To what extent do histories of the White Australia Policy confirm E.H. Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their context?

‘The thought of historians, as of other human beings, is moulded by the environment of the time and place.’

(E.H. Carr, What is History?)

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‘History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.’

(Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and on Historians)

Abstract

‘The thought of historians, as of other human beings, is moulded by the environment of the time and place,’ wrote E.H. Carr in his 1961 What is History?. The thought of historians has been moulded by that deceptively simple statement ever since. Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity has transformed science, Carr’s theory of relativity has transformed history. It wasn’t so much that Carr was proposing something new, as the 1913 statement of Italian historiographer Benedetto Croce that ‘all history is contemporary history’ had increasingly influenced British historiographical thinking from the 1920s. It was that What is History? consolidated and refined much of the thinking about relativism in history and presented it to a wide audience. Carr wrote, ‘Before you study history, study the historian’, and ‘Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment’. Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their social and cultural context can be tested by considering the histories of the White Australia Policy and the historians’ social and cultural contexts, and assessing the extent to which the histories confirm Carr’s thinking. An analysis of the first published history of the policy, Myra Willard’s 1923 The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, and of Andrew Markus’ 1994 Australian Race Relations 1788-1993 and Keith Windschuttle’s 2004 The White Australia Policy, can test Carr’s thinking on how changes to social and cultural context over time influence historians’ histories. An analysis of the first Chinese history of the policy, Wu Tsao-Chih’s 1956 Hong Kong published A White Australia and Other Essays, can test Carr’s thinking on how the historian’s place influences their history. These histories, considered collectively, confirm Carr’s thinking that the historian’s social and cultural context influences their selection, ordering and interpretation of historical facts and helps them to understand both the past and the present. The histories also confirm Carr’s thinking that the historian’s own situation in society informs the history they produce. However, they suggest Carr’s thinking about the role of the historian as a spokesperson for their society breaks down in pluralist societies and in postmodern approaches to history. The histories highlight risks identified by Carr in producing contemporary history and validate his warning that the historian cannot produce an unbiased history if they cannot rise above the nationalism of their social and cultural context. Wu’s history, and the development of more critical and postmodern historical approaches after Carr wrote What is History?, do not support Carr’s thinking that historians should always divorce themselves from the moral values of their cultural context. The histories demonstrate the continued relevance of much of Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their social and cultural context and in informing historiographical thought and practice.

Essay

‘The thought of historians, as of other human beings, is moulded by the environment of the time and place,’ wrote E.H. Carr in his 1961 What is History?. Carr argued, citing examples of historians from different times and places, that the social and cultural context of the historian influenced their selection, ordering and interpretation of historical facts. ‘The historian is part of history’, Carr wrote, with history ‘a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’ to unlock understanding of the present, the historian’s ultimate function. While acknowledging the historian’s approach to history was shaped by their ‘own situation in society’, Carr saw the historian as a ‘spokesman of the society to which he belongs’. Carr’s relativist approach to history was a challenge to positivist historians, who emphasised the use of archival research and critical analysis of sources to show the past ‘as it really was’, free of the historian’s context. While Carr believed subjectivity was inevitable in producing history, he urged historians to pursue ‘’a faint and partial approximation’ of objectivity’ by rising above the prejudices of their context, particularly prejudices associated with nationalism and the moral values of their society. 

A study of historians and histories of the 1901-1973 White Australia Policy (‘the policy’) will be used to test Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their context. Histories of the policy have been produced for over a century and the abundance of primary sources means there’s general agreement on key facts, allowing a focus on differences in historical interpretations and the contexts that informed them. An analysis of the first published history of the policy, Myra Willard’s 1923 The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, and of Andrew Markus’ 1994 Australian Race Relations 1788-1993 and Keith Windschuttle’s 2004 The White Australia Policy, can test Carr’s thinking on how changes to social and cultural context over time influence historians’ histories. An analysis of the first Chinese history of the policy, Wu-Tsao Chih’s 1956 A White Australia and Other Essays, can test Carr’s thinking on how the historian’s place influences their history. All four histories noted these reasons for the policy: the desire to preserve Australia’s British-Australian character; the desire to protect employment conditions; and the desire to prevent Asian invasion or domination of Australian politics. However, Wu and Markus considered racial prejudice arising from scientific racism to be the main cause of the policy. Willard disagreed, arguing that the policy’s architects weren’t racially prejudiced. Windschuttle further argued that neither were most Australians. An analysis of the historians’ social and cultural contexts, and of nationalist bias in three of the histories, can help explain these different views.

Carr argued that people from different nations have different attitudes towards the way society should be constituted, with these differences producing different histories. Wu’s 1956 history allows a comparison of the philosophical, intellectual and social contexts of 1950s China and the West and how differences in those contexts informed different approaches to history. Wu, a Hong Kong intellectual, arrived in Australia under a long-term business visa in 1949. Chinese historiography tends to have a moral emphasis, traceable to its Confucian foundation, and Confucian moral and religious thought influenced the educated elite, particularly in Hong Kong. Confucianism emphasises social cohesion and the ‘friend to friend’ bond of mutual equal respect guiding relations between people of different races and classes, with Wu stating that China had always respected every nation and race, China and Australia were equals, and there should be ‘polite manners’ between the nations. Wu described the policy in moral terms, as a departure ‘from what is right, moral and just’. There are other differences in western and Chinese historiography, with China never having adopted positivism. The Chinese view of history sees historical development as progressive, with each regime building upon the previous one and the past used to justify the historian’s present. Religion and morality are evident in the Chinese intellectual context, which influenced the social context of race relations. Wu’s history supports Carr’s thinking that the historian’s social and cultural context informs the construction of their history.

Willard’s 1923 history provides a useful starting point for analysing the impact of temporal changes to the Australian social and cultural context on historians’ interpretations of the past. Willard argued that the fundamental reason for the policy was ‘the preservation of a British-Australian nationality’ centered around ‘equality and democracy’, which was threatened by immigrants ‘utterly alien in ideas and customs’. Those who crafted White Australia, she wrote, ‘knew that racial unity… was essential for national unity’. Willard emphasised the importance of common customs, language, jurisprudence and democratic ideals. She argued that the ancient nature of Asian cultures would prevent Asian people from assimilating, but never explained why the policy also applied to non-white non-Asian people. Although expressed in cultural terms, the racist concept that cultural difference is biologically-determined was apparent in her uncritical references to cultural differences being ‘bred’ into Asians, superior and inferior races, peoples of different levels of intelligence, and the degradation of mixed-race marriage. Markus noted that while scientific racism wasn’t universally accepted in 1901 or the 1920s, it had helped normalise racial discrimination, and that there was virtually no domestic opposition to the policy at those times. Willard was a cheerleader for the policy, arguing that if you accept the validity and morality of nationalism then a White Australia was inevitable. This uncritical patriotic view of the past was common in pre-1970s Australian histories, most of which advanced nationalist and imperialist narratives. Willard approach to history was typical of her context in other ways. It was positivist and she saw history as progress towards state-centred democratic-egalitarianism, in common with much of the Western liberal historiography of her era. She also focussed almost exclusively on policymakers: this was a ‘history as past politics’, popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Willard’s positivist, liberal and politics-oriented approach to history was consistent with the intellectual context of 1920s Australia and her approach to race, pluralism and nationalism was consistent with Australia’s social and cultural context. Willard’s history was consistent with Carr’s thinking that historians were influenced by their social and cultural context.

Willard, in writing about current policy, was writing contemporary history. Carr argued that it was difficult for contemporary historians to approach current figures without judging them on a personal, rather than historical, basis. Willard’s personal support for the policy suggests Carr’s logic extends to current matters generally. Willard’s history reflected one significant post-1901 change in social context: the move towards internationalism arising from the establishment of the League of Nations in 1920. Willard explained the policy in terms she hoped would reduce the League’s opposition to it. Carr, a product of the British Foreign Office who supported an internationalist view of history and advocated historians adapting to changes in their context, would have approved Willard’s history taking account of the new international order. 

Carr argued that individuals are social beings and a false antithesis shouldn’t be drawn between society and the individual. He acknowledged that the historian’s ‘own situation in society’ shaped their history, although the historian should try to eliminate bias arising from this. Carr’s Foreign Office career influenced him, Wu’s experience of racism in Australia informed his history, and Markus’ experience as a child refugee from Hungary in the 1950s led him to write histories addressing race and immigration. Despite acknowledging the role of the historian’s situation in society and that no society is truly homogenous, Carr, echoing Jacob Burckhardt, saw history as a dialogue ‘between the society of today and the society of yesterday’, with the historian the ‘spokesman of the society to which he belongs’. Markus believed Willard, who republished her 1923 history in 1967, was from the last generation of historians to defend the policy and downplay its racial basis: although Windschuttle’s 2004 history would prove him wrong. From the late 1960s imperialist and nationalist Australian histories slowly gave way to more diverse histories. Mark McKenna noted the fragmentation of the grand narrative of national progress, with ‘’Australian’ history… no longer written from the perspective of the majority’ and identified Markus as a prominent voice in contesting the traditional narrative. This fragmentation was a challenge to Carr’s view of the historian as a spokesperson of their society. Carr’s view seemed plausible in a monoculture like Willard’s 1923 Australia, and perhaps his own 1961 Britain, but breaks down in pluralist societies, where there are multiple and often competing views. Carr’s view also doesn’t accommodate post-1961 postmodernist or critical approaches to history, where the idea of the historian as a spokesperson of society is anathema. Carr’s historian as spokesperson thesis goes far further than his well-reasoned argument that historians are influenced by their social and cultural context.

Carr encouraged historians to rise above the prejudices of their context, identifying nationalism as an area of concern. Nationalist historians, he argued, risked being unable to ‘see beyond their country’s own narrow national interest’ and would write history ‘as an act of patriotism’. Markus and Windschuttle, although writing their histories at similar times, reach very different conclusions about racial prejudice in their histories. Their differences may be partially explained by the change of political context in 1996, outlined below, but more by Windschuttle’s nationalist bias. Markus and Windschuttle weren’t spokespeople for their society, but reflected two different elements within it. Markus’ and Windschuttle’s histories provided similar analyses of most of the material causes for the policy’s introduction and for its dismantling between 1947 and 1973. However, Markus saw racial prejudice as central to the policy, while Windschuttle denied this. Historian Marilyn Lake reflected the views of most post-1970 historians in labelling Windschuttle’s denial that the policy wasn’t racist as perverse. Windschuttle’s views were a product of his approach to nationalism and an Australian multiculturalism that he thought had gone too far. Markus believed multiculturalism and racially-neutral immigration enjoyed broad cross-society support in 1993 and his 1994 history reflected the social and cultural context of multicultural Australia. However, historian Geoffrey Blainey, Prime Minister John Howard and Pauline Hanson reignited debates about these issues, indigenous relations and the communication of history. Blainey, in a 1993 speech that Markus didn’t acknowledge in his history, argued that the pendulum had swung from the overly-favourable, patriotic ‘Three Cheers’ view of Australian history to an overly-condemnatory ‘Black Armband’ view that much of Australian history was a disgrace, with the multicultural lobby championing this view. In 1996, Prime Minister John Howard rejected the Black Armband view of history and called for Australia’s ‘remarkably positive’ history to be better recognised. Six weeks earlier, Pauline Hanson had attacked the levels of Aboriginal funding and Asian immigration in her maiden speech to Parliament. Blainey had changed the intellectual context of Australia and Howard and Hanson the political one. Nation-wide debates on race and the communication of history followed. Windschuttle was a key player in those debates. In 1994, he’d criticised post-modernism and called for a return to traditional empirical history, arguing that historians were using the past to advance their left-wing political agendas. Windschuttle’s 2004 history accused Markus and other ‘academic historians’ of being ‘radical multiculturalists’ who ‘aimed to destabilise Australian traditions, values and institutions by censuring the nation’s original character’ and to ‘exploit their interpretations of the past to influence the politics of the present’. He concluded, ‘Australia is not, and never has been, the racist country its academic historians have condemned’. Marilyn Lake characterised Windschuttle’s ‘revisionist account’ of the policy as part of a larger political undertaking to redeem Australian national honour, stating Windschuttle saw it as the role of history to serve the nation. Tom Griffith argued Windschuttle’s post-2000 works have a political agenda of promoting nationalism and advancing a metanarrative of the superiority of Western culture. As a racist past threatened the nationalist narrative of an egalitarian Australia built on Enlightenment principles, Windschuttle argued there was no racist past. Wu’s history also displayed nationalist bias. Wu wrote, ‘Chinese people have suffered a century of severe humiliation from the Australian government and people’, consistent with the Chinese cultural and historiographical nationalist narrative of ‘National Humiliation’. While Wu condemned Australia for the policy, his nationalism meant there was no comparison with imperial China’s attempts to exclude westerners or the ‘anti-foreignerism’ of the Boxer Rebellion and 1920s. The histories of the policy confirm Carr’s warnings about historians unable to rise above the nationalism of their societies.

Carr argued historians should rise above the moral values of their cultural context in writing about past individuals, events, institutions or policies, with historians who applied those values to the past unable to meet the ‘specific function of the historian, not to judge but to explain.’ He stated that it was not for the historian to determine ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in their analysis of the past. Terms like equality, liberty and justice are historically conditioned and, in Carr’s view, the historian should avoid imposing their own society’s values. Willard and Windschuttle, although not meeting this standard, would have agreed to it as positivists. Markus agrees that ‘historical actions can’t be judged in moral terms, as all values are historically conditioned'.  These are difficult views for many historians to accept. Wu, consistent with Chinese historiographical tradition, viewed history through a moral lens, and one of Carr’s colleagues, Sir Isaiah Berlin insisted that it was the historian’s duty ‘to judge Charlemagne or Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin for their massacres’.  If people at the time of the Holocaust judged it in moral terms, why can’t the historian? Carr scholar Richard Evans noted that one of the major developments since 1961 was the ‘emergence of genres of history which carry a strong moral charge’. Carr’s view that historians should never apply the moral values of their cultural context in producing history doesn’t reflect the pluralism of contemporary historical writing and practice.  

Histories of the White Australia Policy confirm Carr’s thinking that the historian’s social and cultural context influences their selection, ordering and interpretation of historical facts and helps them to understand both the past and the present. The histories also confirm Carr’s thinking that the historian’s own situation in society informs the history they produce. However, Carr’s thinking about the role of the historian as a spokesperson for their society breaks down in pluralist societies and in postmodern approaches to history. The histories highlight risks identified by Carr in producing contemporary history and validate his warning that the historian cannot produce an unbiased history if they cannot rise above the nationalism of their social and cultural context. Wu’s history, and the development of more critical and postmodern historical approaches after Carr wrote What is History?, do not support Carr’s thinking that historians should always divorce themselves from the moral values of their cultural context. The histories demonstrate the continued relevance of much of Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their social and cultural context and in informing historiographical thought and practice.

Bibliography

Books

Berlin, Isaiah. Historical Inevitability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Burckhardt, Jacob. Judgements on History and on Historians. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959.

Carr, E.H. What is History? (2^nd ed.). London: Penguin, 1987.

Cohen, Paul. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Croce, Benedetto. Theory and History of Historiography. Translated into English by Douglas Ainslie. London: G.C. Harrap and Company, 1921.

Griffiths, Tom. The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2017.

Markus, Andrew. Australian Race Relations 1788-1993. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994.

Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1981.

Smith, Craig A. “Refuting the White Australia Policy: Wu Tsao-Chih: 1956”, forthcoming publication.

Willard, Myra. The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1923.

Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One. Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003.

Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: how a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists. Sydney: Macleay Press, 1994.

Windschuttle, Keith. The White Australia Policy. Sydney: Macleay Press, 2004.

Wu, Tsao-Chih. A White Australia and Other Essays. Hong Kong: Zi you chu ban she,1956. (unpublished translation of Chris Wong and Xianghao Li).

Zinn, Howard. ‘Historian as Citizen’. The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.

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Ainsley, Douglas. ‘Benedetto Croce’s “Historiography”’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol 22. (1921–1922). pp. 205-214.

Barton, Edmund. Commonwealth Parliament Hansard, House of Representatives. 26 September 1901. Immigration Restriction Bill (In Committee). p. 5181.

Callahan, William A. ‘National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation and Chinese Nationalism’. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 29, No. 2. (Mar-May 2004). pp. 205-214.

Carr, E.H. ‘History and Morals’. Times Literary Supplement. 17 Dec 1954. pp. 821-824.

Chang, K.C. ‘Archaeology and Chinese Historiography’. World Archaeology 13, no. 2. (Oct 1981). pp. 156-169.

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Finney, Patrick. ‘Review Article: Beyond the Postmodern Moment?’. Journal of Contemporary History, vol 40(1). (Jan 2005). pp. 149-165.

Howard, John. Commonwealth Parliament Hansard, House Of Representatives. 30 October 1996. Racial Tolerance. Motion by the Prime Minister on this matter. [Accessed 4 May 2025]

https://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/howard_1.pdf 

Lake, Marilyn. ‘Review of The White Australia Policy’. Sydney Morning Herald. 23 Dec 2004. [accessed 24 Jan 2025]

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-white-australia-policy-20041223-gdkd9y.html

McKenna, Mark. ‘Different Perspectives on Black Armband History’, Research Paper No. 5 1997-1998. Department of the Parliamentary Library, Commonwealth of Australia, 2012. pp. 1-21.

Waterhouse, Richard. ‘Locating the New Social History: transnational historiography and Australian local history’. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 95, Issue. 1. (June 2009). pp. 1-17.

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Confucian Academy. [Accessed 3 April 2025] https://www.confucianacademy.com/home.asp.

National Archives of Australia. ‘The Immigration Restriction Act 1901’. [Accessed 6 April 2025] https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/immigration-and-citizenship/immigration-restriction-act-1901.

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Author correspondence

Author’s email correspondence with Emeritus Professor Andrew Markus AO FASSA, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University.

Author’s email correspondence with Dr Craig A. Smith, Associate Professor, Translation Studies (Chinese), Asia Institute.

ANNOTATED SOURCES

Willard, Myra. The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. Melbourne University Publishing, 1923.

Willard’s history of the first nineteen years of the White Australia Policy is an invaluable resource, not just for understanding the policy’s origins and rationale, but for understanding how the policy was viewed shortly after its inception.  As the first history of the policy, it provided a benchmark against which later histories could be measured. Two strengths are its analysis of post-1855 colonial policies that informed the White Australia Policy and its comparisons with race-based policies of the USA, Canada and South African republics. It’s greatest weakness is its nationalist bias, but its unreliability was useful in exploring the risks Carr identified in writing contemporary and nationalist history. It further assisted in testing Carr’s thinking on changes to social and cultural context over time, as well as providing a practical example of how historians incorporate emerging social contexts (internationalism following the establishment of the League of Nations) into their histories.

Wu, Tsao-Chih. A White Australia and Other Essays. 1956 (unpublished translation of Chris Wong and Xianghao Li).

Wu’s history of the White Australia Policy was a personal one, as he’d experienced racism after entering Australia. The strength of Wu’s history is that it is the only comprehensive Chinese language history of the policy, while it’s weakness is that it also dealt with contemporary political figures and debates and this sometimes overshadowed the history. The text differed from western histories of its era, judging the policy in clear moral terms. It supported a comparison of the philosophical, intellectual and social contexts of 1950s China and the west and how differences in those contexts informed different approaches to history. The text also demonstrated that nationalism, which Carr identified as a threat to historical objectivity, can take different forms, showing how shame, not just pride, can fuel nationalism. It challenged Carr’s thinking on historians rising above the moral values of their context and allowed Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their context to be approached from a different perspective.

Markus, Andrew. Australian Race Relations 1788-1993. Allen & Unwin, 1994.

Markus’ history is an ambitious work that charts Australian race relations from the arrival of the First Fleet. Its greatest strengths are that it puts the White Australia Policy in context of what came before and after it and shows how the policy has shaped recent debates on multiculturalism and nationalism. It shows how the policy and policies discriminating against First Nations people were interrelated, sharing common origins. It enabled a comparison with Windschuttle’s history, demonstrating that historians from similar contexts can produce radically different interpretations of the past. It was the most reliable of the histories considered, drawing information from a wide range of sources, and the only one that demonstrated no obvious bias. Hence, it provided a useful counterpoint in testing Carr’s thinking on the relationship between historians and their context.

Windschuttle, Keith. The White Australia Policy. Macleay Press, 2004.

Windschuttle’s history provides a compelling analysis of some of the material causes of the White Australia Policy, particularly the labour and economic factors relevant to its introduction. It also explains reasons for dismantling the policy, including the need to increase the Australian population develop infrastructure and defence capability and foster trade relations with Asian neighbours. However, Windschuttle’s arguments that the policy was not established for racist reasons and that most Australians in the early twentieth century did not discriminate on the base of race are, as Marilyn Lake commented, perverse. While Windschuttle claims no political agenda, and accuses other historians of having one, constructing a history that whitewashes the past to provide a patriotic present. It was invaluable in assessing Carr’s warnings about nationalism and for helping to demonstrate that historians from similar contexts can produce radically different interpretations of the past. It also demonstrated that political change can change the types of history being produced.