A sad day for our proud history of tolerance

’European settlement brought tolerance to our shores; taking root early on, it gradually extended its reach, eventually allowing an extraordinarily diverse population to live in relative harmony; now, it risks dying, and not of natural causes’.

This Australia Day, as we count the nation’s blessings, an easygoing tolerance will no longer be among them. European settlement brought it to our shores; taking root early on, it gradually extended its reach, eventually allowing an extraordinarily diverse population to live in relative harmony; now, it risks dying, and not of natural causes.

That colonial Australia would be a pioneer of toleration was scarcely obvious. The Toleration Act of 1689 granted all of Britain’s Protestant denominations freedom of worship, but it did not emancipate Roman Catholics, much less Jews: those faiths had to wait until 1829 and 1858 respectively, and even then many “disabilities” remained in place.

The newly founded colony therefore faced a formidable challenge. With settlers coming from Ireland as well as England and Scotland, it had a substantial Catholic presence.

Moreover, highly fluid settlement patterns meant that Catholics and Protestants – who in the UK, the US and Canada typically lived apart – were thrown together, creating vast scope for the colony to descend into conflict.

That it didn’t reflected deliberate choices. In 1836, governor Richard Bourke, an Irish Protestant and lifelong liberal, decided that if there were to be established churches, all the great divisions of Christianity, and not just the Anglicans, should be established, and funded equally.

That decision was remarkable; providing, soon thereafter, public funding to Jews made it astonishing. It signalled, unmistakably, that this “New Britannia” would strive to avoid the worst features of the mother country’s past, including heart-wrenching sectarian strife. “Warned by all sorrows that have gone before,” rhapsodised colonial poet John Farrell, “Our children shall, upon this new-won shore/ Build up the glory of a grand new World.”

Yet it was not only public policy that mattered. Battling blight and drought, fire and flood, the settlers forged a style of personal interaction that combined informality with the scrupulous avoidance of anything divisive. Differences were never erased: they were laconically ignored.

Few things surprised commentators more. “Every branch of the Christian religion,” Anthony Trollope excitedly reported, “is supposed to stand here on equal footing, and to have an equal title to support the State may give.”

The result of that environment of coexistence, wrote novelist Rolf Boldrewood, was that “there scarcely can have been such a thorough sifting together, such intermixture of English, Scots and Irish blood”, as was under way in the Australian colonies.

There were, no doubt, grievous exceptions, too slowly corrected, most obviously in respect of Aborigines. There were also periods when civil peace broke down, on occasion disastrously. But toleration always remained the norm that framed the nation’s aspiration and helped propel its progress.

No one experienced that norm’s benefits more clearly than the Jews who arrived, destitute and devastated, in the wake of the Holocaust. The advice they received was simple: you are free to retain your heritage but “don’t make a nuisance of yourself”; and “first and foremost, work hard” – which is precisely what these “New Australians” (as migrants were then called) did, all the more so as they were excluded from virtually all forms of public assistance.

Carefully tracking their experience, sociologist PW Medding described their reception as one of “qualified acceptance”: it was the “indifference which is not apathy” DH Lawrence portrayed as quintessentially Australian: “Australians did not especially like ‘foreigners’ but they disliked drawing attention to themselves by being nasty to people even more.”

However, the important thing, the recent arrivals soon learnt, was that the barriers melted with time, helped by the respect Australians had for those who helped themselves.

Yet never and nowhere has toleration come easily or been easy to sustain. David Hume called it an “artificial” virtue that (like chastity) struggles against mankind’s natural inclinations.

For some, its grudging character meant it was too little, falling short of Christian charity, which demanded not just toleration but love; for many, unwilling to tolerate those they detested, it demanded too much. As an attitude intermediate between wholehearted acceptance and unrestrained opposition, toleration was perpetually poised on the knife’s edge. And once it began to fray, it tended to unravel, as one side’s excesses provoked the other, precipitating a generalised brawl.

If it instead proved resilient that was in no small part because of a widely shared commitment to this country as a project and as an achievement. The sense of being united in a single community of fate, with the same rights and obligations for all; the pride, as radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick put it, in having “made of Australia a home good enough even for men of modest report to live in, calling their souls their own”: these bound Australians together more tightly than the many things that pulled them apart.

But the survival of toleration also reflected its resolute defence by successive governments.

Thus, 1846 saw the country’s worst riots, when Catholic and Protestant mobs in Melbourne fired on each other on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The official response was prompt, unforgiving and instructive: all processions held to commemorate festivals, anniversaries or political events related to religious conflicts were henceforth banned, with severe punishment for infringers.

Australia’s cities, said the authorities, were not Belfast. Even less, we might say today, would they be allowed to become Beirut.

Those foundations of our tolerance are now disappearing. As an attachment to equal citizenship vanishes from progressive elites’ mindset, racial and ethnic differences, rather than being eliminated from the public sphere, are relentlessly highlighted and enshrined, undermining the sense that we are joined in a community of fate.

Instead of a tempered pride in this country’s achievements, we are subjected – not least by the major corporates – to distempered torrents of contrition. And far from encouraging “New Australians” to blend in and work hard, public funds pour into enclaves such as Lakemba where religious separatism and hatred flourish.

Nor is the government effectively defending tolerance. Yes, Anthony Albanese has rightly said that anti-Semitism must be called out. Merely saying that, however, is scarcely enough. To genuinely help stem the tide of intolerance, he should, for example, explicitly condemn the Muslim preachers who day after day demonise Jews and publicly urge the leading Islamic associations, which have remained stubbornly silent, to condemn them too.

Looking back in 1955 on the early European settlers’ dreams, Manning Clark concluded the introduction to his Select Documents in Australian History with these words: “So we leave them, dumbfounded at their optimism, astounded that belief in material progress and mateship could be their only comforters against earth and sky, man and beast.”

That they created an open, tolerant society, which could respectfully absorb deep conflicts, shows just how potent those dreams were. But who, on this Australia Day, could dream those dreams today? And if they did, what awaits them when they wake?