| Book Review | Labour History, 88 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard (eds), Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2003. pp. xii + 267. $38.95 paper.

David Goldsworthy (ed.), Facing North: a Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 1, 1901 to the 1970s, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2001. pp. xx + 523. $59.95 cloth, $36.30 paper.

These two books are very different takes on the question of the relationship of Australians to the world outside their borders and to ideas of race within. Legacies of White Australia, published following a 2001 symposium held at the University of Western Australia, claims as its provocation the Tampa episode, and its subject matter is ideas of race. There is current a renewed interest in versions of the history of White Australia. Keith Windschuttle has fed his recent and execrable offering The White Australia Policy into the media mill, and has been rewarded with substantial publicity. It is a pity that it is tiny minded polemics such as Windschuttle's, rather than the sort of thoughtful analysis that can be found in the pages of Legacies of White Australia, that captures the journalistic imagination. Nonetheless, such is the tide of battle in the culture wars that old foot-soldiers can wave old standards.

Legacies of White Australia assembles a range of distinguished and familiar academics that in general display a common shock at the moral turn of Australian politics. Ann Curthoys' 'Liberalism and Exclusionism: A Prehistory of the White Australia Policy' looks at the Janus face of liberalism and the tradition of exclusion in a liberal democratic society, drawing parallels between the Tampa episode and the exclusion of indentured Chinese and Indian labourers, and, later, Chinese gold seekers. David Walker, author of the stylish and entertaining Anxious Nation, takes up his earlier theme of national phobia and paranoia, and appraises the appeal of White Australia to writers and intellectuals, and the necessary changes in the rhetorical defence of Australia over time — abandoning, Walker quotes a 1930s author, the stupid nomenclature of White Australia, though not the policy itself. Sean Brawley puts Australian racism and refugee policy in a regional context, and concludes along the way that it is hardly likely that Australia's refugee policy (and presumably the rhetoric and drama that it carries with it) will be heavily influenced by significant criticism from neighbours in Asia — principally because Australia's so-called refugee crisis is histrionic nonsense compared to the situation in our region — or allies elsewhere — who are joining in the construction of the apparatus of deterrence. Given this, Brawley concludes that, if Australian policy is to change, it won't be because of international pressure, but because of domestic force — and the influence of progressive thought in Australia is probably, Brawley assesses, at its lowest ebb in the history of this nation.

The scope of the articles reflects the fact that the White Australia Policy was constituted by more than just a series of legislative restrictions on immigration. Ien Ang writes on the persistence of cultural anxiety and its role in the new conservatism, Gavin Jones on population change and the links with changing bases for national identity, and Alastair Davidson on democratic mechanisms for inclusion in a globalised world. Hilary Carey contributes a chapter on the role of religion in the federation movement and the construction of White Australia. Kim Rubenstein reflects on notions of citizenship and the manner in which the omission of a discussion of citizenship in the Australian Constitution has shaped the development of legal and normative notions of membership of the Australian community. Andrew Markus writes on the politics of race at large, detailing the assembly and disintegration of the White Australia Policy, before turning to the breaching of the bipartisan accord on Aboriginal affairs, immigration and multiculturalism by John Howard in the late 1980s, and its shattering a decade later. Robert Manne reflects on the current self-absorption of western societies and the moral lethargy of Australian opinion. Manne recounts Australian post-war generosity towards refugees — in the case of refugees from Eastern Europe and from Indochina, and from Chile or Central America or East Timor — and ascribes it to the ideological setting of the Cold War. In the past, such refugees had strong support from within the Australian community, on the Left or the Right, depending upon their source and who they were fleeing. Now, Manne contends, refugee supporters are limited to isolated individuals and human rights advocates, who cannot withstand the populist tides.

The equation looks grim. Manne perhaps best symbolises the reeling horror of the more humane Australia at the turn of national politics centred on the Tampa. At least in this volume they may exercise their prerogative to preserve the political authors of that blighted episode in infamy. Legacies of White Australia contains a moral rejoinder to the turn of national politics, and is an effective pre-emptive strike on works like that of Keith Windschuttle.

Facing North: a Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 1, 1901 to the 1970s, is a solid narrative history that pays occasional homage to the role of the politics of race in Australian policy, but more usually occupies the traditional territory of foreign policy history. Facing North has already been the subject of some unkind treatment in a review that complains, among other things, that it persists in them-and-us colonialism and is foisted upon us by economists endorsed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

This is spurious and ad hominem criticism — the book is what it is and its principal interest is what it uncovers from the official files and from private collections, which this volume proceeds to deal with systematically and adequately. It is a robust history of considerable breadth and scope, and it features contributors and editors invested with far more academic authority than such a complaint reflects. These include editor David Goldsworthy and major contributions from David Dutton, Shannon L. Smith, Christopher Waters, David Lee, Moreen Dee, Peter Gifford, and Roderic Pitty. They represent the most recently established generation of Australian foreign policy analysts and historians.

There is an extensive use of archived official records of the Department of External Affairs, Defence, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet that are now open for the entire period under review in this first volume. These sources are treated thoughtfully, and given occasional wider context by reference to political and social attitudes, although this is by no means a preoccupation of the study. There are useful insights into departmental dynamics and foreign policy development. There are some very handy appendices of Prime Ministers, and Ministers and Departmental Secretaries in areas related to external affairs and trade. There are immigration and trade statistics, and a rather useful chronology of events. There is also, unusually but very usefully, an appendix of Australian diplomatic and consular appointments in Asia, and of Asian diplomatic and consular representation in Australia.

It is perhaps a little less colourful than a history of Australian engagement with Asia from the start of the century might be — and there are quite enough acts of dubious merit and shady intent to make such a history colourful indeed. But it is an official history, and will provide a useful reference tool for students and for academics.

While the volume labels itself 'a Century of Australian Engagement with Asia', it happily does not become bogged down in pontificating about the nature of engagement, and whether engagement or enmeshment or involvement or any other descriptor that gets brought into the fray is a useful conceptual tool when appraising Australia's relations with Asia over the last century. David Goldsworthy and Roderic Pitty, summing up, announce that 'Australian approaches to Asia were not just a function of larger forces, but also an expression of Australian interest, and hence, in this key respect, a willed process'.

Willed, and, one might add, contingent on a particular set of personalities that willed such approaches. You can adduce some of the influence of the force of personality in Australian approaches to Asia in the last century — for good or for ill — in this book. A full appreciation, though, of the flavour of personality in this level of politics, from the subtle to the ludicrous, awaits a less scrupulously objective analysis.


Sydney	DAVID AYRES

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