Of the inhabited continents of the world,
Australasia is the least developed and the most
empty of people. The Aborigines had been build-
ing their lives and culture for millennia when, in
the late eighteenth century, settlement from
Britain began and progressively dispossessed them
of their lands. Regarded as little more than
savages, exploited and treated at best like chil-
dren, they lived an existence that was marginalised
until the third quarter of the twentieth century.
Gough Whitlam, the Labor prime minister, in
1972 condemned Australian racism: ‘Australia’s
treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the
thing upon which the rest of the world will judge
Australia and Australians – not just now but in
the greater perspective of history.’ But the
Aborigine voice of protest is not strong enough
to have made much impression on the world.
Before the European came there were, accord-
ing to rough estimates, between 300,000 and
400,000 Aborigines; by 1961 it was estimated
that only 40,000 had survived. No one could
judge their precise numbers because they were
not included in the census before 1967. They
posed no threat to white Australia. The menace
Australians felt came from outside the continent.
The geographical position of Australia at the
‘edge’ of Asia did much to shape the outlook of
Australians during the twentieth century. Asia,
with its poverty-stricken teeming millions loomed
menacingly over its southern neighbour, with its
tiny and comparatively prosperous white popula-
tion of some 7 million in all in 1945, largely of
British stock, few of whom inhabited the northern
half. Could Australia survive as a ‘white’ outpost of
civilisation? That was the burning question. For
Australians a civilised culture was a Western cul-
ture, the preferred ‘race’ people of British descent.
In the nineteenth century there had been some
Chinese immigration and labour had been
brought in from the Pacific islands. The number
of these workers, however, remained small, and
they mostly remained aliens with little defence
against deportation. In 1901, immediately after
Australia had ceased to be a colony and become
a self-governing federal commonwealth, signifi-
cantly the issue of paramount concern was immi-
gration. The Immigration Act of that year was
enacted to keep out ‘undesirables’; that included
all ‘non-Europeans’, as the official phrase went,
though the immigration programme is better
known as the ‘white Australia’ policy. Even after
large-scale immigration from Britain and Ireland,
from 1909 to 1913 and from 1921 to 1925, the
population of Australia during the Second World
War had reached only 7 million.
Before the Second World War Australia was
still closely tied to Britain, and not only by com-
mon bonds of origin. As a member of the empire
and Commonwealth, Australia’s trade in wool and
other rural products enjoyed their main market in
Britain. British industry supplied most of its
imports. For defence, Australia looked to Britain
too. When Britain went to war in 1914 and 1939,Chapter 60
THE PROSPEROUS PACIFIC RIM II
AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND