BLACK AND WHITE DOWN UNDER
Richard West compares Australian and South African attitudes to race
Cape Town ON A bright but nearly windless Saturday afternoon, the 19 yachts of a round-the- world race moved slowly from Table Bay to start the second and much the more perilous leg of their trip, past icebergs, to Sydney, that other magnificent port of Britain's old maritime empire. The first settlers, bound for Van Diemen's Land, had stopped at the Cape for water, meat, vegetables and some healthy exercise. La- ter, the Table Mountain was part of the doleful memories of thousands of convicts who lay in shackles off the Cape on their way to penal servitude. It was on the route of the grain and wool clippers.
Gold-diggers stopped here on their way to the first Australian gold rush, and many of them, or their children, came back to Cape Town to join in the diamond rush at Kimberley or the gold rush on the Wit- watersrand, which began exactly 100 years ago.
This year, white South Africans in their thousands are once more off to Australia, escaping from the incertitude and the violence at home. Those who intend to remain, or have not yet raised the money to leave, speak scornfully of the 'chicken run' or 'taking the gap'. Whatever their motive, many South Africans have decided to start a new life in Britain, the United States or increasingly Australia, especially its west coast.
The Australian government has cut off air connections with South Africa, as part of its sanctions policy, but Qantas flights out of Zimbabwe are booked for months ahead, mostly by South African emigrants. A few South Africans have sailed all the way to Australia, for yachts ore a useful way of carrying household goods. People are building yachts as far inland as Johan- nesburg, but most of the yatchtsmen head west to the Florida town of Fort Lauder- dale, where there are lawyers who special- ise in helping South Africans to obtain a `green card', the US work permit.
South Africans of British origin, who are the great majority of the whites who emigrate, have natural affinities with the Australians. Both are outdoor peoples, mad about cricket, rugby, tennis, surfing and golf. Australians who come to South Africa, apart from the politicians and ideologues, are quick to perceive that the apartheid system has mostly vanished, and that the blacks are now suffering not from the white regime so much as their own savage young 'comrades'. An Australian yacht skipper, Ian Kiernan, who toured western Cape during his stay last week, seems to have done some impressive re- search. 'I have been into the townships and visited about 15 shebeens. I found the black people to be very friendly and happy, though the situation among the youngsters seems to be somewhat different and I think that's where the problem should be addres- sed. I cannot believe the stance by the international media against this country.'
The Australian cricket team which is touring here has run into less trouble than would a South African team in Australia. The protesters, apparently all whites, shied bricks at the seafront hotel where the Australians are staying, poured oil on two of the pitches, and also into the swimming pool of the national team chairman.
Australian yachtsmen and cricketers may be popular in South Africa, but not Australian politicians. In fact, Australia may have taken over from Britain and Sweden as the symbol of the outside world's pharisaical humbug. Even Van der Merwe, the stock South African figure of fun, has been used to express this bitter- ness: `All the Van der Merwes went from South Africa to Australia, raising the average IQ of both countries.' The arch- bogyman is the former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, who came here as co-chairman of the grotesque 'Eminent Persons Group'. He stood out, even from this bunch, by his ignorance and pompos- ity.
There was much delight when the news reached South Africa that Fraser had come to grief on a boozy might out in Memphis, Tennessee. 'Ex-PM loses pants in motel' was the headline in my newspaper. Many South Africans assert that Australia led the demand for a boycott against this country in order to pinch more of the world market for goods which they both produce, such as minerals, sugar, fruit and wine. Australia was trying to get out of its own economic mess by instigating a crisis here.
Because South Africa and Australia are so alike in both natural resources and the character of their English-speaking colon- ists, one needs to reflect on why they have turned out so differently. Australia is an island and the first Cape settlers found only a few aboriginals, most of whom they killed. The first settlers found only a few bushmen and Hottentots, many of whom they killed, but there were no blacks, or Bantu, for 500 miles to the north or 1,000 miles to the east.
Then, at the start of the 19th century, the Boers fleeing the British started to move north and east, while blacks, fleeing a Zulu army, started to stream south and west. By the end of the 19th century, Boers, British and blacks were fighting a three-way battle for land and mining rights, while a new immigration of Indian indentured labourers came to cut cane in Natal. Australia is an island and was, and chose to remain a white man's country. The sugar planters in Queensland tried to obtain cheap native labour by 'blackbird- ine or kidnapping men from the Solomon and New Hebrides islands, but this practice was stopped by the British government. Whites cut cane until the recent invention of machinery for the job.
In the depression after the first world war, the mine owners in both South Africa and Australia wanted to cut costs by bringing in black or imported Asian labour. In 1922, the white miners on the Witwatersrand launched a strike which turned into civil war with the army em- ploying planes and artillery, and the rebels fighting under the Communist Party slo- gan, 'Workers of the world, unite, for a white South Africa'. In that same year the Australian trade unions won their demand for a 'white Australia policy', regulating immigration by race. The 'white Australia policy' was revived in 1975, when hundreds of thousands of boat people fled commun- ist Vietnam, some of them sailing as far as Darwin. This time, Australian racial pre- judice was masked by the argument that the boat people were bourgeois predators, former brothel-keepers, drug-peddlers and black marketeers: the same reason once given for not sheltering Jews from Nazi Germany.
The late and ever lamented Shiva Naipaul, who is a cult figure among dis- cerning South Africans, did not live to write the book on Australia which would have complemented his Black on White, about Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. He did not live to write the story he told me with so much laughter, of how in Canberra he was taken to talk on the subject of Africa with Bob Hawke, the prime minis- ter, and his aides, and of their fatuousness and incomprehension. If he had lived, Shiva might have accepted the hardest challenge of all, and written a great book on South Africa.
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