‘The White Australia Nettle’: women’s internationalism, peace, and the White Australia Policy in the interwar years

Abstract

After Australia federated in 1901, the new Commonwealth government implemented policies that were aimed at establishing a system of labour protections for white male workers unparalleled around the world. This included introducing a number of bills that became known as the White Australia Policy (WAP), which sought to exclude non-white immigration to regulate any attempt to undercut the ‘white man’s wage’. After the Harvester judgement in 1907, which mandated a ‘living wage’ for a man and his family, the national identity of Australia as a ‘worker’s paradise’ and the widespread acceptance of the necessity of a ‘White Australia’ became intertwined. This article focuses on two women’s groups in Victoria immediately after World War I, who, because of their wartime experience, rethought their position on the policy of exclusion. The Sisterhood of International Peace (SIP) and the Women’s Peace Army were ‘non-party’ women’s groups formed in protest against the war, later to merge and become the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Pro-war groups considered them ‘unpatriotic’ because they promoted internationalism. Yet that internationalism, and the experience of travel made the women think differently about White Australia. Their experiences made them alert to overt racism, which they found distasteful. Yet the entangled policies of labour and exclusion made them unable to denounce the WAP entirely. This article examines the efforts of the SIP and the Peace Army to navigate the tension between the labour progressivism they admired and the racism that was so interlaced with its advancement in the WAP.