Oct 1, 2026 · 1 hr · 12 segments
Mark Cully is in conversation with Alan Gamlen on Mark's new book Waves of Plenty: Immigration and the Making of Australia, the definitive story of how immigration made Australia.
Mark CullyGuest
Alan GamlenHost
So y- maybe let's not go back to the 1830s at this stage yet, but, but let's talk about the period before World War I, which you describe in the book as the epoch of international laissez-faire, and a, a period that in, you know, some historians have compared with our own.
That sort of, uh, uh, I'm thinking in particular, um, Margaret MacMillan, um, the Canadian historian who sort of compared the current era to the immediately before World War I. W- why did that era come to an end? It was an era of extraordinarily open immigration for Australia, um, and globally.
So I, I guess, um, many people would characterize the period before World War I as the kind of the first great period of globalization in the world.
Um, uh, I, I see Tim Hatton's, um, sitting here in the audience, um, so I'm gonna better make sure I get things right.
Um, l- l- laissez-faire in terms of people, I mean, th- there were no passports, right? The pass- passports are a 20th century phenomenon.
So you, uh, if you had, if you had the resources, um, and you wanted to commit, you could, um, migrate to pretty much anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.
But what we see is between 1840 and 1914, uh, f- I think it's 53, 55 million people leave Europe for the New World.
Almost all of those people end up in the United States and, um, relatively few come to Australia.
Half of those who do come to Australia only come because they've had their fare subsidized fully or heavily sub- partially underwritten by the colonial governments.
In the 1840s, if you wanted to go to, uh, the Australia, you had to pay £20, which for a, a woman, a young woman who was a servant, that was h- that was a year's wages.
You could go to the US for £5, and it would take you a third of the time that it took to get to the Australian colonies.
So there is, on the one hand, there's this kind of tremendous sense of kind of freedom of movement, um, of people and of goods.
The Gold Rushes is just a, a crazy period in the 1850s for that, also the 1880s.
Um, but you do start to see, uh, for reasons that I can't summarize easily in, in a conversation like this, but the, the, um, development of kind of very racist attitudes in the new w- the New World Anglo-Saxon countries around keeping out particularly, uh, people from China.
And then after World War I- Um, a lot of restrictions put in place in New World countries to prevent migrants from almost anywhere.
The United States effectively shut their doors almost completely to migration in the first half of the 1920s, and they didn't reopen them really again until the mid-1960s.
So y- maybe let's not go back to the 1830s at this stage yet, but, but let's talk about the period before World War I, which you describe in the book as the epoch of international laissez-faire, and a, a period that in, you know, some historians have compared with our own.
That sort of, uh, uh, I'm thinking in particular, um, Margaret MacMillan, um, the Canadian historian who sort of compared the current era to the immediately before World War I. W- why did that era come to an end? It was an era of extraordinarily open immigration for Australia, um, and globally.
So I, I guess, um, many people would characterize the period before World War I as the kind of the first great period of globalization in the world.
Um, uh, I, I see Tim Hatton's, um, sitting here in the audience, um, so I'm gonna better make sure I get things right.
Um, l- l- laissez-faire in terms of people, I mean, th- there were no passports, right? The pass- passports are a 20th century phenomenon.
So you, uh, if you had, if you had the resources, um, and you wanted to commit, you could, um, migrate to pretty much anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.
But what we see is between 1840 and 1914, uh, f- I think it's 53, 55 million people leave Europe for the New World.
Almost all of those people end up in the United States and, um, relatively few come to Australia.
Half of those who do come to Australia only come because they've had their fare subsidized fully or heavily sub- partially underwritten by the colonial governments.
In the 1840s, if you wanted to go to, uh, the Australia, you had to pay £20, which for a, a woman, a young woman who was a servant, that was h- that was a year's wages.
You could go to the US for £5, and it would take you a third of the time that it took to get to the Australian colonies.
So there is, on the one hand, there's this kind of tremendous sense of kind of freedom of movement, um, of people and of goods.
The Gold Rushes is just a, a crazy period in the 1850s for that, also the 1880s.
Um, but you do start to see, uh, for reasons that I can't summarize easily in, in a conversation like this, but the, the, um, development of kind of very racist attitudes in the new w- the New World Anglo-Saxon countries around keeping out particularly, uh, people from China.
And then after World War I- Um, a lot of restrictions put in place in New World countries to prevent migrants from almost anywhere.
The United States effectively shut their doors almost completely to migration in the first half of the 1920s, and they didn't reopen them really again until the mid-1960s.
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