The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
The Force of Truth: Gandhi’s Impact on Australia
Australia India Relations and Gandhi Birthday Celebrations
Parliament House, Canberra
Wednesday, 15 October 2025
Introduction
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. It feels fitting, as we gather to honour Mahatma Gandhi, born 156 years ago this month, to begin with a tribute to another ancient civilisation that has always prized truth, respect and community.
When the Australian statesman Richard Casey was Governor of Bengal, he often corresponded with Gandhi. Every letter from Gandhi began courteously: ‘Dear Friend.’
But Casey later confessed that Gandhi’s handwriting sometimes betrayed him. ‘When he was in a hurry,’ Casey said, ‘‘Dear Friend’ looked perilously close to ‘Dear Fiend’.’
It was an innocent slip of the pen, yet it captures something about our long, sometimes testing friendship with Gandhi’s legacy. Both Australia and India have occasionally misread one another’s handwriting. Yet our intentions have always been friendly, our affection real, and our respect enduring.
This evening, I want to take you on a short journey through that friendship. I’ll begin with how Gandhi saw Australia, and how Australians first saw him. I’ll then trace the way his ideas have echoed through Australian life, from Indigenous rights to environmental protest. Finally, I’ll reflect on why his message still matters in a century that often rewards speed more than patience, and volume more than truth.
Let’s start where Gandhi did: with his first impression of our continent.
First Impressions: The White Continent
In 1896, Gandhi was living in South Africa, fighting for the rights of Indians under colonial rule. That year he published a document called The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa: An Appeal to the Indian Public. Among its sharp observations was a single line about Australia: ‘In Australia they are endeavouring to pass laws to restrict the influx of Indians in those parts.’
It was one of the earliest critiques of what became known as the White Australia Policy. Gandhi had already recognised a troubling pattern: the racism of South Africa’s colonies was being encouraged, even taught, by a still whiter Australia.
Thomas Weber, an Australian historian who has studied Gandhi’s writing, notes that the young barrister saw racism not as a local injustice but as an imperial contagion. It was, he understood, something that crossed oceans.
Yet when an Australian visitor, Albert Bathurst Piddington, came to Gandhi’s ashram in 1929, Gandhi chose not to scold. Piddington was a remarkable figure: our shortest-serving High Court judge, who resigned before ever hearing a case, but a passionate social reformer. He had come to Ahmedabad to tell Gandhi about Australia’s system of industrial arbitration, living wages and child endowment. Gandhi, whose own country had millions living on the brink of starvation, listened politely. He made no comment about the elephant in the room: Australia’s race laws. Perhaps he knew that lecturing visitors rarely changes their minds.
Still, there is something poignant about that meeting. A well-intentioned Australian, proud of his nation’s social progress, sitting across from a man who had renounced possessions, seeking to build an India where every child might simply eat. Two reformers, each sincere, each inhabiting different worlds.
A Colonial in the Colonies
Two decades later, another Australian found himself face to face with Gandhi. Richard Casey had been sent to Bengal as Governor during the final years of British rule. By then, Gandhi was a global symbol: frail, barefoot and utterly fearless.
Casey described Gandhi as ‘by far the most outstanding and interesting individual I met in India.’ He admired his warmth, his humour and his ‘remarkable hold on the hearts of the people.’ Yet he also admitted that conversations with Gandhi could be trying. ‘With the best will in the world,’ he wrote, ‘I landed into misunderstandings with him, and we had some pretty rapid crossfire correspondence, with each of us a little irritable.’
Casey was a man of neat timetables and typed memoranda. Gandhi was a man of parables and prayer. When Casey wanted to discuss taxes, Gandhi wanted to discuss salt. When Casey sought clarity, Gandhi offered paradox. ‘Among saints,’ Casey later wrote, ‘he was a statesman; among statesmen, a saint.’
Their most famous encounter took place in December 1945. The meeting lasted seventy-five minutes. Casey later reported that Gandhi did not utter a single word. Whenever he wanted to ask a question or make a point, he wrote it on a scrap of paper and passed it across the table. Only afterwards did Casey learn that it was Monday, Gandhi’s day of silence. It takes a certain kind of self-assurance to conduct diplomacy entirely by note-passing.
Back home, Australians were divided about this strange, spellbinding figure. When Gandhi challenged the empire, newspapers called him a troublemaker. When he spun cotton and preached moral uplift, they called him a saint.
The Sydney Morning Herald obituary in 1948 captured both tones. It called him ‘the greatest Indian since Buddha,’ yet admitted that Europeans ‘almost always found him baffling.’ Casey’s verdict was quoted again: ‘I do not pretend to understand him at all fully. He is of the East, and I am not.’
That was honest, if revealing. In mid-twentieth century Australia, few could imagine that wisdom might flow east to west. Today, we recognise that Gandhi’s insights belong to humanity, not geography. The civilisation that gave us ahimsa, yoga and cricket’s helicopter shot has given us more than one way of seeing truth.
From Gandhi to Gurindji
So what does Gandhi mean for Australia today?
One answer comes from former Senator Patrick Dodson, the Yawuru elder who delivered the first Mahatma Gandhi Oration at the University of New South Wales. Dodson drew a line between Gandhi’s struggle against empire and the Aboriginal struggle for justice at home. He pointed out that Gandhi’s tools – non-cooperation, moral pressure and peaceful protest – were also used by Indigenous Australians in two landmark movements: the 1946 Pilbara strike and the 1966 Gurindji walk-off.
Vincent Lingiari, like Gandhi, believed that dignity begins with self-determination. He didn’t raise a rifle; he raised a principle. Dodson put it beautifully: ‘Unity has to be about accommodating difference through dialogue so that common ground can be found.’ That sentence could have come straight from Gandhi’s Collected Works.
Dodson’s insight reminds us that the most powerful revolutions often begin with restraint. When people refuse to cooperate with injustice, they expose the moral poverty of those who depend on force. Gandhi understood that; so did the Gurindji.
Green Satyagraha
His influence can also be seen in another Australian turning point: the Terania Creek protest of 1979. In the rainforests of northern New South Wales, a group of young environmentalists formed a human barrier against bulldozers. They declared their protest to be ‘non-violent and peaceful.’ It was the first time Australians had physically defended a natural resource. Despite threats and sabotage, they refused to retaliate. Three years later, the Wran Government’s historic ‘rainforest decision’ protected around 100,000 hectares of forest.
The Terania Creek protest was hardly on the scale of Gandhi’s salt march, but it demonstrated that ordinary citizens, using moral discipline rather than violence, could reshape public policy. The forest still stands today, and so does the lesson.
Gandhi’s reach in Australia extends far beyond protest. It is felt in the words of former High Court Justice Michael Kirby, who delivered another Gandhi Oration at UNSW. Kirby argued that Gandhi’s ideals remain vital to the modern battles over gender equality, animal welfare, sexuality and climate. He reminded us that Gandhi’s message was not confined to politics. It was about the ethical duty to live truthfully, to resist cruelty and to widen the circle of compassion.
António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has made a similar point. Speaking on Gandhi’s 150th birthday, he said that Gandhi’s vision ‘forms part of the pillars of the UN’s work’. Gandhi, he noted, led sanitation campaigns before the phrase ‘public health’ existed, and insisted that the measure of a society lies in how it treats those he called Harijan, ‘Children of God’. His life, Guterres said, proved that non-violence is not passivity but ‘a means to achieve justice and change.’
Former Fijian parliamentarian and author Satendra Nandan reflects on Gandhi’s global impact, writing ‘The oppressed, dispossessed, displaced, discriminated, marginalised, vulnerable everywhere found in him an embracing love, as if we were all brothers and sisters, sharing the same planet, blessed by the same sun and seas, within India, and outside, in our bodies, hearts and souls. One human family.’
Such ideas are not relics. They animate movements across Australia today. You can see them in the quiet persistence of peace campaigners, in the generosity of volunteers, in the compassion shown by those who welcome refugees. Gandhi never visited our shores, but his fingerprints are on our better instincts.
Saint or Human?
Of course, no great life is simple. Around the world, Gandhi’s statues have been vandalised by people who are angry about his attitudes towards African people in his early writings. Others note Gandhi’s ambivalence about caste and his occasional moral rigidity. As University of Melbourne scholars Dolly Kikon and Hari Bapuji have observed, Gandhi’s evolution was part of his greatness. He began as a man of his time and ended as a man for all time, learning, doubting and growing.
The same can be said of nations. Australia began with exclusion and has spent a century learning inclusion. To honour Gandhi is not to canonise him but to share his willingness to change.
Richard Casey once wrote that Gandhi’s mind was ‘that of the artist rather than the executive.’ He was not a bureaucrat; he was a moral experimenter. When challenged, he would calmly restate his principle as though nothing had been said against it, until the world slowly came around. That kind of serene stubbornness is rare, but it has shaped every peaceful revolution since – from Martin Luther King’s civil-rights movement to Nelson Mandela’s reconciliation. Gandhi called it satyagraha, the force born of truth and love.
And yet, it is possible to admire someone without fully accepting their views. Writing in 1949, the year after Gandhi’s death, and four years after the end of World War II, George Orwell reflected that Gandhi sincerely believed that the principle of nonviolence should apply to those who opposed Hitler’s attempts to exterminate the Jewish people, and admitted that a nonviolent resistance against a Japanese invasion might cost millions of deaths. Orwell disagreed with that, as would most of us today – but he still concluded his essay by praising Gandhi’s personal integrity, intellectual courage and political impact.
Gandhi and Australia
If Gandhi could walk through Australia today, what would he see? He would see over a million people of Indian heritage helping to build this nation. He would see his philosophy taught in universities and practiced in community centres. He would see environmentalists quoting his warning that ‘Earth provides enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.’ He would see progress, and he would also see unfinished business: the persistence of inequality, the fragility of reconciliation, the temptation to put comfort ahead of conscience.
He might gently remind us, as António Guterres did, of ‘the gap between what we do and what we are capable of doing.’ Closing that gap remains the unfinished task of every democracy.
Gandhi’s influence on Australia cannot be measured in policies or monuments. It lives in habits of conscience: the instinct to protest without hatred, to persuade without humiliation, to seek justice without revenge. It lives in the belief that power should serve truth, not the other way around.
Those instincts link Australia and India still. Modern India was born from non-violence; Australia continues to learn how to combine power with fairness. Our histories have not always aligned, but our destinies increasingly do. In an anxious world, both our nations can show that moral courage and mutual respect are not weaknesses but strengths.
Closing
Like the friendship between Gandhi and Casey, the friendship between Australia and India endures. And in that friendship, Australians naturally look to learn from Gandhi, who arguably made a bigger impact on the world than any other Indian person in history.
As we mark the 156th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, we honour not just the Mahatma who liberated a nation, but the human being who showed that truth and compassion can outlast empires. Gandhi once said, ‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.’
May that spirit continue to guide both Australia and India: friends bound by history, strengthened by shared ideals and brightened, whenever possible, by a good laugh.
Sources
Casey, R.G. (1946) ‘Gandhi – A Saint Among Statesmen’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May, page 7
Chakraborty, P. (2024) ‘What Gandhi Thought of Australia’ Indian Link, 31 May
Daily Telegraph Service & Australian Associated Press (1945) ‘Gandhi Dumb in 75 Minute Conference with Casey.’ The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 5 December.
Dodson, P. (2012) Mahatma Gandhi Inaugural Oration. University of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 January.
Guterres, A. (2019) ‘Secretary-General’s Remarks at the Event: Leadership Matters – Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi in the Contemporary World.’ United Nations, New York, 24 September.
Kikon, D. and Bapuji, H. (2021) ‘Understanding Modern Attacks on Gandhi.’ Pursuit (University of Melbourne), 17 December.
Kirby, M. (2013) What Would Gandhi Say Today? Gandhi Oration, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 January.
Maclean, K. (2018) ‘A Colonial in the Colonies: Casey, Gandhi, and the Endgame of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 19(3): 1532-5768
Nandan, S. (2019) Gandhianjali. Canberra: Ivy Press International Publishers.
Orwell, G. (1949) ‘Reflections on Gandhi.’ Partisan Review. January.
Sydney Morning Herald (1948) ‘Gandhi Was Saint to the Hindus.’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 31 January, page 2.
Weber, T. (2018) ‘Gandhi, Piddington and Australia.’ Gandhi Marg Quarterly, 40(3&4): 135–146.
White, L. (2019) ‘Terania Creek Landmark Environmental Protest Remembered Four Decades On.’ ABC News Online, 17 August.
Ends