Penny needs to wise up on British history
Penny wong’s ahistorical speech in london did nothing to enhance her personal reputation or that of the country she represents. BY NIck Cater.
There is little doubt Penny Wong’s forebears lived lives more brutal, unjust and less equal than ours. Yet to insinuate that her Hakka Chinese ancestors lived under the yoke of colonial oppression in British North Borneo is a curious interpretation of history.
Wong’s speech at King’s College London last week did nothing to enhance her personal reputation or that of the country she represents. The raising of alleged historical grievances may be common diplomatic practice in less peaceful parts of the world, but if Wong wants to drag them in to our dialogue with Britain she needs to do more than rely on century-old family anecdotes.
Wong’s mother’s maternal ancestors arrived from Britain to settle in the young colony of South Australia in 1836. The other side of her family, however, “had a very different experience of British colonisation”. “Many from these clans laboured for the British North Borneo company in tin mines and plantations for tobacco and timber,” she said. “Many worked as domestic servants for British colonists, as did my own grandmother.”
Wong does a great disservice to the legacy of Sir William Hood Treacher, the first British governor of Borneo from 1881 to 1887. Treacher’s profound opposition of slavery was incorporated into the royal charter of the North Borneo Chartered Company to which our Foreign Minister referred. The charter ordained that “the company shall to the best of its power discourage and, as far as may be practicable, abolish by degrees, any system of domestic servitude existing among the tribes of the coast or interior of Borneo; and no foreigners whether European, Chinese or other, shall be allowed to own slaves of any kind in the company’s territories”.
It’s not for nothing North Borneo was declared a protectorate. The region had a brutal history of slavery, kidnapping, tribal headhunting and piracy. The establishment of the North Borneo Company in 1882 paved the way for the ultimate extinction of slavery and the end of piracy. It substituted a strong, liberal and just government for numerous weak, cruel and unjust ones. It introduced the rule of law and a justice system that made no distinction between races and creeds, rich and poor, or master and slave. It put a stop to headhunting and brought law and order to outlying districts opening the way for free trade. The new-found stability and security of property rights attracted European and Chinese capital, heralding rapid economic development.
Hakka clans were not forced labourers. They were free settlers, most of whom arrived in North Borneo at the express invitation of the British, who recognised the desirability of attracting hardworking, entrepreneurial Chinese people. They were part of a larger Hakka diaspora that fled eastern China to escape the 20-year Hakka-Punti Clan wars. Estimates of the number of Hakkas who died in that conflict range from 100,000 to a million. Tens of thousands were captured by pirates or bandits and sold into slavery in South America, Southeast Asia or Cuba. The lucky ones made it to Borneo, Singapore, Australia or other parts of the anglosphere.
North Borneo in the late 19th century was a sanctuary from oppression and it is highly unlikely Wong’s ancestors were trapped under some harsh colonial yoke.
The civic order and rule of law brought by the British was a marked contrast to the tribal instability that preceded it or the tribal instability in China in the latter part of the Qing dynasty Wong’s ancestors probably fled. Hakka migrants would have “laboured” in plantations much as the Hakka people who immigrated to Australia at that time “laboured” building railways. They laboured in tin mines in North Borneo much as miners from Cornwall laboured in copper mines on Yorke Peninsula.
Wong’s ahistoricism doesn’t end there. She repeats the myth that Australia didn’t take Asia seriously until the election of Gough Whitlam. The history of her father’s connection with Australia paints a very different picture.
Frances Wong was one of the 20,000 Asian scholars who studied at Australian universities between 1950 and the mid-’80s under the Menzies government’s Colombo Plan. Labor offered only equivocal support for the Colombo Plan, variously complaining about the cost, the danger of undermining the White Australia policy and gifting scholarships to our former Japanese enemies. Menzies’ cultural and trade diplomacy helped repair the damage in our relations with Asian countries caused by the arbitrary expulsion of Asian migrants under Labor between 1945 and 1949. That was the measure Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell was trying to justify in parliament in December 1947 with these words: “There are a lot of Wongs among the Chinese community but, as I think Mr White, the member for Balaclava, will agree, ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’.” It would be unfair to make too much of the attitudes of long-dead Labor leaders. Calwell, Ben Chifley and Doc Evatt were products of their times. Yet if Wong is determined to judge present-day Britain by its past failings, real or imagined, why shouldn’t we judge her party that way? Should we call on the Prime Minister to take the knee in recognition of Labor’s historical racism? Or should we fight the modern trend of judging yesterday by the standards of today?
Far from making false accusations about Britain’s past, Wong should celebrate our great inheritance of the rule of law, democracy, and stable institutions. She should be embracing the common values of freedom, fairness and justice that make the bonds between Britain, the US and Australia some of the most natural and secure of any group of countries on earth.