Book review of "Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970" by Anna Haebich, Monash University Press, Victoria

This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of historical studies of assimilation in Australia. Primarily an empirically-based study of assimilation policies during their ascendancy in the 1950s and 1960s, Anna Haebich explains that it is also intended as a riposte to what she terms ‘retro-assimilation’: the nostalgic recreation of those decades as a time of assimilated nationhood,‘of simpler times when we were one nation, united by race, culture and our dreams of Dad, Mum and the kids nestled cosily in our suburban homes’ (9). This fantasy, she argues,has infected many recent debates over policy toward Indigenous and other minorities. Its fallacy is the characteristic fallacy of reactionary ideologies: it mistakes the hopes and ideals of the past for the lived reality of the past. Australia was not an assimilated nation in the 1950s and 1960s; that’s why programs were implemented to make it so. Whatever the shortcomings of assimilation – and Haebich suggests that they were many – in the 1950s and 1960s it was a future-orientated project, unlike its insipid ‘retro’ namesake which seeks solutions to today’s problems in superficial imaginings of the past.

History Australia

History Australia

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1833-4881

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