[Editor: This article, which reproduces a speech by Arthur Calwell (leader of the Australian Labor Party) regarding the O’Keefe case and the White Australia Policy, was published in Labor Call (Melbourne, Vic.), 8 April 1949.]
Australian immigration policy
This speech was cheered by ANA Conference
As reported last week, delegates at the Australian Natives’ Association conference in Bendigo cheered Immigration Minister Calwell when he outlined, as guest speaker, the facts of Australia’s migration problem and the impact of the O’Keefe case. For the record, here is Mr. Calwell’s speech.
“The High Court decision in the O’Keefe case goes far beyond the question of the repatriation of a single Indonesian family.
“It knocks down one of the main pillars upon which the White Australia policy has firmly rested since 1901.
“The most far-reaching result of the Court’s decision is that it confers on non-Europeans resident in Australia for five years and longer the right of permanent residence, unless the Immigration Act is amended. Some thousands of people are involved, comprising Asiatic seamen, evacuees, amahs, overseas traders, local traders, traders’ assistants and substitutes, students, and the wives and families of all these Asiatics.
Pockets of people
“Experience has shown that where you have a pocket of Asiatic people entitled to permanent residence, constant pressure will be exerted for permission to bring in their relatives and friends. A similar problem was faced by the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 when the original Immigration Act gave permission for Asiatics then resident in Australia to bring in their wives and children. So readily did they avail themselves of this provision of the Act and so alarming was the ensuing influx of Asiatic wives and children that the concession had to be withdrawn by amendment of the Act in 1905.
“Australia has had experience, too, of how rapidly the number of Asiatic settlers increased in the absence of adequate immigration controls. In 1853, one Asiatic group in Australia numbered little more than 2000 people. By 1881 — only 28 years later — this group had increased to 50,000 people in a total Australian population of 2,500,000.
History repeats
“The influx of so many Asiatics of different religion, standards of living, culture and national characteristics inevitably led to friction and eventually to rioting, as has happened in South Africa, the United States of America and other countries where people of different races and living standards live side by side in the same community.
“History, I must emphasise, has a habit of repeating itself. Today, as the result of legal interpretation, Australia has for the first time in her history the core of a problem that has caused so much tragedy, bloodshed and murderous strife in other countries.
“An important effect of the High Court decision is that every non-European who was admitted to Australia on a Certificate of Exemption and who has resided here for five years or longer, cannot now be compulsorily repatriated. For years past, the Certificate of Exemption has been used in preference to the dictation test as a means of controlling non-European immigration to Australia, because it has been considered a more generous and tactful method of achieving the purpose of our restricted immigration policy.
“Throughout the war, Australia offered ready asylum to thousands of Asiatic refugees, nearly all of whom were admitted on Certificate of Exemption which, it was then thought, could be withdrawn when the need for continued refuge no longer existed.
Won’t go home
“These refugees have fallen into three categories — firstly, those who have returned voluntarily to their homelands; secondly, those who defied us and refused to be repatriated; and thirdly, those to whom extension of time have been granted on compassionate grounds. Many members of the third category can now be expected to transfer to the second; in other words, they will insist on staying here.
“Thus the whole concept of a homogeneous White Australia is threatened by a numerically strong pocket of Asiatics whose very presence in this country is proof positive of the Government’s strong humanitarian instincts and a flat rebuttal of the foolish arguments that Australia’s immigration policy is based on claims of racial superiority. The only claim, ever made or implied in our policy, is that there are different varieties of the human species distinguished from one another, not by skin pigmentation, but by languages, religions, standards of living, cultures and historical backgrounds, and that it is wise to avoid internecine strife and the problems of miscegenation which such differences have caused in all countries throughout history where races of irreconcilable characteristics have lived in the same community. Our policy is based on the proposition that anything which tends to unite a modern community is good and desirable and that anything which tends to rend it asunder is bad and should be avoided at all costs.
“Heartless Monster”
“I am being represented as a heartless monster who administers a repressive policy without pity or compassion. My Celtic ancestry has given me as tender and as sentimental a heart as the next man. But, unlike the irresponsible newspapers and the addle-headed sentimentalists, I have a stern duty to my country and my countrymen. As Minister for Immigration, I am personally responsible to the Australian people for the maintenance of the present composition of our population upon which 99.9 per cent. of Australians insist.
“No policy is worthy of the name unless it is administered fearlessly and with consistency. In publicising the special, compassionate case, the newspapers ignore the thousands of other cases in which compassion could equally be given free rein. But then the newspapers are not answerable to the Australian people, as I am, for the maintenance of a policy to which Australians have always given unswerving allegiance. I say to the newspapers and to sentimentalists that appeasement has never solved a problem. Indeed, it creates problems far greater than those which it may temporarily appear to overcome.
Other countries
“Burma, in 1947, passed an Immigration (Emergency Provisions) Act which provides that no person shall enter Burma without an immigration permit issued by the Controller of Immigration or a valid passport duly visaed or endorsed by, or on behalf of, the Governor. The Indian Government protested against this legislation as an ‘unfriendly act.’
“In Ceylon, the Immigration and Emigration Bill of 1948 provides that persons other than a Ceylon citizen or an exempted person, such as members of the Forces, persons accredited to the Ceylon Government, etc., and their families, shall not enter Ceylon unless their passports are specially endorsed for entry or they hold permits for permanent or temporary residence. Under the Bill, the Minister has power to impose specific requirements in the public interest as a condition of entry.
Philippines policy
“Fiji has a law under which a person who is regarded as an undesirable immigrant may be prevented from landing.
“The Philippines limit Chinese immigrants to 500 yearly, and until April, of 1947, the Siamese Government imposed a landing fee of 200 ticals on immigrant Chinese. Chinese immigration to the Malayan Union is restricted except where no other means of satisfying local labor requirements exist.
“China long ago expressed her distaste for ‘foreign-devils’. Japan, after contact with European civilisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, adopted an isolationist policy and maintained it for nearly two centuries until the United States of America forced her out of it for commercial reasons.
US and Canada
“Before the Pacific war, a quota system was in force in Indonesia for all alien immigrants. Under this system, only 8000 alien immigrants were admitted to the Netherlands East Indies from 1940 to 1942 inclusive. Since the end of the Pacific war, admission of aliens has been made dependent on proof supplied by the immigrant’s prospective employer that his admission was economically necessary and that accommodation was available.
“The United States and Canada have their exclusionist policies. So has our neighbor New Zealand; so has another of our fellow member States of the British Commonwealth, South Africa; so have several of the Latin American republics.
“Today’s threat to the White Australia policy must be firmly and fearlessly met. No matter how violent the criticism, no matter how fierce and unrelenting the attacks upon me personally may be, I am determined that the flag of White Australia will not be lowered.
“I shall refer the whole matter to Cabinet with a recommendation that amending legislation be presented to the next session of Parliament on May 18 to repair the weaknesses in the Immigration Act which the judgment of the High Court has disclosed. Cabinet’s decision will be referred to the Labor Party for endorsement and I now give the assurance that so long as the Labor Party remains in power, there will be no watering down of the White Australia policy.
There will be no quota system for the admission of Asiatics, no appeasement, or no other administrative action which would imperil the hard-won living standards which we inherited from our forebears. So long as the Labor Party remains in power, we shall insist on maintaining our sovereign right to determine what people shall make up our population.
“The White Australia policy is not a color bar. It began as a positive aspiration, and from it has resulted a positive achievement. This achievement is a united race of freedom-loving Australians who can inter-marry and associate without the disadvantages that inevitably result from the fusion of dissimilar races, a united people who share the same loyalties, the same outlook and the same traditions.”
Source:
Labor Call (Melbourne, Vic.), 8 April 1949, p. 5
Editor’s notes:
Act = an Act of parliament, a law (in its written form, a law is called a “statute”)
See: 1) “Act of parliament”, Wikipedia
2) “Statute”, Wikipedia
alien = a foreigner (someone who was not born in the country, i.e. a person from a foreign land); someone who is not a citizen of a country
amah = an East Asian or South Asian term for a girl or woman who has been employed as a domestic servant (performing such duties as cleaning, cooking, and looking after children)
See: “Amah (occupation)”, Wikipedia
Asiatic = of or relating to Asia; someone whose ethnic background is from Asia, especially Eastern Asia; an Asian person, an Oriental person
asunder = apart, especially forced apart; separated; into separate parts, into separate pieces
Australian Commonwealth = the Commonwealth of Australia; the Australian nation, federated on 1 January 1901
Australian Natives’ Association = a fraternal patriotic organisation and mutual society which was founded for the benefit of Australian-born white people; the organisation was originally established in April 1871 as the Victorian Natives’ Association, but in 1872 it extended its coverage to all of Australia
See: “Australian Natives’ Association”, Wikipedia
Bill = a proposed law, or an amendment to an existing law
British Commonwealth = the British Commonwealth of Nations (formerly known as the “British Commonwealth of Nations”), often simply referred to as “the Commonwealth”, an international association of sovereign states, based upon the former British Empire
See: 1) “Commonwealth: association of states”, Encyclopaedia Britannica
2) “NotesAndLinks”, Wikipedia
Cabinet = (in the context of various British Commonwealth countries, including Australia) the government Cabinet (the ruling body of the government of the country), comprised of the Prime Minister and other Ministers of the Crown; the chief decision-making body of the executive branch of a parliamentary government, comprising a group of ministers responsible for overseeing government departments, formulating government policy, and making decisions on issues affecting the country
Calwell = Arthur Calwell (1896-1973), politician, Minister for Immigration (1945-1949), and leader of the Australian Labor Party (1960-1967); he was born in West Melbourne in 1896, and died in East Melbourne in 1973
See: 1) Graham Freudenberg, “Calwell, Arthur Augustus (1896–1973)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography
2) “Arthur Calwell”, Wikipedia
Ceylon = the former name of Sri Lanka, an island nation in South Asia
See: “Sri Lanka”, Wikipedia
etc. = an abbreviation of “et cetera” (also spelt “etcetera”), a Latin term (“et” meaning “and”, “cetera” meaning “the rest”) which is translated as “and the rest (of such things)”, used in English to mean “and other similar things”, “other unspecified things of the same class”, “and so forth”
Forces = armed forces, i.e. the military forces of a country
foreign-devil = (also spelt: foreign devil) a derogatory term in Cantonese (a Chinese language) which refers to a foreigner, especially used regarding white foreigners (it should be noted that the Chinese term has also been translated as “foreign ghost”, and that many Chinese people do not view it as derogatory)
See: 1) Victor Mair, ““Gweilo” as a racially charged term”, Language Log, 10 September 2018
2) Victor Mair, “Foreign devil froth and foam”, Language Log, 13 February 2022 [the comments are worth reading, more than the article]
3) Ryan General, “Why white people are called ‘Foreign Devils’ in Hong Kong”, NextShark, 23 October 2017
4) Jason Wordie, “Ghost, foreign devil, cow stink – racial terms Chinese, others used for Europeans in Asia”, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 9 June 2024
5) Lisa Lim, “Where the word gweilo comes from, and other names East Asians have for foreigners”, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 15 September 2017
6) “Gweilo”, Wikipedia
Immigration Act = the Immigration Restriction Act, an Australian law passed in 1901, a key intention of which was to stop non-white immigration into Australia
See: “Immigration Restriction Act 1901”, Wikipedia
internecine = of or relating to fighting or warfare occurring between people of the same group (fighting between people who belong to the same country, ethnicity, family, religion, or organisation); destructive or ruinous to both sides in a conflict, fight, or war; of or relating to fighting which is mutually damaging or destructive to groups which have a close connection to each other; a conflict marked by much death, carnage, destruction, or slaughter (derived from the Latin “internecinus”, meaning: “deadly”, “destructive”, “murderous”, or “fought to the death”)
Latin America = countries in the Americas whose heritage and history have been significantly affected, impacted, or influenced by Portugal and/or Spain (both of these European countries speak a Romance language, i.e. a Latin-based language), with many Latin Americans speaking Portuguese and/or Spanish; whilst definitions of the term may vary, broadly speaking “Latin America” refers to all of the Americas south of the United States
See: “Latin America”, Wikipedia
Latin American = of or relating to Latin America [see: Latin America]
Malayan Union = a union of eleven south-east Asian states (nine Malay states and the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca); in 1948 it was reformed as the Federation of Malaya; in 1963 it was again reformed, as Malaysia, with the addition of Sabah (North Borneo), Sarawak, and Singapore (although, in 1965, Singapore separated and became an independent country)
See: 1) “Malayan Union”, Wikipedia
2) “Federation of Malaya”, Wikipedia
3) “Malaysia”, Wikipedia
4) “Independence of Singapore Agreement 1965”, Wikipedia
miscegenation = the interbreeding of races; sexual relations between people from different racial backgrounds; interracial marriage; interracial cohabitation; the mixing of races (also known as “race mixing”)
See: 1) “miscegenation: social practice”, Encyclopaedia Britannica
2) “Miscegenation”, Wikipedia
Netherlands East Indies = (also known as the Dutch East Indies) a Dutch colony, essentially comprising the islands which later became Indonesia (which declared independence in 1945)
See: “Dutch East Indies”, Wikipedia
O’Keefe = Annie Maas O’Keefe (1908-1974); born Annie Maas Dumais in the Netherlands East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), she married Samuel Jacob; as Annie Jacob, she (along with her husband and children) was part of the approximately 15,000 refugees who came to Australia during the Second World War (1939-1945); whilst in Australia, her husband died; her landlord, John (Jack) O’Keefe, offered to marry her so that she could stay in Australia, but in 1949 (after the end of the war) the Department of Immigration issued a deportation order for her and her children; an appeal was made to the High Court, which ruled in her favour, thereby setting a legal precedent for other refugees; the case was regarded as damaging to the White Australia Policy
See: 1) Kim Tao, “The case of Mrs O’Keefe: A watershed for white Australia”, Australian National Maritime Museum, 22 Jan 2019
2) Sean Brawley, “Mrs O’Keefe and the battle for White Australia”, Making Multicultural Australia [from Memento, no. 33, Winter 2007, pp. 6-8, National Archives of Australia]
3) Sean Brawley, “Finding home in white Australia: the O’Keefe deportation case of 1949” (abstract), Macquarie University
4) “Annie Maas O’Keefe”, National Archives of Australia
5) “O’Keefe v Calwell”, Wikipedia
Pacific war = the Pacific aspect of the Second World War (1939-1945), during which Japan fought against a number of countries in the area of eastern Asia, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania
See: “Pacific War”, Wikipedia
per cent. = an abbreviation of “per centum” (Latin, meaning “by a hundred”), i.e. an amount, number, or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100; also rendered as “per cent” (without a full stop), “percent”, “pct”, “pc”, “p/c”, or “%” (per cent sign)
rend = to tear or break in a violent manner
Siamese = of or relating to Siam (the former name of Thailand); a Siamese person; something that is Siamese in origin or style
See: “Thailand”, Wikipedia
tical = (also known as: baht) a monetary unit of Thailand (formerly known as Siam)
See: “Thai baht”, Wikipedia
visaed = having a visa; a passport which has been endorsed with a visa (in the past tense)
[Editor: Changed “immigration to Autralia” to “immigration to Australia”, “Labor Paty remains” to “Labor Party remains”. Added a closing double quotation mark after “the same traditions.” The second-last paragraph (beginning “There will be no quota system”) was in bold in the original article, but has been rendered as standard text here.]
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