Getting hit by the Great Depression …
After the dreams and excess of the 1920s came a doozie of a global economic depression, which began on the Wall Street stock market in New York and spread rapidly to take in most of the world. Australia, up to its eyeballs in debt at the same time as prices for its major export commodities such as wool and wheat were crashing through the floor, was acutely vulnerable.
When the economic crisis hit, the politicians and bankers proved themselves unable to agree on what measures should be followed. The Labor Party, which had the misfortune of regaining government for the first time since the end of World War I at about the exact same moment as Wall Street crashed, split for a second time within 20 years over the disagreement.
Unemployment trended upward to a peak of around 30 per cent. After the frenetic expansion years of the 1920s, and the pursuit of new enjoyments with new inventions such as automobiles, cinema and radio (see Chapter 14), ordinary people found themselves thrown back upon their own resources. Luxury items that had been considered essentials a few years previously were now eschewed, garden lawns were converted back to vegetable plots and broken items now found themselves being fixed rather than replaced. (See Chapter 15 for more on life in Australia during the Great Depression.)
… And another war
In 1939, Australians faced up to another world war, but this time one fought not only on faraway battlefields (as World War I had been) but also much closer to home. Japan’s downward thrust meant that, for the first time in its history, Australia felt itself to be directly menaced with possible invasion. Darwin and other northern towns were repeatedly bombed but Britain, its hands full defeating Nazi Germany, was unable to send much in the way of help.
Luckily, America’s interests and Australia’s coincided: America needed a geographic base from which to launch a counteroffensive against Japan, and Australia needed the reassuring presence of a great and powerful ally. Australia geared its economy up to full capacity, converting all possible industries to war production. (See Chapter 16 for more on Australia’s involvement in World War II and events back home.)
As the tide of the war turned, the Curtin Government began preparing postwar reconstruction plans. Along with implementing a bold new immigration scheme (for the first time taking in large numbers of European immigrants as well as those from Britain), considerable economic and social progress was made (see Chapter 17). This laid the groundwork that helped sustain an economic boom that proved second only to the long boom of the 19th century for duration (see Chapter 18).
The Postwar Boom Broom
Prosperity unleashed a new generation — the postwar baby boomers — onto the world, coinciding with a social revolution in the 1960s. This younger generation had grown up in an era of prosperity and increasing material affluence — an experience quite unlike the Depression and war years in which their parents had reached maturity. The Beatles, miniskirts and tie-dye psychedelia — you have the 1960s to thank for them. The 1960s also spawned a series of social movements, including:
Vietnam War protests: Many in the baby-boomer generation refused point-blank to serve as conscripts or soldiers in the Vietnam War, which Australia had entered in 1962.
Calls for the end of the White Australia Policy: This policy was aimed at excluding non-whites from immigration into Australia (under the old social homogeneity argument or, as Labor minister Arthur Calwell unfortunately joked, the argument that ‘Two Wongs don’t make a White’.) By the 1960s, the policy was becoming increasingly odious to newly independent non-white nations. The policy was progressively dismantled from 1966.
Campaigns for civil rights for Aboriginals: Inspired by the civil rights movement for African Americans in the US, Indigenous Australians began agitating to have all constitutional bars against their full recognition as Australian citizens removed.
Women’s rights campaigns: Liberated by access to a recently developed contraceptive (‘the pill’) and ‘no-fault’ divorce, Australian women began calling for equal rights, including equal payment for work done, the right to work after getting married or having children, and the removal of old segregation rules (such as those that fined pub owners for serving women in the front bar of pubs) that were starting to appear, quite frankly, a little archaic.
See Chapter 19 for more on the changes wreaked during the 1960s and 1970s in Australia.
Breaking Down the Fortress Australia Mentality
The ambition for pushing through and instituting great waves of social change came to a head under the government of Labor leader Gough Whitlam in 1972 to 1975 (see Chapter 19). Unfortunately for Gough, however, the economic good times of the postwar boom that had been sustaining the plans for social change came to an end during his prime ministership. The recession destroyed his government, as it did his successor, Liberal Malcolm Fraser.
The challenge of fixing the economic problems — including the special guest stars of high inflation, rising unemployment and declining industries — was so great that it took a concerted revision and ultimate termination of the original Fortress Australia economic policies first implemented early in the 1900s. This was a long period of sustained and largely unquestioned economic orthodoxy to up-end, but up-ended it was.
At the same time, another revolution was taking place — this one with a more multicultural flavour.
Opening up the economy
By the end of the 1980s, Australia had begun winding back tariffs used to protect uncompetitive industries. It had also opened up the financial market, and allowed the Australian dollar to ‘float’ and find its own level of value on international exchange markets rather than being kept fixed at an artificial and government-maintained level.
Opening up the borders (mostly)
At the same time as the economic revolution, a sustained and at times ferocious debate was taking place over Australia’s cultural direction. When the White Australia Policy had been dismantled in the 1960s, it was done with loud public reassurances that ‘social homogeneity’ continued to be the key ambition informing immigration policy. Australia was welcoming immigrants from many diverse and new parts of the world, but the job of the immigrants was to adjust and assimilate. The thought that Australia could be genuinely enriched by these diverse new arrivals