Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Or have they changed? Few would dispute that if Australia ever wants to enjoy a degree of respect in the western Pacific commensurate with its wealth and power, it has to be taken seriously by its neighbors. Most especially by its Asian neighbors, those who inhabit a vast slew of north-running countries from New Guinea up to Siberia, by way of Indonesia and Indochina, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China itself. For many years, that had not been the case at all: Australia was regarded principally as a source of minerals, little more than an immense quarry, and was much caricatured as such, as an uncultured, socially conservative, unsympathetic, misogynistic, and racist outpost of the British Empire.

  Geographically and geologically, and with its own distinct and ancient native anthropology, Australia is properly and undeniably a component of Asia. Yet in societal terms, and as reflected in its press and by way of its politicians until as recently as the 1970s, it seemed to see itself differently—not as part of the East at all, having made no serious attempt ever to be so, and with the great majority of its people shuddering at the thought of ever becoming so.

  It was the country’s infamous White Australia immigration policy that first set the tone. Laws were enacted in 1901, from the country’s very beginnings as an independent federation, to protect it from Asians, “from the coloured races which surround us, and which are inclined to invade our shores.” The whites-only policy was declared by its supporters to be the nation’s Magna Carta, the ultimate shield that would prevent the country from being “engulfed in an Asian tidal wave.”

  This was motivated by fear, of course. It was much the same fear as was enacted on the American side of the Pacific, and that hastened the passage of the various exclusion acts that kept “Orientals” so firmly at bay in California and beyond. Fear of the Chinese among Australian miners who couldn’t dig as fast or as furiously. Fear of the Pacific Islanders who would work in the cane fields of Queensland for much lower pay than their white counterparts. Fear of the Filipinas who might launder the linens and cook the pork stews with more alacrity and eagerness than would the ladies from Ireland and South Wales. Fear of the Indians and Malays who could labor on the stations of the outback with far less complaint about the heat than the wild but pale-skinned Australian boys whose ancestors had emigrated from English cities such as London, Leeds, and Liverpool.

  Wars with the Japanese hardly helped. The original act that had been passed after the First World War was to be hailed by successive immigration ministers as “the greatest thing we have ever achieved,” and in keeping out nonwhites (Japanese now most especially), it seemed an even more blessed creation at the start of the Second. The prime minister of the day backed the policy wholeheartedly: “This country shall remain forever,” he declaimed, “the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.”

  The Labour Party, purportedly the champion of the working man, turned out to be the most vocal in keeping Australia as pure as pure could be. “Two Wongs don’t make a White,” said a Labour Party immigration minister in 1947. Under the strictly enforced rules, no madmen could come in, no one afflicted by an illness “of loathsome or dangerous character,” no prostitutes, no criminals; nor could any “Asiatics” or any “coloureds” enter, either; and for good measure, no one who failed a written dictation test, an examination that could be given to an unwary applicant at a moment’s notice, and in the language (not necessarily English) of the immigration officer’s spontaneous choice. Sometimes the officer would, for his own amusement, choose to have his applicant write out the test in Gaelic, to be quite certain of a ban.

  This couldn’t last, of course, this fantastic notion of keeping Australia an antipodean refuge for snow-white Britons, for simon-pure Englishmen. Soon after the end of the Second World War, when war brides began knocking at the country’s doors, they were opened a crack, and somewhat reluctantly, to some of the swarthier-looking Europeans: Greeks and Italians at first. They soon came in waves, found the climate and the scenery and the city life much to their liking, and were publicly welcomed in return to a far greater degree than the politicians had supposed. Melbourne in particular soon became the most populous Greek city outside Greece. And these immigrants were well liked. “Better a dark-skinned Greek than a Japanese,” one historian commented.

  Then, in the 1960s, the Japanese and the Chinese started being allowed in, too—“distinguished and highly qualified Asians” only, at first; then, as these bellwether arrivals were found acceptable, the restrictions were eased still further. Before long, members of the Oriental races who were vaguely described as “well-qualified” could apply to enter, too. And then, by 1973, Gough Whitlam, as part of his abruptly instituted reform program, ended all such restrictions. The dictation test had already been scrapped. The degrees of qualification were now dropped. The question of an applicant’s race vanished from the forms.

  All who now wanted to come, and who met the none-too-strict criteria of entry, were welcome to apply. The seventy-year-old White Australia policy was swept into history. The country now became, and in short order, a great multicultural experiment. A country first manufactured as the colony of interloping white men could now reinvent itself as a brand-new community born of the entire world. It was a locally novel type of national entity, a western Pacific version of two tried-and-tested equivalents—Canada and the United States—on the ocean’s faraway east coast. All three experiments were at last joined to an ocean that was now fast turning itself into a test bed, a place where the future of human society would begin to be charted. The U.S. president Bill Clinton seemed to understand this when he came to Sydney in 1996: “I cannot think of a better place in the entire world, a more shining example of how people can come together as one nation and one community.”

  It was quite an endorsement. Except that inside Australia, there were still legions of highly vocal opponents of any policies like this, policies that might draw the country more closely, as they saw it, into Asia’s too foreign maw. Some of the shriller of these have adamantly refused to quiet themselves, to accept the realities of change. They have on occasion managed to tap into an alarming groundswell of very ugly popular opinion, and by doing so have managed to set back somewhat Australia’s gathering reputation as a fully functioning member of a new pan-Pacific society.

  Pauline Hanson is perhaps the most egregious recent example. This was a lady who came to brief prominence in the autumn of 1996, on the heels of a savage outbreak of race rioting that briefly convulsed the country. She was a twice-divorced mother of four, of very limited education, and the owner of a fish-and-chip shop near Brisbane—who yet managed to win election to the federal parliament in Canberra on a platform of undiluted racism and xenophobia. Her views were primitive, direct, and aimed at readily identifiable targets, both at home and overseas.

  The aboriginals who lived among her own people were bad enough—they were a lazy, ill-disciplined, and grubby population of hard drinkers who, according to a book to which she gladly put her name soon after she won her seat in Parliament, ate their own babies and regularly cannibalized one another. Yet they were handed privileges in abundance, and they vacuumed up public money that should by rights have been spent on “mainstream Australians.”

  Her views were no less sparing of peoples living beyond Australia’s coasts: she was especially contemptuous toward the Asians to her north:

  “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians,” she told Parliament in a truly splenetic inaugural address—in which she could say as she wished quite uninterrupted, as one of the courtesies that is customarily accorded to a maiden speech. “Between 1984 and 1995, 40 percent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, they form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist, but if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.


  “A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united. . . . The world is full of failed and tragic examples, ranging from Ireland to Bosnia to Africa and, closer to home, Papua New Guinea. America and Great Britain are currently paying the price. . . . It is a pity that there are not men of . . . stature sitting on the opposition benches today. . . . Japan, India, Burma, Ceylon and every new African nation are fiercely anti-white and anti one another. Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no, and who speaks for 90 percent of Australians.”

  For a short while her message won a great deal of domestic traction. She wanted Australia out of the United Nations, a total end to Australian foreign aid, and, as her career progressed, ever-harsher limits on nonwhite immigration. The newspapers splashed her over the front pages for weeks. The popular Australian art form of talk-back radio was dominated by her, even though she had a voice that was as penetrating as a dentist’s drill. Television interviewers managed to find Mrs. Hanson Sr., who, over sweet tea and sticky buns, voiced her own fear, evidently inculcated in her daughter, that “the yellow races will one day rule the world.”

  They also found Hanson’s senior adviser and speechwriter, and wondered why, as a man named Pascarelli, he should be so vehemently opposed to immigration. His answer was glib: “I was de-wogged.” And when Mrs. Hanson was asked if she was xenophobic, her lack of schooling offered up a reply, made after a brief and bewildered silence, of studied artlessness: “Please explain.”

  But neither did her political opponents do much to advance the standing of Australia to the outside world, which watched bemused, even appalled. During a heated television discussion about why aboriginals had an alcohol problem, a well-meaning political critic demanded of Mrs. Hanson if she knew who the world’s greatest drunks happened to be? She didn’t. “White Australians,” he declared. “The biggest drunks ever known.” The notion that twenty-first-century Australia might ever revert to its old idea of keeping Asians at bay, while at the same time taking pride in a permanent national inebriation, caused a wave of shame to engulf the continent.

  Which is perhaps why, by the turn of the millennium, the phenomenon of Pauline Hanson had begun to fizzle away. The country seemed swiftly to weary of her. She started to lose elections, then she lost money, and she went briefly to prison on fraud charges, though she was acquitted on appeal and released.

  She tried hard to turn such occurrences to her political advantage. During her rise to prominence, she frequently claimed to have survived a childhood of “hard knocks”—and these new stumblings, she claimed, were just more of the same. Her remaining supporters found the suggestion engaging, as endearing evidence of her humanity. So, after only a brief hiatus, she was back in the running, and today she is still present, a slowly dimming star in the country’s political firmament, her drill-bit voice little more than background noise. But all the while, her political views have managed to hold the attention of not a few Australian voters, and so long as they do so, they manage, if unwittingly, to dull some of the luster of her country’s otherwise brightening public image.

  Australia’s current harsh treatment of asylum seekers, most particularly those who attempt to come from Asia by boat, has served only further to damage this image of regional congeniality. The country’s current stand toward those would-be migrants hoping for safety and protection is that it will detain anyone who comes into its waters in the hope of refuge. No matter how violent the war back home, or how harsh the regime you are escaping, or how severe your risk of persecution, or how desperate your voyage—if you arrive by boat in “the lucky country”9 without a valid visa, you will be locked up. Where you will go, under what conditions, and for how long are the only variables—and in recent years, the world’s human rights community has declared itself, over and over again, deeply troubled at the manner in which Australia, now essentially alone in the democratic world, has been dealing with what its politicians see as an intractable problem.

  Boats laden with hungry, sick, frightened people, fleeing from a variety of conflicts and inhospitable situations in a variety of Asian nations, have been arriving in Australian waters since the mid-1970s, when the Communist takeover at the end of the Vietnam War first caused flotillas of crowded, unseaworthy, near-sinking vessels to set sail into the relative freedom of the South China Sea. For five subsequent years, the exodus of such Vietnamese went on. Most sought asylum in Hong Kong, nearby, or slightly farther away, in the Philippines. But the braver souls, or those in better-equipped boats, managed to navigate their way through the mess of Indonesian islands to the northern coast of Australia. The Canberra government of the day—Malcolm Fraser’s post-Dismissal government, as it happens—took a kindly view: more than fifty thousand were admitted. Then the situation in Vietnam eased, and the country’s frontiers were more keenly guarded. The boats stopped leaving. The South China Sea stilled. The Hong Kong camps were emptied. The coastal waters off Darwin and Cairns and Broome quieted. The problem, so far as Australia was concerned, seemed to be over.

  But not for long. In 1989 it all started up again, this time with Indonesians, fleeing from poverty, dictatorship, and summary justice—or else making a quick run across the Arafura Sea in the hope of a better and more prosperous life. Or else they were Papuans trying to make it across the Torres Strait for much the same reason. Or else Afghans or Pakistanis, Burmese or Cambodians. Australia was to such people so close, so very tempting, so empty, so rich, so clearly in need of those who could, and would be willing to, work.

  Invariably by now the fleeing thousands had the help (bought at great cost) of gangs of “snakeheads,” the people smugglers eager to cash in on those impoverished Asians desperate to get to the bright lights and big opportunities of Australia. But this time Australia reacted, harshly. It had no room for more, it said; Australian workers were bitterly complaining about the low-cost newcomers who were now plundering their jobs. The detention policies that still exist today—draconian, harsh, criticized—were slowly and steadily brought into force. And since that time, with the policies and their manner of implementation ebbing and flowing and shape-shifting as the various governments in Canberra have changed their views, so the matter of dealing with arriving boat people has proved to Australia a practical and humanitarian challenge without end or answer.

  A so-called Pacific Solution was brought into force in 2001. It ebbed and flowed and shape-shifted, too; and though it now has an extra aspect with an extra name, Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia’s Pacific Solution remains, in essence, the policy of today.

  Under its rubric, three island camps were opened to accommodate the hopeful masses, and all remain busily active today. One is on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Two others are on foreign-owned islands, and the Australians pay to have them there. One is in Papua New Guinea, on the Admiralty Island of Manus, which was made briefly famous by Margaret Mead, who lived in its rain forests after World War II. The other is on the former phosphate-rich equatorial Pacific island of Nauru, which in the 1960s claimed to be the richest per capita state on the planet, but which is now a devastated wreck—a played-out environmental disaster zone; an independent state associated mainly with flagrant corruption, money laundering, a population of nine thousand, and, in recent years, the third of the Australian detention centers for would-be immigrants.

  The camps in all three sites are dreadful and dismal places, filled to bursting with Afghans and Tamils and Pakistanis and Syrians fleeing from war zones or from the Taliban or from ISIL or from a host of other despots and desperadoes. All the incarcerated, some held for the many years that it now takes to process their applications for Australian residency (which most likely will be denied), took months to find their way to this place. Most of them fled first to Indonesia, waiting for countless months in dreadful conditions, before taking to the sea and to what all hoped might be the sanctuary of Australian waters. But there, instead, were the eve
r-watchful ships from the Australian navy, determined to prevent them with force from ever reaching Australian territory and thereby being able to claim refugee status.

  I was in Darwin in the November summer of 2014; and all the local talk was about the customs boats that left the little port, their crews scanning the hammered-pewter surface of the sea, looking for the tiny and barely seaworthy craft that had come down from Java or Sulawesi or the Banda Islands, and intercepting them and brusquely scooping up their passengers. They would take them on next to Manus or Nauru—or even to Christmas Island, which the Canberra government had, with Orwellian cunning, deaccessioned, ensuring that any migrant who managed to land on its shores could not claim to have landed on Australian soil. Christmas Island was indeed, legally and constitutionally, still sovereign Australian territory—except, technically, for the sole purposes of immigration, when it is deemed to be a foreign place.

  Not that landing on Christmas Island was ever easy. In December 2010 a boat crashed into the cliffs of the island’s Flying Fish Cove, tossing scores of its passengers into the raging waters. Forty-eight of them died, their drownings witnessed by hundreds ashore. It was a dreadful tragedy—yet the Australian government simply used it as justification for the national policy of prohibiting boats from trying to reach land. Keeping the boats away would prevent disasters like this from happening again, the government said. Interception by armed warships was for the refugees’ own good.

  The Christmas Island tragedy of 2010 served to diminish still further the luster of Australia as a would-be model member of the western Pacific’s Asian community. Canberra’s immigration minister of the time hardly helped when he complained publicly upon learning that his own government had paid for some family members to attend the funerals of the victims. When asked if he thought it was heartless to complain that a man who had lost his wife and two young children to the sea had been given a compassionate flight to the graveside, the minister went on the radio to declare that the cost of the man’s flight was unreasonable. Few thought the minister anything other than entirely pitiless.