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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.
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.
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 because they were citizens of Austria-Hungary. These were mainly mineworkers at Kalgoorlie, who the racist union had been trying to exclude from the mines for years.
Even some Serbs, who were actually British allies in the First World War, were interned, so viciously confused was the attitude of authority. Later, a number of Russians, also ostensible allies, were interned, really because of their trade union and labour movement activity. Most of these people were locked up in an enormous concentration camp at Holsworthy near Liverpool, in NSW.
When the war ended, these prisoners, who by then numbered about 6000, were kept interned until after the signing of the Versaille Treaty in 1919, when the overwhelming majority of them were ruthlessly deported to their countries of origin. A few, like the brewer Resch, managed to stay in Australia after mounting an extensive and costly legal campaign, which he had the resources to fund. The overwhelming majority of the Germans were not so favoured by circumstances.
Many of the deportees were back-loaded on empty troop ships. A large and significant number of those deported were Australian citizens, and many were Australian-born. So much for «citizenship» in British Australia. According to Fischer's book, hundreds of migrants who weren't enemy aliens, but who were politically and industrially active on the left, were deported in the same sweep.
To quote Fischer: «The total number of deportees, based on the shipping lists of the nine transports, comes to 6150. Of these, 5414 had been interned, the remainder were family members and uninterned ex‑enemy aliens who either accepted the offer to be repatriated or were ordered to leave the country.» The major Australian figure who publicly opposed this atrocious witch-hunt was His Eminence Archbishop Mannix.
The intrinsic cruelty of all this is almost unimaginable. Six thousand people uprooted and implacably deported from this country where they had built their lives, and had lived for many years, to the chaotic and miserable Europe of the 1920s. The main instrument carrying out all this brutality was British‑Australian military intelligence, particularly one Major Piesse, whose name will be remembered in infamy for generations.
An examination of the written records of military intelligence suggests that all this cruelty was motivated by a kind of mad, but in a way logical, notion that the crisis of the war gave the British economic interests the chance to settle accounts with German business activity in Australia and the Pacific, which was seen as a major competitor with Britain.
The German‑Australian cultural community was cowed and crushed by this, and the old centres of German community settlement have never really regained their German multicultural aspect, which is a great pity for the cultural richness of Australian society.
Nevertheless, one of the ironies of all this is that after the Second World War substantial German migration to Australia recommenced, and when you refer to the redoubtable Charles Price and his computer breakdowns of Australian ethnicity, he presents convincing evidence that the German ethnic component in Australia is still the largest after the English, Irish and Scottish, and ahead of the Italian and Greek, at about 4 per cent of the mix. The current best-known German‑Australian is, of course, Tim Fischer, the leader of the National Party.
The foundation of the Australian Communist Party, as a section of the Communist International, in 1920, had considerable repercussions, over time, on the labour movement's attitude to the White Australia policy and racism. From its inception, the Communist Party had a formal opposition to the White Australia policy and racism, though many of its members were quite naturally still influenced by the prevailing racist mood of the labour movement as a whole.
Nevertheless, even the left-wing union bureaucrats, the 'Trades Hall Reds', led by Jock Garden, the Secretary of the Sydney labor Council, took, for that time, quite a courageous stand against racism. They affiliated the Sydney Labor Council to the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, which had its headquarters in Vladivostok, which included unions in a number of Asian countries.
This gave rise to a hysterical clamour from the establishment and right-wingers in the labour movement, like the bureaucrats of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), who accused the Sydney Labor Council of thereby undermining the White Australia Policy, which was in fact true, and completely laudable.
At the ACTU Conference in 1930 there was quite a complex battle over affiliation to the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, with the conference evenly split over the issue, the Sydney Labor Council and Garden in favour of the affiliation, and Bob Ross, who by this time had shifted somewhat to the right, opposing the affiliation.
The Australian Workers Union leadership became an entrenched force defending racism in the trade union movement. Throughout the 1920s they induced successive AWU conventions to oppose all migration and they even persuaded a couple of conventions to carry resolutions against the «southern European menace».
The Queensland AWU even attempted to prevent Italians and Maltese joining the union, and joined the extraordinary and unpleasant racist mobilisation against Italian and Maltese cane farmers and farm workers in North Queensland. North Queensland had also, however, a tradition of industrial militancy and the Communist Party grew rapidly in the late 1920s and the early 1930s in North Queensland.
The North Queensland communists, who were initially mostly Anglo-Celtic indigenous North Queensland militant workers, took a strong stand right from the commencement of their independent political activity, against the prevailing North Queensland racism. In the middle 1930s they led major industrial struggles, particularly the very effective strike in favour of burning the cane to prevent Weils disease, led by the notable communist militant Jim Henderson.
This struggle, despite the bitter opposition of the AWU leadership, was spectacularly successful, and Henderson and the other North Queensland communists were able to draw the Italian and Maltese cane cutters and cane farmers into the struggle, thereby largely defeating and pushing aside the racism.
Many North Queensland Italians and Maltese joined the Communist Party, and by the time the Communist Party was declared illegal in 1940, its influence in North Queensland was enormous, including a very considerable influence among the Italians, Maltese and Spanish immigrant farmers and workers. Fred Paterson, the Rhodes Scholar Communist, who was elected as the only Communist member of Parliament ever in Australia, for the seat of Bowen in the 1940s, got an enormous vote amongst the Italian, Maltese and Spanish migrants in the area.
All these developments in North Queensland are described in detail in Dianne Menghetti's excellent book, «The Red North». (It is one of the wonderful ironies of trade union history that in 1997 a bitterly fought election took place in the Australian Workers Union. Two teams were in conflict, one a coalition of some right-wingers and some left-wingers, and the other one the traditional leadership of the Queensland AWU. The left-right combination defeated the Queensland group, and even got 46 per cent of the vote in the large Queensland AWU branch.
The successful candidates of this team were Graham Roberts for President, a left-winger from Port Kembla, and a right winger, Terry Muscat, for AWU General Secretary, who also happens to be a Maltese from Melbourne. The Queensland AWU has come a long way in 60 years!)
Most of the 1920s and all the 1930s were a period of mass unemployment, and the labour movement tended to oppose all migration throughout the period. Also, the conditions of mass unemployment and some bitterly fought strikes at the onset of the Depression created an environment in which the use of some migrants as scabs in industrial disputes led to an explosion of chauvinism.
The most unfortunate examples of this were the waterfront strike in Melbourne, in which Italians were taken straight off the ship, so to speak, and used as scabs. This gave rise to many ugly incidents. There were also extensive race riots on the Western Australian gold fields in the early 1930s, directed at Yugoslavs and Italians.
During the race riots in Kalgoorlie the Communist Party played a heroic role, attempting to combat the outbreak of chauvinism directed at the Italian and Yugoslav miners, who were accused of competing with Australians for a declining number of jobs. This vigorous defence of migrant miners by the Communist Party led many Yugoslav and Italian migrants to support the Communist Party for quite a period afterwards.
Another feature of the 1920s and the 1930s in the labour movement was a certain amount of thoughtless anti-semitism. The notorious architect of the Premiers' Plan sent out by the Bank of England to put Australia «under orders», so to speak, was one Otto Niemeyer.
He was actually descended from Prussian bankers, «pure» Germans, who had come over to Britain with the «German Georges», who became kings of England. Nevertheless, the persistent urban myth grew up that he was Jewish, and this gave rise to a long lived and widespread popular propaganda about «Jewish bankers» which, unfortunately, became mixed up with the completely righteous opposition, in the labour movement, led by J.T. Lang, to the «Premiers' Plan».
This was particularly pronounced in Catholic circles, where the mild anti-semitism of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, which was mixed with their anti-capitalist radicalism, had considerable influence. In the late 1930s, when Jewish refugees from Hitler began to knock on the Australian door, so to speak, the labour movement confusion between Jewishness and capitalist banking, gave rise to a certain unfortunate resistance to Jewish migration in some labour movement circles.
This is all documented in «Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933–1948», by Michael Blakeney. Once again, a significant part of the left, particularly the Communist Party, were a notable and honourable exception to this anti-Semitism, and defended the right of the Jewish refugees to enter Australia. An example of this agitation was a couple of excellent Communist Party pamphlets by Len Fox debunking anti-semitism and defending the right of Jews to come here.
Julia Martinez, of Wollongong University, has been doing her PhD on the above topic. She published a most informative article, a preliminary part of her thesis, in «Labour History» magazine for May 1999. The picture that emerges from Martinez's pioneering research underlines the social dynamics in both Australian society and the labour movement, in the very special but culturally significant circumstances of the Northern Territory, that eventually undermined «White Australia» on an Australian national scale. Martinez's investigation shows the evolution of trade union and labour movement attitudes in the Northern Territory.
In 1901, when White Australia was adopted, Port Darwin, the main town in the Territory, had a small population of mixed origins and initially the White Australia Policy was supported by the trade union movement.
However, special objective circumstances prevailed because the workforce was actually of very mixed racial origins, including many people of mixed white, Asian, and Aboriginal origin and many non-British European migrants. British‑Australian racism was, in practice, very hard to enforce in the frontier conditions of the Northern Territory.
The tiny trade union movement paid strong verbal allegiance to the White Australia Policy, but even at the start a number of exceptions were made for people of mixed racial origins, both for practical reasons and for the more ethical reasons of basic human solidarity. Martinez describes a variety of arguments in the emerging Northern Territory trade union movement about these questions.
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