ROGER BELL In Apartheid’s Shadow: Australian Race Politics and South Africa, 1945-1975. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
The anti-apartheid movement in Australia had more of an impact on policies at home than is usually recognised.
In his prologue Roger Bell refers to his childhood in country New South Wales where Aborigines lived ‘on the fringes of town’; something akin to the ‘separate but [not] equal’ doctrine of Jim Crow America. Among other things, Bell refers to ‘the black kids gathered outside the fence that denied them entry to the local swimming pool’. This is an image he was unable to forget, and Robert Campbell Jr’s 1986 painting Barred from the Baths is reproduced on the cover of his book.
Bell’s concern is how, in the 30 years after World War II, Australia moved away from its racist past, exemplified by the White Australia policy and discrimination against its Indigenous population. He raises crucial questions about Australia: its mores, its sense of itself, its relationship with other nations and the nature of world affairs. His proposition is that Australia’s transition away from the White Australia Policy was mediated through South Africa and its apartheid policies. These ‘Sisters of the South’ were tarred with the same racist brush in their respective treatment of and attitudes to persons with coloured or black skins. Bell sets out his aim thus:
In Apartheid’s Shadow traces Australia’s tortured responses to apartheid in the generation after World War II. It explores what might be seen as the ripple effects of the rising assault on institutionalised white supremacy.
In his research Bell consulted the National Archives of Australia and the Department of External Affairs, the private papers of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and anti-apartheid groups, official government publications, United Nations publications, newspapers and a wide range of secondary sources. He knits together developments within the United Nations, the British Commonwealth, the deliberations of governments across the globe, advice from Australian diplomats — mainly those in Pretoria and the ‘South African’ office in Canberra — with developments in Parliament, the stances of pro- and anti-apartheid forces within Australia, Aboriginal activists, a variety of sporting organisations in Australia and overseas, and an extensive secondary literature. This forensically detailed approach demonstrates the complicated, contradictory ways in which history unfolds.
World War II ushered in a revulsion to the racist policies of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Following the war, as decolonisation worked its way across the globe, and in the wake of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, new African and Asian nations condemned South Africa’s apartheid regime in the UN. During the 1950s, Australia invariably voted against these motions, as did other white nations. Following the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, the United States of America and Great Britain backed anti-apartheid motions. Australia decided to join them as it didn’t want to be seen as being out of step with world opinion. Continuing throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s successive Australian Coalition governments would support resolutions condemning apartheid, but not resolutions proposing international action to bring about its end. Like other Western nations, Australia continued to trade with South Africa, and continued investment and military contacts, such as selling arms and sharing intelligence information. This was the period of the Cold War, and Australia would soon find itself enmeshed in America’s war in Vietnam to ward off the spread of communism. In this climate dissidents in South Africa could easily be dismissed as communists.
In defending apartheid, South Africa would often point to the White Australia Policy, and when criticised for its treatment of its black population, would claim Australia’s policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people amounted to nothing more than genocide; South Africa, its leaders said, sought to keep the races apart, which ensured the survival of the native population.
Bell examines the development of different anti-apartheid organisations in Australia. They comprised religious leaders, trade unionists, academics, students – especially from Sydney University, Labor members of both state and federal parliaments, rogue elements of the Coalition and expatriate South Africans. The anti-apartheid movement was never endorsed by the wider Australian public. Opinion polls over these years reveal public support for the Coalition’s ‘do nothing’ approach on South Africa. Most importantly, the public was opposed to boycotts of whites-only South African sporting teams.
A criticism levelled at the anti-apartheid movement in Australia — by South Africa and by its opponents in Australia — was that it was more concerned about the plight of blacks overseas than those in Australia. This was also a view of Aboriginal activists. Bell points out that the battle for Aboriginal rights stemmed from the agency of Aboriginal activists, rather than from the broader ‘civil rights’ struggles of anti-apartheid groups. To the extent that there was overlap, it resulted from Aboriginal activists becoming involved in anti-apartheid struggles.
In the 25 years after World War II, South Africa was impervious to attacks mounted on it by United Nations motions, the campaigning of overseas anti-apartheid groups and activists within the country. The West, especially English-speaking nations, maintained economic, diplomatic and military connections. Where it was vulnerable, an area some described as its Achilles heel, was its desire to play sport against other white nations. As Bell explains:
Isolation from the highest levels of contest became the most effective lever against the apartheid regime (in large part because UN sanctions resolutions failed so dismally in the economic, strategic and diplomatic fields).
In sport South Africa enforced a strict policy of not fielding mixed-race teams. In the latter part of the 1960s it was prepared to allow the odd coloured or black sportsperson to tour as an ‘honorary white’, but these were exceptions. Aboriginal tennis player Evonne Goolagong, for example, played in South Africa in the early 1970s under such a designation.
Anti-apartheid campaigners in the latter part of the 1960s and early 1970s turned their attention to campaigning against touring South African teams in Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand. The major targets were rugby and cricket teams. The 1971 Springbok tour of Australia was associated with widespread disruption, including the involvement of police to ensure games were played, and the declaration of a state of emergency in Queensland.
A tour by a cricket side was scheduled for the summer of 1971–1972. Pressure was mounted for it to be stopped. The Australian Cricket Board under its chairman, the legendary cricketer Sir Donald Bradman, consulted widely on whether it should go ahead. Prime Minister McMahon of Australia and Prime Minister Vorster of South Africa agreed it should be cancelled. Bell points out that neither government ‘wanted to again be the focus of bitter demonstrations or fractious conflicts that drew world attention to issues of racism and white supremacy’. They informed Bradman, who made the announcement and managed to find himself on the ‘right side of history’.
In examining these events, Bell dismisses their impact on the course of apartheid in South Africa. It took another 20 or so years before apartheid crumbled, and it is difficult to see how activism in Australia in the early 1970s had any influence on this change at all. What is important, however, is the impact it had on Australia’s abandoning of the White Australia Policy. The subsequent end of tours by South African sporting teams and, in time, of official rugby and cricket tours to South Africa, represented an important signal to the world, especially in Asia, that Australia had turned away from its racist past.
Various diplomats provided Canberra with advice that the world had changed, and Australia needed to adjust to these new realities and desist from its previous racist policies. In 1967, 90 per cent of the electorate endorsed a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the census of the Australian population, and to give the Commonwealth the power to make laws relating to them. Integration and ethnic diversity replaced the previous policy of assimilation. The Holt government began the process of winding back the White Australia Policy with race replaced by attributes and capabilities as criteria for immigration. A small number of Asians began to be accepted as immigrants. Moves were also afoot to grant Papua New Guinea, at that time still a protectorate of Australia, independence.
The election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 sped up these processes. In 1975 Australia ratified the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and passed the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. This enabled increased legislative and administrative action to tackle discrimination against Aborigines, pursuit of land rights and other issues; a work in progress which looks like it will never be completed. Papua New Guinea was granted independence in 1975. The Whitlam government moved away from Pretoria and pursued a policy of strengthening ties with nations in Asia and Africa. Sporting contacts with South Africa were reduced. The Whitlam government endorsed United Nations motions deploring apartheid but was unprepared to initiate action against it, unless other nations, especially America and Great Britain, were prepared to start proceedings.
Roger Bell, currently Professor Emeritus in History at the University of New South Wales, says that it took him five years to research and write this book. It was time well spent. In Apartheid’s Shadow: Australian Race Politics and South Africa, 1974-1975 makes an outstanding contribution to Australian scholarship and historiography. He has examined a wide range of orbits in examining how Australia wrenched itself from its racist past and embraced a more tolerant approach to recognising people for their inherent worth. Australia redefined its role in the world – not that the battle against racism is over. His book will be a standard on the move away from the White Australia Policy for many years to come.
Roger Bell In Apartheid’s Shadow: Australian Race Politics and South Africa, 1945-1975 Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019 PB 364pp $39.95
Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University who writes on industrial relations and sport. He recently completed a history of the Rugby League Players’ Association.
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