General Cariappa encounters ‘White Australia’: Australia, India and the commonwealth in the 1950s

Abstract

There have been a number of studies of the White Australia policy and some examination of white Australia's relationship to the new, multiracial Commonwealth that emerged after the Second World War. Drawing extensively on Indian sources, this article examines how Australia was viewed by India's high commissioner to Australia and New Zealand, General K. M. Cariappa. In the period from September 1953 to April 1956 he sparked considerable controversy by suggesting that the White Australia policy ran the risk of alienating Asian opinion and undermining the Commonwealth ideal in India and Pakistan. Cariappa maintained a high public profile throughout his stay in Australia and was widely regarded as one of the most prominent diplomats posted to Canberra in the 1950s.

The post-war world of the 1950s created new challenges for social policies based on race – not least for the White Australia policy. Australia's commitment to two key institutions, the United Nations and the ‘New Commonwealth’, generated tensions between its international obligations and its domestic policies and priorities. The ‘New Commonwealth’, by virtue of the membership of the ethnically diverse countries of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, and later the nations of decolonising Africa, gave racial issues a new prominence. In families, even a ‘family’ of nations like the Commonwealth, divisive resentments can simmer below a seemingly calm surface. In 1954, India's General Cariappa exposed the tensions within white Australia when he broke with diplomatic convention and publicly commented on the White Australia policy.

Australia's leaders after the Second World War had either held the contradictions of the White Australia policy in check, or ignored them, as they simultaneously embraced the multilateralism of the United Nations and sought to maintain their exclusive immigration policy. Historians have recently argued that Australia's relationship to the ‘New Commonwealth’ was complicated by a bi-partisan commitment to the continuance of British Australia. Frank Bongiorno has observed that Australia's manoeuvres over the admission of a republican India into the Commonwealth reveal the depth of Australia's devotion to Britain. H. V. Evatt, Labor's minister for external affairs, and R. G. Menzies, leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister from 1949, differed on the form the ‘New Commonwealth’ should take. While Evatt argued for the continuance of the Royal Prerogative, Menzies took a narrower view, proposing an exclusive inner circle of old ‘white dominions’, or a ‘Crown Commonwealth’.1 Whatever form the New Commonwealth would take, there were troubling implications for exclusive immigration policies.

As David Goldsworthy has observed, in the conflict between Menzies' idea of an ‘organic’ Commonwealth and an emerging ‘New Commonwealth’, it was apparent that the British world no longer spoke with one voice in international politics.2 The divisions of the Cold War made that manifest; so too did criticism of the White Australia policy from within the Commonwealth. The thorn in Australia's side in both instances was India, with Jawaharlal Nehru the undisputed leader of the non-aligned movement then gathering momentum in Asia and Africa and leader of a nation with particular reason to feel affronted by the White Australia policy. The relationship, such as it was, was not entirely antagonistic, though Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell's rigorous application of the policy heightened resentment, and Menzies' personal relations with Nehru were at all times difficult. Meg Gurry has argued that ‘neglect’ best characterised Australia's relationship to India in the second half of the twentieth century.3 Indian responses to Australia in the 1950s were dominated by Australia's continued self-identification as ‘white’. India was the most persistent external critic of the White Australia policy at this time, and, though the protests were never formal, they would spark a powerful debate within Australia itself.

I

No high commissioner posted to Canberra in the 1950s was better known or more widely reported than General K. M. Cariappa. Born in the Coorg district of Karnataka South India in 1899, at the time of his appointment Cariappa was a revered figure throughout India. He was a man of ‘firsts’: the first Indian to qualify at Staff College, the first Indian brigadier, the first Indian to enter the Imperial Defence College in England, the first Indian Army commander and, from 1949, the first commander-in-chief of an independent Indian Army.4 Cariappa was a wonderful example of a British-trained officer: clipped moustache, beautifully modulated vowels, immaculate dress, personally initialled Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes (ordered direct from London in batches of 1,000) and the military disciplines of punctuality, fitness, loyalty, attention to detail and hard work. He was a reader and a thinker who found spiritual solace in the great texts, the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, but he also tripped the light fantastic on the dance floor and was to be remembered as ‘Dear Carry’ by many Australian ladies of breeding and social standing.5 Cariappa was at once an embodiment of independent India and its loyal servant. In 1953 he was asked by Nehru to end his brief retirement to become Indian high commissioner to Australia and New Zealand. Cariappa agreed, aware of the Gita's maxim: ‘your business is with the deed, and not with the result’.6

British colour prejudice was something no educated Indian of this time could escape. As a young officer at Sandhurst Cariappa had experienced it at first hand.7 He was also well aware of Australia's attachment to the White Australia policy. In 1951, Shakuntala Paranjpye, the daughter of India's first high commissioner to Australia, had described the country as ‘a part of the British Empire, barefacedly crying out its aversion for the coloured races’.8 While it is unclear whether the Indian Ministry for External Affairs asked Cariappa to press for a liberalisation of Australia's restrictive immigration policies during his appointment, he was offended by racial exclusivity and referred on several occasions to his Australian ‘mission’. Immigration reform was one of his causes and his outspokenness on the subject is well documented.

As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a legislative formulation, the White Australia policy responded to the new awareness of regional sensitivities, not through any fundamental change, but through subtle adjustment of the language used to describe and explain it. External Affairs officers in Australia and Asia had pressed for some moderation of that language. It was increasingly argued in official circles that the White Australia policy was designed to protect ‘social homogeneity’, rather than exclude on the basis of race. For both critics and entrenched supporters of White Australia, this language avoided acknowledging racial exclusivity as its key plank. Goldsworthy has observed that Australian policy-makers found a set of terms in which to talk about immigration that ‘proved eminently flexible and therefore almost devoid of content’.9 While such a language could work to veil harsher realities, ‘such dissembling went only so far’.10 In 1954 Cariappa tested the language and the reality of White Australia.

Cariappa arrived in Australia in September 1953 accompanied by his twelve-year-old daughter, Nalini, and his niece, Sagari Chengappa, who acted as his hostess on official occasions, Cariappa's marriage having ended some years before.11 One of Cariappa's well-publicised early activities was an unscheduled visit to the Gundagai war memorial. Disturbed at finding it so neglected, he and his Sikh driver promptly got to work with spades, brooms and hoses to clean it up. Thereafter, Cariappa became a regular visitor to war memorials. The interest was certainly genuine. Cariappa was a soldier first and foremost. His actions were also a reminder to Australians that the Indians they excluded had fought alongside them in both World Wars.12

Another of Cariappa's early official engagements was to travel to Melbourne to meet Harold Holt, the minister for immigration and one of the more progressive members of the Menzies cabinet. Trailing his extensive war record, Cariappa soon asked Holt why it was not possible for well-educated Indian and Pakistani ex-service men to settle in Australia. After all, they had fought for the Empire and could readily adapt to English habits and customs. Why exclude them when poorly educated immigrants from Germany and Italy, former enemy countries, were welcomed? Cariappa insisted he was not attacking Australia's immigration policy, rather he questioned the logic of excluding Commonwealth fellow citizens. Cariappa was not the first Indian in Australia to raise such questions. In the early years of federated Australia Indian residents had protested about their treatment to the Imperial government, though it was not until after the First World War that the Australian government revised Indian residents' civil status in the 1920s, over and above the rights of other ‘non Europeans’.13

Nevertheless, Indians in Australia suffered discrimination in other areas, particularly business and employment, and continued to chafe at their circumstances. The introduction of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 offered no relief: where some measure of equality in terms of British citizenship may have existed in theory, the new act gave the minister discretionary power to deny ‘registration’ even to long-term residents with children who were citizens by birth. Cariappa emphasised that, while Indians had no desire to force the issue, ‘we of India and Asia very strongly objected to the words “Coloured People” and “White Australia” – which are repugnant to us’.14

Cariappa well understood the discomfort caused when he played the Commonwealth card in such a setting. A good deal of effort and delicate negotiation in the crowded weeks before Indian independence had produced a formula enabling India to remain in the Commonwealth while becoming a republic. Churchill had dropped his persistent objections to Indian independence only after receiving a personal assurance from Mountbatten that the Commonwealth link would be preserved. Mountbatten considered this a major achievement.15 This was a tectonic shift in which the ‘white’ Commonwealth gave way to an altogether more complex and racially diverse community. Cariappa's first meeting with Holt signalled that significant immigration reform was most unlikely. He would have to find other ways of advancing his more inclusive Commonwealth ideal. One strategy that bore fruit was his creation, on return to Canberra, of the Commonwealth Club, an organisation, still in existence, that brought together supporters of the Commonwealth ideal in Canberra.16

Cariappa travelled on to Perth: ‘A very pretty state and full of potential wealth.’17 Here he was particularly struck by the scarcity of people available to develop the mines and farms. Returning via Adelaide, he met a group of Asian students studying at the University of Adelaide. He stressed the need for them to make Australians more aware of the Asian perspective in international affairs, a solidly Nehruvian sentiment. Cariappa was to make this point often to Asian students in Australia. From Adelaide, Cariappa travelled to New Guinea. Here the racial issue again proved an irritant. Learning of the shortage of qualified English teachers, Cariappa proffered ‘help with young men from our Indian universities’, well aware that this was unlikely to receive any serious consideration. By the end of the trip, he had grown thoroughly tired of Australians ‘using the word “native” ad nauseam’. Yet, on his travels, there were also pleasant surprises. In Goulburn he was pleased by Bishop Young who told an audience of school boys to ‘forget what their fathers and grandfathers had told them about being Australian only – and to regard themselves as part of Asia’ and ‘one with Asians’.18

II

By the end of 1953, Cariappa had no illusions that the White Australia policy was about to change. His recent tour had indicated that, while Australians could be a very hospitable people, they were also quite narrow and insular. In his first annual report to New Delhi, Cariappa noted that the world had become more complex for Australians. They had once feared that Japan would claim ‘“lebensraum” for her surplus population’ in ‘thinly populated Australia’. Now, in the aftermath of the war, Australians were aware of the decline of British power in the Pacific and the rise of communism in Asia, with China a particular concern. Cariappa observed that Australia now looked to America for security and predicted that over time American influence on Australia would inevitably increase. Australia's decisive shift into the American ‘orbit’ effectively put to rest any prospect that Australia might find a common cause with non-aligned India. Cariappa now saw his task not to win Australians to the Indian ‘School of Thought’ but to have them ‘understand us better’.19

Cariappa was also aware of a progressive element in Australia that recognised the need for better understanding of India and Asia more generally. ‘Many thinking Australians’, he noted, ‘realize that whatever their sentimental attachments to the United Kingdom may be, Australia's future is bound up with the Asian countries which adjoin her.’ He quoted with approval Percy Spender's observation that ‘geographically Australia is next door to Asia’, making friendly relations between Asia and Australia vital to Australia's future. Cariappa was also aware of the growth of neighbourly sentiments in ecclesiastical circles, where the Christian principles of brotherhood were not easily reconciled with an exclusionary and often harshly administered immigration policy. In explaining Australia's enthusiasm for European immigrants, Cariappa quoted Field-Marshal Sir William Slim, his friend and former army commander in Iraq, now governor-general of Australia. Slim emphasised the need for Australia to build a much larger population: ‘otherwise with neighbours so numerous and so land hungry it will be hard to justify at the bar of history and of world opinion the possession of so much land by so few people’.20 Yet it continued to annoy Cariappa that in under-populated Australia ex-servicemen settlers from India or Pakistan were not wanted.

Claude Auchinleck, one of Cariappa's former army friends, shared these concerns about ‘empty’ Australia. Writing privately to Cariappa, he expressed a significant strand of British opinion when he criticised Australians for having their ‘heads in the sand’. Like many critics of empty Australia before him, Auchinleck was unfamiliar with the factors that had for so long and so frustratingly limited northern development. He supposed that climate was the problem, but maintained that it was hardly possible to leave the north empty ‘in view of the pressure from over-populated countries’. He agreed with Cariappa's suggestion that it would be a wiser course to allow Asians from Commonwealth countries to settle there on terms that suited Australia rather than be presented with an ultimatum from more hostile quarters.21 Auchinleck later returned to the theme: ‘I agree with you that the immigration bar is absurd and doomed to fail someday. It is impossible to deny large regions otherwise empty to people willing and anxious to fill them. Don't quote me in Australia or I shall not be allowed in!!’22

These issues came to a head in June 1954 when a statement made by Cariappa in Brisbane on the impact of the White Australia policy on opinion in India and Pakistan produced controversial headlines in the Australian press and considerable political agitation. It is no simple matter determining what exactly was said, as Cariappa disputed a number of the newspaper accounts of his interview, including the opening salvo in the Brisbane Courier-Mail on 22 June 1954. The headline read: ‘Indian official attacks White Aust policy’ and in quotation marks there is a further statement: ‘Driving Millions to Reds’. Cariappa had just returned from an exhausting tour of North Queensland when he agreed to be interviewed by a staff reporter from the Courier-Mail. The reporter quoted Cariappa to the effect that the White Australia policy ‘was driving 440 million people from India and Pakistan away from the British Commonwealth and into the arms of Communism’. Cariappa claimed to be making a rather more subtle point: Australian immigration policies ran the risk of undermining the Commonwealth ideal in India and Pakistan and in so doing created a fertile soil for anti-Commonwealth propaganda: ‘We are of the family, yet we are not wanted.’ Australians were more interested in the colour of a person's skin (and here Cariappa tapped the back of his hand for effect) than the content of their heart.23 There is not much doubt that Cariappa was feeling annoyed and insulted and that his irritation was poorly concealed, if concealed at all. He spoke as a soldier used to direct speech, rather than as a diplomat.

In the wake of Cariappa's comments, it did not take long for fears concerning the disappearance of White Australia, that old standby of invasion narratives stretching back to the 1880s, to reassert themselves.24 A correspondent to the Courier-Mail maintained that Australia would ‘commit national suicide within 80 to 90 years’, if it permitted Indians to settle in Australia.25 The Courier-Mail reported the ‘stir’ Cariappa's statement had caused ‘in diplomatic and Government circles in Canberra’.26 Canvassing local opinion, the Courier-Mail found Archbishop Duhig in support of a modest intake of Indians, while the president of the Queensland Council of Churches, the Rev T. Rees Thomas, maintained that it was ‘high time’ for a quota system for Asians to be introduced, as a few well-chosen Asian migrants could only elevate Australian standards. The secretary of the Queensland branch of the Australian Natives' Association disagreed. He believed Asian immigration would lower living standards and lead to ‘racial feuds’.27 Cariappa had triggered a debate that rumbled through the remainder of the year and which, more than anything else, marked his period as high commissioner to Australia. If it had been Cariappa's ‘mission’ to bring immigration and the meaning of the Commonwealth into the open, there can be no doubt that he succeeded.

The Courier-Mail continued the story with an editorial, ‘As India Sees Us’, in which it thanked General Cariappa for providing so clearly an Indian perception of the White Australia policy. While Cariappa believed it was the colour of his skin that was the problem, this was a difficult conclusion for many Australians to accept in the 1950s, as the language of ‘social homogeneity’ was becoming entrenched. The Courier-Mail was no exception. This paper argued that it was only the use of the ‘unfortunate’ term ‘White Australia’ that created the impression that Australia's immigration laws were racially motivated. ‘Australians have very little colour prejudice. They accept as immigrants many people who have skins as dark or darker than General Cariappa.’ The Courier-Mail insisted that maintaining social cohesion was an acceptable national goal, not a racial policy. Misconceptions about the policy now spreading through Asia had to be corrected before serious harm was done to ‘Australia's relations with her nearest neighbours’.28 A ‘Gallipoli veteran’ shared this contradictory viewpoint. Writing to the Courier-Mail he claimed it was possible to take ‘the offence out of our immigration laws’ without significant change to the policy itself. Australians had no racial animosity: ‘we do not consider that colour of skin is any indication of character.’ But they still wanted their settlers to be white: ‘we do have a prejudice in favour of white skins and consider that any wholesale mixing of the races would ultimately result in the disappearance of the whites.’29

For those with a strongly anti-communist orientation Cariappa offered a possible solution to the task of immigration reform. The Catholic paper News Weekly maintained that Australia faced an inevitable choice between accepting ‘a small quota of hand-picked and friendly migrants from the Asian countries of the British Commonwealth’ or to hold out stubbornly ‘until millions of Communist Chinese simply take the entire country’.30 Yet, whenever the case was made in favour of friendly Indians over hostile Chinese, there was always someone waiting to point out the troubles that beset the Indian communities of South Africa or Fiji. Communist Chinese were a certain menace, but Indians seemed not much better.

III

The emphasis on the ‘White Australia’ wording was the standard response of the day. Minister for External Affairs R. G. Casey continually appealed for the Australian press not to use the term ‘White Australia’ in the belief that this change would itself reduce Asian criticism of Australia's immigration policies.31 It was a minimalist response, but based on a need to convince the ‘neighbours’ that Australians were not racist, but an hospitable and unprejudiced people. Many Australians of the time were quite convinced of this. The strategy was then to keep out Asians as settlers, but to extend to any Asian visitors an overwhelming display of warmth and cordiality. Tea, scones and lashings of whipped cream were recruited to the policy of neighbourliness. Though General Cariappa is a rather special case, the love and devotion that he often attracted speaks to this almost demonic passion for hospitality. It is no accident that Dame Edna Everidge, the monstrous diva of suburban hospitality, began her remarkable career in 1955.32 The Courier-Mail called for more visits from Indian students, teachers, scientists, philosophers and educators so that this new affection could be more amply displayed.33

A day after the story broke, an Age editorial accused Cariappa of ‘extravagant over-emphasis’ in his comments, but agreed with the Courier-Mail that the adjective ‘white’ was ‘no doubt a prolific source of misunderstanding’. The term was ‘unfortunate’ and had recently been dispensed with at official levels. The Age felt it was time to find ‘some other expression’, but offered no alternatives. The paper argued that the terrible misunderstanding created by the term ‘white’ had been refuted by the experience of Colombo Plan students who had been so widely ‘welcomed in our midst’. Over time they would discover that: ‘the belief in their homelands – that our policy denotes a pretension to some sort of racial superiority is a complete misconception’.34 A later immigration minister, Alexander Downer, however, conceded that the cause of reconciling the White Australia policy with Australia's relations with Asia was ‘relying very largely on the Colombo Plan’.35

Apart from a willingness to leave Australia at the end of their studies, if there was one thing required of Asian students, it was an astonished denial that Australians were motivated by ‘some sort of racial superiority’. Palfreeman captured the inconsistency inherent in this expectation in 1967, when he observed that the government's parading of Colombo Plan students and claims that no colour bar existed ‘in almost so many words…denied the existence of the White Australia policy’.36 If the students were unwilling to make such a statement, numerous Australians were prepared to do it for them. Having stated that the immigration policy had nothing to do with race, the Age explained that it rested on ‘our own modes of life…in human genetics, in economic factors and a predominantly British or European inheritance’.37 How the Age hoped to reconcile its reference to ‘genetics’ as a founding principle of the immigration policy, while also denying that it had anything to do with race, is left unexplained. The editorial was an odd mixture of bombast and muddle that did nothing to dispel the idea that one of Australia's basic aims was to keep the country white.

Elizabeth Marshall, the driving force behind Melbourne's East-West Committee, dismissed the Age editorial as yet another example of the ‘usual confused thinking’ about White Australia, arguing that the policy was almost entirely racial in its motivation and was routinely defended on racial grounds by public figures like Arthur Calwell.38 Nor did she believe there was any basis for the claims that Australia was free of pretensions to racial supremacy: ‘my own experience with many Asian students and other Asians – and it is a pretty wide one – does not bear this out. I have found an almost universal dislike of what they regard as a humiliation.’ Marshall thought Australians should stop ‘inventing obvious excuses’ about the nature of the immigration policy and introduce a system of quotas for Asian immigrants.39

Asians who entered the debate directly lent support to these claims. Dr Hari Narain, an Indian research scientist from the University of Sydney, pointed out that the Indian problem in South Africa, so often adduced in favour of keeping Australia racially homogenous, had been a problem caused not by the Indians but by the European demand for cheap labour. He added that it was clear India's population problems had to be solved in India; immigration was not the answer to overcrowding and poverty. No Indian would object to Australia opposing mass migration from India, but they did object to the White Australia policy on ‘moral grounds’: ‘To differentiate and forbid people on the basis of colour of the skin alone in the 20th century does not seem to go well with the profession of good faith and friendship which Australia has with her Asian neighbours. Asians feel hurt about it.’40 Chev Kidson, an Indian medical student at the University of Sydney, also rejected the South African analogy, arguing that restricted immigration from Asia need not lead either to ghettos or racial conflict. As for the current policy, it ‘strongly suggests racial and colour superiority, which are incompatible with Christian ideals’.41

The Hobart Mercury also ran an editorial on ‘White Australia’ in the wake of Cariappa's Brisbane interview. The tone was not nearly as shrill as that of the Age. The Mercury admitted that Cariappa's pointed comments revealed the depth of feeling in Asia towards the White Australia policy: ‘It rankles and festers, particularly among those people who have been Australia's allies.’ Nonetheless the Mercury thought it a ‘wise policy’ that had enabled Australia to avoid the racial antagonisms that had beset Fiji, South Africa and America. The Mercury declared that ordinary Australians ‘were not colour-conscious in an offensive way’. What might be deemed ‘offensive’ appeared to be a matter for Australians themselves to determine. This returned the issue to an Asian problem of misunderstanding and over-sensitivity. Nonetheless, the Mercury admitted the day might not be far off ‘when this country may have to consider some token modification of the policy’.42 It would be hard to phrase a more cautious invitation to consider change.

The Mercury's Canberra correspondent reported that Cariappa's statement had caused diplomatic circles to ‘gyrate’, while senior officers in External Affairs were relieved that Parliament was not in session. The correspondent claimed that, from the beginning of his appointment, Cariappa had been ‘trying to break the diplomatic taboo on the subject of White Australia’. Yet, while it was the topic of the day, Cariappa had merely stated publicly what India, Pakistan and Ceylon had already stated in private: ‘that they do not expect…a flood of Asians into Australia, but they resent distinction on racial grounds’. There followed a sympathetic portrait of Cariappa as one of the ‘best-liked diplomats’, noting his war service under Sir William Slim, his impressive demeanour and his ‘keen smiling eyes’. Yet he listened ‘politely but incredulously’ whenever the White Australia policy was described as entirely economically motivated.43

The Sunday Telegraph's ‘Whip’ also placed the Cariappa debate in a wider context. He conceded that by normal diplomatic standards Cariappa's criticisms had been blunt, but the criticisms themselves were not new. He noted that ten years earlier Dr Hsu Mo, China's ambassador to Canberra, had held similar views, but these had been expressed only in private to Prime Minister Curtin. Cariappa might have breached diplomatic etiquette, but he had ‘brought into daylight a problem that has been hidden in darkened official cupboards for too long’. Australia faced a choice: relax the policy and ‘hope by doing so to conciliate countries which now resent our racial prejudices’ or continue with the present policy in the hope that Britain and America would rescue Australia in the event of any Asian hostility. ‘Whip’ clearly favoured the first policy, but observed that no political figure was prepared at present to suggest any liberalisation. To do so would create an election issue and any party that sponsored change, or even toyed with the idea, would be annihilated in the polls. The nation was at an impasse.44

IV

Cariappa was correct in identifying the churches as one of the key groups advocating change. The Anglican thought it was time to ‘bury the White Australia policy’, noting that it ‘carries an ugly, and to Asians especially, maddeningly supercilious and un-Christian overtone of racial superiority in the silly Nazi sense’. The Anglican pressed for a quota system to replace the current policy.45 The Rev. Alan Walker, a leading Methodist, was another trenchant critic of the White Australia policy, maintaining that it was racial in motivation and application and a barrier to building ‘goodwill with Australia's Asian neighbours’.46 He was supported by the Rev. B. R. Wylie, master of Wesley College at the University of Sydney, who insisted that the White Australia policy was an insult to Australia's nearest neighbours.47 Progressive opinion was not given much of a hearing in the mainstream media, although it was more fully and sympathetically reported in the Melbourne Argus, where Peter Russo reported regularly on Asian affairs, and in the Adelaide News, where the editor, Rohan Rivett, a friend of Cariappa, pushed for immigration reform and closer ties with Asia.48 However, the Argus was soon to close its doors and Rivett was pushed out of the News and left Australia for Switzerland.

Progressives notwithstanding, newspaper coverage of the debate reveals the widely held view that the White Australia policy was not racially motivated. This was a flimsy argument, difficult to defend, particularly while some sections of the press were noisily justifying the policy on explicitly racial grounds. The Sydney Daily Mirror decried Casey's cowardly attempts to eliminate references to ‘White Australia’ and his ‘milk and water’ defence of the policy.49 Melbourne's Truth condemned Holt's ‘flabby administration’ that allowed ‘all kinds of Asians’ to stay in Australia and called for politicians with the courage to affirm the policy's racial objectives.50

The White Australia campaign conducted by the Daily Mirror and Truth precipitated a protest meeting of University of Sydney students opposed to anti-Asian propaganda. The secretary of the Student Representative Council affirmed that it was council policy to welcome Asian students whose presence promoted international understanding. Representatives from both the Labor and Liberal Clubs and from the Evangelical Union condemned the newspaper attacks, singling out Ezra Norton, editor of the Truth, for his persistently anti-Asian views.51 Chev Kidson, international officer of the SRC, called for a student-led campaign to educate public opinion on the benefits of closer ties with Asia.52

Politicians no doubt felt that such student opinion could be ignored. H. V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell, leader and deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party respectively, took Cariappa's statement as a heaven-sent opportunity to affirm the ALP as the only true champion of White Australia. Evatt declared that the Labor Party opposed a quota for non-European immigrants and called ‘for frankness on vital matters of national policy’. The White Australia policy was not to be compromised. It was ‘a basic Australian doctrine’. He argued that had it not been for Labor's strict enforcement of this policy, the Northern Territory would have been overrun by the Japanese.53 Calwell quickly entered the debate with a press release on 25 June. He condemned Cariappa for his ‘ill-tempered and impertinent outburst’ and the Menzies government for not lodging an official protest against the high commissioner. Calwell accused Cariappa of running ‘a persistent campaign’ in public and in private ever since he had first set foot in Australia. Calwell cited insoluble problems arising from the presence of Indian minorities in Singapore, Ceylon, Fiji and South Africa as sufficient reason for keeping Indians out. He added that Cariappa had approached the Australian government to introduce a quota of Indian immigrants and that this was no mere ‘token quota’ but a plan for ‘large-scale Indian settlement’.54 When these claims were repeated in Brisbane's Daily Telegraph, Cariappa wrote in the margins: ‘I have at NO time asked them to take millions of our people. They cannot take them and we will NOT come.’55

There was indeed no formal Indian request for quotas, let alone a plan to bring about ‘large-scale’ settlement. Perala Ratnam from the Indian High Commission in Canberra personally advised the Department of External Affairs of the Indian government's position on 7 July.56 In a country that had a long history of believing that malign forces were plotting Asian settlement, however, any suggestion of a secret plan along the lines outlined by Calwell was bound to gain a hearing. Truth soon turned the rumour about quotas into a firm ‘proposal’ designed as a ‘backdoor approach to smash the White Australia policy’ and an invitation to ‘national suicide’. Cariappa's role, according to Truth, was to ‘prepare the ground’ for this assault. The paper quoted the federal president of the Australian Natives Association, Mr Burrows, saying that Cariappa's alleged plan ‘signifies the beginning of the end of this outpost of western civilisation’.57

The Labor attack on the government's tardy response to Cariappa's statements had an effect. The Age reported that Liberal backbenchers had ‘bitterly attacked’ responsible ministers, particularly Holt, for allowing Labor ‘to express true Australian feeling’ on the matter of immigration. The Age noted they believed Labor's attack ‘was as violent as it had been unexpected’.58 No sooner had the party meeting ended than a rather shaken Harold Holt issued a press statement affirming that the government stood ‘four square’ behind the ‘traditional immigration policy’ which was ‘not based on racialism or racial superiority’.59 The Daily Mirror suggested Holt's wording reflected his ‘reservations’ about the policy, accusing him of cowardice in hiding ‘the operative word “White” behind the title “Australia's traditional immigration policy”’.60

On the day that Holt bolted from the Liberal party room to declare the government ‘four square’ behind the immigration policy, Cariappa wrote a long letter to N. R. Pillai, secretary general of the Ministry for External Affairs in New Delhi, reviewing the controversy and canvassing his future as high commissioner. Cariappa had indicated his wish to return to India early both for family reasons and because of his difficulty in continuing to work in a country that had such a ‘poor opinion of us’. His early return might now be misinterpreted as a rebuke. Therefore, if Prime Minister Nehru wanted him to stay and ‘permits me unofficially to quietly carry on my “mission”’, he would try to get Australians to see ‘that they are neighbours of us Asians and that they must have our goodwill’.61 In the event, Cariappa stayed on in Australia until April 1956.

Cariappa pointed out that every time he noted in official circles in Canberra how the immigration policy caused hurt among non-European members of the Commonwealth, the ‘stock comment’ was that change would come in good time. For the present, great care must be taken since any admission of Indians might trigger a similar demand from China and Japan. Cariappa invariably replied that China and Japan were not members of the Commonwealth. This was a family matter. Cariappa remained unimpressed by the Australian position: ‘They are scared stiff of Asians over-running their country if they relaxed their Immigration Policy!!’ Writing to Pillai he emphasised: ‘This is the way they think.’62 Indian Foreign Secretary R. K. Nehru advised Cariappa that Prime Minister Nehru had seen his report on the Brisbane interview. The episode was ‘just a storm in a tea cup’ indicating ‘how jittery the Australians are about their immigration policies’.63

The American embassy in Canberra took a close interest in the unfolding dispute. A number of press clippings were forwarded to the Department of State in Washington and to their embassy in New Delhi. The embassy noted: ‘It was particularly unfortunate that General Cariappa chose to make his remarks in Queensland, a State where, perhaps, there exists a higher degree of popular sensitivity to the threat of oriental pressures and fear of Asian influence than in any other on this continent.’ The report went on that Cariappa's statements had damaged Australian-Indian relations and that members of the embassy ‘have been informally led to believe’ that, although he has been ‘generally well-liked’ and was ‘an energetic and effective representative of his country’, an official protest had been sent by the Australians to New Delhi ‘seeking his recall’.64 In fact, the Australian high commission in New Delhi was specifically instructed to take no official action in relation to the Cariappa incident.65 It therefore seems quite unlikely that either an official protest or a recall were ever given serious consideration. In reporting back to the State Department, the American embassy also brought to notice an editorial from the Indian Daily Mail in Singapore. Headed ‘Unwanted Members of the Commonwealth’, the paper condemned Australia's restrictive immigration policy, noting that it was a grievous insult to learn that Australians would prefer to leave their lands empty rather than have Asians defile their soil. While the paper conceded that Indians were treated far worse in South Africa and Ceylon than in Australia, this only deepened ‘the disgrace’ in calling the Commonwealth a family.66

V

As soon as news of Cariappa's Brisbane interview reached Canberra, the Australian government sent a report alerting Walter Crocker, its high commissioner in New Delhi. Crocker was informed that the government was writing to Cariappa, pointing out that immigration was ‘not a fit subject for public criticism by accredited representatives of other countries resident in Australia’. Such public controversies, the report remarked, ‘can only embarrass good relations between our two countries…a deplorable result’. Crocker was asked to monitor press and official reactions to Cariappa's comments, but was instructed not to take the matter up in any official capacity.67

David Martin was an Australian novelist who wrote as Canberra correspondent for The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper. On 8 July, Crocker warned External Affairs that Martin's latest article suggested ‘some State Premiers and semi-government officials’ were negotiating with Cariappa for an Indian immigration quota.68 Several days later, Crocker reported at further length. He had met with R. K. Nehru but as Nehru was ‘fanatical about colour, race, etc’ had not tried to raise the Cariappa question with him.69 Instead, Crocker directed his comments to Pillai, stressing that the Australian government had acted with ‘uncommon forbearance’ in the face of Cariappa's ‘embarrassing lapse’. Crocker insisted that Cariappa had harmed the cause of immigration reform by drawing forth responses from both sides of Australian politics that would prove difficult to retract. Having been forced to come out ‘four square’ behind the policy, Harold Holt for example was left with little room for manoeuvre. Crocker explained: ‘It will not be easy for him, or for his Government, or for his Party, to go back on that statement for a long time to come, if ever.’ Similarly, the ALP would find it very difficult to retreat from Calwell's statements. In Crocker's view, the popular press had then compounded the problem by stirring up even more ‘emotion and prejudice’.70

Cariappa had clearly breached diplomatic protocol but his comments were hardly responsible for the expression of prejudice over immigration reform or for the inability of the Australian government to change its position. Prejudice was freely expressed in the Australian press well before Cariappa's appearance and continued well after his departure. The suggestion that Cariappa's comments had made the prospects for change unlikely ‘for a very long time, if ever’ is nonsense. Crocker concluded that Cariappa had ‘done harm altogether out of proportion to his few words’. Crocker kept his focus on Cariappa the man, describing him as a person consumed by vanity who had no understanding of politics: ‘further, as he cannot read anything, let alone study, he has acquired no understanding of the basic forces and factors in Australian life’.71 This certainly contradicts the opinion formed by the Canberra press gallery. The Sydney Morning Herald's regular political columnist, ‘Onlooker’, referred to Cariappa as ‘India's brilliant and likeable High Commissioner’.72 It was generally conceded that no high commissioner in Canberra had made a greater effort to gain first-hand experience of Australia.

Crocker was very cross that Cariappa had failed to comment on the hospitality Indian Colombo Plan students enjoyed in Australia. Cariappa had mixed views of the Colombo Plan and believed that it was often used to deflect attention from Australia's restrictive immigration policies. Presumably he had found support for this view among Asian students. He knew that many of them found the White Australia policy humiliating. Even so, Cariappa had praised the Colombo Plan and suggested that it should be expanded. He also had written a general letter to his staff and to Indian students in Australia soon after his arrival, pointing out that Australians were a generous and hospitable people whose achievements deserved to be understood and respected.73

Crocker again approached Pillai a week later with a story from the Canberra Times claiming that the Indian government was about to raise the question of an immigration quota with the Australian government. Pillai appeared irritated by this recent development and knew nothing of it.74 It was now almost a month after the original Brisbane interview and speculation about quotas, ‘large scale settlement’ and the destruction of the White Australia policy continued to be given free rein. Crocker had fixed his attention on Cariappa, the messenger, and his purported failings and all but ignored the message itself.

By July 1954, Cariappa's future had become a matter of lively interest, for it bore directly on how his actions were viewed in India. Crocker understood that Cariappa had originally intended to vacate his position in September or October 1954, but had taken a six-month extension to his furlough to avoid any suggestion of recall. Continuing to mark his man, Crocker advised Canberra that Cariappa's ‘standing with the powers-that-be here is weak’ and that he was considered to ‘have failed in Australia’, a failure ‘due to his vanity’.75 Crocker discussed the matter with several Indian officials, including the Commonwealth Secretary Dutt, who told him that Indians had ‘no interest in Australian immigration policy’. Crocker concluded that Dutt ‘obviously thinks that Cariappa is not all there’ in his failure to follow the government line.76 Crocker was well satisfied with this interview not least because it confirmed so many of his own views. Crocker himself later described Cariappa as ‘not compos mentis’.77

Crocker was an astute and experienced, if somewhat peppery diplomat, one of the best in the Australian service. However, the quality of his informal sleuthing is questionable. It seems probable that Crocker underestimated support for Cariappa in the Indian Ministry for External Affairs. This is supported by the fact that Cariappa stayed on in Australia until April 1956, almost eighteen months longer than Crocker had thought would be the case. Crocker seems also imbued with the Australian habit (especially evident in thinking about the White Australia policy in the 1950s) of speaking on behalf of Asian opinion rather than listening to it. Instead of attending to what Cariappa was saying, Crocker concluded there was no need to listen because the man was vain, unstable and out of step with the opinions of the Indian government.

Not long after his return to India, Cariappa was pleased to read an editorial by Rohan Rivett in the Adelaide News, headed ‘Gesture Could End Asian Discontent’. The gesture was another adjustment to the immigration policy that Rivett believed might help remove the White Australia tag that ‘hangs around us like the albatross round the neck of the Ancient Mariner’.78 His critics notwithstanding, Cariappa had a significant impact on progressive opinion in Australia. In 1960, after Cariappa had left Australia, the Immigration Reform Movement published a seminal work: Control or Colour Bar.79 This was the first serious critique of the White Australia policy to appear since the publication of E. W. Foxall's Colorphobia: An Exposure of the White Australia Fallacy in 1903.80 When a new edition of Control or Colour Bar came out in 1962, Alan Gregory, a member of the Immigration Reform Movement, sent a copy to Cariappa, now at home in Coorg. Gregory's accompanying letter described the recent moves to liberalise Australian immigration policy, ‘which I spoke to you about and which you initially inspired’.81 Cariappa may well have been important in changing attitudes since he had so conspicuously brought the issue of immigration reform to public attention throughout his period as high commissioner. In doing so he had made a range of contacts with people who saw the need for change and impressed them with the force of his personality and the strength of his case. Above all, perhaps, Cariappa's presence was a constant reminder to fair-minded Australians that their immigration policy caused deep offence to fellow members of the Commonwealth.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the help of Air Marshall (rt'd) ‘Nanda’ Cariappa, Glenda Lynch, Saroj Rath and Bart Ziino.

Notes

1. Bongiorno, ‘“British to the Bootstraps?”’, 18–39; Bongiorno, ‘Commonwealth and Republicans’, 33–50.

2. Goldsworthy, ‘Australian External Policy’, 17–29.

3. Gurry, India: Australia's Neglected Neighbour?

4. Khanduri, Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa, 17–19.

5. Smith, ‘General K. M. Cariappa – Profile’; 13 Nov. 1953; David Redstone, Sobranie Ltd., 17 Feb. 1959 to K. M. Cariappa, Cariappa Collection, Group X, Part II, National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI).

6. Nehru to Cariappa, 10 April 1953, Cariappa Collection, Group XXI, Part II (A) Section 26, NAI.

7. Chinappa and Muthanna, ‘Cariappa, our Bojjie Mava’.

8. Paranjpye, Three Years in Australia, 1.

9. Goldsworthy, Dutton, Gifford and Pitty, ‘Reorientation’, 320; also Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia; Brawley, The White Peril; Jayasuriya, Walker and Gothard, Legacies of White Australia.

10. Goldsworthy, Dutton, Gifford and Pitty, ‘Reorientation’, 321.

11. ‘Nanda’ Cariappa, personal communication, 22 Feb. 2002.

12. Khanduri, Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa, 298–99; Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 1 April 1954.

13. de Lepervache, Indians in a White Australia, 61.

14. Cariappa, ‘My official tour and visit’, Cariappa Collection, Group XXIII, Series No. 1-389, NAI.

15. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 468–69.

16. The founding members wanted it to be called the Cariappa Club. Sagari Muthanna, Deccan Herald, 5 Feb. 1999.

17. Cariappa, ‘My official tour and visit’.

18. Ibid.

19. Cariappa, annual political report 1953, Cariappa Collection, Ministry of External Affairs File no. 3(3) R. No. 54, NAI.

20. Ibid.

21. Auchinleck to Cariappa, 6 Jan. 1955, Cariappa Collection, Group XIII, Series 1–389, NAI.

22. Auchinleck to Cariappa, 18 March 1955, ibid.

23. Courier-Mail, 22 June 1954, 1.

24. Walker, Anxious Nation, 98–112.

25. O. H. Underwood, Courier-Mail, 24 June 1954, 2.

26. Elgin Reid, Courier-Mail, 23 June 1954, 1.

27. Courier-Mail, 23 June 1954, 1.

28. Ibid.

29. A. E. Rayment, Courier-Mail, 23 June 1954, 2.

30. Undated cutting, News Weekly, Cariappa Collection, NAI.

31. Casey to Counsellor Solly, 3 June 1954, A1838 581/1 part 2, National Archives of Australia (NAA).

32. Humphries, More Please, 151–53.

33. Courier-Mail, 23 June 1954, 2.

34. Age, 23 June 1954.

35. Tavan, Long Slow Death, 85; Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy, 129; Lowe, ‘The Colombo Plan’, 107; Oakman, Facing Asia.

36. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy, 131.

37. Age, 23 June 1954.

38. Barmé, Kulap in Oz, xxxiv–xxxv.

39. E. N. Marshall, Age, 30 June 1954, 2.

40. Hari Narain, SMH, 30 June 1954, 2.

41. Chev Kidson, SMH, 30 June 1954, 2.

42. Mercury, 25 June 1954, 4.

43. Mercury, 26 June 1954, 18.

44. Sunday Telegraph, 27 June 1954, 2.

45. The Anglican, 22 July 1954, 6.

46. Argus, 10 July 1954, 7.

47. Daily Mirror, 23 June 1954, 25.

48. Torney-Parlicki, Behind the News; Mary's Own Paper (not dated) 1954, 2.

49. Daily Mirror, 22 June 1954, 2.

50. Truth, 9 June 1956, 3.

51. Farrago, 13 July 1954, 5.

52. Honi Soit, 15 July 1954, 4.

53. Daily Mirror, 8 July 1954, 5.

54. Age, 26 June 1954, 2; Herald (Melbourne), 25 June 1954, 2; Truth (Melbourne) 3 July 1954, 5–6.

55. W. R. McDonald, Daily Telegraph, 23 June 1954. Handwritten note on cutting, Cariappa Collection, Group XXIII, Series No. 1-389, NAI.

56. F. Stuart, record of conversation with Ratnam, 24 June 1954, Series A1838 Item 581/1 Part 2, NAA.

57. Truth (Melbourne), 10 July 1954, 4.

58. Age, 8 July 1954, 4.

59. SMH, 8 July 1954, 5.

60. Daily Mirror, 22 June 1954, 2.

61. Cariappa to N. R. Pillai, Secretary General, Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi, 7 July 1954. Cariappa Collection Group No. IX, Part III (9) S No. 1-244, NAI.

62. Ibid.

63. R. K. Nehru to Cariappa, 7 July 1954, Cariappa Collection, Group No. XXIII, Series No. 1-389, NAI.

64. Avery Peterson, American Embassy, Canberra to Dept. State, Washington, 12 July 1954, RG84, 631/18/25/1-2, Box 4, US National Archives.

65. Cablegram. Minister and Dept. Immigration to Australian High Commissioner's Office, New Delhi, 23 June 1954, Series A1838/257 Item 1500/1/12/24, NAA.

66. Indian Daily Mail, 23 June 1954, RG84, 631/18/25/1-2, Box 4, US National Archives.

67. Cablegram. Department of External Affairs to Australian High Commissioner's Office, New Delhi, 22 June 1954.

68. Crocker to Dept. External Affairs, Canberra, 8 July 1954. Crocker Papers, Series 10, V2.2, University of Adelaide. See also Series A6119, Item 2059, NAA for Crocker's view of Martin as a pro-communist Hungarian Jew.

69. Crocker, ‘Minute’, 12 July 1954. Crocker Papers, series 10, V2.2, University of Adelaide.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid.

72. SMH, 27 June 1954, 18.

73. Cariappa, circular letter to staff, 10 Oct. 1953. Cariappa Collection, Group No. XVI (16) Part II, NAI.

74. Crocker, ‘Minute. General Cariappa’, 17 July 1954, Crocker Papers, Series 10, V2.2, University of Adelaide.

75. Crocker to Secretary, Dept of External Affairs, Canberra, 25 Aug. 1954, Crocker Papers, Series 10, V2.2, University of Adelaide.

76. Crocker, ‘Minute. General Cariappa’.

77. Crocker to Secretary, Dept. External Affairs, Canberra 2 Sept. 1954, Crocker Papers, Series 10, V2.2, University of Adelaide.

78. R. Rivett, News, 12 June 1956.

79. Immigration Reform Group, Control or Colour Bar?

80. Gizen-no-teki [E. W. Foxall], Colorphobia.

81. Alan Gregory to Cariappa, 15 Oct. 1962, Cariappa Collection, Group XXIII, Series 1-389, NAI.