By Chris Slee
An editorial in a recent edition of the Irish Echo (a paper for Irish people in Australia) draws some interesting parallels between anti-immigrant prejudice today and anti-Irish prejudice in 19th-century Australia. Some 19th-century politicians complained about the "excessive" numbers of Irish people coming to Australia, and their failure to assimilate — the same complaints Pauline Hanson makes against Asians today (the Irish Echo points out that Hanson is herself of Irish descent). Following are some extracts from the editorial.
Even a casual glance at the history of Irish Australia tells us that since 1788, this country has been multicultural ... Modern Australia evolved out of a struggle between the polarities of British Protestantism and Irish Catholicism.
Early Irish arrivals were obviously culturally separate to their British counterparts and this separateness fuelled the idea that Australia should not be, as the English imagined, a little Britain of the south.
Rather, as Patrick O'Farrell explains in his book The Irish in Australia: "It was the Irish minority that was compelled to entertain the matter of an Australian nationalism".
O'Farrell tells us that the Irish asserted the idea of pluralism from the start — that Australia should be an "open, varied society". They rejected the idea of "homogeneity" and of a "closed, uniform society".
Targeting particular Â鶹´«Ã½ of the community for not assimilating is nothing new in Australia, however. In 1872, one of Australia's most prominent politicians, Henry Parkes, spoke in terms eerily echoed by the leader of One Nation in 1998.
Speaking to electors in Mudgee, Parkes said: "I protest against Irishmen coming here and bringing their national grievances to disturb this land of ours ... to distract the workings of our political institutions, by acting together in separate organised masses, not entering into the reason of our politics ... but blindly obeying the dictation of others as ignorant as themselves". Sound familiar?
He later said: "I object to seven Irishmen coming here to every three Englishmen, to set themselves in motion to extinguish freedom of speech and to impede the work of our free institutions".
Of course, Parkes' idea of free speech was that he be allowed, for example, to call the Irish "jabbering baboons", as he did regularly.
The target of Pauline Hanson's ire is obviously not the Irish (we're predominantly white and English-speaking, after all) but her notions are every bit as deplorable as Parkes' were back then.
[Nineteenth-century Australia contained not only people of English and Irish origin, but many other groups, including Aborigines, Chinese and Pacific Islanders. Australia was never racially or culturally homogeneous, despite strenuous attempts to make it so through racist measures such as the White Australia policy — Chris Slee.]