s В«the ChowsВ», and this unpleasant obsession unhappily had a considerable cultural influence on Australia.)
After Archibald's death, The Bulletin was acquired by other owners who swung over to the Tory side of politics while retaining all the exotic racism of the founder, and all through the 1920s, 1930s 1940s and 1950s, The Bulletin was both viciously anti-Labor and rabidly racist, adding to Archibald's anti-Asian racism a vicious anti-semitism. Finally, in the 1960s, the magazine was acquired by the Packer family, and is now a rather pedestrian business magazine and appears to have shed the racism of the past. Thank heaven for that! p> However, even in the 19th century there was a significant amount of opposition to racism in the trade unions. The following exerpt is from a chapter by Mick Armstrong in Class and Class Conflict in Australia edited by Rick Kuhn and Tom O'Lincoln. p> Consider the early Amalgamated Shearers 'Union (ASU), notorious for its exclusion of Asians. There is no doubting the racism of the ASU leadership, which became more pronounced as a conservative bureaucracy strengthened its control, after defeats in the Great Strikes of the 1890s weakened the position of militants. Yet the union members were more open to ideas of inter-racial unity than most historians contend. In 1889 Robert Stevenson, a militant organiser, won the support of the Bourke branch for allowing Chinese shearers to retain their membership. The Bourke members, predominantly landless labourers, were more open to ideas of working-class unity than members nearer the coast, where small farmers predominated.
The ASU (shearers 'union) paper, The Hummer , in 1891 exposed the terrible conditions of Aborigines, and they were exempt from the racist exclusion clause. Indeed at the 1891 ASU conference the Adelaide branch moved to admit Aborigines for half the normal fee. A compromise was reached: Aborigines received full benefits by payment of an annual contribution, without the entrance fee.
It was not only militants who supported this measure. The more conservative general secretary David Temple thought it would be a В«graceful act to those from whom the country had been taken В», and that it would be good for the union's image.
Nevertheless, by the time of federation, labour movement opposition to migration had become solidly entrenched and the White Australia Policy had become an almost unchallengeable orthodoxy in the labour movement. The labour movement didn't produce the White Australia Policy. It was initiated by the British ruling class, emanating from the Colonial Office in London, and it oozed out of the general fabric of British-Australia imperialist bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, despite its ruling-class origins, this unfortunate attitude became extremely entrenched in the labour movement.
The heroic member of the Left Opposition in Russia, Victor Serge, towards the end of his life, was challenged by theoreticians who completely opposed the Russian Revolution. He responded to this by saying:
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, ...
