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Immigration nation : the secret history of us.
Off-air recording of SBS1 broadcast 9th, 16th, and 23rd January 2011. Copied under Part VA of the Copyright Act 1968. Classification: PG (Mild themes and Holocaust images) "DVD. Episode one: At Federation in 1901, Australia had a dream to create a democratic utopia. But the nation's leaders believed this vision would only be achieved by closing the country to anybody who wasn't white. This paradox and the draconian laws known as the White Australia Policy that followed caused great human suffering and ironically helped realise the very threat Australia feared the most - invasion from the Asian north. Episode two: As World War 2 ended Australia faced a population crisis. Its solution was to adopt a bold and radical new strategy - white was redefined as migrants were recruited en masse from Europe for the first time in the nation's history. In a single decade the country opened its doors to a million immigrants but somehow clung more strongly than ever to its cherished White Australia Policy. Episode three: By the 1960s a new generation were questioning Australia's racist immigration policies and the exclusion of our Asian neighbours. The staged kidnap of a six-year-old Indian-Fijian girl by an Aboriginal activist and leader [Charles Perkins] exposed the injustice of the system. But it took the Vietnam War and a humanitarian crisis to force the country to banish the ideal of a White Australia once and for all and sow the seeds for the Immigration Nation we live in today." - Inside case. "DVD. Episode one: At Federation in 1901, Australia had a dream to create a democratic utopia. But the nation's leaders believed this vision would only be achieved by closing the country to anybody who wasn't white. This paradox and the draconian laws known as the White Australia Policy that followed caused great human suffering and ironically helped realise the very threat Australia feared the most - invasion from the Asian north. Episode two: As World War 2 ended Australia faced a population crisis. Its solution was to adopt a bold and radical new strategy - white was redefined as migrants were recruited en masse from Europe for the first time in the nation's history. In a single decade the country opened its doors to a million immigrants but somehow clung more strongly than ever to its cherished White Australia Policy. Episode three: By the 1960s a new generation were questioning Australia's racist immigration policies and the exclusion of our Asian neighbours. The staged kidnap of a six-year-old Indian-Fijian girl by an Aboriginal activist and leader [Charles Perkins] exposed the injustice of the system. But it took the Vietnam War and a humanitarian crisis to force the country to banish the ideal of a White Australia once and for all and sow the seeds for the Immigration Nation we live in today." - Inside case.