The Song of the RSL

Words: Anonymous
Tune: Peter Dodds McCormick (Advance Australia Fair)



Australia's sons let us rejoice
For we are young and white
The yellow hordes may get us soon
But we are in the right
The white man's burdens never cease
We bear them night and day
Until the Asian hordes increase
And everybody's grey

CHORUS:
Of mingled strains let others sing
But keep Australia's white

Though other races interbreed
We'll toil with heart and hand
To keep our island continent
A white and open land
Our natives have their settlements
Our neighbours all are Asian
We'll sing and dance and wave our flags
Because we are Caucasian.

Though other states desegregate
Our gallant lads ensure
That through our British ancestry
Our heritage is pure
The negroid races may prevail
But still Australians stand
United to this common end
A white and pleasant land.


From Warren Fahey's The Balls of Bob Menzies (Australian Political Songs 1900-1980), Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1989 with the following note:

Anonymous song that seems to havae gained wide circulation including most university songbooks in the 1960s and 1970s.


The RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) has been a generally conservative force in Australia for many years

The White Australia Policy is the collective name for a series of government policies directed at limiting non-European immigration to Australia from the 1850s until 1966. Originally directed at the prevention of Chinese immigrant workers, it developed in later years to be directed at most non-white immigrants.

The illustration to this post is a cartoon from Punch, June 2, 1888, with the caption, "Outside, Sir, Outside!"