An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion: Australia from 1788 (Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society) - Hardcover

Jupp, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783087668 ISBN 13: 9781783087662

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2018

Synopsis

An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion presents Australian traditions, myths and legends in an understanding but often critical light in the belief that such devices have often been used by interested parties and even governments to maintain social solidarity and to mould a very complex people into a coherent and obedient whole.

Australia is not and never has been an equal society. It has not always been a peaceful and tolerant society but it is more so than most other states and especially many of those sending immigrants. It is not a perfect democracy. Many have been mistreated and even persecuted but that most of those suffering at present are either indigenous or refugees should not be a cause of indifference. Australians may be suspicious of foreigners and social and political deviants. But they have passed a whole series of reforming laws since the Federation in 1901, not all of which have been as racist as the White Australia policy. An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion attempts to get a little bit closer to the truth of two hundred years of creating a liveable society in what was a remote and unknown part of the world.

About this title

About the Author

James Jupp is a visiting scholar in the School of Demography, Australian National University. Educated in the UK, Jupp moved to Australia after graduation. His doctoral dissertation has been published as Sri Lanka: Third World Democracy (1978). Jupp is the author of several books and articles, the editor of three encyclopaedias and the co-editor of six books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

An Immigrant Nation Seeks Cohesion

Australia from 1788

By James Jupp

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2018 James Jupp
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78308-766-2

Contents

Preface, vii, 
List of Abbreviations, xi, 
Introduction, xiii, 
Part I, 
1. Prisons in the Pacific, 1788-1850, 3, 
2. The British Inheritance, 7, 
3. White Australia and the Golden Age, 15, 
4. Peace, Order and Good Government, 33, 
5. Indigenous Australia and the South Pacific, 41, 
6. Rural Settlers, the Irish and the Chinese, 53, 
7. Radicals and Rebels, 59, 
8. Communists and Their Allies, 65, 
9. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 79, 
10. Refugees before the UN Convention and Enemy Aliens, 83, 
11. Crime, Corruption and Terrorism, 95, 
12. The Multicultural Era, 109, 
13. Islam as the New Threat, 113, 
Part II, 
14. The Post-War Promise Ends, 127, 
15. Refugees and War, 135, 
16. The United Nations and Refugees, 139, 
17. Mandatory Detention, 151, 
18. 'Stop the Boats', 157, 
19. Finding a Decent Dumping Ground, 159, 
20. History as Tragedy and Farce, 165, 
21. Facing the 'Real World', 173, 
22. Cohesion and Humanity, 177, 
23. From Nation-Building to Border Protection, 181, 
24. An Unstable World, 183, 
Chronology, 187, 
References, 193, 
Index, 207, 

CHAPTER 1

PRISONS IN THE PACIFIC, 1788–1850

Modern Australia was founded in 1788 as a prison in the Pacific, far enough away from Britain for its inmates to be unable to escape (although a few did). Its long- term planners in London had rejected previous disastrous sites in Africa but were anxious to secure Britain's existing interests against the French in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific (Christopher 2010; Atkinson 1997). This required a reserve of British settlers and defenders and a well-developed military base. The first-generation convicts were not normally locked away, as there were no custom-built prisons for them. Massive constructions such as Fremantle Gaol or Port Arthur came later. Prison stations outside Sydney, such as Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay, Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island and the Newcastle coalmines, were more stringent and feared than the relatively liberal arrangements in Cumberland County defended by historian John Hirst in Convict Society and Its Enemies (Hirst 1983, 1988). A much longer and quite different account of the system is that of Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore (Hughes 1987). A statistical analysis by Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold (Nicholas 1988) argues that convicts to New South Wales were relatively skilled and literate and were a useful workforce. Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania) was more rigorous than New South Wales and continued its convict system longer. Convicts were normally put to constructive work relevant to building a permanent society as part of the expanding British Empire. This followed a tradition of convict and indentured labour in other British colonies, but it did not use slavery as in the Caribbean or North America. Convicts and Aborigines were nominally British subjects, governed by British law. Australian origins lay in coercion but not formal conquest.

When necessary, convict discipline was maintained by floggings, transfer to stricter locations or chain gangs working on the roads and public works. Guarding and policing were often provided by other convicts. The British military saw their role as defence and preventing rebellion and (for its officers) making money. Convict numbers reached a peak of 27,831 in New South Wales in 1836, and 46.4 per cent of the recorded population in 1828. In Van Diemen's Land numbers peaked at 28,459 in 1848 and 47.1 per cent in 1819. Convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868 totalled 160,000 (Robson 1965). Convicts were a major part of the white recorded population and were overwhelmingly male (Robinson 1985, 1993; Daniels 1998). Convicts sent to Western Australia between 1850 and 1868 numbered 9,600, were exclusively male and included many drawn from the industrial areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands. A request that no Irish should be sent was ignored.

As in all repressive systems, some controllers could be more vicious than others. Patrick Logan of Moreton Bay (Brisbane) has gone down in song and story as particularly brutal and was eventually killed by Aborigines in 1830. At the other extreme was Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of Norfolk Island from 1840 to 1844. His radical reforms were well in advance of contemporary thinking. The degree of repression often depended on the colonial governors sent out for limited periods by the government in London. Convict life under Lachlan Macquarie was more liberal than under Ralph Darling (1825 — 1831), for example. However, this liberalism was criticized by the Thomas Bigge commission of enquiry, published in England in 1822 and 1823. This led to a series of administrative reforms, including further assignment of convicts to farmers and landowners (Hirst 1983).

In theory convicts enjoyed the same common law rights as enjoyed in England and Wales. But these were not very liberal in practice. By the 1830s transportation, as shipment of convicts to Australia was termed, was being attacked as 'slavery' both in England and New South Wales. Convicts could not be bought and sold, unlike the slaves in the US system until the civil war of the 1860s. Australia never had slavery, but it had many similar practices into modern times. What it also had was repression of the indigenous population as rigorously as in the United States, but without the use of overwhelming military force. The rapid decline in Aboriginal numbers was largely due to infectious diseases (Campbell 2002). Many were hunted down and shot, especially in Queensland, which did not become a distinct colony until 1859. The British government and humanitarians in England deplored this oppression, but had limited influence on settler society, which was at a distance of several months' sailing.

Many convicts were on a seven-year term, which could be reduced for good behaviour. It could be modified by the grant of tickets of leave, which allowed participation in the labour market and greater mobility. Many were forbidden to return to Britain but could build a new life in the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, often starting as labourers assigned to farmers (Alexander 2010). Murderers were normally hanged in Britain, so they did not arrive. Radicals such as Irish nationalists were sometimes treated lightly when they were of middle-class origin like Smith O'Brien and Joseph Holt. After massive protests in Britain, six farm labourers from Tolpuddle (Dorset), transported in 1834 for forming a union, were returned to England three years later (Marlow 1971). Unions had been freed from the restrictive Combination Acts in 1824. It was no longer illegal to form one, but being charged with taking an illegal oath made transportation questionable.

Eventually, time-expired convicts moved into Victoria and South Australia, in neither of which were they welcomed, instead scorned as 'Van Diemonians'. Both these colonies had laws by the 1850s to prevent migration from Tasmania. Convicts, former convicts and their children comprised the majority of white Australians until the 1830s, when they began to be replaced by immigrants assisted with public funds from the sale of lands. Immigrants were encouraged to bring families and contributed to reducing the heavy male imbalance caused by the convict system (Oxley 1996; Robinson 1993). Many convicts had also formed families, started farming and commerce, and they were admitted rather reluctantly to the classes 'born free', meaning never a convict. Polite society, centred around the Government Houses of Sydney and Hobart, was usually closed to former convicts. The South Australian Act of 1834 specifically banned the entrance of convicts into the new colony, with limited effect (Pike 1967). Wealth mattered more than origins, in contrast to Britain, where the two were closely interrelated. As long as the convict system lasted, Australia could not be described as a 'cohesive' society. Convicts and their families could always be identified by their ship of arrival. They were predominantly male labourers, with some middle-class forgers or embezzlers.

Misbehaving convicts could be locked into chain gangs, which mainly laboured on roads and public works. A few were imprisoned on small islands in Sydney Harbour, such as Garden Island. Others were sent to isolated prisons on Norfolk Island or at Port Arthur and Macquarie Island (Tasmania). Escape from these was almost impossible. Isolated penal stations at Newcastle, Port Macquarie and Moreton Bay were all more rigorous than the major centres at or near Sydney. Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land) was regarded as especially repressive, with an isolated island in Macquarie Harbour on the remote west coast (Reynolds 2012). In very serious cases, recalcitrants were hanged. More common was flogging, not prohibited for females until 1817, and used on boys as well as adults. Although transportation ended in 1840 in New South Wales and in 1853 in Tasmania (VDL), it was continued in Western Australia until 1868 (for male convicts only).

Prisons in the Pacific were central to the first 60 years of British settlement. (Shaw 1977; Robson 1965). The discovery of gold in the 1850s created several decades of free and uncontrolled immigration, with some ineffective restrictions on the Chinese by governments or employers (Victoria 1855). This came to an end throughout the united country with the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, the first major law of the Commonwealth ( Simms 2001; London 1970; Tavan 2005). Without saying so, this created the White Australia system of excluding all immigrants not of European origin. About half the free settlers from the British Isles were assisted with the passage money; these settlers were selected in Britain or Ireland and paid for by funds raised from land sales in the Australian colonies (Charlotte Erickson 1994). Many were also given support for removal expenses by the English Poor Law system, reformed in 1834 around the new workhouses. Australian employers were critical of those chosen, as they had been of the convict labourers. Skilled workers in mining and the construction trades were not eligible for assistance, but were often paid passages by employers or trade unions.

While many former convicts created respectable and constructive lives, others were recruited into outlaw gangs of 'bushrangers', who flourished between the 1820s and 1880s (White 1975). Ned Kelly, like many other criminals, was the son of a convict, and his family was in regular conflict with the police (Macfarlane 2012). Assisted immigrants, however, normally established stable families and were selected with that in mind. Preference was given to agricultural workers for a century. Recruitment during the first Australian century was designed by colonial governments to ensure a predominantly British and Irish population of mainly working-class people, drawn from convicts, assisted immigrants and gold-rush arrivals. Traditional views of Australia were developed within that context and still influence many popular stereotypes. This produced a planned society, although not one without continuing problems.

CHAPTER 2

THE BRITISH INHERITANCE

The complex but controlled society of today, created after World War II, followed in a historic tradition of bureaucratic nation-building (S. Macintyre 2015). This began with the convict settlement of New South Wales from 1788 to the 1840s and then built on a system of state-assisted British and Irish immigration, which lasted from the 1830s until the 1970s. Other Europeans were not excluded before 1901, but were not encouraged, except for Protestant northern Europeans from Germany and Scandinavia (Koivukangas and Westin 1999; Tampke and Doxford 1990). From 1901 until the early 1970s no one was allowed to settle permanently who was not of white European origin, with some very limited exceptions, including some already there (Tavan 2005). Although other states around the Pacific had similar or related policies, none pursued them as rigorously as the new colonies of Australia (Lake and Reynolds 2008).

Such imported labour as had been, or continued to be, introduced included Muslim camel drivers from the north-west of the British Indian empire (the Afghans') (Bouma 1994; Cigler 1986). Pacific Islanders were recruited for the sugar cane plantations of Queensland and northern New South Wales, but were returned to their islands in 1906 (Corris 1973; Wawn 1893). By 1945 only 1 per cent of the population were not of white, European origin, together with less than 2 per cent from the Indigenous Aboriginal people who had lived in Australia for countless thousands of years. Both of these populations were declining in numbers by federation in 1901. Public policy was designed to maintain this decline (Markus 1979; Palfreeman 1967; Price 1974).

There is a contrast between Australia's early development of parliamentary democracy (Hirst 1988), its later ratifying of international conventions protecting human rights and the right to seek asylum, and its reluctance to extend such rights to minorities — ranging from the early convicts to the current asylum seekers. Unlike similar democracies, Australia does not have a bill of rights, either in its constitution or its legislation. In current debates and public analyses Australian culture is often credited with a basis in British liberal tradition and common law and/or the Judeo-Christian ethic and eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Gascoigne 2002; Broadie 2003; Herman 2003). These analyses are essentially social myths that treat the development of the past 250 years in favourable and even flattering terms. They are seldom analysed in detail and often serve the purpose of obscuring other less attractive inheritances, such as the denial of equality to unpopular minorities or individuals. Most elected politicians were anxious to sustain and expand the control of their parliaments and to mobilize the majority population, if necessary, against minority groups and opinions. Australia and Britain were not liberal democracies in the sixty founding years of the colonies, but neither were they autocracies. They were less directly influenced by the Enlightenment than many European societies or the United States. However most of their governors believed in rational planning, if not in formal democracy. For most of the convict period 'democracy' was officially rejected by governors as the bloodstained and unstable system imposed on France by the revolutionaries in 1795.

The so-called Judeo-Christian inheritance is a recent artefact coming from the United States. Previous Australian generations probably learned more about Greek and Roman cultures, as in Britain. This alleged inheritance is designed to distinguish majority ideals and practices from those of other 'alien' minorities and especially Muslims. Both the Jewish and Christian religions have important bases in the same Old Testament texts as Islam, a fact that is usually ignored or unknown. Most of the popular generalizations about Australia assume a much greater degree of uniformity than can be detected on closer inspection (Bouchard 2008; Hartz 1964). For two centuries two alternative Christian systems competed for public support, agreeing on many moral issues, but disagreeing on church discipline, private morality, educational systems and limitations on personal behaviour (Breward 2001). These Protestant and Catholic systems derived their clientele from Britain and Ireland, respectively. State control of immigration developed rapidly, only frustrated during the gold rushes by huge increases in population and private wealth. State selection was made more important by the need to sustain a cohesive society, while recruiting a labour force from overseas — one that would be useful, obedient and British.

The British inheritance is well documented (Bridge and Fedorowich 2003). But it is also less obvious and uncontested than it was as recently as the government of Sir Robert Menzies. Its lasting benefit is the English language and all those works of literature, knowledge and ideas that most Australians see as sustaining their way of life. Yet changes in ethnicity caused by mass immigration have reduced the British element in the population from over 95 per cent in the 1940s to less than 70 per cent by 2000. British subjects, apart from New Zealanders, ceased to have privileged immigration status in 1978. A varied population of just over one million British-born remains, the largest number in such a diaspora outside the United Kingdom (Jupp 2004). The great majority of these have the vote, including an elderly residue who are not Australian citizens, but arrived while British subjects and Australian citizens had equal rights and privileges. The British diaspora is remarkably assimilated but still retains some old loyalties (Hammerton and Thomson 2005).

Prior to 1949 British subjects were treated as equally Australian unless they were 'Aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa or the Pacific'. Since then Australian citizenship has become increasingly obligatory for the franchise, passports and visa-free admission. Temporary residents, whether students, workers or visitors, may change their status entirely at the discretion of the Australian government. Citizens have no inalienable right to a passport. This remains the property of the Australian government and may, in rare but increasing cases be denied to them. By 2015 politicians were talking of removing passports from citizens thought to be active in support of Islamic extremism and having dual citizenship. Inhibiting this was the realization that dual citizens may number several millions, the largest group being from the United Kingdom. However, a growing number were stopped at the airports from travelling to the Middle East and a few of these had their passports cancelled. The threat of losing citizenship altogether now hangs over anyone believed to be involved in terrorism overseas. As proposed, this will be subject to a ministerial rather than a judicial decision.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783087668
• ISBN 13: 9781783087662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 236