Griffith University anthropologist and historian and Director of the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas Professor Anna Haebich recently launched her new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 at the Museum of Brisbane. This post is an edited version of the talk she gave at the launch.
You know that feeling when you’re writing and you get to the point where you think why am I doing this? Surely everyone knows all this already?
Well it was a relief to me to find out since my new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 hit the road last week that quite a lot of people know very little about the history of assimilation. For most it’s an old policy for migrants and Aborigines. But of course assimilation is more complex than this and far more important for all Australians.
Assimilation is woven into the fabric of our nation and will always be with us. It goes in and out of favour and takes different forms but is always lurking somewhere.
Most people aren’t aware of this – it’s the people on the margins who have to assimilate. I was at a conference in 2000 with academics splitting hairs over when assimilation started and ended. Finally a frustrated Aboriginal voice called out ‘it started when you wetjalas first set foot here’.
Assimilation is so ingrained that we can be living it without even realising it. Present governments reject any connection – it has become a dirty word. Yet for the past decade we have been living a dream of retro-assimilation where nostalgia for the past is mixed with current visions of nationhood using today’s spin to create an imagined world of equality and shared values. Global fears and anxieties leave us susceptible to this phoney dream.
Assimilation’s heyday was in 1950s and 60s. Spinning the Dream focuses on these decades but trawls backwards and forwards across time from early contact to the present.
This was a curious time of hope and high anxiety. Sympathy for rights for the oppressed mingled with a drive for security promised by the uniformity of assimilation. Humiliating attacks on the White Australia policy and the treatment of Aboriginal people (including allegations of genocide) in the United Nations and the world press by leaders from Soviet Russia, China and the new states in Africa and Asia hastened Australia’s commitment to assimilation’s promise of equality. In this climate we welcomed migrants from Europe as workers and future citizens. Along with Aboriginal people they were promised proper homes, jobs and schooling and an end to discrimination. There would be an equal playing field for all.
A national campaign – the first of its kind in Australia - showed images of Aboriginal and migrant families fitting in with a minimum of fuss. The nation was bombarded with images of them living the Australian way of life – Mum, Dad and the kids in a cosy home in the suburbs surrounded by all the mod cons and a new car in the garage. The message was “We will all become one if you become like us”. But the images were aspirational for migrants and an impossible dream for Aboriginal families.
“New Australians� survived as best they could with little help from the government. They seemed to disappear into the suburbs. The average punter gave little thought to the many problems they faced with language, culture, prejudice, family separation, and homesickness. Our family saw this daily. My father was the Lutheran pastor in Wollongong and he ran our family home and the church next door as a one-stop welfare shop, advice bureau and spiritual home for migrants. My partner Darryl Kickett was growing up on the other side of the continent where Nyungar families were negotiating their way through the new pressures of assimilation.
There were improvements for Aboriginal families - segregation laws were repealed and for the first time they had access to services like schools. But governments kept “rescuing� the children to assimilate them. They broke their promises of proper housing and jobs. Families spiralled into welfare dependency. In a time of economic prosperity and full-time employment other Australian families found economic security for decades to come. Aboriginal families were left out and they are still trying to catch up.
Today public sympathy is again riding high and we have another chance. Tom Calma told a rcent ANTAR meeting in Brisbane that to move forward we must learn from our past mistakes. But many of us are ignorant of just what those past mistakes were. So how can we stop repeating them?
50 years ago we missed the opportunity to really make a difference, with devastating consequences. My new book Spinning the Dream provides a ground plan of what happened and shows what did and didn’t work and why. It provides a framework for comparing the experiences of all Australians – settler, migrant and Aboriginal. And it guides us through government spin on assimilation.
If we are truly serious then we need to come to grips with the past. Ignorance is not a vacant space waiting to be filled. Ignorance allows misinformation to roam unchecked. When it targets special groups it normalises discrimination and produces bad government policy. If nations who do not know their history are destined to repeat it, what happens to those who pin their hopes to the retro marketing of a phoney dream?
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 is published by Fremantle Press.
Note [by MB]: Here are some photos I took at the book launch. If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view� once you’re inside the gallery.
Reading from the book.
Spinning the Dream by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Intently listening II by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Darryl Kickett speaking.
Spinning the Dream II by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Anna Haebich speaking.
Spinning the Dream III by *phenomenologist on deviantART
Museum of Brisbane by *phenomenologist on deviantART
As John Howard said as Prime Minister, most Australians favour a model somewhere in between assimilation and multiculturalism.
Aboriginal policies following assimilation have been even worse for Aborigines. The ideology of “self-determination” has produced isolated communities where social order has broken down and alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse is rampant. It should also be noted that many Aboriginal children were rescued from unsafe and unsound environments, and were not removed for assimilation purposes.
When it comes to migrants, the recent cases of people being charged with terrorism-related offences, not to mention the disgraceful speeches of certain Muslim leaders have also shown that mushy multiculturalism is quite flawed. Migrants have to be made to understand that they must obey our laws and respect our culture before they are awarded citizenship. That’s what we ask in return for their receiving all the rights and benefits that everyone in Australia enjoys.
I don’t think that the mistakes of the past will be repeated for a while yet. Multiculturalism and self-determination ideologies have been recognised to have failed, so there’s no going back to that.
Well, that was predictable.
As with most of these rhetorical screeds fashioned after the bleh of John Howard, teh evil others of “sexual abuse” and “terrorism” pop up pretty darn quickly in some sort of alleged moderate blah.
The real interest in considering these sort of apologias (and though claiming to maintain a distance between “mushy” multiculturalism and assimilation, it slides almost immediately to the far right end of the purported dichotomy) is that it begs the question of what an “assimilated” country would look like - one, presumably with only a “we” having got what “we” wanted - no more “them”.
And also the point Anna made - how was assimilationist policy, when it was at its height, incable of achieving its supposed ends, and why did it fail?
I’d be very interested in reading the book to find out more.
It also strikes me that assimilation is some sort of fantasy of equality which masks inequalities among “us” - performing a rhetorical and political function akin to black/white racism in the US.
Will be very interested in reading the book.Agree with you, Kim about comment 1. Won’t comment further in case I get sent the book to review.
On that’s right. These issues are not supposed to be spoken of. We are supposed to stick our heads in the sand and pretend they don’t exist. And when a terrorist attack does occur, we simply blame it on those neo-cons. That’s right. If they didn’t support Israel or invade Iraq then everything would be okay.
Whilst accusing me of being extreme simply because I oppose mushy multiculturalism (most of the Australian does, but let’s not reality get in the way of calling someone hard right in order to marginalise their views), you then wonder why there are social divisions between people. In ethnically diverse societies, only values can unite communities. When we forget this, we tacitly encourage the spread of division and conflict within our countries.
Even the battle against terrorism is fundamentally a clash of ideas. Whilst you appear determined not to use the West’s intellectual weapons to defeat antiquated ideas, I recognise that the battle of ideas is equally important to the more direct battles we have against terrorism. I am not one to promote nihilism through the promulgation of cultural and mortal relativism, because I believe that societies that promote freedom of religion, respect for women and economic freedoms (among other values) have superior values to those who do not.
I repeat that “Migrants have to be made to understand that they must obey our laws and respect our culture before they are awarded citizenship”. That’s a sensible position, and it’s a pity that Kim and Paul are unable to recognise the inherent wisdom of that statement.
Sure does! Janet Albrechtsen, Christopher Pearson, etc, etc. That’s actually quite an interesting slip because the lack of logic and the emotive triggers in your ‘argument’ are identical. But then I suppose you’re a “free thinker” like Planet Janet and you just happen to have come up with stock standard culture warrior schtick all on your lonesome, complete with the insinuation that you’re some brave truth teller and teh left have their head in the sand.
What a waste of time.
Anna’s book is about assimilation policy from 1950 to 1970. I don’t think the terrsts were the threat de jour back then. Had you been around, I suppose you would have been supporting the White Australia Policy to keep us safe from the Yellow Peril?
Get real.
It would actually be nice if some right wingers were capable of constructing an argument for themselves, engaging seriously with Australian history, and having an open mind. But I’m dreaming, I spose.
Leon Bertrand wrote:
Or in other words: You can only enter this country as long as you discard the attributes and values that mark you out as different to conservative Anglo’s, so shut up and conform.
Or as the 1969 Minister for Immigration, Bill Sneddon, put it:
Unlike you Leon, at least Sneddon was up front about his bigotry.
I’m very much looking forward to reading Anna’s book when I get a chance - it seems to me that it does raise issues which are of great importance and which ought to transcend knee jerk reactionary spiel.
In many ways, the postwar period had resonances with similar experience outside Australia - a desire to put conflict in the past and a nation building ethos, shaped greatly by the experience of both depression and war. But, if we were to take the UK and the US as comparators, patterns of immigration were very different. It wasn’t until 1965 that LBJ did away with the “quota” policy on immigration which had prevailed since the 1920s, and the context of Caribbean and subcontinental immigration into the UK in the 50s and 60s was also quite unique - and in many ways paralleled and reflected the end of the UK as a metropolitan and Imperial power. Race, whiteness and immigration function very differently as signifiers and markers of integration and exclusion in metropolitan as opposed to settler societies.
It would be interesting to compare Australian post-war experience with that of NZ and Canada, in particular because there’s a common dimension of the continuing displacement of Indigenous people, and at least in Canada, some big parallels in policy.
I was very struck by this part of Anna’s talk:
I wonder whether there wasn’t a blockage in the formation of an active settlement policy caused by Calwell’s denial that immigration would be largely or substantially Southern European. But I also wonder if the Poms coming in on assisted passages found “assimilation” a piece of cake. No doubt many of the answers are in Anna’s book, but I think we’d benefit from a discussion of these issues on this thread, much more than we’d benefit from a partisan shitfight.
“Migrants have to be made to understand that they must obey our laws and respect our culture before they are awarded citizenship�.
So what are we going to do to the people who are born here who disobey our laws, and have a culture that ‘we’ vehemently disagree with? Oh and I know this has been said a zillion times before, but exactly what is this thing called ‘our culture’ and how will I know it when I see it? Who decides what is ‘our culture’ and what is alien? You?
I am so sick of this tripe. Boiler plate ozzian whinging moaning and griping that people from other places insist on speaking foreign, live in places which thereby automatically become the ‘ghetto’ while being pushy and arrogant in trying to build schools and mosques in places far away from where they should stay.
You aren’t a member of the NSW Liberals are you?
I appreciate the varied comments on my piece and encourage you to read the book, not for my profit but because I believe that it provides important new perspectives for us to address in open discussion, as Mark suggests. I wrote the book principally to unpack the many assumptions we hold about assimilation and it was a big learning curve for me. An important insight came from reading Nancy Tuana and Charles Mills’ comments about collective ignorance. As I mentioned above this is never a benign condition: it does things. Nor is it a simple lack, something that we will come to know better as we push out the boundaries of research and experience. Rather, to quote Tuana it is ‘often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty’. Not knowing can actually work to preserve ignorance by bestowing value on misinformation and failing to question its veracity or authority. In a world of separation and suspicion of the other, hearsay and imaginings can take on the appearance of fact. Contradictions abound, untruths multiply and conversations slip unchecked from one outrageous claim to the next. Repeated by government and the media this misinformation can take on a new aura of authority and authenticity. Ignorance and misinformation can be harnessed to target specific groups who are defined and stereotyped on the basis of some attribute such as race, gender, ethnicity, class or age. This is then used to rationalise and normalise their discriminatory treatment. Finally the very significant point made by Mills that these steps can lead to the ‘ironic outcome’ where the perpetrators of prejudice and discrimination ‘will in general be unable to understand the world they have themselves created.’
Years ago I lived in Melbourne. Once while walking to a mates through Richmond I passed a Vietnamese family having a barbie in a park.
It was a beautiful summer day, there were 3 generations (at least) of the family sitting around the barbeque area, blabbing away in Vietnamese, cooking all sorts of food, the smells were partly familiar, partly foreign. The patriarch of the family was even wearing one of those dodgy barbie aprons you used to see everywhere.
The kids, well younger group, from about 5 to 20 years old were playing cricket, and yelling in a combination of English and Vietnamese.
As I wandered by, the patriarch fella looked at me, and beamed. He looked so happy, his family were doing what families should, eating and playing together and enjoying some of the benefits of Australia.
He said “G’day Mate!” possibly had the slightest trace of an accent, maybe not. Who TF really cares.
For some reason this made me feel better about being Australian than just about anything ever, before or since.
Multicultural? Assimilated? People living well in a great part of the world?
Who gives a fuck really it was great to see that people who were obviously an immigrant family, and arrived here from somewhere else in the recent past, actually having a great time in Australia.
It would be easy to say that eating together outdoors and playing cricket are a part of Australian culture and these people had assimilated, and also to say that aspects of their culture were still strong. (Obviously the food, that basic and patronising thing that people say about multiculturalism. We all eat so much better since the arrival of non anglos.) Of course the fact that 3 generations were there, and grandma was treated with reverence is a pretty vital part of asian culture, something that doesn’t seem to be as important to “traditional” Australian values.
But also, barbeques and cricket are not exclusive to “Australian” values. People have been having barbies in australia for thousands of years, and have them elsewhere too. People play cricket, or any sport, in public everywhere else too.
In fact the only real thing that seemed unique to me was that this mob were given the opportunity to live well here, and took advantage of it. They were actually having a real fair go. Their economic circumstances may have terrible for all I know, but for that moment they were living well.
Thats what real Australian culture is, thats what “assimilation” should serve, and thats something attitudes like Leon the dick’s work against constantly.
Whats Australian culture Leon?
Is it obeying the law? Selling our assets off overseas for a quick profit? Bashing the other cos we don’t know how to see ourselves?
You wouldn’t know what real culture was if it bit you on the backside.
For a start what makes you think Australians are “law abiding”? How well do you know this country? Ever hear of SP bookies? Two up? Driving hotted up cars in excess of 150km hr outside towns? Bushrangers? Waltzing Matilda? Eureka? Miners strikes in the 20th century? The highest recreational drug use in the world? Nimbin mardi grass? Buying nicked stuff at the pub?
As for the turrists … at what point did the sacrifice of thousands of Australians for our freedom in two world wars mean so little that we are prepared to throw away basic legal protections, things that supposedly define our democracy?
Attitudes like yours are a cancer on real Australian culture. Its not assimilation you want, its the subjegation of any difference. You are indulging in “collective ignorance” and it is a blight on whatever’s good about Australia.
Sorry I’m ranting, but idiots trying to define MY culture within their narrow bigoted worldview irritate me. Australian culture is actually wider and more complex than Howard era culture warriors could ever hope to understand, and like all undeveloped cowards they want to run from it screaming. Or kill it.
Onya, Jules! That’s a great story, and some interesting insights.
Btw, Leon Bertrand is complaining on his “Blog of Freedom” that he’s been “censored”. I deleted one of his comments because I think that his predictable schtick isn’t really responsive to the sorts of insights Anna’s thinking can stimulate, and is just a partisan rant. Our blog, our rules. He’s got his own, and if no one reads it, that’s surely not my problem. But if anyone wants to debate his views with him, they can do it there, rather than here:
http://leonbertrand.blogspot.com/2008/03/animal-farm-at-larvatus-prodeo.html
It’s specifically against our comments policy for a commenter to try to twist a thread into a self-serving debate about their own opinions, and I won’t allow it, so any further responses to Mr Bertrand can go on his blog not this blog.
You linked to Deviant Art, rather than http://www.leonbertrand.blogspot.com/
Hmpf. Another book I’ll have to buy, be fascinated by, no doubt enjoy thoroughly, and fruitfully use. Why can’t you authors leave us readership in peace? I demand a moratorium on new knowledge!
…
A point of technicality. Aren’t there two very different Australian assimilationisms, the first being the one Governments have required since 1788 for Aboriginals, the second being the one the Federal Government proposed between the post-war reconstruction era and the “integration” era of the 1960s? “Multiculturalism” as a normative concept of State-granted permissions of difference has never really applied to Indigenous people at all.
And yes, it’s all about equality. Always has been. Until Indigenous people enjoy the same material benefits of capitalism the rest of us do, there’ll always be assimilationist rationalisation and normalisation.
Sorry, P, fixed now.
Heh!
The timeless lament of the research student!
I remember that feeling from writing a thesis - stop writing new stuff on my topic til I’m finished!
No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.
How about a Welsh corgi bred by Germans? But of course Ma’am.
I remember an interview in one of the weekend supplements with the two Marios who ran Marios cafe in Brunswick street, Fitzroy. For those who don’t live in Melbourne, it was an iconic cafe and they are well-known characters. They would be I suppose late baby boomer generation and one of them spoke about being bashed at school because of the smelly salami/garlic sandwich in his lunch. bashed. For a sandwich. It seemed almost incomprehensible to me and it really drove home the inverse side of the cosy, feelgood coin of assimilation: hostile repression. These days, girls get harassed for little bits of cloth (their headscarves). So it goes on.
The people who think that things are quieter and nicer under an assimilationist mindset are generally the favoured group that’s being assimilated to, I find.
In the 70s I attended schools in Newcastle which were a fair model of the tensions between multiculturalism and assimilation of the Mediterranean wave of migrants, and we’d just managed to mostly get past the “jokes” about garlic etc, although stereotypes about which group were most likely to pull a flick-knife at “their” soccer matches were still considered fair game. Certainly the migrant kids were expected to repress anything too different from us Anglos, just like the indigenous kids were.
But at least we were there, sharing the same public schools and gradually getting used to each other, eventually many of us becoming friends without reference to ethnicity, building a new social cohesion between Anglos and immigrants (the indigenous kids still largely got shafted of course). Today’s articles about white flight from public schools with high indigenous and/or immigrant numbers mean that such possibilities for building social cohesion are being lost.
Kodwo, re your Sneddon quote”Or as the 1969 Minister for Immigration, Bill Sneddon, put it:
We must have a single culture – I am quite determined we should have a mono-culture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism”
Do you think he meant we should all die like him too?
I agree Liam, assimilation means something potentially quite different in relation to Aboriginal people. The cultural politics of settler/Aboriginal relations have quite different implications. The subsumption of ‘indigenous’ as a further category within multiculturalism is also a form of assimilation, just as the granting of land rights in only remote areas tends to imply that assimilation ‘worked’ in settled areas.
I arrived with my family from the United States as a 4 year old in 1974. We settled in Perth from 1974-77, then moved to Canberra where I grew up.
For some strange reason (probably from listening to my parents too obediently) my accent didn’t leave me completely until my 20’s.
During my primary school years I was constantly beaten up, teased and ostracised simply because I ’spoke funny’.
I often consider what other new Australians go through, and how hard it must be. Despite the fact the North American culture was almost identical to Australian culture (with the exception of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the other kids ran in horror from) I still found myself on the outer. I can’t even imagine what kids from differing cultures go through these days.
Helen
Much as I don’t wish to trivialise the inherent racism of that story, getting bashed is and was a rather easy thing to provoke among boys of a certain age, particularly in boy’s schools. Eleven year old boys in groups seem to like hitting people and, if retribution appears unlikely, tend to find an excuse somewhere to torture the unsupported and weak. Having once been one I can say with confidence that medium size boys are a vicious bunch.
What tigtog said at #18.
There is quite a bit more to be written in response to the reports she links to in today’s SMH, some of which I would write if I didn’t have to prepare two hours of lectures by this afternoon.
Much as I don’t wish to trivialise the inherent racism of that story, getting bashed is and was a rather easy thing to provoke among boys of a certain age, particularly in boy’s schools. Eleven year old boys in groups seem to like hitting people and, if retribution appears unlikely, tend to find an excuse somewhere to torture the unsupported and weak. Having once been one I can say with confidence that medium size boys are a vicious bunch.
I reserve my right to deplore racist persecution of little kids, however unlikely it may be to stop in the near future.
Also, my point was that that went much more unremarked in those days, and I think the “boys will be boys” opinion that you espouse was more dominant. People today are starting to stand up and say that that’s unacceptable - and good on’em. Politically correct my ass - it’s about making bullying unfashionable.
The essence of assimilation is a belief in cultural superiority.
It used to be racial superiority in Australia up to the late 20th century, but multicultural immigration, the end of the Aboriginal protection laws and the introduction of the racial discrimination act changed things. Notions of race were downplayed but the culture of the British was maintained, including its inherent belief that it is the peak of social (if not genetic) evolution.
Myths of democracy, free enterprise, and a christian moral framework (if not religious belief) are held to be the goal of all humans on the planet and of course all “Australians”. Other cultural notions of reality are sidelined as evolutionary anachronism. Australia and the USA are the same thing and it is this same cultural superiority that determines foreign policy of these nations, together as cultural allies. Separation from Britain, even hundreds of years ago in USA has still maintained the cultural arrogance of the original genocide and invasion in these countries, as represented in the ongoing genocides of these countries current foreign policies. Americans and Australians may speak with our own accents but we still speak “english”.
Questions of assimilation of the descendents of African slaves into British American society is a point of difference between the U.S. and Australia as our slaves were from here, not Africa. (The exception of course is the blackbirding of South Sea Islanders).
Even our racial discrimination act is both assimilationist and culturally arrogant. It gives every Australian the right to live as a white person, no matter what the colour of their skin. There are no indigenous rights and interests, such as customary law, that is protected by this act. Customary law is itself a breach of the principles of the act as it relates to the rights of a specific racial/cultural group above and beyond the average white citizen.
Noel Pearson’s dismissal of “left” perspective as being an ignorant white and guilt ridden perspective and the clashes between Cape York Murries and the Wilderness society about what the landscape actually is, indicate that it may not only be conservative Howard/Ruddock/Vanstone style racism at play but also alternative and even rebellious movemnts in Australia operating within an overarching cultural matrix of British culture and knowledge, which is both alienated from and alienating to any cultural perspective outside of the dominant British world view (and language!).
Yes as Liam and others suggest assimilation has more than one meaning - pressures to assimilate woven into discriminatory legislation and practices for Aboriginal people to the 1950s; the 1950s vision of an assimilated nation; the government’s policy for aboriginal people and migrants in the 1950s; on-going dreams of creating an Australia with one culture; retro-assimilation. They’re teased out in the book.
I look forward to reading it Anna, but I’m going to have to pretend it doesn’t exist until I finish my thesis
On to the list it goes…