In-Game Biography[]
Support for the White Australia policy has slowly diminished over the last twenty years. The network of racist legislation first passed to safeguard Australia as an outpost of the British race in Oceania has been, and is slowly being, unwound by a new generation of cautious reformists.
Political lepers, the lot of them!
Arthur Augustus Calwell is the most dogged, full-throated defender of the White Australia policy in the Federal Parliament. Calwell contends that standing as sovereign of his own nation, the African, the Asian, and the mulatto is equal to the white man, but upon his first step in Australia, he becomes a pollutant. No nation, however strong, can survive the unsegregated cohabitation of the races. It is with this line of thinking that Calwell argues he is not a racist, but merely proud of his color, as any man ought to be. His critics deride him for this. Calwell reckons they're all ratbags.
Indeed, what Calwell reckons has always come first. He argues that the media misrepresents him: that they never focus on the working-class man orating from the back of pickup trucks in isolated townships on the need for rural hospitals; on the self-educated unionist conversant in Mandarin who argues against involvement in foreign wars; or the community-minded Socialist who champions welfare and good wages.
But all of that ends at the color line. In the hazy bar of Parliament House, holding a shot glass level to his eyes, the Prime Minister grins and rasps to his comrades, "Two Wongs do not make a White.