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Geoffrey Blainey

107 quotes

“The majority of Australians are now paying the price of a policy that is eager to please each ethnic minority at the expense of the great majority. If the people of each minority should have the right to establish here a way of life familiar to them, is it not equally right - or more so, in democracy - for the majority of Australians to retain the way of life familiar to them?”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whereas the old White Australia Policy, in its extreme form, kept out all Asians, the new policy could be moving towards the opposite extreme. In calling for a strong, long-term flow of Third World migrants, it foreshadows the sacrificing of vital Australian interests on behalf of vague international creeds. It is also forsaking out historical experience for the sake of a nimble dream.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Again and again Australia is depicted as a bonanza - ready made - that was snatched from the Aboriginals. But the Australia of the Aboriginals, distinctive as were its achievements, was not a bonanza. Generations of Australians since 1788 have developed this land and its resources, applying sweat and grit and ingenuity. Asian immigrants had the opportunity to come, several hundred years ago, but they had no incentive to come. Australia then was not worth colonizing.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The multicultural policy has, at times, tended to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging divisions and weakening social cohesion. It has tended to be anti-British, and yet the people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Recent governments emphasize the merits of a multicultural society and ignore the dangers. And yet the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People need to feel they belong to their country. Their need for community is most pronounced in a time of adversity. The people who are hit hardest by a depression, who feel that their children will suffer, look for loyalty from the rest of the community and the government. The present immigration programme, in its indifference to the feelings of the old Australians, erodes those loyalties. The multicultural policy, and its emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority, gnaws at that sense of solidarity that many people crave for.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A nation is drawn together by loyalties and obligations, and in a depression or war those bonds are vital. Sir Henry Parkes, a father of the Commonwealth of Australia, said in 1890: 'The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all.' That crimson thread is vital for any nation, but in the last six years there has been a growing concern at the way in which Australian governments, perhaps with lofty aims, have cut the crimson threads. The cult of the immigrant, the emphasis on separateness for ethnic groups, the wooing of Asia and the shunning of Britain are part of this thread-cutting.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australia will have to find ways of impressing on Asia and the rest of the world that much of its territory is arid. To sell Australia successfully is not only to sell its products and its tourism, but also sell to other nations the fact that much of its territory is desert and can support few people.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One lesson of history is that every gain has its potential loss. The highest human achievements carry the danger of pride, and pride can lead blindly to disaster, just as failure can fortify the determination and so lead slowly towards triumph.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The slow decline of Christianity prepared the way for new Utopias and doomsdays. Indeed some of the new views of the future contained many of the characteristics of a religion.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eclipse of the Aborigines was tragic. Could it have been averted? It could have been prevented for a time if no British settlers had landed, but eventually people of other European or Asian nations would have come and occupied much of the land.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The shrinking world was becoming too small to permit a whole people to be set aside in a vast protected anthropological museum where they would try to perpetuate the merits and defects of a way of life that had vanished elsewhere, a way of life that - so long as it continued - would deprive millions of foreign people of the food and fibres that could have been grown on the land.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even in the 1860s and 1870s most Australians did not feel fully at home in their land. So many of them were new migrants, mostly from the British cities, and so they found rural Australia strange and even hostile at first. Above all, in the long European see-saw of ideas and taste, the wilderness and untamed nature were falling somewhat from favour; to be revived late in the century. Attitudes to Australian landscape reflected this see-saw.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a delicate balance between shielding people and encouraging them, and the USA perhaps went too far in one direction and Australia in the other. The Soviet Union, born in 1917 and influenced a little by the exciting Australian and New Zealand experiments, would eventually show how the umbrella, if too big and cumbersome, exposed people far more than it protected them.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The decline of the churches was a sweeping social revolution, because they had done more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australia is increasingly the story of a few large cities, but a thousand half-forgotten townships still view themselves as the emotional heart of the nation.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is remarkable that India became a democracy in modern times, because the long-lasting Hindu civilisation at first sight was innately hostile to the ideas that all adults should have an equal vote, irrespective of their caste, and that all adults should be able to share in the social mobility which was part of the democratic spirit. But to graft exotic new trees onto old, when there seemed little hope of success, and to watch them grow vigorously, is not a rare experience in human institutions.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Looking back on Rome's success, it is all too easy to conclude that its victories were preordained. It is almost as if Rome arose with consummate certainty from the seven hills, gaining such a height that seemingly it could not be challenged. But in almost every phase of Rome's history there were crises.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unpredictable events, or the coincidence of vital events happening side by side, play their part in history. In the emerging of the United States of America, the South American nations, South Africa, Canada and Australia the unforeseen mixture of events was especially powerful in the final decades of the 18th century. Many of those events pirouetted around the fortunes of France, whose influence was as decisive when it was losing as when it was winning wars.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Within the next two centuries, as the world shrinks and its distances are diminished, an attempt could well be made, by consent or by force, to set up a world government. Whether it will last for long is an open question. In human history, almost nothing is preordained.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have long believed that during the time of the Aborigines' domination their landscape did not change. At times it changed dramatically. The basalt plains of that part of Victoria, which was later named Australia Felix, were violently affected by volcanoes. For most of the people living close to the ocean - and for some who had never seen it - a more shattering change was the rising of the sea and the drowning of their hunting grounds. Nothing in the short history of British Australia can match those physical changes.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing in the traditional life of Aborigines was more impressive than their practical knowledge. They were masters of their environment even though they could do little to change it.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many convicts were bewildered by the first days of the voyage to Australia. Most had never seen the open sea until they boarded the convict ship, and few had travelled in a ship. And now, by sentence of the courts, they were about to begin one of the longest voyages any traveller could make.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When in Hobart in May 1853 the ship St Vincent sent ashore the last consignment of convicts, Tasmania had received almost as many convicts as New South Wales during the long history of transportation. Western Australia now remained the only penal colony and it received its last convict ship on 9 January 1868. For eighty years convicts had been shipped to Australia, and a total of 163000 had set out on that voyage from which few returned. In the modern history of Europe there was rarely a planned deportation on a more ambitious scale until the era of Stalin and Hitler.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“France's decision to ignore Australia was understandable. Even colonial Australians took little interest in most parts of their own land, and hardly a soul in Melbourne or Sydney thought kindly of the idea of setting up any kind of business... on the shores of the Indian Ocean or Arafura Sea. The effects of this decision, or default, were far-reaching. The huge continent became the sole possession of Britain. Few decisions have had more influence on Australia's modern history.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most Australians did not love a sunburnt country. Farmers preferred a reliable rainfall; bank managers and city merchants preferred to deal with customers living in towns where the economy did not suffer from drought. The governors, who came from the British Isles, still retreated in summer to the cool hill towns - to Sutton Forest and Mount Macedon and the Mount Lofty Ranges and other colonial Simlas.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The birth of a nation called for many fathers, none of whom could be pre-eminent, and when Parkes died the federation was only a balloon floating beckoningly in the air.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea is still widespread that Australians were among the world's most persistent racists until the White Australia policy was abolished. But in 1900, and long after, almost every part of the Western world was wary of large-scale immigration from poorer, low-wage countries whose reigning culture was different. Asians at times were wary of outsiders. Between 1860 and 1914 it was safer to be a Chinese gold-digger living in Australia than to be an Australian, especially a female missionary, living in China.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps no Australian politician, to this day, has made such a mark for so long on the global stage as Hughes achieved in the first half of 1919.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Menzies was the first - and maybe the only - national leader of whom it could be safely said that he was capable of rising to the top of almost any ladder he dared to climb.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One Australian tradition is to cut down the elite and the successful. It had its roots in the era of convicts who naturally opposed those in authority. This levelling or egalitarian tradition continued to flourish on the goldfields in the 1850s when the unusual mining laws gave everyone an opportunity to find gold, and the tradition was accentuated around 1900 by the rising trade unions. The attitude was one of the spurs to Australian democracy.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mapmakers of Europe and navigators of the Indies once thought Australian seas washed the isles of gold. Even after navigators had seen the north-west coast of Australia it was named on one map the coast of gold. Unknown coasts were treasurelands; imagination shaped and gilded them. Then slowly Dutch and British voyagers tarnished the gilt, and Australia turned from a land of reward to a land of punishment when Great Britain dumped convicts and guards at Sydney in 1788. The imagination of the ancients had more truth than the knowledge of the moderns, but for two generations the settlers did not know that their prison had bars of gold.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Rush That Never Ended (1963)
“The compound of bigness and communism made Soviet Russia very much an ogre in the 1920s and accentuated her isolation from the rest of the world. In turn the Soviet's acute sense of isolation, the sense of living in a perilous world and, above all, the bitter memory of foreign intervention between 1918 and 1920, made her, in self-defence, more authoritarian in her internal policies, and spurred the campaign to regiment and unify her people and fortify her economy, thus conferring on the word 'communism' an additional wrapping of terror. This sense of isolation must have also intensified the Soviet Union's desire to extend her territory and her sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and she seized the opportunity which came at the end of the Second World War.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Across a Red World (1968)
“To some extent my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good... There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history. In recent years it has assailed the optimistic view of Australian history. The black armbands were quietly worn in official circles in 1988, the bicentennial year. Until late in that year Mr Hawke rarely gave a speech that awarded much praise to Australia's history. Even notable Labor leaders from the past - Fisher, Hughes, Scullin, Curtin and Chifley - if listening in their graves in 1988, would have heard virtually no mention of their name and their contributions to the nation they faithfully served. Indeed the Hawke Government excised the earlier official slogan, "The Australian Achievement", replacing it with "Living Together" - a slogan that belongs less to national affairs than to personal affairs. The multicultural folk busily preached their message that until they arrived much of Australian history was a disgrace. The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not... To some extent the Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.”
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)
“Could the Aboriginal and the British cultures have been reconciled when they first met? The prevailing view is that they could have signed a treaty and found a way of living together in relative harmony. I am not persuaded. The two confronting cultures, whether first living side by side at Sydney in 1788 or at Perth in 1829, had little in common except that they were the product of human beings. Their languages and religions differed. Their attitude to marriage, family, property and individual wealth, their economic and political systems, their way of fighting, and their thoughts about life and death, were far apart. In the world today no two cultures are so far apart as those that lived side by side in many Australian regions after 1788. Mecca and Washington today have far more in common than did the paternal Governor Phillip and the Aborigines whom he met in Sydney in 1788.”
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)
“Australia became a full-blooded democracy in the late 1850s, achieving it with lightning speed. Only 30 years previously it had consisted of two convict colonies, ruled by governors whose personal power was magnified because most of their subjects were prisoners or ex-prisoners. Moreover, the governors were so remote geographically that Britain’s control of them and their decisions was loose. One year might elapse between the governor writing an urgent dispatch to London, and the arrival of an official reply. And yet, from this prison-like regime, democracy speedily emerged. This was an exceptional outcome.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: After the gold rush, the colonial cradle of democracy", The Australian (August 27, 2016)
“Sections of the media, universities and schools exaggerate the bad news [about Australia's past]. This is a powerful ingredient in the present criticism of Australia Day. These critics, putting on their black armbands, now imagine that before 1788 the Aborigines lived in a kind of paradise, from which later they were brutally and deliberately expelled. Aboriginal life did have many virtues, and from the 1950s Australian archeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians and others rediscovered them. The nation owes them a debt. But the extreme concept of a paradise, wholesome and more spiritual than Australia today, has also won converts. They depict Aborigines as living in peace and harmony with one another and with nature. But the evidence, globally, is that these traditional societies suffered through warfare and that little children and women were often the victims. Massacres of Aborigines by Aborigines, however, are unlikely to find their way into the main textbooks. Their extinction of native fauna will rarely interrupt a school lesson.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Australia Day doubters misread our past", The Australian (January 25, 2018)
“Calwell impressed me partly because of his deep affection for his country and his willingness to see the good in other countries, especially the United States, from which his grandfather had emigrated to the Victorian goldfields. The Aboriginal peoples, as Australians, also came within his affection, and he as much as any public figure of that time tried to help them. Forty years on I came to think just as highly of B.A. Santamaria, the leading Catholic intellectual, as I did of Arthur Calwell, though they were bitter enemies. When you admire people you sometimes do so for the person they are, more than the viewpoint they represent.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Before I Forget (2019)
“Cook was a giant of the sea. To deprive him, his scientists and his crew of high praise would be mean-spirited and would mock history. He was almost certainly the first European to sail along and report on nearly all the eastern coast of Australia. He indirectly made possible present-day Australia which, despite its many failures, is surely one of the success stories of the world. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples will rightly insist that they, or people close to them in kinship, were the first discoverers of Australia. Their ancestors, one after the other, had sailed and walked along the Indonesian archipelago, a chain of stepping stones that were easily used when the world’s sea levels were lower.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An epic Endeavour, a vexed debate about Captain Cook voyage", The Australian (January 24, 2020)
“One of the most remarkable voyagers in the long history of the seas, he [James Cook] deserves far more praise than blame. Contrary to the common belief, he admired the Aborigines and facets of their traditional way of life. Above all he grasped this continent and began unknowingly the work of knitting it again to the outside world. On the whole the outside world has gained because of his epic voyage. The settlers who arrived after him eventually made this land so productive that it is capable, almost annually, of feeding tens of millions of people in foreign lands as well as all those in Australia. Here flourishes a democratic society which offers freedom in a world where freedom is not — and never was — the right of most people.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Captain Cook's Epic Voyage (2020)
“A sure supply of flax, wrote Lord Sydney, 'would be of great consequence to us as a naval power'. At the same time the tall trees which grew to the water's edge in New Zealand and in islands near Australia would yield masts of unparalleled size and quality for the British fleets in India. Australia would thus be 'reciprocally beneficial' both to English gaols and to English seapower. Thus Lord Sydney affirmed the traditional principle that England expected more gains than the simple pleasure of ridding her soil of criminals. Australia then was not designed simply as a remote gaol, cut off from the world's commerce. It was to supply strategic materials.”
Geoffrey Blainey (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source