“The White Australia Policy”

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, 01 January 2005 12:40.

Keith Windshuttle‘s new book “The White Australia Policy” is not going to make the big splash his work on the British colonisation of Tasmania has had. There Windschuttle more or less single handedly overturned the established wisdom on Tasmanian frontier history and rammed home his argument with repeated volleys of documentary evidence, something he shows time and time again his targets either don’t have or frankly distort. Windschuttle’s big splash is not going to be overturned by his critics. They were caught with their pants down. Their collective embarassment and outraged response probably has more to do with the full glare exposure of their professional laziness and competence than with their ideological blinkers.

Unfortunately this book won’t have the same impact. Instead it is more like a handful of stones thrown into a larger pond, each with it’s own splash and overlapping wavelets. In contrast the Tasmanian book dropped a boulder into a birdbath. This book however discusses issues that impact ordinary Australians where they live.

One thing you won’t find in “White Australia Policy” is a defence of the White Australia Policy, although I am sure Windschuttle’s typically intellectually lazy critics would have certainly jumped to that conclusion before they opened the book. Windschuttle says the White Australia Policy (WAP) is nothing for modern Australians to be proud of, or ashamed of either. Windschuttle does not debate the merits or demerits of the policy, just the historical debate around it.

He looks at the oft repeated claim that the WAP represented the triumph of “Social Darwinism” and associated scientific racialism. Whatever appeal this analysis has to modern critics, few late 19th century Australians were particularly interested in Darwinism, social or otherwise. In fact darwinism of all sorts, unlike Darwin himself, was a latecomer to our shores. Apart from the intelligentsia, social darwinism just did not have the popular appeal. Recently controversial Novelist Robert Crichton hits the nail on the head in the appendix to his “State Of Fear” when he compares “Global Warming” today to “Social Darwinism” a century ago. Both were the scientistic dogmas du jour. However we live in the age of The Discovery Channel so these things naturally have a wider currency. If there was any group interested in social darwinism it was the newly minted late 19th century radical socialist movement, atheists and agnostics keen to establish their “scientific” credentials and thus distance themselves from the earlier Christian socialist movements.

Windschuttle’s critics will say he is falsely portraying colonial Australians as racial egalitarians. Nonsense. Insofar as 19th century Australians believed any kind of hierarchical ordering of mankind, it was not the racial hierarchies of the scientifics. More influential was the Scottish Enlightenment and it’s hierarchy of “economic cultures”, with hunters and herders, as usual, at the bottom, agrarians in between, and commercial civilization on top. Unlike the later more static ‘scientific’ racialist dogmas this hierarchy saw transition through these levels as difficult, but not impossible. The scientific racialists were less forgiving.

Windschuttle uses the term “racist” throughout his book. It would seem to me that the older distinction, now unfashionable, of “racialism” and “racism” makes for more accurate tracking of contending arguments in works of this type.

Windschuttle does find the evidence of racialist dogma, most strongly among the republicans and socialists of “The Bulletin” crowd, those urban intellectuals who fancied themselves as radical “bushmen” nationalists and anti-imperialists. This finding will not come as a shock to many Australians but Windschuttle does argue this group was much less influential than most modern accounts assert. He uses comparative circulation figures to dispell the myth. Most Australians urban and rural, working and middle class, just weren’t reading what these alienated radicals were writing. Their paens to bush nationalism were about as (un-)popular as the old leftie “Nation Review” was in the 1970s. Just as ordinary Australians simply ignored the Bulletin-ites republican doctrines, so why should they support their racialist ones? The more prominent British Empire ethos and evangelical Christian views were not perfect, but it was much more open minded and ‘modern’ on racial issues than the self styled avante guard radical republicans were.

Our modern intellectuals have focused myopically on their Bulletin-ite forebears . So the racialist dogma of this crowd looks bigger in the microscope than it really was. With all this intellectual navel gazing going on it doesn’t take too much thinking to see the ideological motivation behind their sexing up of the social darwinist bogeyman. Windschuttle doesn’t say this, but social darwinism is a furphy, used by modern critics to distract attention from rampant racialism of the radical socialists. Their modern followers need to throw up a roadblock. Social darwinism is usually thought of as a vice of the capitalistic inclined classical liberals, and so it was for some of them. Few non-specialists are aware of the later and altogether more sinister collectivist variants of social darwinism. Our myopic gurus are content to find social darwinism and thus blame the whole mess on the classical liberals. Of course not all classical liberals were social darwinists. The myopes somehow forget to mention that it was the liberal free traders, usually painted with the social darwinist brush, who were, in fact, the main historical opponents of White Australia restrictionism.

Indeed if you dig beyond Windschuttle you’ll find that the prototypical liberal-cum-social-darwinist, Herbert “survival of the fittest” Spencer, actually rejected most of the unsavoury policy positions (eugenics, imperialism etc) usually associated with social darwinism. He put his liberalism before his darwinism. In contrast socialist heroes, like the early Fabians and Bertrand Russell, had no such qualms. They were keen about the whole damn lot. To this day Spencer is being pilloried for crimes he did not advocate, yet the real villains get off scott free. Not all social darwinists are cremated equal.

Windschuttle also examines the role of the organised labour movement, which since the 1970s has been painted as racist by it’s New Left critics. This section is fascinating as he goes beyond the usual focus on immigration restrictions as a form of economic protectionism. They were certainly that, but there were related issues about the dignity of labour, democratic / egalitarian culture and the impact of the Coolie labour system. He looks at the cultural / political / economic forces at work in China that were exporting workers across the Pacific.

He shows how the now common left-liberal argument that 19th century unionists should merely have recruited the Chinese into their unions, rather than demanded exclusion, as incredibly nieve. It’s a “let them eat cake” argument. The cultural gap between the working class Chinese and the unionists was too great, many Chinese were sojourners not settlers, so their incentives were different. Many worked in Australia to pay off debts to landlords that kept family members back home as human collateral. Australian unionists did make some attempts to organise Chinese labour but it was not a winning strategy. A modern interventionist state would have a panopoly of regulatory devices and ILO treaties to fight these kind of practices, not so 19th century Australia. The modern critics want to have their cake and eat it too. They either have to give the Coolie system the good historians’ seal of approval or perhaps extend some empathy to the exclusivist agenda of the unionists.

Windschuttle examines the massive parliamentary debates at the time of the adoption of the White Australia by the new federal parliament. Both the free trade and protectionist parties were vying for the support of the Labourites, who controlled the cross benches. The strongest and most consistent opponents were the free traders. The protectionists were in a stronger position. The Labourites were distinguished by their stronger exclusionism and by the increasingly racist tone of their arguments. The non-labourites for the most part were less racist, some anti-racist. Thanks to the influence of The Bulletin-ites, labour’s position had hardened from earlier economic exclusionism to become more racist over the last decades of the 19th century.

On the way Windschuttle introduces us to Adela Pankhurst, English suffragette Emily Pankhurst’s daughter, the socialist and feminist doyen of the colonies. She argued loudly that white womanhood was at risk from the Asiatics. My guess is that modern feminists won’t like to be reminded of her. Usually this sort of nonsense is blamed on patriarchial anxieties not socialist feminist propaganda.

The book explores the myth of “blackbirding”, the alleged enslavement of South Sea Islanders. This was quite new to me, blackbirding has been exploded as a folk myth by academic researchers decades ago. The debunking still hasn’t had any popular circulation, owing to sensitivities within the Melanesian community. The claims for blackbirding essentially have no historical credibility.

Windschuttle briefly discusses the survival of this folk myth amongst Melanesian Australians but doesn’t discuss the utility this myth may have had in supporting the whole White Australia Policy edifice among the general population. This myth may have given the policy the false air of social reform.

Public Choice economists are used to seeing do gooders acting as unpaid frontmen for vested interests. And mythologising, and the exploitation of mythology, is not uncommon in the government regulation business. For example, “the Thalidomide tragedy” is still used to justify drug industry regulation, despite massive evidence assembled by researchers such as Sam Peltzman that the longer lead times regulatory regimes impose on new drug launches lead to more deaths than they prevent. Similarly the economic case against minimum wage laws struggles in vain against populist Dickensian mythology. Maybe the blackbird myth has some of this kind of self justification to it. White Australia was heralded as a reform to a problem that didn’t exist. We have heard that before.

Windschuttle points to the gross injustice that the new federal government imposed on the Melanesian immigrant community with their mass deportations in the first decade of the Commonwealth.

Other byways in Windschuttle’s book include race relations in Northern Australia. He looks at recent authors who have painted the north as a racially harmonious experiment poisoned only by the presence of racist whites. The “rainbow North” myth overlooks some of the worst and bloodiest race riots in Australian history, between Japanese and Timorese in Broome. With historians of race relations ferreting out “implicit racism” under ever stone, isn’t this an uncomfortable example? Why do they think Asian lives less important? Windschuttle is too polite to give these myopic critics a taste of their own medicine.

He looks at the “Yellow Peril” and Japanese scares at the turn of the century. There was certainly some scare factor at work, but Windschuttle says we need to recognise that there were legitimate security concerns as well. Prophecies of Japanese expansionism were premature not paranoid. Something modern critics overlook.

Windschuttle finds no deep rooted anchor for the White Australia Policy within the heart of Australian culture. The policy arose and survived as it suited a shifting coalition of politicians and labour interests. It’s rootlessness meant that killing it off was surprisingly easy and relatively painless. There is no need to hypothesise some great seachange in Australian sociology. Modern advocates for the success of multiculturalism have to posit a racist people becoming wonderfully cosmopolitan and open minded all in a short decade or so. Yet the opinion polls clearly show Australians circa 1996 actually more opposed to immigration than those of 1950.

All told an interesting excursion into a century of Australian history and a valuable starting point for those wanting to dig further. My guess is that an aging generation of leftist university tutors will find their student critics throwing sections from this book at them. God bless ‘em.

Tags: Australian Politics

Comments:

Posted by Arcane on Sat, 01 Jan 2005 21:18 | #

Well, Windschuttle isn’t done yet. He is getting ready to publish the second volume of his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and has just completed the third volume. The White Australia Policy book was merely a detour, because he saw it as a rather pressing issue that needed to be debunked.

The outrage at his first Fabrication book was amazing. The National Interest published a review of it, and here’s a part from it:

“ONE MIGHT have hoped that the academic response would be more measured. In fact it was pathetic, but it has an interest that goes beyond the primitive Tasmanians. It goes to the question of how postmodernist historians, who deny there is any one truth about the past, behave when they are accused of telling untruths. Like any other reasonable human being in an argument, they must want to say they are right and the other fellow wrong, but their philosophy forbids that. One replied to Windschuttle,

For us the “truth” is made up of countless contradictory, ironic and provocative elements, woven together into an allegorical, sometimes fictive documentation of what it is to live our lives.

In other words, “No facts please, we’re postmodernists!” Charged by Windschuttle with fabricating history, Professor Lyndall Ryan retorted that history was

a complex terrain in which multiple stories and interpretations are represented [and not] a one-dimensional discipline in which all ambiguity must be removed…. Two truths are told, is only one truth correct?

Asked about her fanciful black death tolls in Tasmania, she said, “Yes, but historians are always making up figures.”

Posted by Arcane on Sat, 01 Jan 2005 21:28 | #

And I forgot to say… what a fantastic post. Good show Tim.

One other thing: Windschuttle doesn’t believe races exist. So don’t expect him to make a differentiation between a racialist and a racist, like David Horowitz did with Jared Taylor.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 01:01 | #

One thing that’s important to remember is that Keith Windschuttle identifies himself as being within a particular liberal intellectual tradition which he calls “The Sydney Line”.

He writes that the Sydney Line “favours multiracialism but not multiculturalism” and “has always preferred internationalism to nationalism”.

So he is no conservative. I think it would be fair to describe him as a “right liberal”. Certainly, in his work on Aborigines he is typically right liberal in two respects. First, he rejects the left liberal insistence on always portraying whites as oppressors and Aborigines as victims. Second, he favours the assimilation of Aborigines into the mainstream.

His book on the fabrication of Aboriginal history is terrific and really has muted some of the more outlandish attacks on the record of white settlement.

I haven’t had a chance yet to read his latest book on the WAP. From Tim’s description, though, it will be a realistic account.

It’s true, for instance, that it was the more radical “bush” nationalists who were most race-conscious, though the early labor movement was also influenced by working class feeling on the issue.

That’s one reason why the 1930s were such a turning point in Australia’s history. It was about this time that Marxist intellectuals began to dominate the left in Australia, so there was no longer any effective opposition to those who wanted open borders.

Finally, the arguments about the WAP are still acutely relevant to today’s Australia. A regional development board wants to bring 10,000 Chinese workers into Australia (it would have been called coolie labour in the nineteenth century). The union concerned has spoken out about the undermining of the local workforce.

This time, without the protection of the WAP, an entire local workforce may be put out of business.

Posted by Tim on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 01:12 | #

In reply to Arcane’s comment:

Aw shucks, I’m blushing.

Well I had a go at a review of Volume 1 of Windschuttle’s “Fabrication” that is on-line at http://personalindependenceday.blogspot.com/2004/08/heart-attack-of-yellow-bellies.html

What struck me about the academic response to it was that it reflected the same research incompetence Windschuttle targeted in his book.

I am but a mere home hacker with a real job, not a tenured academic. But none of them seem to have noticed that Windschuttle sees himself within the John Anderson Sydney University ‘libertarian’ tradition. Anderson who was both a left wing and later a right wing nonconformist believed it was the intellectual’s role to challenge. Anderson was the only philosophy professor personally censured by an Australian parliament (NSW). That was for his ‘war idols’ paper, published in the 30s (?), condemning war memorials.

Windschuttle’s “Sydneyline” website makes the Anderson connection quite up front, yet none of our academics or other paid pundits seem to have noticed.

As for the racism/racialism distinction, even if you don’t believe races exist, this way of categorising ideas and behaviour would still seem relevant.

I think the adoption of the cline approach by mid-century neodarwinian sythesis more or less made racial typologies obsolete from a scientific point of view, still it is still something of a jump to say that their historical and ongoing cultural and social significance is all due to racism and poor schooling. You may as well say that nationalities don’t exist and everyone who thinks they do exist is a jingoistic warmonger.

Furthermore the usual racial identifiers are external physical criteria and these are presumably determined by only a small percentage of total set of genes. The whole genome approach used to say “that more genetic differences exist within a racial category than between them, and thus races are a myth” is really an irrelevant argument. It’s like saying that the English and French languages are the same because they use the same alphabet.

Posted by Arcane on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 04:07 | #

Well, Tim, I didn’t say I didn’t think races exist. I was just saying that he didn’t.

Heck, I’m a Gene Expression blogger. Don’t expect me to say that races don’t exist. *laugh*

Posted by Tim on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 05:41 | #

I am increasingly of the view that the ‘races-don’t-exist’ view is an example of scientism. Whether anthropologists, geneticists or biochemists wish to use races as categories or not may be irrelevant. To astronomers, ‘constellations’ do not exist. Ordinary folk still see them when they walk out at night.

Posted by John Ray on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 10:41 | #

Yes. I am not surprised that Windschuttle is a remnant of the Sydney “Push”. Their devotion to booze sure made more sense than devotion to Marx. I drank with a few of them myself in the declining years of the movement.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 12:07 | #

Arcane will have a better take on this than me, but I think that among scientists the proponents of RDNE divide into two broad categories:-

1) The politically motivated (ie marxist) - including anti-white hucksters from Boas to Gould and Lewontin - all of whom prostitute(d) science in their ideological or particularist interests,

2) The “go with the flow” majority who are mindful of their academic tenure and/or grant status, who don’t see race as an issue worth dying for and who mouth the RDNE pieties accordingly.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 14:38 | #

Guessedworker I think you’ve nailed it. Very well summarized: those two are indeed the groups among academics who deny race exists—plus perhaps one or two secondary spin-offs of one or the other. You’ve got it exactly right. Once everyone understands that, it’s clear it’s no longer necessary to waste so much as another millisecond arguing that race exists: race-denial is either marxism or political correctness and should simply be ignored, as those capable of honesty and integrity go about furthering their biological, social, etc., research.

Posted by Arcane on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 18:56 | #

What I get a kick about when it comes to those who deny there is a such thing as race is that they are quick to label anybody who disagrees with them a “racist.”

I don’t understand how one can be a racist if races don’t exist. If the term “race” has no meaning, then surely the term “racist” would have no meaning, as well.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:22 | #

No, No, Arcane. You have to look through the mirror. It’s those right-wing bastards who explain away the outcomes of oppression as the outcomes of a social construct who are short of meaning - except of course that they are, by their actions, self-confessed racists.

You see, left and right cannot speak to one another. There is no common ground, which is a large part of the reason why, in the end, the right turns to examining the sanity of leftists and the left turns to verbal abuse.

Posted by Tim on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:38 | #

R.E: The “Race Does Not Exist” (RDNE) debate

I think there are two “polar opposite” pitfalls here. I will submit what I think are they key issues in this comment and a following one.

Science deified

First, “Scientism”. The inappropriate use of scientific theories in social and political life.

Although the debate about scientism can be nebulous at times, the threat it poses to liberty and common sense is great. Especially in our era in which science has made great strides, has largely replaced religion and has it’s own charisma.

In the 1920s and 30s, G K Chesterton fought the scientism of the eugenicists and social darwinists. Marx tried to repackage socialism as a scientific belief. The Nazis took an older German / European / Christian prejudice and discrimination against jews and turned it into a doctrine of racial extermination, thanks to scientific racialism. C S Lewis in “That Hideous Strength” satirised scientism and Hayek in his “Counter-Revolution of Science” attacked the same dragon from a secular point of view.

(I would argue that the old eugenicists’ goal of preventing the ‘criminal classes’ from breeding has now largely been achieved thanks to the promotion of ‘abortion rights’ agenda by the p.c. left. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is an example of some successful conspiracy by eugenicists-disguised-as-feminists there are some uncomfortable parallels here)

Just because scientists working in the field of human genetics think ‘race does not exist’, and it might not be a relevant definitional category for the purposes of their particular investigations, is no more reason for John Citizen to change his mind, than when a previous generation of anthropologists told him that race x was inferior. The scientists make interesting observations but they are not the be all and end all.

Western man has been bitten by scientism before with eugenics and social darwinism. Once bitten twice shy. Just because the latest round of scientism is wearing attractive new politically correct dentures is no reason to tolerate a second bite.

Posted by Tim on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:40 | #

See previous comment from me for part one of this comment…

Real Science defied

The second pitfall is the opposite tendency. The politicalisation of science. This is kind of scientism-in-reverse.

Max Planck Institute’s Jan Klein and Naoyuki Takahata, both heavy hitters in the field of human genetics, in their acclaimed 2002 book “Where Do We Come From? The Molecular Evidence For Human Descent” argue that the RDNE approach is politicalised science.

Over a few pages, Klein and Takahata outline a key part of the history of the RDNE thesis. They point out that L.L.Cavali-Sforza (circa 1966) was the first geneticist to survey genetic differences between distinct populations as defined by classical physical anthropology. He found ~15% variation between groups. K&T mention that Sforza didn’t consider this important enough for commentary. ~1977 Lewontin did make a splash with essentially the same findings.

“Lewontin’s study revealed that 85.4 percent of the genetic variation that exists within the human species is contained within individual populations and the remaining 14.6 percent is accounted for by differences between human groups. Of the 14.6 percent, 8.3 percent accounts for differences between populations, as defined by Lewontin, and 6.3 percent for differences between races. Of course, since Lewontin’s distinction between populations and races is arbitrary, some anthropologists might want to call some or all of his “populations” races.”

Lewontin and others have thus come to the conclusion that “racial classification is now seen to be of no genetic or taxonomic significance”.

“This view is echoed by most authors of similar studies, who seem surprised that genetic variation within populations is greater than that between them. By contrast, Sewall Wright, who can hardly be taken as a dilettante in questions of population genetics, has stated emphatically that if differences of this magnitude were observed in any other species, the groups they distinguished would be called subspecies.”

K&T go on to point out that the famous 200 species of Lake Victoria cichlid fish differ from each other much less than the human races in their neutral genes, although they are presumably distinguished by genes that control external appearance.

K&T argue that scientists should be frank about differences and that those who argue the differences are trivial without establishing any yardstick to determine what is trivial and what is not is are engaged in politicised science and actually play into the hands of racists.

“By mixing science with politics, geneticists and anthropologists are committing the same infraction of which they are accusing other scientists, whom they themselves label as racist. Even worse, by dismissing the genetic differences as insignificant, they play into the hands of genuine racists who can easily demolish this claim and so further their own agenda. It is intellectually more honest to acknowledge the differences and then point out that they by no means imply supremacy of one race over others. This can be done by demonstrating that the differences in genes that cannot be linked to any features that would be be required for the preeminence of a particular race.”

I suppose one could add that the politicalised RDNE advocates (as distinct from RDNE as a genuine sci. hypothesis) also imperil the great finding of modern human biology, the common origin of all mankind. Something the religious types were telling them all along.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:29 | #

“Just because scientists working in the field of human genetics think ‘race does not exist,’ and it might not be a relevant definitional category for the purposes of their particular investigations, [...]” (—Tim, 01/03, 12:38 PM)

I was going to reply to this bit by saying most scientists working in human genetics, molecular anthropology and related fields today have no doubt whatsoever that race exists and is “relevant” (i.e., they see absolutely no reason in genetics to doubt the evidence of their and everyone’s two eyes and common sense) but are constantly shouted down by a noisy politicized “race-doesn’t-exist” minority, and so just quietly go about their work without making too much noise or too many public statements. But then I read the second part of Tim’s post about K & T, so a reply to the above wasn’t really necessary. Anyway, that’s what I was going to say, and just to further emphasize the point, I’ll post it.

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