It is often said that the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is this very sensible?.
Much the same analogy can be applied to the argument put forward by Iggy Kim, that the germ of racism was absolutely dominant in the formation of the Australian Labor Party. That may have an element of truth, but there were many other germs present in the early years of the Australian labour movement and the ALP. While the racism was dominant, it was contested by significant and vocal minorities in and around the labour movement. My investigations have led me to the conclusion that there were two significant currents that dissented from the prevailing racism.
One location of opposition was the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which was an international outfit, the boss of which was an Italian in the Vatican in Rome, and it had a largely Irish flock in Australia, thoroughly alienated from the rhetoric of British Australia.
There were also quite a few Catholics who weren't British. Cardinal Moran defended the Chinese. Moran also, on a number of occasions, articulately exposed the imperialist activities of Protestant missionaries in the South Pacific. Caroline Chisholm defended Asian migration to Australia. Archbishop Duhig, the long-time and politically very right-wing Archbishop of Brisbane, nevertheless stood up strenuously in opposition to racism against Italians and Maltese in North Queensland, obviously partly because they were part of his own flock.
Some of the group settlements of Italians in North Queensland were actually organised by the Catholic Church. A bit later on, during the British‑Australia hysteria of the First World War, Archbishop Mannix strenuously defended German and Austrian Lutherans and Catholics against the prevailing madness.
While it wouldn't be accurate to idealise the racial attitudes of ordinary Catholics, who no doubt shared, to some degree, the prevailing racism of Australian society at that time, their Irish origins made their racism more equivocal than that of the majority. In addition to this, the international connections of the Catholic Church, and particularly the Catholic hierarchy, brought an international influence into play that implicitly contradicted the local racism.
Even the fact that some Catholic priests went overseas to Rome or Louvain to train, had a rather internationalising effect on the Catholic Church. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Catholics supported, and many were active in the labour movement, brought this influence to bear in the labour movement.
The other major site of opposition to racism was in the socialist, Marxist and secular groups and sects in or around the labour movement. Quite a few early socialists and left-wingers in Australia were themselves non-British migrants. Such groups as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were explicitly anti-racist from their inception.
The largest and most influential socialist group in Australia before the First World War was the Victorian Socialist Party. It was well entrenched in the ALP, and was, through linked socialist organisations in other states, influential all over Australia.
The VSP was repeatedly convulsed by debates and arguments over the White Australia Policy and the race question. There are three important sources on this debate. One is These Things Shall Be, an objective but filial biography of his father, Bob Ross, by Edgar Ross; the chapter, A Socialist Dilemma: Racism and Internationalism in the Victorian Socialist Party 1905–21 by Graeme Osborne, in the book Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class, edited by Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus; International Socialism and Australian Labor by Frank Farrell; and Doherty's Corner, the biography of Marie E.J. Pitt, by Colleen Burke.
The major debate in the Victorian Socialist Party erupted in 1907. To quote Graeme Osborne:
The case for socialist brotherhood was put initially by a non-Party member, a remarkable Victorian public servant – Miss Amelia Lambrick – who wrote first under the pseudonym Hypatia. She launched the debate by urging socialists to recognise that they had not yet grasped the full meaning of socialism in Australia. When they did they would see as its unique essence an insistence on brotherhood which demanded freedom and equality for all peoples. Unfortunately Australian socialists who though quick to recognise the nature and beauty of brotherhood… are often slow to realise what it involves. We generalise loudly but particularise softly. We shout «Brotherhood» in the major and «White Australia» in the minor and seem quite unconscious of the discord…
Both «reason and righteousness» compelled socialists to recognise the antagonism between socialism and the White Australia Policy, and the inconsistency involved when «we repudiate the rights of a privileged class, and uphold the rights of a privileged race». Accordingly Australia's socialists must seek to open her abundance to her crowded northern neighbours…
Within the Party her principal support came from the poet Bernard O'Dowd. He acknowledged the delicacy of the issue when he wrote of Hypatia's «courage» and congratulated Tom Mann as editor of The Socialist for running «this dangerous, but necessary discussion». Though conceding that immigration restrictions might be necessary on occasions to protect workers against unfair competition, he attacked the racist assumptions that frequently underlay such a view. European cultures were not necessarily superior, nor was it evident that interracial unions and their progeny were in any way inferior. Further, if such unions were undesirable it was not a matter for males alone to decide. For O'Dowd socialism meant democracy. To realise democracy it was necessary to absolutely eliminate… colour from all State and social policy, unless you would justify… caste, wealth, rank, birth and education, as giving title to privileged treatment…
Some in the Party, however, when discussing the immigration question, saw very definite reasons for limiting the application of the principles of democracy and socialist brotherhood. In advocating restricted immigration, they began by stressing the need to defend the economic position of workers, but nearly always eventually revealed a range of racial assumptions. Prominent in these assumptions were the inevitability of racial incompatibility, the dangers of pollution and contamination, and the horrors associated with sexual encounters across racial boundaries. W.J. Baxter and Mrs M.E.J. Pitt were the leading protagonists of such views…
Baxter's heroic depiction of woman's role as defender of the race and his sexual chivalry won the approval of Mrs Pitt, one of the first Party members to voice doubts openly over coloured immigration. Mrs Pitt found the prospects of sexual encounters across racial boundaries «repulsive» and under normal conditions «impossible». In her view «perfect brotherhood» would be quite as perfect «without any blending of the white and coloured races». She concluded:
«As a woman… I cannot allow the occasion to pass without very sincerely thanking Mr Baxter for his treatment of his subject as affecting the woman, and particularly for his able and singularly luminous expression of the instinct in the woman of any race which makes for racial purity – an instinct… as dear… as life itself, and… being so, should be equally dear to the nation to which she belongs.» Clearly, in Mrs Pitt's view the connection between racial purity and nationalism was indissoluble.
This debate continued in the Victorian Socialist Party for the next 10 years, with both anti-racist and pro-racist views having quite widespread support, both among the rank and file and the leadership of the party. The debate was still unresolved as the Victorian Socialist Party gradually declined in the 1920s after many of its supporters and members crossed over to the newly formed Communist Party following the Russian Revolution.
One very significant generally left-wing figure in the VSP was R.S. Ross, who through his own socialist magazine, Ross's Monthly, widely popularised the Russian Revolution. Despite this, Ross remained a defender of the White Australia Policy, and this is discussed carefully and intelligently, but quite critically, in veteran Communist Edgar Ross's very useful biography of his father, Bob Ross.
A rather interesting sidelight on this debate is the personal story of the poet Marie Pitt and the poet Bernard O'Dowd, who clashed so sharply on opposite sides in this debate. As far as one can tell from the records, their views didn't change, but they got together personally and became quite a well-known couple in Melbourne intellectual circles. This was complicated by the fact that O'Dowd was married to a Catholic woman who would not give him a divorce, and so O'Dowd and Marie Pitt became quite a notorious item in the rather moralistic atmosphere of Melbourne in the 1920s, and remained together into old age, until Marie Pitt died. In their own way, they struck a considerable blow for civilised, modern living arrangements. This is all described rather nicely in Colleen Burke's book about Marie Pitt's life, which also contains an excellent selection of Pitt's poetry.
One significant opponent of White Australia at its inception was the quirky, independent-minded Melbourne bookseller, E.W. Cole. He published a number of pamphlets and articles at his own expense, opposing the White Australia Policy, which was quite a courageous line of action, considering that his large Melbourne retail business might have been, on one reading of the situation, affected by his public stand on White Australia. It did not seem to be, as his business went from strength to strength in the early years of the new century.
The most important bourgeois opponent of White Australia was Bruce Smith, the Free Trade MP for Parkes in NSW. He was a very significant figure in the capitalist class. He was the principal of Howard Smiths, the shipowners, and he was a fairly determined opponent of trade unionism.
He was obviously partly motivated by his antagonism to George Reid, the Free Trade leader, who had formed several Free Trade governments in NSW by getting Labor support at the price of enacting a lot of progressive pro-Labor legislation. Smith had been his main opponent within the Free Trade party of this parliamentary line-up.
Smith's lengthy and intelligent speech against all aspects of the bill embodying White Australia in the newly established federal parliament, was the only one against it, and he was attacked by his fellow politicians on all sides for his stand, which didn't seem to overawe him one bit.
He even subsidised the publication of a hardback book opposing White Australia, a large part of which consists of a reprint and discussion of his speech in the parliament.
This 235‑page book, printed in Rowe Street, Sydney, by R.T. Kelly and Sons, in 1903, a copy of which I own, is called Colorphobia. An Exposure of the White Australia Fallacy, by Gizen-No-Teki (obviously a pseudonym) concentrates its criticism of White Australia on Smith's fellow Free Traders, particularly Reid, who supported White Australia, and on the labour movement advocates of White Australia. A curious feature of this book is that it is written from the point of view of the advocates of Henry George's single tax on land. Maybe Bruce Smith was a Single Taxer.
The conflict over conscription during the First World War had a number of complex and conflicting racial overtones. The British‑Australia racism of William Morris Hughes and the ruling class was used to whip up wild jingoistic hostility to Germans and Turks in Australia, and to the «disloyal» Irish Catholics.
Unfortunately the anti-conscription side resorted to a certain racism of its own, with accusations that the ruling class intended to flood the country with cheap labour from unacceptable places. This conflict came to focus around an unfortunate shipload of 214 Maltese migrants, who had the bad luck to arrive in Australia on a French ship, the Gange, in the middle of the first conscription referendum campaign in 1916.
As the propaganda of the anti-conscription side against the government about Maltese migration was obviously damaging the government in the referendum, Hughes ditched the interests of the Maltese migrants, whom he had previously encouraged.
The unfortunate Maltese were first of all interned for some weeks in New Caledonia, and then they were detained for a further long period like convicts on a dilapidated old hulk at Berry's Bay in Sydney Harbour. A mad and virulent controversy ranged around the heads of these unfortunate immigrants for nine months.
They were defended by a courageous and redoubtable Maltese priest, Father Bonnet. After being thus interned for such a long time, they were finally allowed to land in Australia in March 1917, well after the first conscription referendum. Predictably, the most vehement advocates of deporting the Maltese were the bureaucracy of the Australian Workers Union.
One wonders whether Terry Muscat, the Maltese migrant, who was recently elected National Secretary of the AWU, may even have had the odd relative on the Gange. The shameful incident of the internment of the Maltese, is described in detail in Barry York's very fine book, Empire and Race. The Maltese in Australia 1881–1949.
The greatest atrocity perpetrated by British Australia against any cultural group after the enormous atrocities committed against indigenous Australians, the Chinese, and the Kanaks, was the ruthless cultural destruction of the German‑Australian community during the First World War.
This is described thoroughly and graphically in a 400‑page book Enemy Aliens by Gerhard Fischer, published by University of Queensland Press in 1989. The large German‑Australian community was assaulted by anti-Boche hysteria in every possible way. All the German-language schools in South Australia and Queensland were closed down. Many Lutheran churches were locked up. Even the German names of villages of German settlement (like Hahndorf in South Australia) were changed. An arbitrary and brutal policy of internment was inflicted on the German Australian community.
Not everybody was interned. That would have been impossible, as there were about 70,000 people of some German ancestry. But all the significant leaders of the German community, and many others besides, were interned in a completely arbitrary way. They included Edmund Resch, the brewer, interned at the age of 71, a large number of Lutheran ministers, a Catholic priest, Australia's foremost orthopaedic surgeon, a number of musicians, a waiter in a German club who happened also to be a member of the IWW, the secretary of the Sydney Motor Chauffers Trade Union, who had committed the unpardonable sin of leading a successful strike of his members in time of war, a second-generation German Australian leader of the wharfies' union, and even a second-generation farmer in the Riverina who was interned just a week after his eldest son, a volunteer in the AIF, had been invalided back from France.
Many of the German‑Australians interned were Australian citizens and many had even been born in Australia. No evidence was ever produced of political activities on behalf of the German war effort.
The citizens of other belligerent countries on the other side in the war were also interned extremely arbitrarily, including Bulgarians, Austrians, Turks, and even some Afghans who were classed as sympathetic to Turkey because of their Muslim religion.
In Western Australia the then racist mineworkers union played an unpleasant role, succeeding in provoking the internment of 300 southern Slavs, Croatians and Slovenes, who were classed as enemy aliens because they were citizens of Austria-Hungary. These were mainly mineworkers at Kalgoorlie, who the racist union had been trying to exclude from the mines for years.
Even some Serbs, who were actually British allies in the First World War, were interned, so viciously confused was the attitude of authority. Later, a number of Russians, also ostensible allies, were interned, really because of their trade union and labour movement activity. Most of these people were locked up in an enormous concentration camp at Holsworthy near Liverpool, in NSW.
When the war ended, these prisoners, who by then numbered about 6000, were kept interned until after the signing of the Versaille Treaty in 1919, when the overwhelming majority of them were ruthlessly deported to their countries of origin. A few, like the brewer Resch, managed to stay in Australia after mounting an extensive and costly legal campaign, which he had the resources to fund. The overwhelming majority of the Germans were not so favoured by circumstances.
Many of the deportees were back-loaded on empty troop ships. A large and significant number of those deported were Australian citizens, and many were Australian-born. So much for «citizenship» in British Australia. According to Fischer's book, hundreds of migrants who weren't enemy aliens, but who were politically and industrially active on the left, were deported in the same sweep.