Birth rate, 1901-1952

Component identifier:

Subseries 48-3

Content Summary:

Australia's declining post-war birth rate, the White Australia Policy, and the need to encourage immigration were issues closely associated with Hughes' name. The material he gathered for speeches, articles, and replies to critics consisting of notes, statistics, correspondence, printed items and cuttings form this file. It includes J. H. Gaffney's Populate or perish (n.d.), Albert Golding's 'Reservation of the Australian continent for the British race' (typescript, 1945) and the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action's social justice statement for 1944, The Family.

Two controversies over Hughes' views are well documented here. In 1943 the Chicago Tribune blamed Japan's belligerency and Pearl Harbour on Hughes' unwillingness to allow Japan former German colonies north of the equator. The other involved an attack on Hughes in 1948 by an International War Crimes Tribunal, Justice Pal, for opposing the racial equity clause at Versailles.

Other notes, cuttings, press releases and correspondence reveal Hughes' interest in the cause of the declining birth rate and his belief in moral regeneration as the only real solution, and his interest in immigration schemes such as the settlement of Jewish refugees in the Kimberley region.

Immediate source of acquisition:

The W. M. Hughes Papers were presented to the National Library of Australia by Dame Mary Hughes in 1953. The collection was received in two consignments. One consisted of papers taken from the Perpetual Trustee Company comprising material from Hughes' Lindfield home and from his office rooms at the Commonwealth Offices, Sydney; the other came directly from Lindfield. Lists of the contents of both consignments are held in the Library's Manuscript Branch. With the agreement of the executors and the Library, much of the collection, was for a time, held at the Australian National University by Fitzhardinge. He was permitted sole access to the collection while writing the biography Hughes commissioned in 1951. Fitzhardinge's own papers documenting the writing of the biography are also held by the Library (MS 5400). The papers transferred to the Library in 1953 are by no means the total collection of Hughes' personal papers, although it is impossible to say what proportion has survived. (see Fitzhardinge, p.936).

Names:

Hughes, W. M. (1862-1952)

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