Meanwhile in Western Australia from 1944, Aborigines could gain the vote through a Certificate of Citizenship—a ‘dog tag’ or ‘dog licence’, as it was dubbed. To obtain a certificate, applicants had to furnish two references from ‘reputable’ citizens and satisfy a magistrate that, amongst other things, they had ‘adopted industrious habits’ and were of ‘good reputation’.
In 1961, a Select Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament concluded that far from ‘dying out’ as surmised at Federation, Aboriginal people were increasing in numbers and had become a ‘permanent part of the Australian community’, and that ‘the majority’ of those who five years earlier had lived as nomads had now chosen to join settlements and missions. The right to enrol and vote, the committee recommended, was to be extended to all Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. While acknowledging it was recommending the enfranchisement of ‘people who had no history of exercising a franchise and who had no knowledge of electoral and political rights’, the committee rejected the view that the franchise should be withheld from Aborigines until the state first made them ready. It was better that in the case of some the full franchise be extended even before there was a capacity to exercise it reasonably ‘than that others should suffer the frustration of being denied that right, which they can clearly exercise’. The committee dismissed the idea of subjecting Aborigines to such indices of assimilation as reading tests, housing inspections, investigations of job records, or the necessity to have deposits in a bank. In this way the committee implicitly endorsed the anthropologist clergyman Augustus Elkin’s position that ‘in Australia the franchise is not a reward to be earned by good conduct or by proficiency in literacy or in anything else’. The committee recommended that enrolment was to be compulsory in New South Wales and Victoria as it was in state elections. In other jurisdictions where Aborigines had just recently emerged from a tribal state, enrolments were to be—at least for the time being—non-compulsory.
To what extent were the committee’s recommendations the result of Aboriginal pressure? For most of Australia’s post-settlement history, Aborigines, according to one historian, were ‘a silent and apparently unreacting mass of passive objects’, although he acknowledged that any Aborigine who tried to take an active posture towards society was smacked down for getting out of his place. Indeed, black leadership was dismissed by the authorities on the ground that it was not truly representative of its people, or else (as would happen in the case of the Freedom Rides later in the 1960s) that it was the result of Aborigines being ‘stirred up’ by white left-wing agitators. It might have been true that the sort of raucous protest that often marked much Australian life was alien to Aboriginal culture. Even so, protest from the 1920s onwards took the form of petitions, delegations and strikes, and from the late 1950s Aborigines campaigned for and won a number of important rights, such as access to unemployment benefits, pensions and maternity allowances.
In all this the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, founded in 1958, acquired enough of a voice that Menzies became worried about the publicity it might generate internationally, and thus cause other Commonwealth prime ministers to bracket Australia with South Africa. The Minister for the Interior and future Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gordon Freeth, introducing the legislation to extend the franchise to Aborigines in 1962, expressed the hope that it would proclaim to the world ‘that the Aboriginal people of Australia enjoy complete political equality with the rest of the community’. But under pressure from the United Nations’ Trusteeship Council, legislation was already being prepared to enfranchise Papua New Guineans in elections for their assembly. In that situation, to continue to deny Aborigines the vote would have been unjust as well as odious to the world. It would be wrong to accuse Menzies’ government of pandering to world opinion rather than responding to conviction in passing the new laws. Freeth, for example, was a South Australian born in 1914, in a society with many Aborigines. At Federation, South Australia had been one of the states that was most vocal in demanding—for racial, philosophic and fiscal reasons—that Aborigines not be counted in the census. Given his privileged background, and the often malign opinions held about Aborigines during his early life, Freeth had by 1962 travelled some distance in his attitude and believed in the legislation. But like other Australians, he had further to travel still.
After 1962, Queensland officials did little to encourage indigenes to enrol or to prepare them for the electoral process. The election of Aboriginal councillors on settlements and reserves, or the setting up of Aboriginal courts of summary jurisdiction, could have been used as an introduction to voting, but in most cases was not taken up. But in the Northern Territory, the effect of the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1962 was dramatic. Now, under the new Act, no person entitled to vote for the House of Representatives could be declared a ward of the state. In the Territory, community consultative councils were set up, though their role was limited to just that—consultation. It was true that ‘in more remote areas’, as Professor Ann McGrath says, ‘Aboriginals did not consider the vote as importantly as the Civil Rights campaigners in the cities.’ One commentator, Colin Tatz, says that federal enfranchisement offered nothing more than a ‘mildly meaningless sense of participation’. Whites continued unilaterally to define the problems and enact the legislation that spelled out what were the Aborigines’ best interests.
And some Aborigines hostile to assimilation felt that the vote was just another trick. ‘You’re not going to get my vote,’ Veronica Brody of South Australia thought when, after she married an already-exempted Aborigine, the Protection Board exempted her more or less from her Aboriginality in 1961, giving her a ‘dog tag’ she could produce to prove her status and self-governance. In her own eyes she was not exempt and didn’t need to be, but ‘still Aboriginal’.
Others felt included in Australia once they were able to vote. There was the question of a lack of Aboriginal representatives in Parliament. In some cases, as for example the Yorta Yorta people from Victoria and New South Wales, indigenes would not come to consider themselves represented until, in another decade, Neville Bonner, an Aborigine from the borders of New South Wales and Queensland, was appointed to the Senate and subsequently elected to it by voters in Queensland.
In Victoria the Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL) was the most important Aboriginal body. Its principal office bearers were William Cooper and Arthur Burdeau, and it was revived in 1945–46 when Doug Nicholls and Bill Onus joined forces under the AAL banner with William Ferguson and Pearl Gibbs. The organisation had a focus on Cummeragunga, which was Cooper’s homeland as well as that of Shadrach James, Nicholls and Caleb Morgan. The bitter memory of losing much of the reserve to white farmers recurred, and representations were made to the New South Wales government.
Jack and George Patten had led a walk-out on Cummeragunga in 1939. Their concerns were the same as those of the Aborigines on other reserves in New South Wales—land rights, appalling living conditions, mistreatment by the Protection Board’s officers and fear of the removal of their children. They were supported by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and other left-wing organisations. But AAL had previously sought supporters amongst humanitarians, churchmen and missionaries such as the north Queensland missionary E.R.B. Gribble and, later, parliamentarians such as M.J. Makin. The AAL was suspicious of the CPA, despite Communist Margaret Tucker’s close relations with members of the party and the faithful support of the socialist Helen Bailey.
As the campaigning of the 1940s and 1950s reveals, Cooper’s political son, Doug Nicholls, inherited much of his emphasis on as well as his concern for Aborigines in remote Australia and his articulation of Aboriginal rights. This is evident in Nicholls joining forces with South Australian churchman Charles Duguid, anthropologist Donald Thomson, pacifist Doris Blackburn and others to fight rocket-range testing in the Central Australian Aboriginal Reserve in 1946–47; his role in attacking the banishment of Darwin strike lead
er Fred Waters in 1951; and his calling for Aboriginal parliamentary representation. Nicholls and Onus also focused on other aspects of Aboriginal welfare, such as their living conditions and the colour bar in Victoria and elsewhere.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S COFFIN
John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidential victory in 1960 was narrow, with only a little over one hundred votes separating him from Richard Nixon. His glamorous style, the nature of his family, his war record and his courageous approach to foreign policy, as well as his youth, made him attractive to Australians in general. But for Australian Irish Catholics he seemed—just as sectarianism was on the decline in Australia—to validate their identity. Australian and American experiences of Catholicism had been similar, with at first a heavy Irish component and social contempt developing into acceptance and a more diverse Catholic population from Italy, Lebanon, Malta, and Central and Eastern Europe. This parallel history made Australian Catholics feel that American Catholicism’s success was theirs as well.
With television recently come to Australia, and with perhaps a majority of urban homes now possessing a television, Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963 was unique, in that Australians felt intimately connected to the event and all its developments, including the assassination of the perpetrator, Lee Harvey Oswald. Critics of the Australian–American relationship issued warnings about the risk to Australian culture from Americanisation; the historian Geoffrey Serle criticised Australia’s failure to resist cultural domination by America, elders complained about American speech usages and the fact that our Rockers, including Johnny O’Keefe, sang with American accents. But no one who had visited America could say that Australians had transmuted themselves into sub-Americans. Callowly or otherwise, they took what impressed them, yet there were elements in the Australian character (not least in attitudes to leisure and the measuring of what was success) that seemed unchangeable. One commentator speaks of the Australians as coming up with hybrids of both cultures.
During his presidency, Kennedy was urged by a Californian Democrat congressman to visit Australia, and at the time of his assassination planned to include Australia in an itinerary for a tour of the Far East. New Zealand was included in his itinerary, on Menzies’ advice about New Zealand sensibilities. The Kennedy trip never came off because congressional business on civil rights and tax made a visit in October 1963 impossible. So January or February 1964 were suggested. This was not convenient for Australia because the prime minister of Japan, the Maharajah of Mysore and the Queen Mother were planning to visit immediately before that, and the Prime Minister’s Department was concerned about the logistic problems of too many state visits at once and particularly worried about ‘the Queen Mother and the President cross-trumping each other’. So, in the Australian popular view, it was the assassination that caused the cancellation.
At their meetings in 1962, when Menzies was invited to give the Monticello Lecture—Monticello being the estate of Thomas Jefferson—Menzies and Kennedy had not warmed to each other. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that in the previous year, 1961, a week before what would turn out to be a very close Australian election, Kennedy had given an interview in which he said he wanted the Dutch out of West Papua; that Laos, the scene of Communist-instigated civil war, was indefensible; and that he did not care who won that year’s Australian election. The story was repressed and never ran, but Menzies had offered Australian troops for Laos and was not amused that Kennedy called it indefensible. Menzies was up against the very militant Indonesian President Soekarno and both he and Arthur Calwell wanted the Dutch to hang on to West Papua rather than allow Soekarno to expand. And last of all, Kennedy didn’t care whether Menzies was prime minister or not.
There is a photograph of Menzies and Kennedy taken in the Oval Office in September 1962 with Kennedy leaned back in his rocking chair, smiling into the camera, looking handsome and relaxed, while Menzies sags uncomfortably in a soft sofa. Kennedy resembles a film star; Menzies appears as he was—an ageing statesman of a declining Empire, a man who did not much want to see his companion. And he knew Kennedy was beloved in Australia. After his first meeting with Kennedy, Menzies declared, ‘Nobody can fail to be impressed by the liveliness of mind, vigour of approach, energy and desire for results, and forceful personality of the new President.’ And Menzies believed that American support was necessary to address Australia’s political and military vulnerability, to help it defend its 66,000-kilometre-long coastline (if one includes New Guinea). In that spirit of vulnerability, in May 1963 Australia agreed to the establishment of an American communications base at North West Cape. The Labor Party was divided over the North West Cape communications base, and Menzies could depict that as irresponsibility. The credit crunch had ended too, and commodity prices were rising. After the Liberal Party’s near defeat in the 1961 election, Menzies decided to call an early election and campaigned on his government’s commitment to Australian security.
When Kennedy was shot on Houston Street, Menzies was preparing for a 30 November election (which he would win) and did not attend the funeral, a decision that was, said the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘a national disgrace’. Menzies’ electoral prospects were enhanced by Kennedy’s assassination, since commentators believed that feelings of ‘dismay and uncertainty’ would favour the incumbent government. Arthur Calwell complained that within twelve hours of his death, references to Kennedy were inserted into the Liberal campaign material. Calwell accused Menzies of ‘trying to smear the Labor Party over President Kennedy’s coffin’. There was a perception, fostered by Menzies, that the Labor Party was guilty of anti-American feeling, and the Coalition could make much of Labor’s desire to recognise Communist China and support China’s entry into the United Nations. On 26 November, in a television broadcast, Menzies identified the Chinese as ‘looking right down through South-east Asia. Right down to Australia’, and said that the late President Kennedy ‘did a wonderful job when he helped to keep them quiet’. Before the election, Paul Hasluck wrote to the Liberal Party, ‘I suspect . . . that there was an emotional and sympathetic move after the assassination of President Kennedy towards the idea that we must try to be good allies and be close to America.’ This might have made people ‘even more receptive to Liberal proposals’. The Democratic Labor Party was potent in influencing the result as well, winning 7 per cent of the vote. But because so many of the Catholic schools had, with the help of university scholarships introduced by Menzies, brought more Catholics into business and the professions, many of them voted directly for Menzies anyhow. It was often in the Catholic skilled working class and lower middle class that the DLP got its chief support, and the more radical economic policies of the Labor Party had lost their appeal. One Strathfield woman wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy, ‘Well, with the disclosure of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist sympathies, there was a great swing to Liberal and they won with the amazing majority of twenty-two seats.’
None of the cultural and political suspicion of America applied to President Kennedy and his exquisite wife. At that stage most Australians approved of American actions in Vietnam, and did not know that Kennedy was not quite the ‘family man’ Cardinal James Freeman of Sydney declared him to be. Television made people feel that they knew John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and Jacqueline was a fixture in the Australian Women’s Weekly, with its circulation of 800,000. ‘If only you lived near here,’ an Australian (initials H.H.) wrote to Mrs Kennedy, ‘I could help you, perhaps looking after the kiddies or doing something practical.’ John Kennedy’s Catholicism was a sort of catalyst for these impulses. A Victorian woman saw Kennedy as ‘a great Western leader’ and ‘a fine Catholic man’. ‘To us here he was just John Kennedy, the same as he was to you,’ wrote another woman, from Penshurst in New South Wales. Condolence material sent to Jacqueline Kennedy often contained details about decades of the Rosary said in suburban homes and prayers offered. ‘We heard the news before Mass and a gasp of horror went through the Church,’ wrote a young wom
an from the Loreto Convent in Marryatville, South Australia. ‘I am sure that there were more masses and prayers said for you both than for Pope John.’
Behind the grief lay a sense that a sure leader in the Cold War chaos had been lost. Australian Catholics too had a grieving sense that their chief champion had gone. And all were shocked, given the comparative innocence of the time, and the lack of knowledge of other coming assassinations, that a democratic leader could be so suddenly erased.
WHITE AUSTRALIA’S LAST DECADE
It was after Menzies’ retirement in January 1966, and the departure the following year of Arthur ‘Cocky’ Calwell, Chifley’s Minister for Immigration, that politicians on both sides began to think practically of easing restrictions on immigrants. New Prime Minister Harold Holt reduced the barriers to the entry of non-European migrants and reduced the qualifying period for citizenship from fifteen to five years. He saw this as necessary under the pressure of Asian trade and diplomatic relationships. It was the sort of legislation Calwell had opposed on trade union grounds, that Asians undermined Australian working and social conditions. Calwell believed that if ‘9000 or 10,000 coloured migrants [start] coming into Australia each year . . . we will have the same terrible insoluble problems to face in the future, similar to those they face in England and America today’. But thanks to air travel and widespread peace, Australian travellers, officials and diplomats were now reduced to trying to make apologies for or explain away White Australia to their counterparts in Asia. In any case, the entry of increasing numbers of Asian students into Australia made a mockery of the policy. The Coalition supported change because they were now beginning to travel in Asia and could see that White Australia was being invoked to drive Indians and other Asians, as Holt said, ‘away from the British Commonwealth and into the arms of Communism’.
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