Menzies’ many achievements had included a banking system that provided stability yet encouraged initiative; a two-airline policy that ensured a high degree of safety as well as competitive efficiency; a system of social security, including a medical benefits scheme; and a modified arrangement for non-European immigration that won a high degree of bipartisan support. But White Australia was still in place.
Between 1901 and 1940, one could say that, in accordance with doctrine, Australia became progressively whiter. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population had fallen steadily to 1 per cent of the population in 1950. The number of Chinese, about thirty thousand in 1901, stood at 6500 in 1947. And on the verge of World War II, 97 per cent of Australia’s population was still of British and Irish stock.
Calwell, so opposed to Asian immigration, nonetheless had a strong and early belief that Australia had to protect Aborigines against exploitation by squatters and other plutocrats and that they merited ‘equal benefits as the white race’. In 1964, he began with others to attempt to remove from the Constitution racially discriminatory clauses towards Aborigines. In defending White Australia, however, he uttered sentiments that were like those of Deakin earlier in the century and Hughes at the Paris Peace Conference—that none of it was motivated by feelings of racial superiority. Calwell declared in 1959: ‘We have no pretensions to racial superiority and we have never been colour-conscious in our treatment of the people of other lands.’ As a committed internationalist in his foreign policy, with sympathy for colonial independence movements, Evatt had defended White Australia in the same terms, as being based ‘not upon racial superiority but upon the well-established fact of racial difference’.
Menzies and Calwell both opposed any immigration from Asia under a quota scheme. It would be of its nature either so small that it would insult Asian countries or so large that it would threaten the all-holy homogeneity of the Australian race. Gestures of democracy, friendship and anti-Communism such as the Colombo Plan, by which Asian students were invited to study in Australia and take home a positive view of the country after they had graduated, were considered a better option. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, it was the ALP who rejected motions to overturn its traditional commitment to White Australia. In 1958, the infamous dictation test, by which those considered unwelcome could be given a dictation test in any European language—a method that had been used to exclude the anti-Fascist campaigner Egon Kisch in the 1930s—was dropped. It had frequently been used to exclude Asians, and Kisch himself was notoriously given a dictation test in Erse, Scottish Gaelic.
There is no doubt that many British immigrants to Australia were attracted by White Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald of 17 October 1968 claimed that six British immigrant families out of ten gave fear of a colour problem as a major reason for leaving Britain. After being deposed as leader of the Australian Labor Party in favour of the former bomber navigator and barrister Gough Whitlam, Calwell would say that Perth was ‘already becoming the Durban of Australia’, and there was the prospect of ‘the creation of a chocolate-coloured Australia in the 1980s or the 2000s’.
FALLEN GIRLS
In Australia in the 1950s, Homes for Fallen Girls operated by Sisters of the Good Shepherd existed in every state, for example, at Abbotsford in Melbourne, Ashfield in Sydney, and Leederville in Perth. These were often country girls who had become pregnant and whose offspring had been delivered and put up for adoption. The ‘fallen girls’ themselves now worked in the home’s laundry, and it was said that ‘bad girls do the best sheets’.
Even as the ‘bad girls’ attended to hotel and other laundry, sometimes finding a tip in the crumpled linen that waiters had missed picking up, an American biologist named Gregory Pincus was one of many scientists working on a contraceptive pill, spurred on by a grant from a patron, Katharine McCormick, and a fellow activist, Margaret Sanger, who had seen her mother die prematurely after giving birth to eleven children.
The new contraceptive pill developed by Pincus was passed for use in the United States in 1960, and by 1963 over a million American women were taking it, despite its side-effects. The impact of the pill, for good or ill, could not be overstated. It made it possible for young women to treat sex as a recreation rather than a potential pregnancy. Women knew well, in every community, what unwanted pregnancy could bring: undesired marriage, running away to have the child, heinous methods of illegal abortion, medical peril, and the tag engraved over the door of the Ashfield Home—‘Fallen’.
In America the pill was not available to married women in all states until a decisive court judgment in 1965, and it would be longer still—1972—before it was available to unmarried women, who had nonetheless long since managed to get hold of it. Australia, in 1961, was the second country in the world to authorise prescription of the pill, for married women only. With the first prescription written, the pill became a focus of moral panic, gossip and ambition. Young feminist Anne Summers later wrote, ‘The word would go round and we’d flock to the medico who we’d heard would not give us a hard time for daring to ask for a script.’ (If university students became pregnant, said Summers, they would go to the university library and look up the telephone directory for the listings under medical practitioners. The names that were underlined—everyone knew this—would do abortions.) In 1961 a woman about to be married was given a prescription for a year’s supply of the pill, even though the quantities of hormones in the preparation were likely to cause nausea. As usage of the pill grew during the 1960s, there was the disadvantage that boys presumed every girl they met was on the pill and was thus available. Many girls were taking it but could not tell anyone they were. Pharmacology could not change age-old reticence.
Through the 1960s in Australia and elsewhere there was a heady season when the Vatican had not yet forbidden the pill outright; even though some Catholic clergy condemned it as permitting ‘public licence’, others allowed Catholic mothers to follow their conscience on it, and conscience was often taken by these women as code for common sense.
When, in 1968, Pope Paul VI brought down the encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning all contraception in all circumstances, many Australian Catholics abandoned the faith of their fathers. Even within Catholicism, many had already resolved the issue. The rigidly homogeneous church of the 1950s, in which the bishop was God’s voice and even more so the Papacy, was gone, and the proposition that conscience came before Papal magisterium was uttered widely by younger Catholics. By the time of Humanae Vitae, too, a young woman from Melbourne, Germaine Greer studying at Newnham College at Cambridge, was writing a thesis about feminism that would become a bestseller when published in 1970 as The Female Eunuch. Greer’s book would make an excoriating tract and confirm thoughts many women had been harbouring throughout the past decade.
Conservative people forgot that for much of the 1950s they were terrified of nuclear war and Asian malice, and now yearned for the supposed sexual serenity of that decade. The term ‘women’s liberation’ had already been let loose into the world’s discourse. Trade union activist Zelda D’Aprano, a former machinist and dental nurse who campaigned for equal pay throughout the 1960s, would draw attention to unequal pay and status by chaining herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne after the proposition was again rejected by the Arbitration and Conciliation Commission. R.J. Hawke, a young Rhodes scholar and larrikin orator, speaking on behalf of meatworkers, declared that the difference in men’s and women’s wages was a relic of ideas that existed at the beginning of the century. A few years later, Neville Wran QC would declare that ‘our society is now geared to a participation of women at all levels’.
In so far as that was true, the pill had been instrumental.
FREEDOM RIDES
In 1965, Charlie Perkins, a young Sydney Aboriginal student of Central Australian origins, son of an Aranda man and a Kalkadoon woman, and soon to be Australia’s first Aboriginal university graduate, an Australian representative soccer p
layer, and chairman of Student Action for Aborigines, initiated the idea of an Aboriginal Freedom Ride, inspired by the Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement in the US. A bus was chartered to carry forty-five young Aboriginal passengers through the west and north coast regions of New South Wales. Wellington, Dubbo, Walgett, Moree, Lismore and all communities southwards down the coast to Sydney, and an assessment was to be made by the riders as to Aboriginal housing, education, employment, health, and both European and Aboriginal attitudes. ‘We hope to visit, with the [Welfare] Board’s permission, all reserves plus missions, and town homes of Aboriginal people. We wish to view all facets of Aboriginal assimilation and accumulate statistical data on the same. We will be directed in this survey by the Reverend T.D. (Ted) Noffs, who did a similar survey in America.’ They proposed to integrate theatres, swimming pools and other venues that discriminated against Aboriginal people, and to do so along the moral suasion lines advocated by the Reverend Martin Luther King. ‘We merely wish to stimulate both Aboriginal and European townspeople into doing something practical themselves about the situation.’
One of the major stops on the Freedom Ride was Moree, where Perkins and his group, which included future Supreme Court judge Jim Spigelman, had come to point out discrimination that was both blatant and subtle. The school bus in Moree picked up white children first and delivered them to school, before then going out to the mission, collecting the Aboriginal kids and getting them late to their classrooms. In the afternoon the Aboriginal children left school early so that they could be dropped home before the end of classes. To a man like Perkins who cherished his education, this seemed indicative of coast-to-coast disadvantage for Aboriginal children.
The students’ group sought to persuade people to end discriminatory action of any kind, but especially at the swimming pool, where Aborigines were not admitted, even those who paid rates. The students caused the pool in Moree to be desegregated, but the visit had proved to be a bemusing and alienating experience for some townspeople. The day after the bus left, the segregation commenced again by order of the mayor. The students returned to town. It was a Saturday, and locals stoked their anger in the Moree pubs. Perkins later declared that the driver, a man named Packenham, had been the subject of threats, both personally and in relation to the bus itself, in a number of towns. (He would ultimately walk away from the bus at Grafton.) His sense of security was further eroded as his bus was pelted with eggs and rotten fruit as it pulled up outside the pool to pick up the students, who had blocked the entrance to the pool after they were refused permission to bring in nine Aboriginal children. A crowd of five hundred gathered around the students, shouting insults and throwing fruit, and the mayor, William Lloyd, grabbed three of the students by their shirts to present them to police. The crowd blockading the students who were in turn blockading the pool became sufficiently volatile for the police to need to escort the bus out of town.
The women members of the Freedom Party were generally put up by sympathetic residents in the towns they passed through, and so it was in Walgett in August, where the students attempted to break the colour bar in the luxury theatre. A number of students were arrested over the demonstration. They were released after four hours, and young non-Aboriginal people waiting outside the police station fed them hot Bonox and biscuits.
That night the colour bar at the cinema broke down and the Aborigines were admitted. But a crowd outside argued the issue for and against, and were joined at the interval by those who found what was happening outside more interesting than the motion pictures inside. The local head of the Aboriginal Progress Association, Harry Hall, thanked the police for protecting various students. The crowd dispersed and the colour bar in the luxury theatre was over.
An Aboriginal man in Walgett was emboldened by the breaking of the colour bar to make a speech to the crowd which exposed an issue that blighted every town with a reserve close at hand. ‘Listen! You whites come down to our camp and chase our young girls around at night! You were down there last night. I know you! I saw you last night . . . why don’t you go back and tell your wives where you’ve been. They’re over there in the crowd! Go on, go tell ’em. You there. You’re nothing but a gin jockey—yes you! And you! You were there a week ago! You have been going with my sister for two years in the dark! . . . Tell her about the little black baby boy you’ve given her.’
FAITH
Faith (Mussing) Bandler was a woman born at Tumbulgum on the far northern coastal strip of New South Wales, and she would become a potent advocate of the 1967 referendum to change two clauses of the Constitution, one which prevented Aborigines being counted in the census, and the other allowing the Federal government to legislate for Aborigines. To some these could seem modest changes, but Bandler and others saw them as the gateway to full rights.
Bandler’s father had been one of the imported ‘Kanakas’, indentured labourers brought from Vanuatu in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations. Subject to expulsion under the race legislation passed in the first session of the Federal Parliament, some hid and stayed on. Bandler’s father was one who did so, eventually marrying a Eurasian woman of Scots–Indian background. Contrary to common belief, Bandler was thus not an Aborigine but suffered from the same attitudes as they did. During World War II, after schooling in Murwillumbah, she joined the Australian Women’s Land Army, driving tractors, digging irrigation trenches, and fruit picking. After the war, by eloquence and force of character, she was given a job as a dressmaker at David Jones department store and became part of Sydney’s artistic and political circles.
In the 1949 federal election Bandler had campaigned for the feminist Jessie Street, who stood for the Labor Party in Wentworth. Street campaigned for equal pay for women, married or not, as a right as fundamental as that of men to sell their labour, and for the rights of women treated harshly under national security regulations if suspected to have venereal disease. Street was a formidable exemplar for any young woman. Bandler was also inspired by the strength of Pearl Gibbs, an Aboriginal woman from La Perouse. Born in 1901, the year of a Federation in which Aboriginal peoples were dealt out of the equation, Gibbs had founded the Aboriginal Progressive Association, had organised a strike by Aboriginal pea-pickers, and had been the first Aboriginal to speak on radio—about thwarted Aboriginal hopes.
Bandler worked with Jessie Street again in 1950 when she represented the supposed Communist-front Eureka Youth League at the Australian Peace Congress in Melbourne. She was an engaging speaker, and during a musical evening with the theme ‘Our Friends the Aboriginals’, she turned the motif of the evening on its head by speaking of ‘My friends, the Australians’. Bandler also danced with the Unity Dance Group at the International Youth Festival in Berlin. Even before the ship left Sydney the passport of one of the Aboriginal dancers had been stalled on a technicality and, on a protest organised by Gibbs, waterside workers refused to work until the missing document was produced. On Bandler’s arrival home early in 1952, not only were her recordings of the African–American basso Paul Robeson, who was a target of the McCarthyists, seized, but she and the dancer and science student Shirley Andrews had their passports confiscated, preventing them from leaving Australia for the next ten years. The dressmaking foreman at David Jones told her that he was not allowed to employ her again—a fine example of McCarthyism at work in Australia.
In 1956, Gibbs and Bandler founded the Australian Aboriginal Fellowship. In March 1957, Street for the first time suggested to them that they might change the Australian Constitution. A petition of ten thousand signatures was necessary to require Parliament to hold a referendum. The petition was launched at a concert where Pastor Doug Nicholls opened proceedings and the great Aboriginal tenor Harold Blair sang before an audience that included Dame Mary Gilmore. Blair’s life began at Cherbourg mission in Queensland, and when he sang on The Amateur Hour in 1945 he received a record number of votes. He went to America to study but many believed the cold of the American east coast wint
er changed his voice for the worse. Dame Joan Sutherland said that he went to America ‘singing like [Irish tenor] John McCormack’ and came back ‘without a middle register’. But he now had to undertake further formal studies before he could gain entry into the Melbourne Conservatorium. He performed to acclaim in Australia and Europe, but in between he taught singing, briefly managed an Aboriginal reserve and ran a service station. He was active in Labor politics and Aboriginal progress groups, and would perform well into the 1960s and die in the following decade.
The ten thousand signatures were gathered promptly and presented to Canberra, and Bandler’s immediate task in 1958 was to help establish a national organisation to promote the referendum for the campaign, the Federal Council for Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. She had a suspicion of the word ‘advancement’, however. ‘I am rather sorry that it has been used in various committees established to assist the Aboriginal people. I am not convinced that it is advancement for the indigenous Australians to become like the European Australians.’
Bandler was an effective champion of the referendum idea. She was softly spoken but highly determined and eloquent. She did not confront whites but held out a picture of blacks and whites living and working together. In cranky cars given to breakdowns, she travelled around New South Wales fundraising, and presented frequent petitions in the Senate chamber. She led a final deputation to Sir Robert Menzies on 11 November 1965, to protest the government’s failure to respond, and in such meetings, she was capable of matching Menzies’ flintiness. When Menzies retired two months later, the delegation was repeated with his successor, Harold Holt.
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