Comment: Who Our Enemies Are: Andrew Markus and the Baloney View of Australian Racism

Abstract

The editors of this journal have kindly invited me to reply to Andrew Markus's article in the last issue, without waiting the customary two or three years for publication. This is a once-in-a-lifetime offer I cannot refuse. Markus's 'Comment: Explaining the treatment of non-European immigrants in nineteenth century Australia' is not what its title suggests, but a full-scale assault on my position on the question, first published seven years ago in the Who Are Our Enemies? collection edited by himself and Ann Curthoys. Is Markus slow to respond, or was he goaded into frenetic intellectual endeavour by my temerity last year in pointing to a resemblance between the explanation of Australian racism espoused by Markus and that of Geoffrey Blainey? I suspect the latter, as Andrew and I had for the six intervening years cheerfully debated our differences over the occasional capuccino or vegetarian pizza. The vitriolic piece aimed at Blainey, which I am sorry to find inadvertently offended Markus, alluded to Markus's contribution to what I designated as 'the baloney view' of Australian racism: the long line of working-class-beating and immigrant-bashing historiography which finds merely its best-known exponent in the guise of Professor Blainey. I wrote: Most recently, Andrew Markus's Fear and Hatred, published in 1979, claims that the late nineteenth century opposition to non-European immigration is best understood as 'part of a broader battle to maintain established standards by restricting access to the labour market'. He explicitly denies a racial motivation in the first instance, arguing that the experience of contact with coloured workers or gold diggers came first, and that this experience then led to the expression of racial sentiment. To substantiate this argument, he depicts pre-gold rush Australia as a land innocent of racial passions, agreeing with the original thesis of R?ssel Ward before his intellectual mea culpa on the subject that just preceded the publication of Markus's book. Markus insists the gold rush Chinese were welcomed at first, before being rejected as economic com petitors. In other words, the Chinese immigrants caused Australian racism; Markus blames the activities of the objects of prejudice for the creation of the prejudice against them. Though Markus abhors the racism that he believes only belatedly manifested itself in our society, and does not seek to defend the White Australia Policy, he does share with Blainey and the other proponents of this orthodox interpretation the unfortunate conviction that racism is something that is caused by immi grants and affects most strongly the members of the working class.1