Ingrained prejudice of any kind is difficult to eradicate, even ameliorate. After more than a century and a half of ill-treatment of their indigenes, and about half a century of attempting to perpetuate a nation of white British peoples in Australia, it was not surprising that the first Australian Minister of Immigration dealt harshly in the late 1940s with the handful of coloured wartime evacuees remaining in the country. He also rejected anyone with a tinge of colour, even the odd tinted child within an otherwise white-appearing family.
We Asians did not accept the Minister's claim that he was merely upholding the law, especially after the O'Keefe episode.
The Minister's behaviour was despicable. His parliamentary remark that 'Two Wongs do not make a white' had been noted. It was his attempt to deport wartime evacuee Mrs Annie O'Keefe and her children (originally from Ambon in the Dutch East Indies), when she was already re-married to a white Australian, and with whom she now had a near-white baby, which showed that ordinary Australians were not as racist as their elected representatives. It was also Calwell who reportedly said 'No red-blooded Australian would countenance a chocolate-coloured Australia in the Eighties.'
As for the O'Keefes, the author and two Malayan friends lived next door to them for a few months. On any weekend, up to ten young Asian lads might have been enjoying the ambience of a sea-front life, socialising with the O'Keefes, and enjoying the little O'Keefe baby wiggling its toes at them. The O'Keefes were a delightful family, full of joy and hospitality. Finally, community pressure, commonsense, and justice prevailed. The High Court apparently decided that the earlier deportations of wartime evacuees were extra-legal.
Interestingly, a biographer of Calwell made no mention of the Australian-born white O'Keefe baby. Yet, he says that Calwell did not much like the British, and therefore went to Europe to harvest able-bodied immigrants. They were necessary to build Australia's infrastructures and to man the production facilities being established by foreign enterprises under invitation by the federal government, with a promise of protection from imports. Thus, an uneconomic and technically inefficient manufacturing sector was established; but the it soon enabled a high-consumption nation, without going through the normal processes of developing a durable and significant industrial sector in the usual stages. But, had Calwell been somewhat selective in the European intake, in that he had sought Roman Catholics?
That Australia's destiny was to become less insular was shown by the successful eventual integration of large numbers of European immigrants and their families. Yet, there were roadblocks to be overcome before a closed nation became truly cosmopolitan.
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