Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  The course by which the Australian colonies achieved self-government was as follows. In 1828, 40 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, Britain established appointed (not elected) legislative councils in the two oldest of its Australian colonies, New South Wales and Tasmania. Those appointed councils were followed in 1842 by the first partly elected representative Australian colonial government (in New South Wales). In 1850 Britain drew up constitutions for its Australian colonies, but the colonies were subsequently free to amend those constitutions, which meant that they became largely free to design their own governments. The 1850 constitutions and subsequent amended constitutions did “reserve” for Britain the decisions on some Australian matters such as defense, treason, and naturalization, and left Britain with the theoretical power to disallow any colonial law. In practice, though, Britain rarely exercised those reserved rights. By the late 1800’s, the only major right consistently reserved for Britain was the control of Australian foreign affairs.

  Along with those reserved rights that Britain retained, throughout the 1800’s it continued to deliver to Australia important services that an independent Australia would have had to provide for itself. One of those services was military protection by British warships, as other European countries and Japan and the United States became increasingly assertive in the Pacific Ocean during the later 1800’s. Another service involved the governors that Britain sent out to its Australian colonies. Those governors were not resented tyrants forced on protesting Australian colonies by a powerful Britain. Instead, they played an acknowledged essential role in Australian self-government, in which the Australian colonies often reached impasses. The appointed British governors frequently had to resolve disagreements between the upper and lower houses of a colonial legislature, had to broker the formation of parliamentary coalitions, and had to decide when to dissolve parliament and call an election.

  So far, I have talked about the historical Australian colonies as if they were straightforward precursors to the unified Australia of today. In fact, Australia arose as six separate colonies—New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—with far less contact among them than the contact among the American colonies that would later become states of the U.S. That limited contact was due to the geography of Australia, a continent with few patches of productive landscape separated by large distances of desert and other types of unproductive landscape. Not until 1917 did all five of the capital cities on the Australian mainland become connected by railroad. (The sixth capital, Hobart on Tasmania, has never been connected because Tasmania is an island 130 miles from the Australian mainland.) Each colony adopted a different railroad gauge (track separation), ranging from 3 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 3 inches, with the result that trains could not run directly from one colony into another. Like independent countries, the colonies erected protective tariff barriers against one another and maintained customs houses to collect import duties at colonial borders. In 1864 New South Wales and Victoria came close to an armed confrontation at their border. As a result, the six colonies did not become united into a single nation of Australia until 1901, 113 years after the First Fleet.

  Initially, the colonies showed little interest in uniting. Settlers thought of themselves first as overseas British, and then as Victorians or Queenslanders rather than as Australians. The stirrings of interest in federation emerged only in the latter half of the 1800’s, as Japan increased in military power, and as the United States, France, and Germany expanded over the Pacific Ocean and annexed one Pacific island group after another, posing a potential threat to Britain’s Pacific colonies. But it was initially unclear what would be the territorial limits of a union of those British colonies. A first federal council of “Austronesia” that met in 1886 included representatives of the British colonies of New Zealand and Fiji far from Australia, but only four of the six colonies that now form Australia were represented.

  Although a first draft of an Australian federal constitution was prepared in 1891, the unified Commonwealth of Australia was not inaugurated until January 1, 1901. The preamble to that constitution declares agreement “to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” with a federal governor-general appointed by Britain, and with the provision that decisions of Australia’s High Court could be appealed to Britain’s Privy Council (equivalent to Britain’s highest court). Imagine those provisions in the U.S. Constitution! That Australian constitution illustrates that Australians still felt allegiance to the British Crown, meaning “an acceptance of shared values—the rule of law, a free press, the protection of individual liberties, a claim on the protection offered by the then superpower and represented by the Royal Navy, a shared pride in being part of the Empire upon which the sun never set, and even an affection for the person of Queen Victoria” (Frank Welsh, Australia, p. 337). The flag that was adopted then, and that remains the Australian national flag today, consists of the British flag (the Union Jack), framed by the Southern Hemisphere star constellation of the Southern Cross (Plate 7.4).

  Australians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all non-white races from Australia. The following quotes illustrate Australian views then about preserving a White Australia. In 1896 the newspaper Melbourne Age wrote, “We wish to see Australia the home of a great homogenous Caucasian race, entirely free from the problems which have plunged the United States into civil war… there is no use in protecting our workers from the pauper labor of the Far East if we admit the paupers themselves.” One of the first acts of the new Australian Federation in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act, passed by agreement of all political parties, aiming to ensure that Australia would remain white. The act barred the immigration of prostitutes, the insane, people suffering from loathsome diseases, and criminals (despite Australia’s origin as a dumping ground for criminals). The act also provided that no blacks or Asians would be admitted, and that Australians should be “one people, and remain one people without the admixture of other races.” An Australian labor leader argued, “The influx of these aliens would so lower the aggregate standard of the community that in a very short time social legislation will be ineffective. But if we keep the race pure, and build up a national character, we shall become a highly progressive people of whom the British Government would be proud the longer we live and the stronger we grow.”

  Examples of other contemporary views from around that time of federation were: “Colored aliens are not nice people to be seen in the lonely bush of Australia”; no Chinese could be expected “to attain that level of civilization which Australia had inherited from the centuries”; and “the beautifully dressed ladies who attend… Church must be pleased to think that perhaps a big fat [unprintable] reeking with the germs of all sorts of diseases carried from the necessary Yokohama, has warmed the seat on which she sits.” Even Australia’s first federal prime minister, Edmund Barton, wrote, “There is no racial equality. These [non-white] races are, in comparison with white races… unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.… Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else would make some races equal to others.” Another prime minister, Alfred Deakin, declared, “Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia.”

  Britain’s colonial secretary objected to the Australian Commonwealth mentioning race explicitly, in part because that created difficulties at a time when Britain was trying to negotiate a military alliance with Japan. Hence the Commonwealth achieved that same goal of race-based immigration control without mentioning race, by requiring entering immigrants to take a dictation test—not necessarily in English, but in any European language at the discretion of the presiding immigration official. When a boatload of workers arrived from the British colony but ethnically mixed Mediterranean island of Malta, with the poten
tial for passing a dictation test in English, they were instead administered a dictation test in Dutch (a language unknown in Malta as well as in Australia) in order to justify expelling them. As for the non-whites already admitted to Australia as laborers, the Commonwealth deported Pacific Islanders, Chinese, and Indians but allowed two small groups of specialists (Afghan camel-drivers and Japanese pearl-divers) to remain.

  The motive behind these immigration barriers was mainly the racism of the times, but partly also that the Australian Labor Party wanted to protect high wages for Australian workers by preventing the immigration of cheap labor. However, I don’t want to malign Australians as being exceptionally racist. Instead, they merely shared racist views widespread around the world, and differed mainly in being able to translate those views into an immigration policy based on racist exclusion while simultaneously encouraging British immigration because of Australia’s low population density. Contemporary Britain and continental European countries didn’t encourage or accept immigrants at all. When many people of African origins finally did arrive in Britain from Britain’s West Indian colonies after World War Two, the eventual result was Britain’s Nottingham and Notting Hill race riots of 1958. Japan still doesn’t accept significant numbers of immigrants. The United States, having rejected Australia’s devotion to British identity, eventually accepted huge numbers of immigrants from continental Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, but over much resistance.

  Until things began to change after World War Two, Australians’ sense of identity centered on their being British subjects. That emerges most clearly from the enthusiasm with which Australian troops fought beside British troops in British wars that had no direct significance for Australian interests. The first case was in 1885, when the colony of New South Wales (long before federation into the Commonwealth of Australia) sent troops to fight with British troops against rebels in the Sudan, a remote part of the world than which no other could have been more irrelevant to Australia. A bigger opportunity arose in the Boer War of 1899, between Britain and the descendants of Dutch colonists in South Africa, again with zero direct relevance to Australian interests. Australian soldiers performed well in the Boer War, winning five Victoria Crosses (Britain’s highest medal for battlefield bravery), and thereby gaining glory and a reputation as loyal British subjects at the cost of only about 300 Australian soldiers dead in battle.

  When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 at the outset of World War One, it did so without bothering to consult either Australia or Canada. Australia’s British-appointed governor-general merely passed on the announcement of war to Australia’s elected prime minister. Australians unhesitatingly supported the British war efforts on a far larger scale than in the case of the Boer War or the Sudan War. An Australian journalist wrote, “We must protect our [sic!] country. We must keep sacred from the mailed fist [i.e., of Germany] this sacred heritage.” In this case, the war did have a slight effect on Australian interests: it gave Australian troops a pretext to occupy the German colonies of northeast New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. But Australia’s main contribution to World War One was to contribute a huge volunteer force—400,000 soldiers, constituting more than half of all Australian men eligible to serve, out of a total Australian population under 5 million—to defend British interests half-way around the world from Australia, in France and the Mideast. More than 300,000 were sent overseas, of whom two-thirds ended up wounded or killed. Almost every small rural Australian town still has a cenotaph in the town center, listing the names of local men killed in the war.

  What became the best-known Australian involvement in World War One was the attack of ANZAC troops (the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) on Turkish troops holding the Gallipoli Peninsula (Plate 7.5). The ANZAC troops landed on April 25, 1915, suffered high casualties because of incompetent leadership by the British general commanding the operation, and were withdrawn in 1916 when Britain concluded that the operation was a failure. Ever since then, ANZAC Day (April 25), the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, has been Australia’s most important and most emotional national holiday.

  To a non-Australian, the emphasis on ANZAC Day as the Australian national holiday is beyond comprehension. Why should any country celebrate the slaughter of its young men, betrayed by British leadership, half-way around the world, on a peninsula that rivals the Sudan in its irrelevance to Australia’s national interests? But I have learned to keep my mouth shut, and not to ask such rational questions, when, still today, my Australian friends dissolve in tears as they talk about the Gallipoli landings of a century ago. The explanation is that nothing illustrated better the willingness of Australians to die for their British mother country than did the slaughter of young Australians at Gallipoli. Gallipoli became viewed as the birth of the Australian nation, reflecting the widespread view that any nation’s birth requires sacrifice and the spilling of blood. The slaughter at Gallipoli symbolized the national pride of Australians, now fighting for their British motherland as Australians, not as Victorians or Tasmanians or South Australians—and the emotional dedication with which Australians publicly identified themselves as loyal British subjects.

  That self-identification was re-emphasized in 1923, when a conference of British Empire member countries agreed that British dominions could henceforth appoint their own ambassadors or diplomatic representatives to foreign countries, instead of being represented by the British ambassador. Canada, South Africa, and Ireland promptly did appoint their own diplomatic representatives. But Australia did not, on the grounds that there was no public enthusiasm in Australia for seeking visible signs of national independence from Britain.

  However, Australia’s relationship towards Britain not only has been one of the dutiful child seeking approval from its esteemed mother country, but also includes a love/hate component. One personal example is that of a friend of mine who worked in an Australian sheep slaughterhouse, some of whose produce was sold for domestic consumption in Australia, while other produce was exported frozen to Britain. Into boxes of sheep livers destined for export to Britain, my friend and his mates occasionally dropped a sheep gallbladder, whose contents of bile are unforgettably bitter-tasting. More serious examples of the hatred component of Australia’s relationship with Britain are the expressed views, which I shall quote later, of Australian prime ministers after World War Two.

  The significance of World War Two for Australia was very different from that of World War One, because Australia itself was attacked, and because there was heavy fighting on islands near Australia rather than just half-way around the world. The surrender of Britain’s big naval base at Singapore to Japanese troops is often regarded as a turning point in the evolution of Australia’s self-image.

  During the two decades after World War One, Japan built up its army and navy, launched an undeclared war against China, and emerged as a danger to Australia. In its role as defender of Australia, Britain responded by strengthening its base on the tip of the Malay Peninsula at Singapore, although that base was 4,000 miles from Australia. Australia relied for protection on that remote British base and on the even more remote British fleet concentrated in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But Britain cannot be blamed alone for the eventual failure of its Singapore strategy, because Australia simultaneously neglected steps for its own defense. Australia abolished the draft in 1930 and built only a small air force and navy. The latter included no aircraft carriers, battleships, or warships larger than light cruisers, hopelessly inadequate to protect Australia and its international sea connections against Japanese attack. At the same time, Britain itself was facing a more serious and immediate threat from Germany and was lagging in its own military preparations against Japan.

  Just as at the outset of World War One, when Britain declared war on Germany again on September 3, 1939, Australia’s prime minister promptly announced without even consulting parliament, “Great Britain has declared war, and as a result Australia is also at war [with Germany].” As in W
orld War One, Australia initially had no direct interest in the Second World War’s European theater half-way around the world, pitting Germany against Poland, Britain, France, and other Western European countries. But again, just as during World War One, Australia sent troops to fight in the European theater, mainly in North Africa and Crete. As the risk of attack from Japan increased, the Australian government requested the return of those troops to defend Australia itself. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried to reassure Australians by promising that Britain and its fleet would use Singapore to protect Australia against Japanese invasion, and against any Japanese fleet that might appear in Australian waters. As events proved, those promises had no basis in reality.

  Japan did attack the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies beginning on December 7, 1941. On December 10, just the third day after Japan’s declaration of war, Japanese bombers sank Britain’s only two large warships available in the Far East to defend Australia, the battleship Prince of Wales (Plate 7.6) and the battle cruiser Repulse. On February 15, 1942, the British general in command at Singapore surrendered to the Japanese army, sending 100,000 British and Empire troops into prisoner-of-war camps—the most severe military defeat that Britain has suffered in its history (Plate 7.7). Sadly, those troops surrendering included 2,000 Australian soldiers who had arrived in Singapore only three weeks earlier, on January 24, in order to serve in the hopeless task of its defense. In the absence of British ships to protect Australia, the same Japanese aircraft carriers that had bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor heavily bombed the Australian city of Darwin on February 19, 1942 (Plate 7.8). That was the first of more than 60 Japanese air raids on Australia, in addition to an attempted raid on Sydney Harbor by a Japanese submarine.