Part 1

The origin of Australia's shift form an anti-immigration (of non-whites) to a multicultural society lies in the experience of Australia during the Second World War. That conflict demonstrated that Australia lacked the population necessary to defend itself. With only a population of 7 million, the continent was thinly populated and the perception was that had it not been for the United States, Australia would have fallen to the Japanese. The post-war government of Prime Minister Ben Chifley (Labor Party) believed that the population needed to be tripled and thought couldn't be achieved through domestic births, immigration held the solution.

Chifley created the Department of Immigration, headed by Arthur Calwell. Chifley believed in giving his minister free reign in the departments so Calwell had great freedom in his policies. Calwell's maiden speech in parliament has become known as the Populate or Perish speech as in it, Calwell states that Australia has twenty years to boost its population before the next attempt by Asians to conquer Australia. As you can no doubt tell, Calwell was still deeply racist and he still supported the 'White Australia' Policy but he was also a realist and saw that Australia needed mass immigration to meets its economic and defence needs.

You'll notice I stated at the end of the last paragraph that immigration was needed to meet Australia's economic needs as well as defence. This again was a direct result of the Second World War. Australia emerged from that conflict with a much bigger manufacturing capacity and a post-war economic boom saw that manufacturing base growing, there just wasn't enough workers available to sustain that boom however nor were there enough to undertake the massive infrastructure and housing projects that Australia needed. Again, immigration was the solution.

The desire amongst Australians was that those immigrants should be British. Australia was 99% white and most of them were of British origin. Policy makers were conscious of this desire and sought to meet a target of 9 out 10 immigrants being from British stock. To illustrate just how deeply the Australian population abhorred the idea of non-white or even non-British immigration, when Arthur Calwell issued 2000 landing permits to survivors of the Holocaust, the Australian newspapers depicted arriving Jews as rats and as cartoon stereotypes that could very well have been drawn from newspapers in Hitler's Germany.

Predictably, British immigrants didn't receive such harsh welcomes. The probloem for Calwell in this regard was that there simply were not enough British immigrants to be had, even when the Australian government offered subsidised travel to British immigrants. Despite the goal of 9 in 10 immigrants being British, the first post-war immigration ship, the Misr, arriving in Australia had very few British immigrants among its more then 600 passengers, most of whom were drawn from eastern Europe and the Middle East. This was not received well by the Australian media and public. To combat this, Calwell embarked on a massive publicity scheme to build support for his immigration scheme.

in 1947 Calwell leaves Australia under the guise of going to Britain to seek ships for transporting migrants to Australia. While there, Calwell meets with the International Refugee Organisitaion who are looking to relocate displaced persons from Europe. Calwell discovers that their is great competition between nations to secure the best refugees. Calweel is forced to act quickly to ensure that Australia does not miss out on securing valuable human resources despite their previous status threats to White Australia. Calwell urges Chifley to takes immediate action and sign an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation. Chifley acts immediately, signing without speaking to his cabinet or the Labor caucus, bypassing any opportunity for Calwell's initiative to be turned down.

This effectively knocks down one of the props that holds the White Australia policy up and while Asians, Africans, or anyone else that didn't look like they might have come from Great Britain are still excluded, the first step to a more multi cultural Australia was taken.

844 former refugees are selected for the inaugural transport to Australia. Calwell keeps the arrival of the ship as secret. These refugees have been selected very carefully, they had to be young, strong, good looking and were almost all listed as labourers despite any previous qualifications or expertise. This was part of Calwell's strategy. By presenting very good looking immigrants to the news reels. Used as a Trojan horse to show that the next best thing to British immigrants were immigrants from the Balkans. More followed the inaugural ship and some 170,000 formerly displaced persons would eventually immigrate to Australia before the end of the decade, rivaling the number of British immigrants.

While all this is going on, Australia is trying to deport those people that did not fit into the idealised Australian society. This included some 6000 Asians who had come to Australia as refugees during the war and had contributed to the war effort and in some cases had settled down, married Australian women, started families and started businesses. Most agreed to leave, honouring the agreement made with them that once the war had ended they would return home. Around 500 resisted on the basis that they had Australian born families. Many of them were forcibly deported, parted from the families. One family challenged their deportation in the courts. Annie Jacob, her eight children her husband Samuel were evacuated from Indonesia to Australia in 1942. Samuel returned to Indonesia to undertake a military mission in 1944 and was killed in a plane crash. Annie and her children boarded with a retired postal worker named John O'Keefe who promised to take care of Annie if anything were to happen to Samuel. In 1947, the government demanded that Annie and her children leave Australia. O'Keefe married Annie, hoping that marriage would prevent her deportation. It did for two years but the government again ordered the family's deportation in 1949.

Despite a slew of public and political support for the family, Calwell refused to reverse the decision, stating that "“We can have a white Australia, we can have a black Australia, but a mongrel Australia is impossible, and I shall not take the first steps to establish the precedents which will allow the floodgates to be opened.” Again you can see that despite his efforts to bring Displaced Persons to Australia, racism still featured prominently in the man. The O'Keefe case was taken before the High Court and it was ruled that as Annie had not been declared a prohibited immigrant upon her arrival, the immigration department did not have the power to deport her or her children. Calwell's actions were seen by much of the public to be hardhearted and coupled with some other attempts to deport individuals (including a Filipino sergeant in the Australian army which almost started an international incident), Calwell's reputation and the Labor Party's reputation suffered. In 1949, the Chifley government lost the federal election to Robert Menzies' Liberal Party, largely due to anti-communist sentiment.

Despite Menzies stance as a very pro-British immigration Prime Minister, he leaves Calwell's immigration scheme in place. Throughout the 1950's Southern Europeans, Greeks, Italians etc start arriving in great numbers. This would eventually lead to the largest community of Greeks outside of Greece being established in Melbourne. This isn't to say that everything was rosy on the immigration front. In 1950, the 75% rule was introduced. This rule was supposed to ensure that immigrants seeking to come to Australia appeared at least 75% white. It's as ridiculous as it sounds and it also sounds disturbingly similar to the Nuremburg laws from Nazi Germany. It was almost impossible to accurately judge such a thing and was poorly implemented.

New immigrants were expected to assimilate to Australian society and leave their past in Europe. The central understanding was that immigrants owed everything to Australia and Australia owed nothing to the newly arrived...despite their role in building some of the largest infrastructure projects in Australian history such as the Snowy Mountain Scheme. As Australia approached the 1960's and its next military encounter with the Asians it had feared for so long, it became apparent to many Australians that the immigration of such large numbers of non-British Europeans was not going to threaten Australian society.

Fear of Asia and the growing perceived threat of communism led the Menzies government to join the Colombo Plan, an international effort to raise the standards of living for people living in developed countries. For Australia, this meant allowing Asians to come to Australia, undertake education and return home to better their countries. This was a way for Menzies to tackle the threat of communism in Asia. By exposing Asian students to Western standards of democracy, capitalism and other ideas, it was hoped that they could champion those ideals in their home nation, combating the spread of communism in the region. It was also hoped that the Colombo Plan would aid in reducing criticism of White Australia in Asia. This somewhat backfired as it exposed Australians to Asians, some landladies only offered rooms to Asians as they proved to be better tenants. More then anything, it demonstrated to Australian university students and urban populations that the stories of Asiatic barbarian hordes that had been spewed from the mouths of White Australia devotees for decades were far from accurate. Rather then reduce international criticism of the White Australia policy in Asia, the Colombo Plan served more to increase criticism of the policy among younger Australians who were coming into contact Asian students.