Henry Reynolds

Australia’s First and Most Important War

Australian history has been shaped by geography. The size of the continent, the physical and climatic diversity and the isolation from the other great land masses all impacted on the ancient indigenous culture and on the settlement patterns of the European colonists since the arrival of the British in 1788. Two features stand out. Much of the continent was unsuitable for European settlement. Equally large areas could only be utilised as range lands for low density pastoral farming. Contact and conflict between settlers and the resident indigenous nations persisted throughout the nineteenth and into the first part of the twentieth centuries. The manner of British colonisation predetermined much of the resulting frontier conflict. There was no recognition of indigenous sovereignty; the continent was regarded as a terra-nullius. The legal situation was dramatically overturned in the 1992 High Court judgement in the Mabo case. Historical interpretation swung in the current. The enduring conflict about ownership and control of one of the world’s great land masses had to be reassessed. It was war and because it was fought in Australia and about Australia, it must now be seen as the country’s first and most important war.

Action and anxiety: the long history of settler protest about the nature of Australian colonization

From the earliest years of settlement there were people who heard what one of them called the ‘whispering in their hearts’ or moral anxiety about the nature of Australian settlement. This often had a religious base and became related with the crusade against slavery. There were always people who made themselves unpopular by attacking the way Australian settlement unfolded and the violence on the frontier. They often appealed to opinion overseas and particularly in Britain. In the twentieth century, there was a very productive era of activism linking overseas humanitarian organizations, local activists, unions, the communist party and the Aborigines often in remote areas.

The Question of Miscegenation in the Politics of English-Speaking Countries in the Early Twentieth Century

In 1902 James Bryce delivered the prestigious Romanes lecture in Oxford. He was a man of many talents—historian, jurist, and politician; world traveler and author of the magisterial study The American Commonwealth. Bryce’s lecture “The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind” was inimitably global in its sweep and sober in its song. Bryce had, for many years, been considering the social consequences of the revolution in communications brought by the trains, steam ships, and the telegraph, and by the contemporaneous expansion of the great European empires. The situation was unprecedented. All parts of the world had been explored and all the races of mankind were in contact. The early twentieth century stood “eminent and peculiar in this” because it marked the completion of a process by which all the races had been effected, and all the backward ones placed in a more or less complete dependence on the more advanced. The new and radical closeness of contact—“so much closer and more widespread than ever in the past”—had created a unique situation. The, by now, inescapable contact between the races had created a “crisis in the history of the world,” which would “profoundly effect the destiny of mankind.”

Drawing the Global Colour Line: Imperial brotherhood or white? Gandhi in South Africa

Mr Gandhi arrives in Natal and becomes a ‘despised being’ In May 1893, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Natal, a British colony in South Africa, described that year by Charles Pearson in National Life and Character as ‘already not a white mans colony’. Four years later, in Impressions of South Africa , James Bryce was more forthright: ‘so far as numbers go, the country is a black mans country’. The anxious preoccupation expressed in these assessments would affect Gandhis experience there in ways he could not have anticipated. An urbane barrister trained at Londons Inner Temple, M. K. Gandhi was twenty-four years old when he journeyed to Natal to work with a client of his Indian law firm. He was the son of a wealthy family of Gujarat merchants, married at eleven years of age and educated in Ahmedabad. Drawn by ambition to study law, he took a ship from Bombay for London in 1888, leaving his wife and first born son in India. As well as attending the regular dinners at the Inner Temple and learning to dress like an English gentleman, Gandhi also sought out some of the two hundred other Indians in London, who were mostly studying law or business, and local theosophists and vegetarians, for whom he wrote articles in their weekly journal. He befriended theosophist Annie Besant, was introduced to Madame Helena Blavatsky on her death bed, read Hindu and Christian scriptures, sat his law exams and matriculated in Latin, French and Science from the University of London.

Drawing the Global Colour Line: Individual rights without distinction

Minority treaties There was continuing debate about human rights during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was stimulated less by Japans failed proposal concerning racial equality, and more by the minority treaties imposed on the new nation states created after the end of the First World War. The first was negotiated with Poland in 1919, and by the early 1930s, twenty-four treaties or other agreements had been ratified. They were drawn up to deal with the problems which arose in Eastern Europe as a consequence of the break up of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and subsequent creation of nation-states from diverse and geographically mixed populations, all of whom could have appealed, with some justice, to Woodrow Wilsons promise of self-determination. The great powers feared that persecution of minorities and irredentism could spark future international conflict. The treaties provided for the protection of individuals against discrimination by the states in question and a number of group rights, relating to language, education and cultural institutions. Minority rights had little chance of support, however, when pitched against the overpowering idea of national sovereignty. A Swiss delegate observed in 1920 that while a policy based on respect for minorities had the full sympathy of the League of Nations, the ‘sovereignty of states’ was its fundamental principle. In 1935, the Permanent Court of International Justice declared that the treaties had two main objectives.

Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Australia points the way

Inauguration In 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in an act of racial expulsion when the first parliament legislated to expel several thousand Pacific Islanders – or ‘Kanakas’ – who had been brought to labour in the sugar cane fields of north Queensland during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Further legislation – the Immigration Restriction Act – was passed to ensure that other ‘non-whites’ would be prevented from coming to settle in Australia any time in the future. ‘The two things go hand in hand’, advised the Liberal Attorney General and future Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin. They were ‘the necessary complement of a single policy – the policy of securing a “White Australia”.’ When the first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, rose to speak in support of the Immigration Restriction Bill, he held in his hand a copy of National Life and Character: A Forecast by Charles Pearson – ‘one of the most intellectual statesmen who ever lived in this country’ – from which he quoted Pearsons now famous warning that ‘The day will come’ when the European observer will wake to find the black and yellow races no longer under tutelage, but forming independent governments, in control of their own trade and industry, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies by the civilised world. When that day came, Pearson had suggested, the white mans ‘pride of place’ in the world would be ‘humiliated’.

Drawing the Global Colour Line: Racial equality? The Paris Peace Conference, 1919

Fleets in European seas Japan played a minor, albeit advantageous role, in the First World War, over-running the German colonies in the Pacific Islands and the Concession on Chinas Shantung Peninsula. The navy patrolled the Pacific and Indian Oceans and, after much persuasion from the allies, extended its sway into the Mediterranean. Ironically, given Australian attitudes towards Japan, it was the Japanese fleet that protected the troopships conveying the Australian and New Zealand armies to the Middle East. The demands of war greatly stimulated Japanese industry and available markets expanded with the temporary eclipse of British and German competitors. When the worlds nations gathered to formalise the peace treaty and create a League of Nations, Japan was accorded the status of one of the great powers alongside the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy, each with two representatives on the Committee. Still virtually invisible to Charles Pearson in 1893, Japan had yet, in a quarter of a century, seemed to fulfil his prophesy about the challenge to the West posed by the rise of the ‘yellow races’. The Japanese Empire had been invited into alliances with European powers, was ‘represented by fleets in European seas’, ‘circumscribing the industry of Europeans’ and invited to participate as an equal in international conferences. Japanese race discourse The long crusade to achieve equality with the Western powers appeared to have been finally successful.