Racism in Australia

I am not Australian but I read with alarm your article Australia polarized by shop owner (Sept. 25, 1996). So, Australia too is falling under the sway of simplistic, antiintellectual, Poujadist shopkeepers. (Why is it that shopkeepers and the daughters of shopkeepers -- Margaret Thatcher, offspring of a Grantham grocer is the other I have in mind -- are such a baleful influence?).

Mrs. Pauline Hanson, we are told, strikes a chord in Australia's "silent majority" (Forgive me, but what's a silent Australian?!). She blames Asians and Aborigines for Australia's woes but she obviously doesn't know any history. The worst unemployment Australia has ever suffered was during the Great Depression when Asians were a tiny handful and the Aborigines, by all accounts, were largely a persecuted minority in their own country. (Please read Thomas Kenneally's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith)

The other dark-skinned people who turned up in Hanson's native Queensland in the early part of this century were Pacific islanders taken there through a notorious latter-day slave trade called "blackbirding" to work on sugar cane estates. All of this is undeniable.

The problem with racist demagogues like Pauline Hanson is that, quite apart from reducing complex issues to crude elements like race, their appeal to the worst sentiments tends to bring on the worst. Enoch Powell's infamous anti-immigrant Rivers of Blood speech in Britain in 1967, by polarizing racial feeling, was eventually self-fulfilling; it helped to alienate many young blacks and led eventually to the rather too numerous race riots Britain has had. If Australia wants race rioting, then Pauline Hanson will help generate it.

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta