To Australians, the fall of Singapore was not just a shock and a frightening military setback: it was regarded as a betrayal of Australia by its British mother country. While the Japanese advance on Singapore was unfolding, Australia’s Prime Minister John Curtin cabled Churchill that it would constitute an “inexcusable betrayal” if Britain evacuated Singapore after all the assurances of the base being impregnable. But Singapore fell because Britain was stretched militarily much too thin between the European theater and the Far East, and because the attacking Japanese forces were tactically superior to the numerically superior defending British and Empire forces.
Australia had been guilty of neglecting its own defense. Nevertheless, Australian bitterness against Britain has persisted for a long time. As late as 1992, 50 years after Singapore’s surrender, Australia’s Prime Minister Paul Keating scathingly denounced Britain and vented his hatred in a speech to the Australian parliament: “At school… I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia—not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan Peninsula, not to worry about Singapore, and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination. This was the country that you people [Australian parliament members belonging to the two conservative parties] wedded yourselves to… even as it walked out on you.”
The lessons of World War Two for Australia were two-fold. First and foremost, Britain had been powerless to defend Australia. Instead, the defense of Australia had depended on massive deployment of American troops, ships, and airplanes, commanded by the American General MacArthur, who established his headquarters in Australia. MacArthur directed operations, including those involving Australian troops, largely by himself: there was no suggestion of an equal partnership between the U.S. and Australia. While there was concern about the possibility of Japanese landings in Australia, they did not materialize. But it was clear that any defense of Australia against landings would have been by the U.S., not by Britain. As the war against Japan slowly unfolded over nearly four years, Australian troops fought against Japanese troops on the islands of New Guinea, New Britain, the Solomons, and finally Borneo. Those Australian troops played a vital front-line role in defeating Japan’s attempt in 1942 to advance over the Kokoda Trail to capture Australian New Guinea’s colonial capital of Port Moresby. Increasingly thereafter, though, MacArthur relegated Australian troops to secondary operations far from the front lines. As a result, although Australia was attacked directly in World War Two but not in World War One, Australia’s casualties in World War Two were paradoxically less than half of those in World War One.
Second, World War Two brought home to Australia that, while Australian troops served in both wars in the remote European theater, there were grave immediate risks to Australia nearby, from Asia. With reason, Australia now came to consider Japan as the enemy. About 22,000 Australian troops captured by the Japanese during the war were subjected to unspeakably brutal conditions in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, where 36% of the Australian prisoners died: a far higher percentage than the 1% death toll of American and British soldiers in German prisoner-of-war camps, and of German soldiers in American and British prisoner-of-war camps. Especially shocking to Australians was the Sandakan Death March, in which 2,700 Australian and British troops captured by the Japanese and imprisoned at Sandakan on the island of Borneo were marched across Borneo, starved, and beaten until most of the few survivors were executed, resulting in the deaths of almost all of those prisoners.
After World War Two there unfolded a gradual loosening of Australia’s ties to Britain and a shift in Australians’ self-identification as “loyal British in Australia,” resulting in a dismantling of the White Australia policy. Even for historians with no particular interest in Australia itself, these changes furnish a model study of changing national answers to the question “Who are we?” Such changes can’t occur as quickly for nations, composed of groups with different interests, as they can for individuals. In Australia the changes have been strung out over many decades, and they are still going on today.
World War Two had immediate consequences for Australia’s immigration policy. Already in 1943, Australia’s prime minister concluded that the tiny population of Australians (less than 8 million in 1945) could not hold their huge continent against threats from Japan (population then over 100 million), Indonesia (just 200 miles away) with a population approaching 200 million, and China (population 1 billion). By comparison with high population densities in Japan and Java and China, Australia looked empty and attractive to Asian invasion—so thought the prime minister, but Asians themselves did not think that way. The other argument for more immigration was the mistaken belief that a large population is essential for any country to develop a strong First World economy.
Neither of those arguments made sense. There always have been, and still are, compelling reasons why Australia has a much lower population density than does Japan or Java. All of Japan and Java is wet and fertile, and much of the area of those islands is suitable for highly productive agriculture. But most of Australia’s area is barren desert, and only a tiny fraction is productive farmland. As for the necessity of a large population to build a strong First World economy, the economic successes of Denmark, Finland, Israel, and Singapore, each with a population only one-quarter the size of Australia’s, illustrate that quality counts more than quantity in economic success. In fact, Australia would be much better off with a smaller population than it presently has, because that would reduce human impact on the fragile Australian landscape and would increase the ratio of natural resources to people.
But Australia’s prime ministers in the 1940’s were neither ecologists nor economists, and so post-war Australia did embark on a crash program of encouraging immigration. Unfortunately, there were not nearly enough applications from the preferred sources of Britain and Ireland to fill Australia’s immigration target, and the White Australia policy limited Australia’s other options. Inducing American servicemen who had been stationed in Australia to stay was not an attractive possibility, because too many of them were African-Americans. Instead, initially the “next best” source (after Britain and Ireland) from which post-war Australia encouraged immigration became Northern Europe. The third choice was Southern Europe, accounting for the Italian and Greek restaurants that I patronized in 1964. Australian immigration supporters announced the surprising discovery, “With proper selection, Italians make excellent citizens” (!!). As a first step in that direction, Italian and German prisoners of war who had been brought to Australia were permitted to remain.
Australia’s minister for immigration from 1945 to 1949, Arthur Calwell, was an outspoken racist. He even refused to allow Australian men who had been so unpatriotic as to marry Japanese, Chinese, or Indonesian women to bring their war-brides or children into Australia. Calwell wrote, “No Japanese women, or any half-castes either, will be admitted to Australia; they are simply not wanted and are permanently undesirable… a mongrel Australia is impossible.” As an additional source besides Britain, Calwell wrote approvingly about the three Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), whose annexation by Russia had motivated emigration by thousands of well-educated white people with eye color and hair color resembling those of the British. In 1947 Calwell toured refugee camps in post-war Europe, found that they offered “splendid human material,” and noted approvingly of the Baltic Republics, “Many of their people were red-headed and blue-eyed. There were also a number of natural platinum blonds of both sexes.” The result of that selective encouragement of immigration was that, from 1945 to 1950, Australia received about 700,000 immigrants (a number nearly equal to 10% of its 1945 population), half of them reassuringly British, the rest from other European countries. In 1949 Australia even relented and permitted Japanese war-brides to remain.
The undermining of the White Australia policy that produced the Asian immigrants and Asian restaurants awaiting me in Brisbane in 2008 resulted from five
considerations: military protection, political developments in Asia, shifts of Australian trade, the immigrants themselves, and British policy. As for military considerations, World War Two had made clear that Britain was no longer a military power in the Pacific; instead, Australia’s military ties had to be with the U.S. That became officially recognized by the 1951 ANZUS security treaty between the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, without the participation of Britain. The Korean War, the rise of communist threats in Malaya and Vietnam, and Indonesian military interventions in Dutch New Guinea, Malaysian Borneo, and Portuguese Timor warned Australia of proliferating security problems nearby. The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain failed to topple President Nasser of Egypt and was forced to yield to U.S. economic pressure, laid bare Britain’s military and economic weakness. To the shock of Australians, in 1967 Britain announced its intent to withdraw all of its military forces east of the Suez Canal. That marked the official end to Britain’s long-standing role as Australia’s protector.
As for Asian political developments, former colonies and protectorates and mandates in Asia were becoming independent nations, including Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. Those countries were near Australia: Papua New Guinea only a few miles away, and Indonesia and East Timor only 200 miles away. They devised their own foreign policies, no longer subservient to the foreign policies of their former colonial masters. They were also rising economically.
As for trade, Britain had formerly been by far the largest trade partner of Australia, accounting for 45% of Australia’s imports and 30% of its exports even as late as the early 1950’s. A rapid rise in Australian trade with Japan began with Australia’s overcoming its racist and World-War-Two–driven hostility to Japan to sign a trade agreement with Japan in 1957, and then in 1960 lifting its ban on exporting iron ore to Japan. By the 1980’s Australia’s leading trade partner was—Japan!—followed by the U.S., with Britain far behind. In 1982 Japan received 28% of Australian exports, the U.S. 11%, and Britain only 4%. But it was an obvious contradiction that, at the same time as Australia was telling Japan and other Asian countries how eager it was for their trade, it was simultaneously telling them that it considered Japanese and other Asian people themselves unfit to settle in Australia.
The next-to-last factor undermining the pro-British White Australia immigration policy was the shift in Australian immigrants themselves. All of those Italians, Greeks, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who immigrated after World War Two were undoubtedly white, but they were not British. They didn’t share Australians’ traditional image of themselves as loyal subjects of Britain. They also didn’t share the strong racist prejudices against Asians that were prevalent in Britain as well as in Australia as late as the 1950’s.
Finally, it was not just that Australia was pulling away from Britain; Britain was also pulling away from Australia. For Britain as for Australia, its interests were changing, and its self-image was becoming increasingly out-of-date. The British government recognized those cruel realities before the Australian government did, but the acknowledgment was intensely painful on both sides. The changes in Britain were at their peak while I was living there between 1958 and 1962. Australians had traditionally viewed their identity as being British citizens within the British Empire, based on the twin realities of population ancestry and of British trade and military protection, all of which were changing. At the same time, the British had traditionally viewed their identity as being based on ownership of the largest empire in world history (“the empire on which the sun never sets”), then on leadership of the British Commonwealth. The Empire and then the Commonwealth had been Britain’s leading trade partners, and major sources of troops: think of all those Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, and Canadian troops who died alongside British troops in both world wars. But Britain’s trade was decreasing with the Commonwealth and shifting towards Europe, just as Australia’s trade with Britain was decreasing and shifting towards Asia and the U.S. Britain’s African and Asian colonies were becoming independent, developed their own national identities, formulated their own foreign policies even within the Commonwealth, and (over British objections) forced South Africa out of the Commonwealth because of its racist apartheid policies. As Australia was feeling pressured to choose between Britain and Asia plus the U.S., Britain was feeling pressured to choose between the Commonwealth and Europe.
In 1955 Britain decided to withdraw from negotiations among six Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) to form a European Economic Community (EEC, progenitor of today’s Common Market). Contrary to British expectations in 1955, the Six (Western European countries) did succeed in bringing the EEC into existence without Britain in 1957. By 1961, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan recognized the shift in Britain’s interests. Europe was becoming more important to Britain than was the Commonwealth, both economically and politically. Hence Britain applied to join the EEC. That application and its sequels constituted a shock to Australia’s and Britain’s relationship even more fundamental than had been the fall of Singapore, although the latter was more dramatic and symbolic, and lingers today as a bigger cause of festering resentment to Australians.
Britain’s application created an unavoidable clash between British and Australian interests. The Six were erecting shared tariff barriers against non-EEC imports, barriers to which Britain would have to subscribe. Those barriers would now apply to Australian food products and refined metals, for which Britain still represented a major export market. Australian food exports to Britain would now be displaced by French, Dutch, Italian, and Danish foods. Prime Minister Macmillan knew this cruel reality as well as did Australia’s Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Macmillan promised Australia and other Commonwealth countries that Britain would insist on defending Commonwealth interests in Britain’s negotiations with the EEC. But it seemed doubtful then that Macmillan would prevail, and in fact the Six refused to make significant concessions to Australia’s interests.
Australians’ reactions to Britain’s EEC application were reminiscent of their reactions to Singapore’s fall. The application was denounced as immoral, dishonest, a basis for moral grievance—and a betrayal of Gallipoli, of a century of other Australian sacrifices for the British motherland, and of the British heritage underlying Australia’s traditional national identity. That is, the shock was profoundly symbolic, as well as material. Worse symbolic shocks were still to come. Britain’s Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, actually aimed at halting Commonwealth immigration from the West Indies and Pakistan, avoided appearances of racism by ending the automatic right of all Commonwealth citizens (including Australians) to enter and reside in Britain. Britain’s 1968 Immigration Act barred automatic right of entry into Britain for all FOREIGNERS (Australians were now declared to be foreigners!) without at least one British-born grandparent, thereby excluding a large fraction of Australians at that time. In 1972 Britain declared Australians to be ALIENS (!). What an insult!
In short, it wasn’t the case that Australian sons and daughters of the British motherland were declaring their independence. Instead, the motherland was declaring its own independence, loosening its ties with the Commonwealth, and disowning its children.
British/European negotiations unfolded with agonizing slowness, starts, and stops. France’s President de Gaulle vetoed the first British application to the EEC in 1963. He also vetoed a second British application in 1967. Following de Gaulle’s resignation and death, the third British application in 1971 was approved by the European Six, and by British citizens in a national referendum. By then, Britain accounted for only 8% of Australian exports. Australian politicians had come to recognize that joining Europe was in Britain’s vital interests, that Australia shouldn’t and couldn’t oppose British interests, and that Australia’s previous relationship to Britain had become a myth.
From an Australian perspective, it may seem
that Australian identity changed suddenly and comprehensively in 1972, when Australia’s Labour Party under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam came to power for the first time in 23 years. In his first 19 days in office, even before he had appointed a new cabinet, Whitlam and his deputy embarked on a crash program of selective change in Australia, for which there are few parallels in the modern world in its speed and comprehensiveness. The changes introduced in those 19 days included: end of the military draft (national conscription); withdrawal of all Australian troops from Vietnam; recognition of the People’s Republic of China; announced independence for Papua New Guinea, which Australia had been administering for over half-a-century under a mandate from the League of Nations and then from the United Nations; banning visits by racially selected overseas athletic teams (a rule aimed especially at all-white South African teams); abolishing the nomination of Australians for Britain’s system of honors (knighthoods, OBEs, KCMGs, and so on) and replacing them with a new system of Australian honors; and—officially repudiating the White Australia policy. Once Whitlam’s whole cabinet had been approved, it then adopted more steps in the crash program: reduction of the voting age to 18; increase in the minimum wage; giving representation to both the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory in the federal Senate; granting legislative councils to both of those territories; requiring environmental impact statements for industrial developments; increased spending on Aborigines; equal pay for women; no-fault divorce; a comprehensive medical insurance scheme; and big changes in education that included abolishing university fees, boosts in financial aid for schools, and transfer from the states to the Australian Commonwealth of the responsibility for funding tertiary education.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 27
