Fortress Australia

Operation Sovereign Borders is hardly the first act of Australia throwing up the barricades for fear of some kind of invasion. Probably the most well known example of such behaviour is the White Australia policy, which was a “vehement effort to maintain high Western standards of economy, society and culture (necessitating at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples”.¹ The xenophobia at that time went under the name of “yellow peril”.

More recently, the “fortress Australia” attitude has been embodied in John Howard’s famous line during the Tampa Affair, “We decide who comes into the country and the circumstances in which they come”. More recently, of course, this sentiment has been captured in the much more succinct “stop the boats”.

This fear of the outsider, the anxiety over a possible invasion (albeit of a quite different nature, for quite different reasons) has plagued our country since the very beginning of colonial times. Right from the beginning, a fear of invasion by European powers shaped the way that white settlement unfolded on our fair shores, as told by Greenwood (1955, p4 onwards):

At the time when New South Wales was first colonized, and when Captain Arthur Phillip was appointed to the command of the first settlement in Australia, the English government did not claim the whole of the continent of Australia. Governor Phillip’s commission gave him command over only half of the continent, his jurisdiction extending westwards as far as the 135th meridian. Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, was also included, on Captain Cook’s supposition that the island was joined to the mainland. It was not certain that New Holland and the new Colony of New South Wales were parts of the one land. Indeed, it was not until many years after 1788 that the name Australia came to be uniformly applied in legal documents and in popular usage to the whole of Australia, and the name Australian to the different Colonies eventually established on its shores.

...

Immediately after the establishment of Port Jackson, Governor Phillip had dispatched a small party to Norfolk Island in the ship Supply under the command of Captain PG King. The convicts and marines were instructed to form a settlement to prevent the island from being occupied by any other European power, and, in the words of the original instructions to Phillip, “as a sport that may hereafter become useful.”

...

The two tiny townships on the Derwent and Tamar rivers on the Derwent and Tamar rivers in Van Diemen’s Land, fating from 1803, owed their establishment to the erroneous belief that a French exploring expedition was investigating the possibility of founding a French Colony in Australia. ... Lieutenant -Colonel Collins, who had occupied Port Phillip to prevent any French government from establishing a claim to that part of the continent, moved his colonists to Van Diemen’s Land after only six months and joined those which had been sent independently from Sydney.

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¹Historian Charles Bean.
Greenwood, 1955. Australia: A Social and Political History.