> 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. p> The conflict over con scription 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 В«disloyalВ» 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. p> 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 . p> 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. p> 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 be...
