Remember Geoffrey Blainey the Historian at Melbourne university who like Enoch Powell the politician in the U.K. warned from their lofty and knowledgeable positions of the dangers inherent in multi racial immigration. Remember the outcry from those who stood to gain from this policy, especially our politicians but also from idiotic do gooders some of whom also stood to gain.

What has now happened in Australia is exactly as predicted. The culprits responsible must now apologise to Geoffrey Blainey and indeed to the rest of us who over the years have warned of this tragedy many times. 

Another who deserves an apology is Professor Drew Fraser who recently was attacked when he spoke out.

Peter Ryan: Apologise to Geoffrey Blainey

15^th Dec 2005

AGHAST at their television screens as they watched Sydney's race riots, how many Australians cast their minds back 20 years to remember Geoffrey Blainey's thoughtful warning that such horrors might happen? Happen, that is, unless we reconsidered our program of almost indiscriminate immigration and the accompanying madness of multiculturalism.

I suppose very few viewers - or newspaper readers, or radio listeners - made the connection:  if a week is a long time in politics, two decades is almost an ice age in the public memory span of history. Yet warned we were, and little heed we paid.  In mid-1984 Blainey, who then held the Ernest Scott chair of history at Melbourne University and was dean of the arts faculty, gave an address to the Rotary Club of Warrnambool, Victoria. This was hardly a commanding forum; there was no TV or radio coverage. Blainey's themes, quietly and soberly presented, were simply these: Australia each year was taking in migrants at a rate faster than the national fabric could absorb; many migrants were coming from backgrounds so starkly different from Australian norms that prospects of a social fit into our community might lie a long way off.  He went on to say that should a time come when ordinary Australians  began to feel crowded or pressured by new arrivals, resentment might soon  end the ready acceptance upon which migrants hitherto knew they could  rely.

Almost as if he had set a match to dry grass in summer, Blainey's few sensible words from quiet, coastal Warrnambool ignited an Australia-wide bushfire of howling criticism. The arsonists fanning the flames were his colleagues at the University of Melbourne's history department On June 19, 1984, 23 academics published in Melbourne's The Age a letter that two decades later still holds some sad record for unctuous academic bilge, expressed with unprickable pomposity.

 By inescapable inference, Blainey was a racist.  The issue soon surged beyond animated controversy to become a full-scale witch-hunt. There were disorders on campus and threatened disorders if this vile man should be allowed to go on teaching. Acting to perfection the part of Pontius Pilate, the university gave the mob its head.  In this impossible situation, Blainey eventually resigned from his  chair and Melbourne University lost one of its most distinguished,  original and publicly accessible scholars. Then he wrote his books, based not only what he had read in the library  but also on what he had seen and touched, and had learned from men and  from managers. It was largely this quality of veracity, of actuality, that regularly made his books bestsellers, running to repeated new editions in paperback. Such success did little to diminish the glances of the green eyes of envy.  Blainey's experience of the world was what above all entitled him to express an opinion on how Australia might react to injudicious immigration, pushed too far and too fast. Compared to him, most of his colleagues in the history department were still wet behind the ears, with minds still damp in academic mental nappies.  The year after Blainey's resignation, on April 1, 1985, The Australian Financial Review devoted its editorial to a review of what by then had become a running academic scandal. Under the heading "Academic  assassination", the editorial made plain its opinion that the political  correctnesses of multiculturalism had suppressed proper public discussion  of the undoubted disruptions being caused by some aspects of migration,  and that freedom of speech was under attack from the "smelly little  orthodoxies that dominate the humanities departments" in the universities.  

 The motives of Blainey's critics were "to give a message to their weaker colleagues that dissent and dialogue will be punished heavily punished.

My own alma mater, Melbourne, is a specially sad case, having cravenly  allowed one of the finest scholars of our time to be driven out by an  academic lynch mob. Until amends are made to Blainey, Melbourne's claim to be an institution devoted to free inquiry will remain a joke. The very least that should be done is the creation and endowment in perpetuity within the university of a Geoffrey Blainey chair of history.  Melbourne (and not a moment too soon) has in Glyn Davis appointed a new vice-chancellor with ambitious plans to lift the university's reputation.  A first step might be to establish the Blainey chair.  Nothing so adds to the standing of a university as a reputation for not evicting distinguished professors simply on the ground that they are doing their job well.  Remember, this is the man who, two decades ago, tried to warn us against what we all witnessed in Cronulla last weekend. Can a university - can a nation - do without such counsellors? Or should they be disposed of at the mere whim of the gruesome ideologues who still control Australian history?  Peter Ryan was director of Melbourne University Press from 1962 to 1989.