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I N THE 1960s, as Australia underwent significant social change at the tail end of Sir Robert Menzies’ prime ministership, the far right started to slowly re-emerge, having been quite dormant in the immediate post-war years as the conservative Liberal–Country Party pursued an anti-communist agenda and the continuance of the “White Australia Policy”, the highly restrictive immigration control system that had been in place since Federation in 1901. With the beginnings of the political and cultural radicalism of the late 1960s in Australia, predominantly the
168 9 From ‘White Australia’ to ‘the race question in America’: Confronting racial diversity In 2009, the controversial Melbourne tabloid columnist Andrew Bolt wrote an article criticising white-skinned people who identified as Aboriginal for the purpose of taking up indigenous awards and scholarships. One of those he targeted was a newly named Fulbrighter. Mark McMillan was a legal scholar who had just been awarded the 2009 Fulbright Indigenous scholarship (discussed in chapter ten). The irony would not be lost on McMillan, who was heading to Arizona State
becoming a part of a White Australia. Colonialism, Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun argue, ‘constructs narratives of time , in ways that create particular political relationships in the present, and attempts to move itself through time to a certain political future’. 26 The story Lugard told was useful and usable in the north Australian context. It enabled the discursive transformation of a colonial situation into a pastoral frontier, establishing a teleological relation between the different articulations manifested in the reserve, the
Masters and servants explores the politics of colonial mastery and domestic servitude in the neighbouring British tropical colonies of Singapore and Darwin. Like other port cities throughout Southeast Asia, Darwin and Singapore were crossroads where goods, ideas, cultures and people from the surrounding regions mixed and mingled via the steam ships lines. The focus of this book is on how these connections produced a common tropical colonial culture in these sites. A key element of this shared culture was the presence of a multiethnic entourage of domestic servants in colonial homes and a common preference for Chinese ‘houseboys’. Through an exploration of master-servant relationships within British, white Australian and Chinese homes, this book illustrates the centrality of the domestic realm to the colonial project. The colonial home was a contact zone which brought together European colonists, non-white migrants and Indigenous people, most often through the domestic service relationship. Rather than a case of unquestioned mastery and devoted servitude, relationships between masters and servants had the potential not only to affirm but also destabilise the colonial hierarchy. The intimacies, antagonisms and anxieties of the relationships between masters and servants provide critical insights into the dynamics of colonial power with the British empire.
–servant relationship at once affirmed and undermined colonial power relations is expressed in British and white Australian men’s representations of their Chinese servants in novels, travel stories, memoirs, newspaper articles and photographs. A critical reading of these texts, unpacking the intended and unintended messages contained within them, sheds light on white men’s assertions of power in the home as well their
Chinese cooks and house-boys who were available when I first went to Darwin for £2 a month can now command £20 a month for their services, and you must be careful to give your cook courteous notification if you desire to bring a guest home to dinner. 1 (Mrs Finnis, a member of the white Australian
as “home”, white Australians have a long history of pushing memories of their own disruptive arrival to one side, as though their physical presence were the upshot of innate historical forces untouched by human agency. This is partly a matter of scale. So comprehensive was the colonization of Australia – and so uncompromising in its claims – that it became that much easier to screen out memories of prior habitation. But it is also about security of tenure. For the best part of two centuries, reconciling violent histories of invasion and wholesale massacres with
White Australia Policy, which was tacitly accepted even by progressive, liberal organisations. 7 Tennant, who joined but was swiftly expelled from the Australian Communist Party in 1935, pursued her activism and independence with a single-minded rigour throughout her life. 8 She campaigned on a wide range of progressive causes, from Aboriginal rights to nuclear testing, peace and women’s rights, and in so doing attracted the attention of the Australian Secret Service, which compiled a 30-page dossier on her, intercepting personal letters and recording her
of 1901, one of the first substantive pieces of legislation, along with the Pacific Island Labourers Act and the Post and Telegraph Act (also of 1901), passed by the national Government after Federation. Through the legislative framework of White Australia (the popular, rather than official, label for these policies), non-Europeans were effectively excluded from the new nation
political fund. Contributions to the Labour Party could be made from this fund, with members being able to ‘contract out’ from the ‘political levy’ if they so wished. In practice ‘most of the ballots went in favour of establishing political funds’ and the BLP benefited accordingly from the injection of funds provided by the burgeoning wartime and post-war union movement. 10 In Australia the ALP ’s primary commitment to the unions was demonstrated by its programmatic support for ‘White Australia’ and compulsory