I

In March 1960, South African police opened fire on protestors in the township of Sharpeville, who were demonstrating against pass laws that restricted the movement of non-Europeans. This infamous event, often known as the Sharpeville massacre, saw the police kill 69 protestors and injure nearly 200 more.Footnote ¹ It led to fierce condemnation of the apartheid regime, particularly in the British Commonwealth, where many recently decolonized and independent nations, such as India and Pakistan, called for the expulsion of South Africa. However, South Africa did have its supporters. Under Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Australia remained officially silent on apartheid throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Part of this was Menzies’ concern that condemnation of apartheid would lead to similar condemnation of Australia for its treatment of its Indigenous population and the maintenance of the ‘White Australia Policy’.

Four months after the massacre, Menzies wrote to South Africa Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, rebuffing the criticism of apartheid from decolonized Commonwealth countries. In doing so, Menzies contrasted the ‘racial problem’ which allegedly existed in South Africa but did not appear in Australia and his government’s efforts to uphold this. He wrote, ‘[i]n Australia, as you know, we have a very strict immigration policy, primarily because we don’t wish to see created in our own country the tremendous racial problem which you have to encounter’.Footnote ² This was a recurrent theme for Menzies and other members of the Liberal/Country Party government in the 1960s, that is, that the White Australia Policy was necessary to prevent ‘racial problems’ domestically and so that Australia did not suffer the same fate as South Africa.

In addition to South Africa, Australian politicians pointed to the conflict arising out of the campaigns in the United States to end segregation in the south and episodes of public disorder in Britain’s inner cities, where significant numbers of Commonwealth migrants had settled after the war, as evidence that ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ populations could not integrate (or ‘assimilate’, the word often used) and needed to be kept separate. As Sean Brawley has written, ‘Collectively, Little Rock, Notting Hill and Sharpeville represented both a concept and a fear – “racial friction”’.’Footnote ³ In the case of Australia, this fear of ‘racial friction’ reinforced the immigration control policy of only allowing a certain number of non-European migrants to enter and reside in the country in order to maintain this separation and the domination of the white Anglo-Saxon Celtic demographic majority. This went beyond the desire to maintain a white Australia through barring entry at the border, since those deemed ‘acceptable’ were also restricted in various other ways, either through selection processes and quotas, or the post-entry efforts to assimilate new migrants.

It was not just the Liberal/Country Party government that held this view of maintaining a white Australia, with many older Australian Labor party politicians, and those from the Democratic Labor party, also supporting this notion. The received wisdom of both the Liberal and Labor parties in the post-war period (from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s) was that Australia’s immigration policies needed to be strict to ensure that a ‘racial problem’ was not imported into the country. This thinking had been present since Federation, and despite the poor treatment of the Indigenous population, there was the belief that Australia had avoided problems faced by other settler colonies. As Andrew Markus has shown, this fear of importing a ‘racial problem’ was a key factor in Australia’s reluctance to allow Jewish refugees to enter the country in the late 1930s.Footnote ⁴ This approach to immigration was continued into the post-1945 period, which is the focus of this article. Examining the public and internal statements by politicians and policymakers in the 1950s to 1960s, we argue that Australia’s governing elites were preoccupied by a racial anxiety about losing power and status, which had developed since the introduction of self-government in the nineteenth century.

International events helped generate this anxiety. Australians saw decolonization as a potential threat that might spark internal changes in Australia, bringing international criticism of the country’s treatment of Indigenous people and the White Australia Policy, but might also inspire activists inside Australia to challenge these policies. The burgeoning anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, as well as the civil rights movement in the United States, further worried Australian politicians and policymakers, who feared that Indigenous Australians could be inspired to take similar actions.Footnote ⁵ The migration of Commonwealth migrants to Britain also reaffirmed the conviction by many on both sides of Australian politics that maintaining a distance between white Australia and the decolonizing world was paramount for societal order and migrant integration. As Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield and Jennifer Sutton have argued, this was an anxiety shared across white settler colonies in North America, southern Africa, and Australasia.Footnote ⁶

II

After the Second World War, Australia encouraged European migration, but still determined who came based on its White Australia Policy. There was a preference for British and Irish migrants, who had very few restrictions upon their entry, followed by northern Europeans and those from the Baltic region.Footnote ⁷ The demands of the ‘populate or perish’ mantra, which dominated Australia’s thinking about immigration in the first few decades after the war, also saw the opening of migration schemes for Maltese, Italian, and Greek migrants in large numbers. Despite this enthusiasm for an increased migrant population, controls meant that non-European migrants, especially from Asia, were kept out, except in very limited circumstances.

At the same time, a wave of decolonization swept across Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Caribbean, with the British Empire’s former dominance being reduced and overshadowed by a world divided between Washington and Moscow. The position of the Australian government on decolonization depended on a case-by-case situation and whether there was a communist aspect to it. As Frank Bongiorno has argued, Labor under Chifley was amenable to decolonization in Asia, as long as the newly decolonized countries did not align themselves with the Soviet Union or China (Australia would send troops to Malaya to assist the British counter-insurgency in the late 1940s and early 1950s).Footnote ⁸ But Labor lost power in 1949 and was replaced by the Menzies government, which lasted until his retirement in 1966. During the main phase of decolonization, the Australian government was more hostile towards decolonization, especially those involving violent uprisings against British rule, thus supporting traditional British imperialism.Footnote ⁹ Correspondingly, it was also dependent on the British and Americans taking the lead on this during the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰

As the Cold War unfolded (and with the Second World War in recent memory), Australia started to pivot to the United States and became less dependent on Britain, as illustrated by the ANZUS treaty signed in 1951. The reality for Australia was that Britain’s world power status had diminished and that the United States was now the dominant Western power. The move from ‘Pax Britannica’ to ‘Pax Americana’, as James Curran described it, was Australia’s response to British withdrawal from the region as decolonization gained momentum, particularly between 1957 and 1968, but also the increased US intervention in the region, as seen with the Korean and Vietnam wars.Footnote ¹¹ At the same time, this encouraged Australia to enter into relationships with the newly independent countries on their doorstep, slowly recognizing that Australia was ‘a Pacific nation with an Asian, rather than a European, future’.Footnote ¹²

However support, or reluctant acceptance, for decolonization in Asia did not extend to allowing significant increases in the number of Asian migrants permanently settling in the country – decolonization was (somewhat) agreeable if it occurred in Asia and did not threaten the white settler colonial hegemony that existed in post-war Australia. Decolonization in Africa, especially southern Africa, was also contentious, and linked to immigration in Australia. Australia shared some political similarities with South Africa and Rhodesia, as settler colonial countries with strict immigration controls on non-white migrants and restricted political rights for native/Indigenous people. As Jon Piccini and Duncan Money have written, in both Australia and southern Africa’s settler colonies, ‘membership of the political community was primarily determined by race’.Footnote ¹³ As decolonization happened against considerable resistance by the European powers in Africa in the 1950s and 60s, both South Africa and Rhodesia maintained that white minority rule was required as bulwarks against multi-racial democracy and communism, seen by these powers as twin threats to Western civilization. The Australian government under Menzies played down the similarities between South Africa, Rhodesia, and Australia and proclaimed that apartheid and white minority rule in these countries were domestic concerns that Australia could not interfere in (particularly before Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence for Rhodesia in November 1965). Several people on the right drew parallels between South Africa and Rhodesia on the borderline with a decolonized Africa and Australia at the bottom of a decolonized Asia, viewing these settler colonies as outposts of whiteness to be defended. As Ien Ang has written, Australia’s racial anxiety was partly spatial as the proximity of ‘white’ Australia to Asia was presented throughout the twentieth century as a threat to the nation’s national security and ‘purity’.Footnote ¹⁴

Meanwhile critics of Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous population made comparisons between Australia and southern Africa, suggesting that a form of apartheid also existed in Australia. Another comparison was made between Australia and the southern United States, where segregation was being challenged by the emerging civil rights movement. Little Rock, the city where the National Guard was called in after protests against the desegregation of a local high school in 1957, became a symbol of racism against African Americans, and throughout the late 1950s and 1960s the spectre of Little Rock was raised by activists to highlight similar racism experienced by Indigenous people in Australia.Footnote ¹⁵ In his 1967 memoirs, Menzies wrote that the critics of apartheid South Africa in Australia also ‘attacked our restrictive immigration policy’ and ‘seemed anxious to create inside Australia those very racial problems which have puzzled the wit of man in South Africa and have presented the United States of America with its greatest unsolved social problem’.Footnote ¹⁶ On both the right and the left, the end of the White Australia Policy through reforms to immigration and the treatment of Indigenous people was intrinsically linked to what was happening around the world – especially in the settler colonies.

III

Scholars have long argued that the development of the White Australia Policy should be viewed in a transnational context, but there has been debate over the nature of this. Neville Meaney, James Curran, and Matthew Jordan have all discussed Australia’s immigration control system, its treatment of the Indigenous population, and its foreign policy outlook as being driven by a ‘British race patriotism’.Footnote ¹⁷ The term has also been used by scholars such as Gwenda Tavan and Jatinder Mann to contrast Australia’s immigration and multiculturalism policies in the 1960s and 1970s with the prevailing attitudes that dominated for the first five decades after Federation.Footnote ¹⁸

Others, such as Henry Reynolds, Marilyn Lake, Christopher Waters, and David Atkinson, have proposed that Australia fit into a wider network of settler colonial states in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, based on a mutual understanding of ‘whiteness’ rather than ‘Britishness’. This network of setter colonial states included Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the colonies that would become the Union of South Africa in 1910 and Southern Rhodesia in 1923, which established exclusionary immigration controls modelled on each other.Footnote ¹⁹ In their recent volume on global white nationalism, Geary, Schofield, and Sutton argue that in between the two concepts was an ideology of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ which brought together British and American elites to assume that ‘white, Protestant, English-speaking men naturally made modern nations’ (emphasis in original).Footnote ²⁰

Alongside these Anglophone settler colonies was Britain, in what Bill Schwarz has called the ‘white man’s world’.Footnote ²¹ Britain, balancing imperial and domestic concerns, did not implement similar controls to these settler colonies, but the Aliens Act 1905, primarily aimed at keeping out Eastern European migrants, was influenced by these controls.Footnote ²² However, at times, the settler colonies were frustrated by Britain’s lack of support for the discriminatory immigration controls implemented on the periphery of the British Empire. Marilyn Lake has argued that the Anglophone white settler colonies ‘looked to each other for sympathy and support, for ideas and practical instruction’ which shifted away from Britishness and the notion of a multi-racial empire.Footnote ²³ Self-government meant that the settler colonies leant into a transnational whiteness that found as much inspiration in the United States as it did in ‘British race patriotism’. As Sean Brawley has shown, the Pacific became an important site of co-operation between the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada, where domestic exclusionary policies against Asian migration were central to the countries’ foreign relations.Footnote ²⁴

Policy transfer between Australia and these other countries continued after the First World War, with this article proposing that this network lasted into the era of decolonization. Post-war racial anxieties were shared across the ‘white man’s world’ about increased non-white immigration, decolonization, and the push for equal rights for non-white people in these settler colonies. Australian politicians, policymakers, and campaign groups looked to ‘race relations’ in Britain, the United States and South Africa and warned that Australia would be creating a ‘racial problem’ similar to that experienced in those countries if the White Australia Policy was modified or abandoned.

Using W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the ‘global colour line’, Lake and Reynolds argued that these nations developed ‘a project of whiteness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an ‘imagined community of white men [that] was transnational in its reach, but nationalist in its outcomes, bolstering regimes of border protection and national sovereignty’.Footnote ²⁵ Debra Thompson points out that this ‘sudden change of consciousness’ emerged at the turn of the last century and that while ‘the Second World War marked a break or disruption of the logic of race and its many manifestations’, racial transnationalism did not disappear in the post-war era and was reconceptualized in the era of the Cold War and decolonization.Footnote ²⁶ In this period, anti-communism became an important part of the reconfiguration of the ‘white man’s world’, and as Richard Seymour has written, ‘race figured centrally in the understanding of communism and in the organisation of its suppression’ – particularly for the United States, but also for Britain, Australia, and South Africa.Footnote ²⁷ Fears of communism, decolonization, non-white immigration, and dissent from internal racial and ethnic minorities overlapped and were international issues to express concern over, as well as domestic issues to be policed. This can be seen in the statements made by politicians and policymakers about reforming the White Australia Policy in the 1950s and 1960s.

In her 2004 article, Gwenda Tavan shows that Australian politicians erred towards some kind of reform of the policy in the 1960s as they feared international criticism from the decolonized countries inside the British Commonwealth, but also argues that the push for this reform should not be construed as merely the will of the elite.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, reform of the White Australia Policy came from a number of different places in the 1960s.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile, resistance to immigration reform also came from both above and below. This article uses the words of politicians and policymakers to show that while some made a realpolitik decision to change Australia’s immigration policies as decolonization gathered pace, especially amongst the country’s neighbours in Asia, some others used their elite voices to express dismay with such reforms, using events in other ‘white’ countries to warn against said reforms. The examples used in this article of Australian figures invoking Commonwealth migration in Britain, the emerging civil rights movement in the United States, and the problems facing white minority rule in southern Africa demonstrate this racial anxiety, fomenting a position of white resentment (or ‘white backlash’) against the dismantlement of the immigration control system that had been in place since Federation.

IV

The ‘long, slow death of White Australia’, as Gwenda Tavan described it, occurred in stages over a period of thirty years, from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975.Footnote ³⁰ The dismantlement of the White Australia Policy was a process, and underpinning this dismantlement was a series of policies and legislative changes that gradually tore down the immigration controls used to prevent the entry of non-white migrants into the country, whilst encouraging Australians to welcome a more diverse range of migrants. The post-war concern about Australia’s low population led to an increased acceptance of migrants from outside the British Isles and northern Europe, which had previously been the preferred origin of the country’s migrant intake. Between 1948 and 1958, assisted passage agreements were signed between Australia and several southern European countries, including Malta, Italy, Greece, and Spain.Footnote ³¹ While southern European migrants had come to Australia prior to the 1940s (and the government tried to limit this), their large numbers in the post-war era challenged prevailing attitudes.Footnote ³²

Another challenge to attitudes toward Australia’s strict immigration policies was the arrival of international students as part of the Colombo Plan in the 1950s. The Colombo Plan was an international agreement that allowed students from South and South-East Asia to come to Australia to study as part of Australia’s increased engagement with Asia in the post-war era. Nearly 5,500 students and trainees from Asia arrived in Australia between 1951 and 1964 and, as Daniel Oakman has written, the plan was ‘important in facilitating a change in outlook among the Australian people’.Footnote ³³ Oakman notes that ‘Colombo Plan students were typically male, from wealthy, middle-class families, already educated, and able to speak adequate English’, which did not trouble white Australia in the same way as the prospect of large scale labour migration from Asia.Footnote ³⁴ This prospect had been one of the original motivating factors for the White Australia Policy in 1901, as the labour movement believed that restricting Asian immigration was vital for protecting their wages and conditions.Footnote ³⁵

By the late 1950s, attitudes towards non-white migration had started to shift, propelled by the Colombo Plan and sympathetic cases that gained national attention, such as citizenship difficulties for non-European war brides. In 1957, the Menzies government decided to simplify and modernize the laws surrounding immigration control, with the Immigration Act, first introduced in 1901, having gathered sixty-four amendments by the mid-1950s.Footnote ³⁶ The most significant change was the removal of the dictation test, which Tavan suggests was abandoned due to considerations of Australia’s growing relationship with Asia, especially through the Colombo Plan. This was replaced with a permit system for aliens and non-white British subjects, with discretion ultimately in the hands of the minister for immigration.Footnote ³⁷

Momentum gathered in the 1960s as Australia gravitated towards its Asian neighbours, exacerbated by Britain’s continued withdrawal from the region and the increased presence of the United States, amidst the fissures of the Cold War in Asia. The retirement of Menzies in early 1966 and the ascendancy of Harold Holt allowed a further break with the traditional mindset of the White Australia Policy as two major reforms were introduced that year. As Neville Meaney explained, the reforms ‘put non-European residents on the same basis as Europeans for the purpose of the qualifying period for citizenship’, while citizenship applications from non-Europeans were to be considered on the grounds of ‘their ability to integrate readily’ and possessing skills ‘positively useful to Australia’.Footnote ³⁸ This halted some of the excessive restrictions of the immigration control system, and James Jupp has noted that it is ‘sometimes claimed that the White Australia Policy effectively ended in 1966’.Footnote ³⁹ However, prejudiced measures continued until the Whitlam government explicitly prohibited racial discrimination in immigration control policy in 1975.

Holt’s brief time as Prime Minister also oversaw the 1967 referendum, which changed the Constitution to allow Indigenous people to be counted in the census and to give the Commonwealth government certain powers to make laws regarding Indigenous people. This occurred amongst a wider campaign for greater citizenship and civil rights for Indigenous people in Australia, and as Larissa Behrendt has argued, was ‘a high-water mark for the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The push for Indigenous rights had grown since the 1930s and gained momentum in the 1950s–1960s. This included the creation of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines (FCAA), as well as similar state-based organizations, in the late 1950s and the ‘freedom rides’ undertaken by students and activists in the mid-1960s to highlight the segregation faced by Indigenous people, particularly in regional Australia.Footnote ⁴¹ Like the challenges to the White Australia Policy, activists used ‘governmental fear of international embarrassment’ to push for recognition of Indigenous rights.Footnote ⁴² The FCAA, later the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), were inspired by the British Anti-Slavery Society to use the UN Declaration of Human Rights to highlight the situation faced by Indigenous people in Australia and called for the country to conform to international norms.Footnote ⁴³ The ‘freedom rides’ took explicit inspiration form the US civil rights movement and used the symbols of segregation abroad, such as Little Rock, to criticize similar practices in regional Australia. While racial discrimination did not disappear in the wake of the 1967 referendum and the movement for Indigenous rights, the explicitly racist framework of the state was being eroded, with multiculturalism being the official position of the Australian government on ‘race relations’ from the 1970s onwards.

As much as there was opposition from above and below to immigration control reforms in the 1950s and 1960s, it was increasingly obvious, as Lake and Reynolds put it, that the ‘white men’s countries’ were in retreat in the post-war era.Footnote ⁴⁴ Australia, like its settler colonial cousins in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, ‘felt increasing pressure from the 1940s onwards to repeal the array of discriminatory legislation and particular their immigration restriction laws, which had been built up over the past one hundred years’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Against this tide of reform was a ‘white backlash’. When similar backlashes occurred in the United States and Britain, there were assumptions that this backlash against ending racial discrimination and promoting civil rights was populist in nature, but scholars such as Anthony Cook and Olivier Esteves have demonstrated that political elites were often at the forefront of these backlashes.Footnote ⁴⁶ The use of parliamentary speeches and other pronouncements from policymakers reveals how sections of the elite were fearful of a dismantlement of the White Australia Policy, and their references to racial strife in Britain, the United States, and southern Africa were rearguard actions against a society moving towards what Stuart Hall called the ‘multicultural drift’, the increasingly visible presence of people of colour in all aspects of social life in ‘white’ society.Footnote ⁴⁷

V

The period between the late 1940s and early 1960s saw a significantly large number of migrants to Britain from the Commonwealth, arriving from such places as the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, West Africa, and Cyprus. Known collectively as the ‘Windrush generation’, these migrants came to Britain at a time when there were few restrictions on their ability to enter, work, and reside in the country.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many of these Commonwealth migrants came to work in industries where there was a labour shortage following the Second World War and the creation of the welfare state, becoming nurses, factory and hospitality workers, and bus and train drivers, amongst many other professions. However, at the same time, these migrants were portrayed as an ‘undesirable’ social and criminal problem. As Chris Waters has noted, these incoming migrants were often seen as ‘dark strangers’ who were alien to the British way of life and were treated as suspicious by many, including the police and the press.Footnote ⁴⁹

Stories of Britain’s immigration ‘problem’ were reported in the Australian press and relayed from Australian figures in Britain. For example, in 1954, Australia’s chief migration officer in London, Noel Lamidey, told the department of immigration in Canberra that ‘responsible sections of the community’ in the United Kingdom had come to the ‘apprehensive realisation that the quickly growing problems associated with the admission into Britain of numbers of non-Europeans (mostly British subjects) … demand a drastic change’ from existing policy regarding migration to Britain.Footnote ⁵⁰ Lamidey added, ‘It seems to be only a matter of time before this Office may be asked to explain the attitude adopted by the present Commonwealth Government regarding the preservation of the “White Australia” Policy as it is commonly known.’Footnote ⁵¹ Neville Kirk points to the papers of Labor’s Arthur Calwell, deputy leader of the opposition from 1951 to 1960 and then leader of the opposition from 1960 to 1967, which demonstrate that he regularly received material from Britain, warning him of the ‘dangers’ of non-white immigration.Footnote ⁵²

British anxieties about Commonwealth migration reached a new height in late 1958 after ‘race riots’ in Notting Hill and Nottingham, when white youths attacked migrants, especially Black people, on the streets. A. Sivanandan has blamed racist agitation for the disorder, arguing that it was ‘teddy-boys, directed by the Mosleyites and the White Defence League’ who were responsible for the riots, ‘under the watchful eye of the police’.Footnote ⁵³ However, the predominant talking point in the aftermath of the riots was that this disorder was caused by immigration. For example, the Labour MP Frank Tomney declared in parliament: ‘we must face the fact – and it would be idle not to face it – that for the first time Great Britain has a colour problem at home’.Footnote ⁵⁴ And the way to deal with this ‘colour problem’ was by restricting immigration. Two months after the riots, anti-immigration Conservative MP Cyril Osborne claimed that ‘about 630 million British citizens’ were technically allowed to migrate to Britain and ‘[s]ooner or later control would have to be put on’.Footnote ⁵⁵ If controls were not introduced, Osborne warned, ‘we shall, whether we like it or not … have Little Rocks and Notting Hill incidents over and over again’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Notting Hill made the news around the world, including in Australia, and over the next decade, ‘Notting Hill’ became one of the shorthand terms for immigration ‘problems’ used by politicians and commentators. In a senate debate about South Africa in 1961, Liberal Shane Paltridge claimed that ‘the beginning of a colour problem’ was being seen in Britain, with ‘evidence’ of this being in Notting Hill ‘when on one occasion no fewer than 150 persons were arrested in an incident when passions ran high and when broken bottles, knives and clubs and all sorts of other weapons were used in what was really a racial disturbance’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Earlier in the same debate, senator George Cole, parliamentary leader of the Democratic Labor party, stated, ‘[w]e know that British subjects in the West Indies have the right to go and live in England’, and suggested, ‘To a certain degree Mr Macmillan has, or may have before long, the same problem in England as exists in South Africa’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Cole posited that if ‘our own natives of Papua’ (who were Australian citizens) were allowed, like the West Indians in Britain, to settle in Australia, ‘could not we be faced with a similar problem?’Footnote ⁵⁹

In 1966, during a debate that encompassed both Martin Luther King’s plea for non-violence in the civil rights movement and Australia’s immigration policy, Country Party MP Robert King warned against immigration and used a variety of international examples, saying, ‘Nor do we want a Los Angeles, a South Africa or, for that matter, a London’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In his speech, he asserted, ‘Many of London’s problems today stem from the fact that the British immigration policy was not strengthened sufficiently early.’Footnote ⁶¹

Even though Labor was going through a generational change that would challenge the White Australia Policy, some Labor MPs also used the United Kingdom as a cautionary tale about immigration.Footnote ⁶² A week after Robert King’s speech, Labor’s Ted Peters raised Commonwealth migration to Britain as a warning to Australia, arguing, ‘Difficulties have been created in a predominantly European populated country by the immigration of West Indians who are not easily assimilated with the existing population.’Footnote ⁶³ As part of a debate on the proposed policy to reduce the number of years that non-Europeans had to wait before applying for citizenship, Peters asked, ‘Why should we create problems and difficulties that are not to the advantage of those coming here or of those living here?’Footnote ⁶⁴ He then stated, ‘[w]e should not try to produce the migration to this country of people whose cultures and ways of life are so vastly different from our own’, instead suggesting that Australia should ‘seek to assimilate immigrants already here and those who will be coming from southern Europe’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Also in a 1966 debate on the department of immigration’s spending, Charlie Jones, Labor MP for Newcastle, claimed that while ‘there has not been a more tolerant race in the world than the people of the United Kingdom’, there was allegedly a time when, in regards to immigration, ‘they had to take a stand and say: “This far and no further”.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Jones said that because, between 1955 and 1962, 472,000 migrants had entered the country, the United Kingdom ‘was forced to take a stand and say: “This has to stop”.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Jones asked rhetorically, ‘Do we want to have the same problem that the United Kingdom has?’Footnote ⁶⁸

This consensus that Britain’s immigration policy had failed and that incidents like the Notting Hill riots were a result of immigration also found its way into the thinking of those who opposed the White Australia Policy. The Immigration Reform Group (IRG), who campaigned against the policy, also tempered that their proposed reforms were not going to lead to the same problems as faced by Britain. In their influential Control or Colour Bar? pamphlet, published in 1960, the group asserted: ‘We do not want a Notting Hill in Australia. We do not propose, for Australia, the unrestricted immigration for Commonwealth countries that made Notting Hill possible.’Footnote ⁶⁹ As Gwenda Tavan has argued, the IRG pushed for managed migration, with a particular preference for middle class migrants from Asia (similar to those students that arrived as part of the Colombo Plan).Footnote ⁷⁰ Large scale migration of Asian workers, the IRG surmised, might lead to similar ‘racial conflicts’ seen in Britain, the United States, and South Africa, which was the argument being made by defenders of the White Australia Policy.Footnote ⁷¹

VI

The United States, experiencing the growth of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, was also evoked on several occasions to remonstrate against any weakening of the White Australia Policy. Most infamously, Country Party MP Robert King, proclaimed in parliament in 1966, ‘I do not want to see any Little Rock in this country.’Footnote ⁷² Little Rock, the capital city of Arkansas, was the site for an early and momentous episode in the civil rights movement in the United States. After the Brown v Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court in 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People assisted nine students enrolling at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. This caused massive protests from the white community in Little Rock, and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called in the state’s national guard to support these segregationists. In response, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect the African American students and to remove the power of the national guard.

Like Notting Hill, Little Rock was a flashpoint that made global headlines and was a by-word for the explicit racism that existed in the US at the time. The events at Little Rock shocked people in places like Australia, but as activists in this country stressed at the time, similar segregation was experienced by Indigenous people. At the same time, it was used in reference to the suggested pitfalls of relaxing immigration policies. In 1960, Calwell warned the state conference of the New South Wales Labor Party that there were some that demanded immigration reform and, according to The Canberra Times, rebutted, ‘I do not want a similar situation here that exists in Little Rock, Arkansas’.Footnote ⁷³ Then in 1966, as many in the Australian Labor Party started calling for a loosening of the White Australia Policy, Ted Peters argued against it. In a debate on the previously mentioned citizenship reforms, he referenced the ‘social problems’ that were supposedly created by the Little Rock incident.Footnote ⁷⁴ Peters asserted that the African American population had ‘not been able to integrate with the European population’ and used this, again with other examples from Britain and South Africa, as an argument for strict immigration controls.Footnote ⁷⁵ Peters asked, ‘Why should we in Australia who have so far been relatively free of these problems that afflict other countries, deliberately import them?’Footnote ⁷⁶

Throughout the 1960s, the United States became one of the by-words for a problem that Australia should avoid. Similar to his rhetorical questions about immigration to Britain, the aforementioned Charlie Jones asked, ‘Do honorable members want a similar situation in Australia to that which exists in America today?’ and argued that the ‘some 18 million negroes in America today’ were creating ‘one of the greatest problems that America has to face today’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In another discussion about Canberra and comparisons with Washington DC in 1960, Liberal senator John McCallum stated that the ‘Civil War that began almost 100 years ago has not quite ended and the negro question may be a crucial one in the forthcoming American presidential election’, then added, ‘[f]ortunately we in Australia do not face this problem’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1968, Jones again brought up international examples to lambast proponents of a ‘multi-racial community’, rhetorically asking in a debate on housing expenditure and immigration numbers, ‘who can say that Australia could do a better job of it than has been done in Britain or in the United States of America?’, and then saying such proponents should ‘visit places like Detroit, Newark, Philadelphia or Los Angeles’.Footnote ⁷⁹ He concluded, ‘I issue the warning to those people who are foolish enough to advocate a policy like that applying in America that we could not do any better than those nations that have tried and failed.’Footnote ⁸⁰

VII

In that same 1968 debate, Ted Peters spoke about the incompatibility of Asian migration in Australia and said that if this was increased, Australia would see the ‘same sort of incompatibility that is demonstrated in the United States of America, South Africa and elsewhere’.Footnote ⁸¹ Alongside Britain and the United States, South Africa was often used as a comparison with Australia – one with a ‘racial problem’ and one without.

There had been legislated racial segregation since the creation of the Union of South Africa in the early 1910s. Then, in 1948, the National Party under D.F. Malan won power, promising the policy of ‘apartheid’ or the separation of the population based on ‘race’ – white/European, black/African and coloured. Apartheid laws brought in through the late 1940s and early 1950s restricted the rights of the African and coloured population, while there were also laws banning the Communist Party and the African National Congress. Under Robert Menzies, Australia remained predominantly uncritical of apartheid South Africa. As Roger Bell has written, ‘Pretoria’s political leaders attempted to enlist Australians as natural supporters of their discriminatory regime.’Footnote ⁸²

Although there had been criticisms of apartheid throughout the 1950s, the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 led to fiercer condemnation of the South African regime. This happened shortly after British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke in Cape Town about a ‘wind of change’ across Africa and Britain’s tempered acceptance of decolonization on the continent.Footnote ⁸³ Amidst this international condemnation, the Commonwealth became a vehicle for Asian nations to criticize South Africa’s apartheid policies, with Australia being one of the few Commonwealth countries to hold back on this. In October 1960, South Africa held a referendum to become a republic, and in March 1961, South Africa withdrew its application to remain in the Commonwealth. By the end of 1961, South Africa had become a republic.

This caused much debate in Australia, including about Australia’s similarities with South Africa and others viewing South Africa as another cautionary tale about ‘multi-racial’ societies. One argument made in these debates was that South Africa was a multi-racial nation, but in Australia, there was not the same level of diversity. In April 1960, Liberal MP Bill Wentworth said that Australia was ‘virtually a homogenous people’ and ‘a people of one race isolated geographically from our fellows of the same race’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Anderson had argued that South Africa’s ‘error’ was ‘to become dependent upon cheap coloured labour’ and this was a ‘mistake’ avoided by Australia through the deportation and rejection of ‘Kanaka and Chinese labour’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Anderson stated, ‘We did not want to be dependent upon cheap labour internally in Australia and, by a policy which was undertaken many years ago, we did free ourselves from the kind of troubles which now afflict the unhappy South Africans.’Footnote ⁸⁶

The following year, parliament debated South Africa leaving the Commonwealth, with both Liberal and DLP members linking it to the entry of recently decolonized new states and also to racial questions in Australia. On 12 April 1961, George Cole, a Tasmanian DLP senator, bemoaned the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth and the entry of Cyprus, pointing to both its recent history of ani-colonial violence and also that ‘within Cyprus there is a certain amount of apartheid’, because of the potential conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots fighting over who might control the island.Footnote ⁸⁷ He commended Menzies for trying to keep South Africa in the Commonwealth, but Menzies himself was more concerned about keeping the racial problems in South Africa from developing in Australia.

Menzies, the previous day, had stated, ‘in every country in which there are large numbers of people of different races, […] the problem must arise as to whether there should be separate development, or integration, with equality of political and social rights within the same geographical era’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Menzies added that this ‘problem’ was ‘most acute in South Africa’, and he was ‘profoundly grateful that we do not have it in Australia’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The inference here being that immigration controls had prevented this ‘problem’ from emerging in Australia. However, Menzies called equation of Australia’s immigration policies and apartheid as ‘untrue’ and ‘arrant nonsense’.Footnote ⁹⁰ For Menzies, apartheid was ‘a discriminatory policy in respect to people already permanently resident’, while Australia’s immigration controls were ‘a discrimination in the admission of persons for permanent residence’.Footnote ⁹¹ The discrimination involved in the latter was, according to Menzies, ‘wise and just’, because it was ‘based not upon any foolish notion of racial superiority, but upon a proper desire to preserve a homogenous population and so avert the troubles that have bedevilled some other countries.’Footnote ⁹²

The reluctance of the Menzies’ government’s criticism of the South African regime also stemmed from the belief that nations had sovereignty to conduct their own affairs without international condemnation. At the time and since then, it has been suggested that the Liberal government did not criticize apartheid in South Africa because it wanted the same relief from international pressure about its own immigration policies. Senator McCallum stated, in support of Menzies, ‘in the Commonwealth every nation had the right to put its own point of view and every nation had the right to have its own domestic policy under its own control’.Footnote ⁹³

Australia was very wary about international criticism of the White Australia Policy and its treatment of the Indigenous population, particularly from decolonizing countries in Asia. But instead of reforms on these fronts, there was a sentiment that Australia should not be criticized for its domestic policies and that other (white settler) countries with similar policies should not be criticized either. In the above-mentioned senate debate, DLP senator Frank McManus asked: ‘are we in a position to point the finger of scorn at South Africa?’, while listing the discrimination faced by non-white people in Australia at the time:

McManus did not compare Australia and South Africa to condemn Australia, but to emphasize that Australia should not criticize the apartheid regime.

While many Labor politicians criticized apartheid in South Africa in the early 1960s and lambasted the Menzies government for its lack of condemnation, some in the ALP still equivocated on the issue. In May 1964, Gordon Bryant, the ALP member for Wills in Victoria, stated: ‘we are not asking the Parliament to carry a motion condemning South Africa and its policies’, adding ‘[w]e do not want to enter that field at all’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Like their approach to immigration, a more decisive stance on apartheid was taken by a younger generation of the ALP in the late 1960s that would be eventually taken up by the Whitlam government in the early 1970s.

While South Africa rumbled on as an issue for the Australian government, there was a much clearer approach towards Rhodesia after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965 – at least in the practical sense. The day after Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front declared the independence of the settler colony on 11 November, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution calling for all states ‘not to recognize this illegal racist minority regime in Southern Rhodesia and to refrain from rendering any assistance to this illegal regime’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Despite having cordial relations with Southern Rhodesia prior to the UDI, Australia recognized the UNSC resolution and severed ties with the Smith government. But, as Matthew Jordan has shown, the Australian government under Menzies was ‘deeply disturbed’ by the UDI and the rupture between Rhodesia and Britain, initially showing ‘no desire to follow Britain’s lead and impose voluntary economic sanctions against the rebel colony’. Footnote ⁹⁷ Historians, such as Jordan, as well as Carl Watts and Alexander Lee, have shown that Menzies in particular had sympathy for the white Rhodesian settlers, although there is disagreement amongst these scholars over whether, in Jordan’s words, ‘Australia’s approach was dictated by a shared belief in the white supremacist views enunciated by the Rhodesian Front’.Footnote ⁹⁸

These historians are more in agreement that Menzies, as well as others in the Australian government and public service, were concerned that Rhodesia’s zeal for independence and reluctance to enfranchise the country’s African population would lead to more scrutiny on Australia’s handling of race relations issues. Carl Watts cites an internal department of external affairs memo from June 1964 that, if Rhodesia was to become independent and insist on white minority rule, it would have implications for Australia as ‘a country of European settlement practicing a discriminatory immigration policy, and desiring Asian goodwill’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Matthew Jordan mentions a letter from the minister for external affairs, Garfield Barwick, to Menzies in 1963 that said Australia could not afford the luxury of sympathy for white Rhodesians ‘if it means that Australia, with its migration policy, Papua New Guinea and our past – and for that matter present treatment of our aborigines, is placed in support of a minority white government in Africa’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As well as this private correspondence, some politicians used Rhodesia in public statements as evidence of a failure of integration of people of different ‘races’ and justification for the continuation of the White Australia Policy. In his 1966 speech against weakening Australia’s immigration laws, Ted Peters stated, ‘[t]he difficult problem that exists in Rhodesia has been brought about by lack of assimilation between various sections of the community’, and asked why Australia would ‘deliberately import’ similar problems.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Further sanctions were imposed by the UN over the next few years, with some of the most extensive coming in 1968, with one resolution coming in May and another in November. In September of that year, the Australian attorney-general Nigel Bowen stated at a convention of the NSW Liberal party that many Australians allegedly had a ‘profound distaste’ of the UN sanctions on Rhodesia, which was shared ‘by very many ministers’, but also acknowledged that Australia would abide by the UN rulings.Footnote ¹⁰² A few days later, Wilfred Kent Hughes, a controversial Liberal MP, posed the hypothetical question in parliament if Australia would similarly follow the UN ‘if the Security Council, on a submission from some nation, decided that Australia’s immigration policy was a threat to the peace of the world’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Although dismissed by Bowen as a hypothetical, Hughes stated, ‘All I want to know is: Does the same principle apply if Australia’s immigration policy is called into question by the United Nations as a threat to the peace of the world?’Footnote ¹⁰⁴

VIII

Despite the fearmongering from actors on both sides of parliament, a new consensus emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s that the border control apparatus needed to change, and reforms were introduced in 1966–7 under Harold Holt, then by the Whitlam government in the early 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By the mid-1970s, world events and public opinion regarding racism, decolonization and multiculturalism had overtaken political discourse amongst Australian politicians and civil servants, making the fears pronounced during the 1950s and 1960s look increasingly backward and out of touch. The fringes of the conservative and far right continued to use southern Africa, the United States or Britain as evidence of the pitfalls of a more liberal immigration policy, but this did not resonate in the same way that in had in earlier decades.

In the post-war era, Australia saw itself as part of a Western, English-speaking and ‘white’ network of nations, predominantly of settler colonial countries within the British Commonwealth. There were also strong ties to Britain herself, alongside connections with the United States, which had increased since the Second World War but had been developing since the late 1800s. In the face of the Cold War and decolonization, Australia embraced a transnational whiteness that set it apart from the communist east and the non-white Third World. An embodiment of this whiteness was the maintenance of the country’s restrictive immigration policies, still referred to colloquially as the ‘White Australia Policy’. However by the 1960s, it was increasingly difficult for the government and state agencies to justify the discriminatory nature of Australia’s border control system. Calls for the end of the policy grew, but were opposed by some politicians from nearly all sides of politics.

Part of the rhetorical devices used by those who opposed moderating the existing immigration policies was the invoking of international incidents as a warning to Australia. This tapped into the network of transnational whiteness with speakers using Britain, the United States, and southern Africa as examples of where ‘racial strife’ had occurred due to a lack of segregation between white and non-white people. Recent events, such as the Notting Hill riots in London, the racist protests against desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, or the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, were used as cautions about any liberalization of Australia’s immigration policy or its treatment of the Indigenous population. These events were portrayed as something foreign to Australia’s experiences and the result of incursions of non-white people into the living spaces of white society, rather than the imposition of white rule over colonized or racialized people. Using a term developed by Satnam Virdee, the ‘racialised outsider’ was expected to remain removed from white society, except when demanded by these white societies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This structural expectation seemed more and more untenable by the 1960s–70s as demands were made in Australia to reform the immigration control system, to treat the Indigenous population more fairly, and to take decolonization seriously (including withdrawal from Papua New Guinea). Efforts were made to achieve this in the face of the foreboding of those politicians and civil servants who used incidents from other places experiencing similar ruptures in the status quo to advise against reforms to the prevailing White Australia Policy. This article shows that transnational political ideas and movements flowed in multi-directional ways in the post-war era. Several scholars have pointed to the transnational solidarity that some Australians expressed with the decolonizing world and the fight against racism during the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, as we demonstrate above, others, including at the elite level, were invested in maintaining the white structures of power, using events abroad to dissuade the country from moving beyond the racially discriminatory immigration policies in place since 1901. Stuart Ward has noted that Australia did not produce a central figure to this white backlash like Enoch Powell in Britain, George Wallace in the United States, or Ian Smith in Rhodesia, but as this article has shown, a number of politicians vocalized the politics of white resentment against the liberalization of Australia’s immigration control system yet were, in the end, unsuccessful in turning back the clock.Footnote ¹⁰⁸