Contact, Friction, Exclusion : Australia’s “Utopian” Federation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the White Australia Policy, a restrictive immigration policy that existed from the Federation of the six Australian colonies in 1901 until Australia’s shift to a multicultural policy in the 1970s. The paper centres on the discourses and ideologies that justified the need for a white Australia at the time of Federation ; such discourses were structured around the postulate that contact between different cultures would necessarily lead to intense and unmanageable friction, and required the full exclusion of non-white others. Such a postulate seemed to be confirmed by the Australian colonies’ direct experience of race riots in the nineteenth century, but it was also supported by theorisations of racial conflict based on interpretations of James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888) and Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character : A Forecast (1893). Australia’s central postulate crystallised many of the tensions that characterised settler colonialism in the British Empire.