In 1945 most in the nation accepted White Australia both as an immigration policy and for all the inequality it represented. But by the mid-1970s, the White Australia policy was over, multi-culturalism was celebrated, and Indigenous Australians had received legal and political equality. We know about the policy shifts and legislative changes involved. We know less about how Australian general opinion came to accept such a fundamental shift.

Should we see this mid-century shift as dismantling, or at least challenging, the colonialism on which Australia was built? And what does it tell us about the process of decolonization, often seen as the throwing out of external imperial rulers, but inevitably a more internal process in a settler-colonial state?

Angela Woollacott is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a former president of the Australian Historical Association. Her recent books include Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2019) and How the Personal became Political: The Feminist and Sexual Revolutions in 1970s Australia, with co-editer Michelle Arrow (Routledge, 2020). She currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery grant 2023-25 for the project on which this paper is based.