White Nationalism - Australia

Australia

The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to an influx of immigrants from all over the world. Over the next 20 years, 40,000 Chinese men and over 9,000 women immigrated to the goldfields seeking prosperity. Tensions between White and Chinese miners led to the Buckland Riot in 1857 and the Lambing Flat riots between 1860 and 1861. A Royal Commission was appointed on 16 November 1854 to address the problems and grievances of the Victorian goldfields. This led to restrictions being placed on Chinese immigration and residency taxes levied from Chinese residents in Victoria from 1855 with New South Wales following suit in 1861. These restrictions remained in force until the early 1870s.

The growth of the sugar industry in Queensland during the 1870s brought thousands of "Kanakas" (Pacific Islanders) into Australia as indentured workers. In the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement began a series of protests against foreign labor. Their arguments were that Asians and Chinese took jobs away from white men, worked for "substandard" wages, lowered working conditions and refused unionization. Of the more than 60,000 Islanders recruited from 1863, the majority were to be "repatriated" by the Australian Government between 1906-08 under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 legislation prompted by the White Australia policy. Despite the objections of wealthy landowners who argued that without Asiatics labor in the tropical areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland would have to be abandoned, between 1875-1888 all Australian colonies enacted legislation which excluded all further Chinese immigration. Asian immigrants already residing in the Australian colonies were not expelled and retained the same rights as White Australians.

The White Australia ideal was semi-official policy in Australia until 1975. The term White Australia Policy comprises various historical policies that intentionally restricted non-white immigration to Australia and allowed for the privileging of British migrants over all others through the first decades of the 20th century.

Australian historian, Charles Henry Pearson, published his work National Life and Character: A Forecast in 1893 in which he makes the argument that allowing "coloured" races into Australia would soon demographically swamp the continent's White population.

"We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year's surplus of population...Transform the Northern half of our continent into a Natal with thirteen out of fourteen belonging to an inferior race, and the Southern half will speedily approximate to the condition of a Cape Colony, where the whites are indeed a masterful minority, but still only as one in four."

Pearson's book caused a shock because it challenged the conventional wisdom about Western expansion, progress and triumph. Pearson argued, to the contrary, that it was the "Black and Yellow" races which were in the ascendant - powered by population increase and industrial capacity, in the case of the Chinese. He argued the so-called higher races, under the impact of declining birth rates and state socialism, had become "stationary." Colonized and otherwise subordinated peoples would soon escape relations of 'tutelage' and become self-governing states, active on the world stage. Pearson was a prophet of decolonization, and was immediately seen as such, with great attention paid to his theme of the white man under siege.

The argument strongly reinforced demands for a White Australia policy.

In August 1902 Prime Minister Edmund Barton, spoke in parliament in support of the White Australia policy; he quoted Pearson's disturbing forecast:

The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the Europeans; when Chinamen and the natives of Hindostan, the states of Central and South America, by that time predominantly Indian . . . are represented by fleets in the European seas, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies in quarrels of the civilized world. The citizens of these countries will then be taken up into the social relations of the white races, will throng the English turf or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to inter-marriage. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated.. . . We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be that the changes have been inevitable.

The Barton Government which won the first elections following Federation in 1901 was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party. The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers' Union and other labor organizations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded. The first Parliament of Australia quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's "British character," and the Pacific Island Labourers Act and the Immigration Restriction Act were passed shortly before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 limited immigration to Australia of various kinds of people, but most importantly through the introduction of a dictation test, which required a person seeking entry to Australia to write out a passage of fifty words dictated to them in any European language, not necessarily English, at the discretion of an immigration officer. The Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, argued in support of the Bill with the following statement: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The test allowed immigration officers to evaluate applicants on the basis of language skills. The test was a method which enabled immigration officials to exclude individuals on the basis of race without explicitly saying so. The test would be no less than fifty words long, and the passage chosen could often be very difficult, so that even if the test was given in English, a person was likely to fail. Although the test could theoretically be given to any person arriving in Australia, in practice it was given selectively on the basis of race. This test was later abolished in 1958.

Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce was a supporter of the White Australia Policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian Federal election.

At the start of the Second World War, Prime Minister John Curtin (ALP) reinforced the message of the White Australia Policy by saying: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."