Leviathan (13 page)

 

Racism was officially sanctioned and organised along twin tracks in Australia for much of the twentieth century. The White Australia Policy attempted to hold off the Asian hordes to the north, while the local Aborigines were to be humanely bred out of existence through the happy coincidence of high mortality rates amongst the adult population and a stealthier program of state-sanctioned child stealing. While such policies were sustainable in a world dominated by European and anglophone powers, they faltered under the banzai charge of Imperial Japan and later collapsed with the exposure of Nazi Germany's racist insanities, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the decolonisation of Africa and Asia, the emergence of the civil rights movement in America, the richly deserved demonisation of apartheid South Africa and, of course, the rapid dilution of Australia's own Anglo homogeny.

This latter process did not run altogether smoothly. For instance, the contribution of European Jews to postwar reconstruction was not appreciated by all. In February 1947, HB Gullet, a Liberal member of parliament wrote to the
Argus
in Melbourne describing the arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe as the beginning of a national tragedy and an act of gross deceit by the Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell. Gullet said the Jews, an Eastern race, had swarmed all over Europe, owing loyalty and allegiance to nobody. They were rife in New York where they owned practically everything and in an accusation which could have come straight from the tombstone of Joseph Goebbels, he argued that: ‘They secured a stranglehold on Germany after the last war during the inflation period, and in very large part brought upon themselves the persecution which they suffered'. If the policy of allowing them entry was continued the country would, he thought, ‘bitterly rue the day'.

Most of the friction which arose as millions of European refugees poured into the cities of Sydney and Melbourne to rub up against the old British monoculture took the form of this sort of low-grade resentment and irritation. Born of ignorance and hopelessly disconnected from the brute facts of Australia's place in the world, it could not resist the force of realpolitik. Gullet, for instance, could have drawn little succour from the victory of his own conservative party in the federal election of 1949. Under Menzies the great postwar tide of migration continued unabated. In the space of one generation it completely transformed the Australian nation and that transformation was felt nowhere more keenly than in the metro centres where most of the newcomers settled. Before the Second World War the ‘British' proportion of Australia's population was about ninety percent. By 1971 Sydney and Melbourne were ranked among the ten largest Greek cities in the world.

Given the deeply rooted xenophobia of the nineteenth century Australian character it may seem surprising that this massive conversion – from a mono-to a multi-cultural, or if you prefer from a provincial to a cosmopolitan society – should take place without the sort of convulsions which had attended previous migration waves. There were no Klan-like processions down George Street to beat up the aliens and burn down their homes and businesses. Not that the base level of paranoia was any less. With Australia having just closely escaped national extermination at the hands of Imperial Japan, and living under the shadow of a looming confrontation with the Communist bloc, the national psyche was raw and fearful.

But it was, ironically, the existence of this universal dread which allowed the dramatic metamorphosis to proceed without fracturing the Australian social contract. Australia's population almost doubled in one generation, but unlike America in the 1920s, or Great Britain at the end of the Empire, the new arrivals did not fundamentally threaten the dominant culture. They were different of course. The Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Greeks and Italians who began to fill up Sydney's old inner city terraces brought new languages, customs, histories, food, art, literature, taboos and religion – their culture, in other words – which had defined their forebears' lives over thousands of years; a very different tapestry from the one stitched together by Sydney's Anglo-Celts in the previous century and a half.

It was not so different, however, as to undermine the basis of white civilization. As exotic as an Italian Jew or a Slavic peasant may have appeared to a fifth generation resident of Rose Bay or Manly, their histories intersected at many points in a common European narrative. Many of the Greeks who clustered together supportively in Redfern, Newtown and Erskineville had come from the hot, limestone island of Ithaca, which generations of English schoolchildren knew as the mythical home of Ulysses, and from Levkas, which some scholars think more likely to have been his home turf. They could see the democratic traditions of their ancestors transplanted to Australian institutions. The works of their ancients, of men like Plato and Hippocrates, were the bedrock upon which Western society rested. The Italians who arrived on the same migrant ships brought with them the history of Rome, which was synonymous with the history of Europe for 1000 years and of England for nearly 500. Roman rule gave birth to civilized England. Its language, religion, science and history – the machinery of national creation – were all shaped by Roman hands. Thus, 2000 years after Julius Caesar took his legions across the English Channel, Australian and Italian Catholics could find themselves worshipping the same God, in the same language, in a church built to principles laid down by Greek architects over two millennia earlier.

Coming hard on the end of a desperate war, the advent of mass European migration did not undermine the nation's sense of identity. In fact, as Sandra Rennie explains, it supported the existing cultural architecture. Still dealing with the recent prospect of annihilation, and no longer able to hide behind the skirts of Mother England, Australia was forced to recast its identity from being British to European, Protestant to Christian, and Anglo-Celtic to merely white. In doing so the country avoided the hysteria which had attended increased migration to America from similar sources after World War One. The US had restricted immigration in 1924 after growing panic about being swamped by the ‘primitive Slavic races' who were pouring into Chicago and New York from the political sinkholes of old Europe. Identifying with Nordic culture generally and Anglo-Saxon in particular, and traumatised by the disappearance of the frontier upon which so much their mythology was based, American intellectuals and proles alike viewed the growth of the huge industrial cities and ethnic slums with alarm. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolated and sparsely populated Australia could not afford the same indulgence.

While the integration of European migrants progressed with remarkably few major problems, for Aborigines, Australia at the start of the 1950s fulfilled all of Jonathan Rauch's criteria for an oppressive society: direct legal and governmental discrimination, denial of political franchise, systematic denial of education, impoverishment and a long-established pattern of human rights violations without recourse. Asian Australians, with the exception of a few small remnant Chinese communities, did not exist. By the end of the 1960s however, White Australia's fortifications were crumbling and would soon be reduced to rubble by a remarkably bipartisan pincer movement from the major political parties. Unfortunately the renovations to the political superstructure did not alter some of the darker cultural foundations on which racist policies such as White Australia and Aboriginal child stealing had been erected. So while postwar economic success enabled Australian society to comfortably welcome millions of new arrivals from previously alien cultures, the retreating waters of official discrimination left behind a few stagnant pools of racism in which the pond scum clung tenaciously to life. The 1972 election which delivered the reforming Whitlam government also marked the first reappearance in the Western world of a Nazi party, the National Socialist Party of Australia, openly running, in jackboots and swastikas, on a crazed crank-up-the-gas-ovens platform.

Until that point the genteel face of racism had been maintained by Eric Butler, Australia's foremost anti-Semite and Nazi apologist. Butler was the long-time chief of the League of Rights, and from 1934 the publisher of a journal called
New Times
, which enthusiastically reported on the progress of Adolf Hitler's daring social experiment. After that experiment was rudely interrupted by the Second World War, the League changed tack, but only slightly. It declared that (i) the Holocaust was a fraud, (ii) the Luftwaffe was controlled by the Jews, (iii) the Nazi Party was controlled by Jews and (iv) Jews had engineered the war to make themselves look good. The League is still rattling along today, desperately trying to hitch itself to the One Nation bandwagon and still quietly maintaining that the Luftwaffe was controlled by the Jews.

National Action is another group of hard core right-wingers who have been busy cosying up to Pauline Hanson's populist movement. A very dubious bunch of Aryan enthusiasts, these guys spent a lot of their political gestation period thrashing about in impotent rage until the arrival of Dinh Tran and his fellow refugees gave them a hook on which to hang their fright masks and secondhand SS helmets. In 1979, when the first great wave of Vietnamese refugees broke on the shoreline, Sydney's right-wing extremists plastered the inner city with leaflets and stickers, the central theme of which could be summed up in the slogan ‘Stop the Asian Invasion'. They received hundreds of initially sympathetic inquiries about their campaign, which unsurprisingly came to nothing when their true nature became obvious. Years later in the early 1980s about fifteen to twenty disgruntled right-wingers gathered around a few beers at a sharehouse in Glebe. They all agreed the revolution had been ‘this close' but perhaps they shouldn't have booked the oompah band for their victory celebrations so quickly. Mainstream Australia just wasn't aware of the threat it faced from the Asian hordes. They would have to be led to that knowledge. To that end the activists founded a new party, National Action, which described its politics as the Third Way; neither capitalism nor communism but revolutionary nationalism. Spokesmen repeatedly stated they were not anti-Asian, merely opposed to the ‘Asianisation' of Australia, and insisted that some Asian immigrants were acceptable as long as they assimilated.

Within a year, independent of developments in Glebe, the media began to run a hostile line against overseas students, particularly Asians. Sensing their time had come, National Action plastered campuses and the streets of Sydney with stickers and graffiti. In their own dim, pointy-headed way they had actually tuned into a powerful shift in the city's cultural and economic structure. The city's old north-south divide was rapidly mutating into an east-west schism. More than a decade later researchers from Sydney University's Planning Research Centre would describe the end point of this accelerating mutation: a bifurcated city ‘with a band of middle-income suburbs standing in between what looks like two armies confronting each other'. Furthermore, by the late 1990s the geographical divide was amplified by a growing economic and racial chasm, with poverty strongly ethnicised along the city's south-west frontier and marked, according to a Monash University study, by ‘the emergence of a potentially huge underclass in Sydney, concentrated in such areas as Fairfield, Auburn, Canterbury and Bankstown'.

For every Dinh Tran who carved out their own version of the Australian dream, there is a Nguyen or a Wang trapped in the gears of an economy grinding its way out of the past. Globalised production, often said to have exported low-skilled Australian jobs to places like Indonesia and China, has in fact imported the work practices and ‘efficiencies' of the Third World to the suburbs of Sydney, nowhere more so than in the clothing industry, one of the biggest employers of migrant women. Typically working between twelve and eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for three dollars an hour or less – a return to the practices of a hundred years ago, when the trade exploited Sydney's poor white working girls in much the same manner – they are at the sharp end of massive changes which have overtaken the local clothing industry in the last decade or so. They are also emblematic of the dark side of increasing economic efficiency. While improving productivity would seem to be a motherhood issue, it is also, as Henry Mayhew explained, a matter of economising human fuel. Isolated, desperate for work, often with poor language skills and unaware of their rights, the outworkers fall prey to the lowest sort of operators. Whole families work and eat at their sewing machines, living in their garages and sheds for days at a time to complete large orders. One woman who rang the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union had worked unpaid for eight months. When she approached her employer about her money, he punched her and took her receipt book – the only evidence she had of the work she had done. Another woman contacted the union after working an incredible 150 hour week then being told that because of a mistake in the sewing – a flaw she had identified but been told to ignore – she would not be paid.

Throughout the 1980s a booming economy masked the social consequences of this deep tectonic rupture within the city's demographics. While shareholders, CEOs and property owners in Sydney's east and north gorged themselves on the proceeds of profit growth and asset inflation, hundreds of thousands in the city's south and west were chopped into a fine mince by the same economic system. Ethnic atomisation complicated the process, with poor families from Lebanon, Vietnam, Turkey, Cambodia and Laos displacing hundreds of thousands of poor whites on the urban fringe, the latter decamping for the coastal strip north of the city. And while the achievements of some Asian-Australians taunted those trapped in relative or even absolute poverty the failure of many others to cope with the transition to Sydney's rapidly globalising economy has provided legions of bitter recruits to the army of the underclass.