Chapter 57 : New Zeal - Australia and New Zealand Australia and New Zealand were virtually unique amongst the European colonies in the sense that they were the only new lands to where large numbers of Black slaves were never imported. The result was a successful colony comprised overwhelmingly of Whites (with only a small fraction of original non-White natives) which established a record for stability and progress virtually unmatched in history. The racial history of Australia and New Zealand is therefore primarily concerned with the interaction between the White immigrants and the native populations: only in the last part of the 20th Century have other racial groups - Asians and a lesser extent Blacks and Middle Easterners - become a factor to be considered. Australia First White Settlement 1788 Within the first ten years of the first White settlement at Sydney in 1788, several major clashes had taken place between the Whites and the Aboriginals. They were one sided: the Aboriginals were an extremely primitive tribe, barely out of the stone age, while the White settlers had all the advantages of White technology: guns, cannons and the wheel. The British government itself however followed a policy of trying to protect the Aboriginals: indeed the very first state-paid schools for Aboriginals was set up by one of the early governors, one Lachlan Macquarie (who served as governor from 1809 to 1821). This was done long before the colonial governments set up schools for all the Whites.
The British government also issued specific instructions to protect Aboriginals: generally they were adhered to; only in a few notable incidents did gratuitous acts of violence take place against the natives. The clashes that did take place were mostly reprisals taken by Whites for criminal acts committed by local Aborigines. Surprisingly enough, there are no recorded incidents of Aborigines having resisted the takeover of land: they were far too politically undeveloped to form any coherent united action, unlike the Amerinds in North America. Overwhelmed by the technologically superior Whites, the Aborigines were forced to retreat into the vast interior. As the White frontier was opened up further, Aborigines were even employed on sheep stations, and others used for police patrols. The Effect of White Settlement on Aboriginal Numbers During the first century of white settlement, the Aboriginal population declined dramatically in numbers. Although there are of course no indications as to what the original Aboriginal population was in terms of numbers, it is so that large numbers died from exposure to diseases which the White settlers brought with them, and to which the natives had not built up resistance. The spread of diseases was by far the greatest cause of the decline amongst the Aboriginals: but there were other causes as well. The White settlers soon found the presence of Aboriginals near their settlements to be of nuisance value: crime and petty theft along with a very quickly developed serious addiction problem to alcohol caused White settlers to exact severe punishments on the local population. These reprisals were sometimes unjustified and involved serious massacres. This state of mutual reprisals led to generally strained relations between the White settlers and the locals. However, the rapid thinning out of the Aboriginal population by disease meant that by 1920, according to estimates, there were only about 60,000 left. As a racial factor they were, therefore, insignificant. Aboriginals omitted from Australian census until 1971 The early White settlers however thought very little of even the few Aboriginals who survived: in fact, the Aborigines' social and political status was so low that they were omitted from the official national censuses until 1971, following the overwhelming passage of a 1967 referendum that granted the government power to legislate for the Aborigines and to include them in the census count. British Penal Settlements grow after American revolution Despite having been discovered by White explorers at the time of the great voyages of discovery, Australia was regarded for many years as an unattractive land for White settlement. Britain was the first country to become interested in setting up colonies in Australia: caused directly by the 1776 American War of Independence. As a result of that war, Britain lost its dumping ground for its penal colonies (the British attitude towards crime was that it would go away if enough criminals were deported to remote lands) and in 1786 announced its intention to establish a penal colony in Australia. So it was that the very first wave of Whites to move to Australia - albeit against their will - set sail in an eleven-strong fleet of Royal Navy ships from Portsmouth in May 1787. The eleven ships carried 759 convicts and 400 crew. In January 1788, the British fleet dropped anchor in - what is today - Port Jackson, and on 26 January founded the first permanent settlement, now known as Australia Day. The settlement was named after the British Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, who had come up with the idea of establishing the colony. Above: The establishment of penal colonies in Australia led to its own conflicts, with many prisoner rebellions having to be put down with force. Here is an illustration of clash between convict rebels and troops at Toongabbie on 5 March 1804. The continual rebellions played a role in eventually halting the practice of deporting convicts from England. Early Difficulties in food supplies The early settlement faced a serious problem in keeping itself supplied: the settlers had great difficulty finding arable land to plant crops, and for a long time the only major natural food came in the form of fish and kangaroo. The nearest viable agricultural land was on Norfolk Island, some 1,600 kilometers way - and this island as duly occupied as the second settlement in February 1788. Later the island was turned into a penal colony as well for hardened criminals. New South Wales Corps established In 1792, a new specially-recruited army regiment, called the New South Wales Corps, was sent to Australia to boost the settlement. Given large tracts of land far from the original settlement of Sydney, these men and their families soon established a decent agricultural community, although they struggled to establish a suitable livestock population. The New South Wales Corps were also obliged to perform other duties: in 1804 they were used to put down a rebellion by Irish convicts: the penal settlements were growing all the while. In 1821, the Corps were sent back to England, although some stayed on in their private capacities.
South African Sheep provide farming BREAKTHROUGH In 1810, a major breakthrough was made in transforming the farming community: a type of sheep called the Merino, was imported from the then growing White settlement in South Africa. Bred especially for the harsh hot climate, it thrived in Australia and soon developed into the Australian farmers' major economic activity and export to Britain. Reformed Convicts Become respectable citizens Convicts who had been sent to Australia, when freed, also stayed: many reformed and became perfectly respectable members of society, one of the first and most notable being one Francis Greenway, who designed many of the public buildings still standing in Sydney to this day. White Settlement Increases after Napoleonic Wars The White population began to climb rapidly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (1815), with the largest increase coming from voluntary settlers who were drawn with the promise of free land. Tension however arose amongst the ex convicts, who also wanted land, and the voluntary settlers, who regarded the ex convicts as only a step above the Aboriginals. A British Foreign Office report into the situation in the new colony in 1819, produced a number of constitutional reforms, which saw greater power being handed to the settlers themselves; and also included a recommendation for the establishment of a more remote penal settlement to try and defuse the growing tensions between the voluntary settlers and the ex convicts. (This report also first used the word "Australia" to refer to the territory - a name which stuck). All the while other White settlements were being established as the population grew: eventually in 1825, the British government formally declared a new colony, that of Van Dieman's land (which changed its' name to Tasmania in 1854), which had first been occupied as a penal settlement in 1803. By 1850, Britain had sent 150,000 convicts to Australia. Twenty percent were women (a major factor in the resultant White population increase) and about one third were Irish. Most, like the prisoners and White slaves sent to early America, had been drawn from the lowest social strata of the Industrial Revolution era slums in British towns. 1850 was the cut off point: after that Britain stopped the practice of deporting convicts: not out of any moral persuasion, merely that the threat of deportation did not seem to lower the crime rate at all.
Above: An ink sketch of the city of Sydney in the early 1820s shows quite how developed the colony had become within a short pace less than 35 years from the first White settlement in Australia - overwhelming evidence of the power of White settlers to shape their environment according to their own culture, compared to the natives who had been unable to build even one fixed structure over thousands of years. What the Aborigines (bottom right of the picture) must have though of the White wizards who arrived from over the sea, stayed and built huge cities, all in a handful of years - is not recorded, but requires little imagination to guess. Western Australia settled after 1829 As the White settlements expanded westwards, so did the sheep farms and the numbers of sheep. After 1813, new South Wales began filling up with Whites; right up until the 1880's, new settlements were established up and down the country, some as farming centers, some as mining towns after the discovery of gold and other minerals in the interior. The first White settlement in Western Australia was established in 1829, after an initial pioneering expedition had visited the area two years before. The town of Perth was established by this expedition, but it was initially not a success, despite being sent 10,000 convicts to provide labor. It was only with the discovery of gold in the 1890s that Western Australia became viable. The first exclusively free settler colony was established in 1837 in South Australia, with Adelaide as its capital. This colony grew into a grain producing area. In 1850, the colony of Victoria was established, with its capital at Melbourne (which itself had been founded in 1836). The growth in the numbers of Whites had in the interim been so dramatic that the colony of Queensland, with its capital of Brisbane, was created out of the colony of New South Wales in 1859. Constitution established with population growth By the mid-1850s, an embryonic democratic form of government had been created - and sanctioned by Britain - in the colonies making up Australia, with each colony having a popularly elected parliament. Australia has retained this basic political structure to this day. By 1861, the number of Whites in Australia had reached 1,2 million: a massive increase over the 1850 population of 400,000. Whites from Britain, America and Canada all joined in, drawn by the discovery of gold. 'White Australia' Policy started in 1856 The development of the mining industry also saw for the first time the importation of non-White laborers: Chinese immigrants started arriving after the discovery of gold, and their appearance created alarm amongst the Whites. Eventually in 1856, the state of Victoria formally passed a law prohibiting Chinese persons from entering its territory. The government of the colony of Queensland started importing Polynesians to work on sugarcane plantations in the early 1860s; a public outcry followed, and the Polynesians were quickly sent back and their jobs were taken by White workers. The Victoria Chinese exclusion law was then taken up by every other colony in Australia, being extended to include all non-Whites everywhere. This policy of excluding all immigrants except those belonging to the White race became known formally as the "White Australia Policy" and had the overwhelming support of all the colonists.
It was precisely the common acceptance of the White Australia policy which finally drew the various colonies of Australia into political unity, as it underlined the need for common immigration laws. The establishment of trade unions and organized labor movements also created a need for common social policies in other areas as well, and by 1898, representatives from all the colonies had thrashed out a common political structure. The Commonwealth of Australia was given official sanction by the British Parliament in 1900 and was implemented on 1 January 1901. The central government - created on a federal system based on the American model - had as one of its first priorities the maintenance of the White Australia policy, then turning its attention to the setting of a minimum wage and other social issues. World War 1 - Australian contribution to Allied victory The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, first saw the Australian nation tested as a whole unit. Sending 330,000 troops to support the Allies against Germany and the Central Powers, the Australian divisions won renown for their participation in many of the worst battles of the Western Front, but will always be remembered for their part, along with a New Zealand unit, for the terrible Allied defeat at Gallipoli in 1915. Following a plan devised by the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill (later to become prime minister of Britain), the Australians and New Zealanders were supposed to spearhead an attack on the Turkish forces in the Dardanelles. The plan was crucially flawed, and immediately upon landing, on 25 April 1915, the Australian and New Zealand force came under murderous and well prepared Turkish shell fire. Never advancing much past their initial beach landing point, the Allied force was to withdraw some weeks later, having been thoroughly beaten by a combination of superb Turkish defense and bad planning. The Battle of Gallipoli was more than just another battle: it marked a change in the psyche of the Australian nation, they were bound together by the horror of the incident and regarded it as their coming of age: Gallipoli Day is still celebrated as a somber remembrance day in Australia. The disaster at Gallipoli dented Australian enthusiasm for the war: in 1917, an attempt to introduce conscription in Australia was rejected. Rapid Progress due to population make-up All the while, Australia continued to progress as fast as any other modern European country, despite the country only being as young as it was. Almost overnight, White European culture and technology was implemented in Australia and it soon became the superpower of the region, easily dwarfing its much-longer-inhabited neighboring islands. The rapid rate of Australia's growth - given its relative youth - is possibly one of the most powerful arguments that can be made for the racial interpretation of history and of how environment is not the overriding factor. There are many Third World lands with greater natural resources, particularly in Africa, which have been inhabited for far longer than Australia, yet they are woefully behind the latter country in development. There can be only one explanation for this differentiation - namely the nature of the population, and not the environment. Internally, Australia's racial population make-up hardly changed during the first part of the 20th Century - only Whites were allowed into the country, and this policy combined with a natural reproduction rate created a steady increase of the numbers of Whites. World War Two - Japanese threat looms large With the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia once again came to the support of the Allies, sending troops to the European theater of war where they acquitted themselves well. The attack on the Pacific territories by Japan, however, heightened racial feeling in Australia: especially when Japanese aircraft bombed parts of Northern Australia itself. Until America was able to retake the Philippines from the Japanese, the supreme commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur and his staff, used Australia for their base of operations. Although the number of fatalities suffered by Australia in the Second World War were far fewer than in the First, the effect on the psychology of the average Australian was far more affected by the threat of an Asiatic invasion: unquestionably it was the very worst scenario which the White Australia policy had sought to prevent. Massive White Immigration after world War II In reaction to the near threat of an Asiatic invasion, the Australian government embarked on a program of encouraging White immigration at end of the war. Thousands of Whites from Eastern Europe, fleeing the spread of the Soviet Union, settled in Australia, with the Hungarian community becoming particularly prominent. Many thousands of Greeks also settled in Australia, establishing large communities in the western cities. Then in the 1950s, came the "ten pound poms" - an estimated one million White British people left the struggling post war Britain to seek a new life in Australia: the British and Australian governments arranged their transportation by ship upon payment of a ten pound fare, hence the name. Rarely in modern times had there been such a massive voluntary White movement. The sudden increase in the numbers of Whites brought on a new age of prosperity for Australia. Almost overnight the number of universities in each state increased threefold, the governments providing free university-level education to all those who were qualified. Aboriginals Sidelined Aboriginals remained on the sidelines of Australian affairs until the late 1960s. After a referendum on the issue in 1967, it was decided to grant full citizenship to Aboriginals, something they had previously not been considered important enough for which to qualify. This year, 1967, marked the year that Aboriginals were first granted the vote in Australia. Until the 1960s, the Aboriginal population was mainly rural. Over the next two decades Aborigines began moving in greater numbers to urban areas. In many country towns, Aboriginal families were viewed - negatively - as fringe dwellers. In the larger cities, small, but highly volatile and crime plagued ghettos were founded. Very soon, it was established that the Aboriginals had the highest imprisonment rate of any non-White grouping in any White-ruled country in the world (pro-rata to their population size) surpassing, even, the Black American imprisonment-rate. A 1975 Liberal coalition government under Malcolm Fraser then introduced measures to look at Aboriginal land claims in Australia: something which would soon have great repercussions. In 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled that the people of the Murray Islands, in the Torres Strait, held title to their land, thereby acknowledging that Australia was occupied at the time of European settlement. In 1993, the government passed an act allowing Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to file land claims. The implications of this decision were far reaching: if carried out to their logical conclusion, it would allow the Aborigines, who constituted an estimated 1.5 or 2 per cent of the population, to claim the vast majority of territory in Australia: with their extremely poor social record this would unquestionably lead to the destruction of the Australian farming community and have serious national repercussions. In terms of unemployment, welfare dependence, infant mortality rates, and average life expectancy, the Aboriginal population is still, despite all the measures taken to improve their lot, way below the levels of all other racial groups in Australia, recent Asian immigrants included. Aboriginal Racial Political Structures In an overtly racial set up which is forbidden to Whites (in fact they would be called racists if they dared create similar structures), every region of Australia is represented by its own Aboriginal land council, and most regions run cultural centers and festivals. Homogeneity Key to Stability Australia's development is notable for its stability, in stark contrast to every other part of the new world settled by White colonists. The key difference between Australia and the Americas or Africa, has been the massive degree of homogeneity amongst the inhabitants of Australia. It has never caused the Australians to become involved in horrendous civil wars nor to face the social unrest and racial violence that has dogged all the other settlements. The development of Australia into a modern First World country contrasts dramatically with the progress of colonies in South America: although the settlements in South America preceded those in Australia by hundreds of years, Australia is nonetheless far more developed than almost all of South America. If time, geography or other environmental factors were the sole determinant of the development of a society, it would be fairly logical to assume that a colony dating from approximately 1500 (for example Cuba) would be more developed than a colony dating from approximately 1800 (Australia). The fact that the levels of development in these two countries differ so vastly can only be ascribed to the populations of these regions, and to no other factor. This is particularly so if it is borne in mind that, by any measure, Australia is a far less hospitable place than most of South America. This stability has allowed Australia to develop as fast as any nation on earth: and the country is classed as First World even though in reality it was only created during the early part of the 18th century - truly a remarkable example of the truth that a society is a reflection of the people living in it, rather than a product of the environment. White Australia Policy Abandoned In a move which has seen Australia's non-White population surge in numbers, the White Australia policy was only formally struck from the statute books in 1966 by a Liberal party government under Robert Menzies: unofficially it remained in force well into the 1970s. Precisely because it has developed into such a stable, advanced and relatively wealthy society, Australia has, in the last three decades of the 20th century, become an attractive focus point for increasing Third World population flows: this effect will be discussed in the last chapter of this book. New Zealand New Zealand's history nearly mirrors that of Australia, with only one small exception: the native population, called Maoris, did not suffer as much in reduction of numbers as the Australian Aborigines. Subsequently, there was a higher number of Maoris for the White settlers to interact with and, therefore, there was a higher degree of racial friction. First Meeting with the Maoris The Dutch navigator, Abel Tasman (after whom Tasmania was named), was the first White explorer to encounter the Maori, and the meeting was not a happy one. Four members of Tasman's crew were killed in a bloody encounter with Maori on the South Island in 1642. The next contact with the Maoris came in 1769, when the British explorer James Cook established friendly relations with some Maori. By 1800, visits by European ships were relatively frequent. First White Settlement Although the British explorer, James Cook, had claimed New Zealand for Britain in 1679, it was only in the 18th Century that British missionaries and whalers established settlements in the territory, mainly on the Northern Island of the two-island country. Maori Resistance Flares up The Maoris put up a mild resistance to these first outposts, with a number of clashes taking place. As in Australia, however, the Maoris were no match for the White technology, and could do virtually nothing against the guns of the White settlers. The number of Whites in New Zealand was however minute: large-scale White immigration into New Zealand only started in 1839 under the guidance of the New Zealand Company, based in London. With hundreds of years' experience in setting up colonies behind them, the British first tried to negotiate a settlement with the Maori population.
A treaty, known as the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed in 1840 between the British and 50 leading Maori chieftains. In terms of this treaty, Britain formally took sovereignty over the islands and agreed to respect the landownership rights of the Maori, who placed themselves under the protection of the British government. The British then proceeded to make the territory a dependency of the colony of New South Wales in Australia. Separate Crown Colony of New Zealand constituted in 1841 The administrative problems involved in running New Zealand from Australia soon became apparent, and in 1841, New Zealand was reconstituted as a separate crown colony, with Auckland as its capital. White settlement continued apace: becoming known as a more hospitable land than Australia, enough Whites settled in the country that within three decades two large cities had been built on the South Island: Otago (now Dunedin) in 1848, and Canterbury (now Christchurch) in 1850. The Maoris, who unlike the Aborigines in Australia, had not been decimated by White borne diseases, started to realize that the White settlers were increasing at a fast rate: several violent Maori uprisings against the Whites occurred between 1845 and 1848, and between 1860 and 1872. These uprisings, known as the New Zealand Wars, were all defeated by White force of arms. Gold and Sheep farming spark new immigrants In 1860, gold was discovered in New Zealand and a fresh wave of immigrants poured in. Sheep were introduced around the same time, and soon sheep farming and mining were the main occupations. An embryonic democracy was created in 1856, modeled on the American Constitution. Fully occupied with domestic, internal, economic politicking, New Zealand remained isolated from the great political events in Europe and elsewhere: only in 1893 did New Zealand attract attention by being the first country to grant the vote to women. Rapid Development Marks European population make-up New Zealand also developed as fast as any other European nation, again reflecting the overwhelmingly White nature of its population, rather than the age of the country itself or of its environment. Railways, modern infrastructure and western social systems were introduced overnight and, like Australia, New Zealand is officially classed as being First World even though it is hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years younger than many Third World countries. Again, the stark division between the continent of South America and New Zealand is vivid, and can only be ascribed to the population make-up. World Wars During the First World War, New Zealand sent just over 100,000 men to serve in the European theater of war, taking part in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign with the Australians. In 1916, New Zealand units fought in France at the Battle of the Somme, and later another unit served in Palestine. As in Australia, the war generated a sense of nationalism in New Zealand. In the Second World War, New Zealand once again made a significant contribution (in terms of its population size) to the Allied war effort, its soldiers serving in Greece, Cyprus, North Africa, Italy and of course in the Pacific where the Japanese, at one stage, seriously threatened both Australia and New Zealand. Modern Maoris - DEVASTATED BY CONTACT WITH WHITES By the end of the 20th Century, the Maoris numbered some 430,000, constituting approximately one-eighth of New Zealand's population. The Maori community continues to struggle with high rates of unemployment, imprisonment, alcoholism, drug dependency, and violence. In the case of both the Australian Aboriginals and the New Zealand Maoris, a convincing argument can be made against racial contact from a non-White point of view - as in both these countries, the native populations have on all levels, been devastated by contact with White culture. Immigration As a stable and relatively advanced nation, New Zealand, has, like Australia, become an attractive landing point for increased Third World immigration in the last part of the 20th Century. The extent and implications of this are discussed in a later chapter. All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. |
