean most Australians away from that self-image.

  It takes time even for just a single person to formulate a new answer to the question Who am I? It takes much longer for a nation, composed of millions of individuals divided into groups with competing views of their nation’s identity, to figure out: Who are we? Hence it should come as no surprise that Australians are still wrestling today with that question. Paradoxically, while crisis resolution in Australia has been slow—so slow that many Australians wouldn’t even consider there to have been a crisis at all—Australia is the one among our six nations that experienced the widest unified set of changes announced within the shortest time, 19 days during the month of December 1972. All of these developments, and others, are what I find fascinating in the story of modern Australia that we’ll now traverse.

  Approximately 50,000 years after Australia had been settled by the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, the first European settlers arrived in January 1788, in a fleet of 11 ships sent out from Britain. The British government had sent that fleet not because it considered Australia a wonderful location attractive to British settlers, but because Britain had a problem with its exploding population of convicts that it wanted to dump somewhere far away. Australia and tropical West Africa had both been suggested as suitably remote locations, but it was becoming clear that West Africa’s tropical diseases made it an unhealthy place for Europeans. Australia appeared to offer multiple advantages: it was much more remote than West Africa; it wasn’t known to be (and in reality for the most part proved not to be) unhealthy for Europeans; and it offered potential Pacific Ocean bases for British navy ships, merchants, whalers, and timber and flax suppliers. And so the choice fell on Australia—specifically, on the environs of what became the city of Sydney.

  The First Fleet consisted of 730 convicts, their guards, administrators, workers, and a British naval officer as governor. More fleets and ships followed, bringing more convicts to Sydney and then to four other locations scattered around the Australian continent. Soon the convicts and their guards were joined by British free settlers. However, 32 years later, in 1820, Australia’s European population still consisted of 84% of convicts and former convicts, and convict transport from Britain to Australia did not cease until 1868. To survive and prosper in frontier Australia was difficult, and so modern Australians of convict ancestry regard it as a badge of pride rather than of shame—like the pride felt by modern American descendants of the settlers who arrived on the ship Mayflower in 1620.

  It was expected (correctly) that it would take a long time for the convicts and settlers to figure out how to grow enough food to feed themselves. Hence the First Fleet carried food shipments, which Britain continued to send out until the 1840’s. Several decades passed before Australians could send significant exports back to Britain: at first, just products from hunting whales and seals; then from the 1830’s onwards, wool from sheep; gold from a gold rush beginning in 1851; and once refrigerator ships for the long sea journey to Britain became available in the 1880’s, meat and butter. Today, one-third of the world’s wool is grown by Australia’s abundant sheep population, five sheep for every human. But Australia’s economy since World War Two has been dominated by mining of the minerals with which the continent is so richly endowed: Australia is a world-leading exporter of aluminum, coal, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, silver, tungsten, titanium, and ur
anium.

  This brief account of the European settlement of Australia from 1788 onwards leaves out what was happening to the Aboriginal population that had settled Australia much earlier. In other British colonies, such as the U.S., Canada, India, Fiji, and West Africa, British colonists dealt with native people either peacefully by negotiating with local chiefs or princes, or else militarily by sending British armies against local armies or sizeable tribal forces. Those methods did not work in Australia, where Aboriginal organization consisted of small bands without armies, chiefs, or princes. Aborigines lived a nomadic lifestyle and did not have fixed villages. To European settlers, that meant that Aborigines did not “own” the land.

  Hence European settlers simply took Aboriginal land without negotiation or payment. There were no battles against Aboriginal armies: just attacks by or against small groups of Aborigines, sometimes provoked by Aborigines killing sheep that they considered no different from the kangaroos and other wild animals that they were accustomed to hunting. In response, European settlers killed Aborigines; the last large massacre (of 32 Aborigines) took place as recently as 1928. When a British governor ordered the trial and hanging of Europeans who had murdered Aborigines, the Australian public strongly supported those murderers, and London’s colonial office realized that it could not stop its British subjects in remote Australia from doing what they wanted—such as killing Aborigines.

  Because Aborigines were hunter-gatherers rather than settled farmers, white Australians looked down on them as primitive. I continue to be surprised at how widespread that scorn of Aborigines still is even among educated Australians. One Australian senator said, “There is no scientific evidence that he [the Aborigine] is a human being at all.” As Aboriginal numbers declined because of diseases and killings and land dispossession, white Australians came to believe that the Aborigines were dying out. An Australian bishop wrote, “The Aborigines are disappearing. In the course of a generation or two, at the most, the last Australian black fellow [i.e., Aborigine] will have turned his face to warm mother earth… missionary work then may only be smoothing the pillow of a dying race.”

  Aborigines were eventually forbidden to marry non-Aboriginals without government consent. There has been much controversy over a policy, developed in the 1930’s, of forcibly removing mixed-race Aboriginal/white children and even Aboriginal children from Aboriginal homes, to be raised (supposedly for their own good) in institutions or foster homes. A movement, beginning in the 1990’s, for white Australians to apologize to Aborigines has faced strong opposition. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd did give a formal apology in 2008, but Prime Minister John Howard argued, “Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.”

  In short, British Australia’s White Australia policy was directed not just at non-white potential immigrants from overseas. It was directed also at the non-white original Australians into whose lands white British settlers were immigrating, whose right to those lands was denied, and who (many white settlers hoped) would die out quickly.

  Throughout the first decades of the Australian colony, immigrating free settlers as well as convicts came from Britain (including Ireland, at that time still part of Britain). The first substantial group of non-British immigrants began to arrive in 1836 in South Australia. That colony had been founded not as a convict dump but by a land development company that carefully selected prospective settlers from Europe. Among those settlers were German Lutherans seeking religious freedom, a motive for immigration much more conspicuous in the early history of the United States than of Australia. Those German immigrants were skilled and white, developed market gardening and vineyards, adapted quickly to Australia, and aroused minimal opposition. More controversial was the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese in the 1850’s, drawn (along with many Europeans and Americans) by Australia’s first gold rush. That influx resulted in the last use of the British army in Australia, to quell riots in which a crowd beat, robbed, and even scalped Chinese.

  A third wave of non-British arrivals arose from the development of sugar plantations in Queensland beginning in the 1860’s. The plantation workers were Pacific Islanders from New Guinea, other Melanesian islands, and Polynesia. While some of them were voluntary recruits, many were kidnapped from their islands by raids accompanied by frequent murders, in a practice known as black-birding (because the islanders were dark-skinned). When plantations (especially of coconuts) were subsequently developed in German and Australian New Guinea, that same Australian model was adopted for bringing Pacific Island workers to New Guinea plantations. Such labor recruitment practices continued in New Guinea long into the 20th century: an Australian whom I met in Australian-governed New Guinea in 1966 told me that he was a labor recruiter, but he took pains to explain how he recruited only voluntary laborers to whom he paid cash bonuses. He proudly insisted that he was not a kidnapping black-birder (that was the word that he still used), whereas some of the other recruiters with whom he competed still were. In any case, regardless of whether the dark-skinned workers on Australian sugar plantations from the 1860’s onwards had arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, they did not make Australia’s resident population less white, because they came on fixed-term contracts and were expelled from Australia at the ends of their terms.

  Still another group of non-British immigrants was a small number from the British colony of India. Despite all these arrivals of modest numbers of Germans, Chinese, contract Pacific Islanders, and Indians, Australia remained by policy overwhelmingly British and white until after World War Two.

  Americans familiar with U.S. history are struck by the difference between the courses with which Britain’s American colonies and its Australian colonies dissociated themselves from Britain. The American colonies achieved independence, joined in a union, and severed all political ties with Britain against strong resistance from the British army, after a revolutionary war lasting seven years. Each year on July 4, on the anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Americans celebrate Independence Day, which is one of our biggest annual holidays. In contrast, Australia doesn’t recognize or celebrate an Independence Day, because there wasn’t one. The Australian colonies achieved self-government with no objections from Britain, and never severed their ties with Britain completely. Australia is still joined with Britain in a (British) Commonwealth of Nations, and still recognizes Britain’s sovereign as Australia’s nominal head of state. Why did the relaxation or severing of ties with Britain unfold differently in Australia and in the U.S.?

  There were several reasons. One is that Britain learned lessons from its expensive defeat in the American Revolution, changed its policies towards its white colonies, and readily granted self-government to Canada, New Zealand, and its Australian colonies. In fact, Britain granted many features of self-government to Australia of its own initiative, before Australians had made any requests. A second reason was the much greater sailing distance from Britain to Australia than to the U.S. East Coast. The First Fleet required eight months to reach Australia, and thereafter for much of the early 19th century the sailing times varied from half-a-year to a full year. The resulting slowness of communication made it impossible for the British colonial office in London to exercise close control over Australia; decisions and laws had to be delegated at first to governors, and then to Australians themselves. For example, for the entire decade from 1809 to 1819, the British governor of the Australian colony of New South Wales didn’t even bother to notify London of new laws that he was adopting.

  A third reason for the difference between Australian and American history was that the British colonial government had to station and pay for a large army in its American colonies. That army served to defend the colonies against the French army that was based in Canada and competing for control of North America, and also against less-well-armed but still formidable populous American Indian tribes with centralized government by chiefs. In c
ontrast, no European power competed with Britain to colonize the Australian continent, and Aborigines were few, without guns, and not centrally led. Hence Britain never needed to station a large army in Australia, nor to levy unpopular taxes on Australians to pay for that army; Britain’s levying taxes on the American colonies without consulting them was the immediate cause of the American Revolution. The last small contingent of British troops in Australia was withdrawn in 1870, by British initiative rather than under Australian pressure. Still another factor was that Britain’s Australian colonies, in contrast to its American colonies, were too unprofitable and unimportant for Britain to care about and pay much attention to. The American but not the Australian colonies were rich and viewed as able to afford paying taxes to Britain. Much more profitable and important to Britain than Australia were its colonies of Canada, India, South Africa, and Singapore. Finally, as I’ll explain in the next section, Britain’s principal Australian settlements for a long time remained separate colonies with little political coordination.