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Geoffrey Blainey
107 quotes
“Poland is like an island on the north European plain. At times the island has been swamped by a tide of iron or steel helmets converging from Germany and Russia. At times it has drifted suddenly with the current; if the continent of Africa had drifted relatively as much as the boundaries of Poland have drifted in the last two hundred years, then Africa would at one time have touched the north pole and at another the south pole.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Across a Red World (1968)
“With the help of hindsight it is easy to imagine the stone-age migrants moving along the shortest possible route to Australia, but there is no reason why they should have taken the shortest route. Australia was merely the chance terminus of a series of voyages and migrations spread in all probability over many generations.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Triumph of the Nomads (1975)
“The convict era gave Australia a high English and Irish population and a predominance of men, a tendency to disdain authority and resent policemen, and probably a love of leisure and an indifference to religion. The convict era imposed on governments from the outset a high and detailed role in economic and social life. Some of these convict influences were fragile and were quickly erased or reversed by the waves of free immigration; some were reinforced by later events, so that they persist to this day.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Land Half Won (1980)
“The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Land Half Won (1980)
“I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny.... As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Asian Immigration," The Age (March 20, 1984)
“The argument by white and black Australians that the events of 1788 are primarily to blame for the plight of many Aborigines is far too negative. The solutions which have been proposed - massive land rights, white confessions of guilt and the granting of hereditary privileges to Aborigines - essentially look backwards. Moreover, the solutions are based on a version of history which is much less valid than its exponents believe.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Not Because they Are Aborigines, but Because they Are Australians," The Australian (October 10-11, 1987)
“In a democracy, all voters are equal but not all are responsible. Compulsory voting ignores that elemental truth.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Infantile Custom of Compulsory Voting," The Australian (February 21, 1990)
“Whether we like the idea or not, war has again and again been seen as the great auditor, the special testing time, of a nation's strength and fibre.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gallipoli: A Battle for a Mammoth Prize," The Australian (April 24, 1990)
“When traditional Australians argue that Asian migrants should be welcome but that the ethnic mix of the nation should not be altered too quickly, they are labelled racists. But when ethnic minorities lobby politicians to enlist as many new migrants as possible from their own race, this is applauded as multiculturalism.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Immigration: Australia's Rag Doll,", The Weekend Australian (June 2-3, 1990)
“Some historians looking back on our era will probably marvel at the fragile economic arguments used to justify the present migration policy. Even more they will wonder at the self-deception of those who defend the policy largely in the name of ethics and morality.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Immigration: Australia's Rag Doll,", The Weekend Australian (June 2-3, 1990)
“The multicultural lobby has little respect for the history of Australia between 1788 and 1950. In the eyes of multicultural supporters, Australia was a desert between 1788 and 1950 because it was populated largely by people from the British Isles and because it seemed to have a cultural unity, a homogeneity which is the very antithesis of multiculturalism.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eye on Australia: Speeches and Essays of Geoffrey Blainey (1991)
“In economics, as in politics, no national reservoir can stand the strain when everyone is turning on the taps and few are bothering to see that the catchments to the reservoir are working.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eye on Australia: Speeches and Essays of Geoffrey Blainey (1991)
“Multiculturalism is really a policy designed for those who hold two passports and who can abandon Australia if our society collapses – indeed if it collapses through the foolish policies they themselves have imposed. For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Australia: One Nation, or a Cluster of Tribes?", in Our Heritage and Australia's Future: A Selection of Insights and Concerns of Some Prominent Australians (1991)
“In Australia democracy is less in favour in intellectual circles today than 30 years ago. The more emphasis that is placed on the rights of minorities, and the need for affirmative action to enhance those rights, the more is the concept of democracy - and the rights of the majority - in danger of being weakened.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History," Quadrant (July-August 1993)
“Anyone who tries to range over the last 200 years of Australia's history, surveying the successes and failures, and trying to understand the obstacles that stood in the way, cannot easily accept the gloomier summaries of that history.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Drawing Up a Balance Sheet of Our History," Quadrant (July-August 1993)
“Those who one-sidedly depict the early European history of Australia are endangering one of the gains of recent years: the willingness to examine the long years of traditional Aboriginal history with sympathy and understanding. Just as the history of European Australia can be denounced from a one-sided point of view, so too can the history of black Australia be depicted by the one-eyed as a story of savagery. To revert to such denunciations would be a loss to all Australians, black and white.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Black Future, Reverse Racism: The "Black Armband" View of History is Intent on Dividing the Nation Forever", The Bulletin, (April 8, 1997)
“Full-blooded democracy still remains a brave new experiment, the history of ancient Athens notwithstanding. It would be unwise to assume that its victory across the globe is inevitable, for democracy is not always a simple mode of governing. It is almost forgotten that one reason why in this century the world stood three times on the verge of chaos - during two world wars and one world depression - was that the leading democracies were almost as prone to accidents and blunders as were their authoritarian rivals.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Our Time: The Issues and The People of Our Century (1999)
“During their long period of unease about a hot Christmas, Australians rarely noticed that they had more access than their British relatives to a vital part of the traditional Christmas story: 'the stars in the bright sky'. Eventually they ceased to lament that their Christmas came in hot weather.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily Life in a Vanished Australia (2003)
“The birth of the 20th century was like a flaming sunrise. More was expected of the century than any other. So much had been achieved in the previous one that it seemed sensible to expect that henceforth the world's triumphs would far outweigh the disasters.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of the Twentieth Century (2005)
“The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question — did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill — will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of the Twentieth Century (2005)
“The rush of events in the Soviet Union, Germany, eastern Europe and China in the late 1980s and the very early 1990s had no parallel in modern history. During the last thousand years no other formidable empire in a time of comparative peace had been dissolved so quickly, so unexpectedly, as the Soviet Union.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of the Twentieth Century (2005)
“Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of Christianity (2011)
“Christianity has both spurred and retarded the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, most of the modern debates of profound significance were originally dialogues with or within Christianity.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of Christianity (2011)
“Christianity probably has been the most important institution in the world in the last 2000 years. It has achieved more for western civilisation than has any other factor; it has helped far more people than it has harmed.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Short History of Christianity (2011)
“Some talk of the “history wars” raging in Australia. The word “war” is mistaken. Controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to come. It is in the nature of history and of most intellectual activities, and the more so in a nation where the main strands of history – Aboriginal and European – are utterly different.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Geoffrey Blainey: I can see parts of our history with fresh eyes", The Australian (February 21, 2015)
“At one time — less so, today — I was often called “controversial” in the media. It’s odd that the word has a negative flavour. Why good journalists and academics should use the word as a weapon is puzzling. They actually dine on controversy: why do they scorn their own food?”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Interview: Geoffrey Blainey, historian", Church Times (28 October, 2016)
“I continued to admire him as a distinguished exponent of the craft of history writing. By the mid-1980s, I guess our views on certain current-day topics were moving far apart; while we rode comfortably in the same train we got off at different stations.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Manning Clark, Before I Forget (2019)
“The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No point in ignoring facts and history", The Australian (June 14, 2020)
“The Latin language is no longer read widely, and so we have lost sight of the old distinction between the real Terra Australis or Australia on the one hand, and the unknown continent called Terra Australis Incognita on the other. That distinction, however, was real to scientists and geographers living in the eighteenth century. They knew of one southern continent, now known as Australia, but then called New Holland by the Dutch and even by the English. But somewhere, out in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, lay another and richer continent, which, they believed, was waiting to be found.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Captain Cook's Epic Voyage (2020)
“... jostling and jockeying [between England and France] was a vital background to the decision of the English government to send a fleet to occupy Botany Bay. In some ways the decision was made for the far future. For the short term it was simply vital that France should not be allowed to occupy such a strategic site.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ironically Britain claimed the whole continent simply in order to claim a few isolated harbours astride trade routes. It was like a speculator who, buying a huge wasteland flanking a highway because it had a few fine sites for road cafes and filling stations, found later that much of the land was fertile and productive.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australia's distance from Europe was probably only tolerable because it had strategic commodities which England, threatened by changing European alliances, might some day be unable to produce in the northern hemisphere. Flax was the first conqueror - a hollow conqueror - of the distance which so often shaped Australia's destiny.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australia's place on new trade routes was decisive in its early history. It aided the convict settlement. It prompted the rise of a new free group of Australian traders who did not depend heavily on the favours of governors, who were alert for new ways of making money, and who were eventually to hasten Australia's transition from a gaol to a series of free colonies.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The convict system in essence was a form of compulsory, assisted migration. It eased the problems created by Australia's distance from Britain. Without it relatively few people from the British Isles would have made the costly journey across the world in Australia's first half century.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The value of subsidised migration was not simply in the working men it brought to Australia. Its value was also in the women it enticed to a man's land. One of Australia's sharpest social problems, and one of the problems which Edward Gibbon Wakefield lamented, was the scarcity of women of marriageable or elopable age. So long as Australia primarily served as a gaol for the British Isles, far more men than women came to the land.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australia and New Zealand depended so much on Britain, were in most senses imitations of Britain, that their geographical position near the end of Asia's tail and near the islands of Oceania seemed irrelevant.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In December 1941, when Australians began to sense that they were plunged into a new environment, the spectacles they had carried out from Britain were obsolete. They needed spectacles that would correct short-sightedness. They had to see the environment they were in as clearly as the environment they had left across the world.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of Australia's history had been shaped by the contradiction that it depended intimately and comprehensively on a country which was further away that almost any other in the world. Now the dependence had slackened, the distance had diminished. The Antipodes were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wars end when nations agree that war is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute; wars begin when nations agree that peaceful diplomacy is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute. Agreement is the essence of the transition from peace to war and from war to peace, for those are merely alternating phases of a relationship between nations.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again the instrument had proved to be blunt or unpredictable? This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases the optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every nation has the right to control its own immigration. To shape sensibly an immigration policy is to influence nearly every facet of life, now and for generations to come.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A policy on immigration helps to determine the unity as well as the size of the population. Should Australia so select its immigrants that the society is relatively unified? Or should it select immigrants who promote diversity? Should Australia continue to be dominated by Anglo-Celtic peoples and the English language and institutions? Or should it become the new Eurasia? In choosing immigrants and the pace at which they arrive, how far should we risk social and racial tensions?”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is not like a long-term loan of property to be entrusted by the people to the government and its small group of advisors. And yet in recent years a small group of people has successfully snatched immigration policy from the public arena, and has even placed a taboo on the discussion of vital aspects of immigration.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our immigration policy is increasingly based on an appeal to international precepts that our neighbours sensibly refuse to practise. We are surrendering much of our own independence to a phantom opinion that floats vaguely in the air and rarely exists on this earth. We should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An immigration policy in any country is based more or less on discrimination. A minister of immigration is a minister of discrimination. If he isn't, he is not carrying out his responsibilities.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the immigration issue the suspicions towards democracy and the distrust towards free speech have come largely from the Left. The distrust of free speech has been especially noticeable amongst a small scatter of academics, members of a profession that by its very nature depends on freedom of inquiry and speech.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source