White Australia Research Articles

Un-Australian? White Australia’s Visions of Identity and the Racialisation of the Pacific War

This article investigates white Australia’s racialisation of the Pacific War. Specifically, it focuses on contemporary disputes over racialised depictions of the conflict, and how such contentions figured in understandings of Australian identity. By looking at wartime newspaper and magazine articles, wartime propaganda, and the public responses to them, this article demonstrates the diversity and complexity of white Australia’s racialisation of the Pacific War. Though the view of the Pacific War as a ‘race war’ was certainly common among white Australians, it was not universal. That said, most white Australians at the time, regardless of whether they supported the racialisation of the conflict, upheld a racialised worldview.

White Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in Interwar Australia

AbstractPopular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.

Political representation of Asian Australians in liberal nationalist multiculturalism

ABSTRACT This article examines the political representation of Asian minorities in Australia. Utilising the case studies of the 2018 Victorian State Election and the 2019 Federal Election, it analyses how Asian candidates’ migratory, ethnic and politico-economic backgrounds shaped their pathways to politics. Based on publicly available data on Asian-heritage politicians and interviews with Asian Australians involving in party politics, the study finds both underlying challenges and emerging opportunities that Asian candidates continue to experience within Australia’s liberal nationalist multiculturalism. The study finds that institutional barriers, cultural fitness and Australia’s relations with Asian neighbours are key factors that contribute to the changing nature of Asian Australian political representation. Finally, it argues that while Australia’s migration programs have invited the skilled youth from Asia, the country’s historical White Australia policy and modern suspicion of ‘silent invasion’ still present challenges for Asian candidates in politics.

The migration heritage corridor: transnationalism, modernity and race

ABSTRACT Currently, heritage practice brings a nation-centric lens to the heritage of migration, privileging narratives of arrival and settlement over narratives of return, circulatory transnational flows, and cross-border connectivity. Drawing on the case of Chinese migration to Australia in the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, the ‘heritage corridor’ concept is proposed here as an aid in conceptualising a heritage that escapes the nation-state frame of reference. The aspirational modernity of Chinese migrants in this period led them to construct new houses, schools, and infrastructure in their home villages in China using money earned in Australia, even though in Australia at this time Chinese migrants were characterised as premodern misfits by a white majority that saw itself as modern and progressive. In relegating Chinese migrants to the past, white Australia conferred on them a state of non-belonging that I argue is perpetuated in the country’s heritage system by a form of structural racism which, embedded in site listing processes, minimises the visibility of Chinese Australians in the heritage record.

‘Primitive, Antique, and Modern’: An Exhibition of Music in Interwar Sydney and the ‘Australian’ Music Question

ABSTRACT In 1933, the city of Sydney hosted the first dedicated musical exhibition in Australia. Showcasing historic instruments, manuscripts, and ephemera in the settler-colonial society of Australia, this exhibition raised uncomfortable questions about the nation’s history. This article explores the exhibition in the context of contemporary musical culture and collecting practices, arguing that this event physically manifests ongoing debates about the formation of Australian social and cultural identity. Its displays demonstrate both a desire for connection with European traditions and an increasing awareness of Australia’s position in the Pacific and white Australia’s relationship with First Nations people and culture.

Past–Present Differential Inclusion: Australia’s Targeted Deportation of Pacific Islanders, 1901 to 2021

In Australia, past and present, Pacific Islanders have been labelled as undesirable others, included to temporarily fill labour shortages as required, controlled while resident in the country and removed when no longer deemed necessary. Pacific Islanders’ experiences in Australia reveal the inception, continuity and durability of differential inclusion produced by border control mechanisms. This paper traces Australia’s history of deporting Pacific Islanders over more than a century: from indentured labour and blackbirding, colonial occupation of Pacific Islands and the White Australia Policy, to more recent patterns of selective inclusion, such as the labour mobility schemes, to the disproportionate effects on Pacific Islanders of modifications to the criteria for deportability introduced in 2014 with the amendments to Section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). By tracing the past–present circular border policies, this paper argues that the high number of Pasifika New Zealanders deported from Australia represents a continuation of a regime of differential inclusion.

The Comfort of Things in White Australia: Male Immigrants, Race and the Three-Piece Suit, c.1901–39

Within a decade of moving to Australia in 1897, Japanese immigrant Setsutaro Hasegawa commissioned a number of three-piece suits and separates from a local tailor. Hasegawa perhaps found it difficult to afford this clothing, given his occupation as a laundryman at the time. Using Hasegawa as a case study, this article highlights the importance of three-piece suits for masculine dignity and belonging in Australia during the heyday of the White Australia Policy. More specifically, the article emphasises the role of what it calls ‘quietly stylish’ suits for non-white, self-consciously respectable, lower middle-class migrants such as Hasegawa. Using perspectives from material culture studies and foregrounding the under-researched topic of dress (especially men’s dress) among Australian social historians of the early twentieth century, we suggest that such suits helped their wearers to subtly assert their manhood, be accepted in their local communities and more generally feel comfortable in this ‘white man’s country’.

Integration Challenges of Immigrants from Non-English-Speaking Backgrounds in Australia

Abstract Migrants have played a crucial role in shaping the history of Australian society and its development, particularly after 1975, when Australia formally dismantled its White Australia Policy and welcomed immigrants from around the world. Since then, millions of immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds have settled in Australia. This review aims to critically discuss the main challenges that many of these immigrants face as part of their integration process in Australia. For this research, various large and relevant databases were considered and searched. And by applying ‘inclusion and exclusion criteria’, fifty-six major articles published between 1975 to 2021 were selected for critical review and analysis. The findings of this research indicate that, while there have been changes to streamline the process of integration and improve services, five clusters of major challenges have confronted immigrants since 1975: the labour market, racism and discrimination, the language barrier, social connections and housing and accommodation.

Images of Chinese in Australian nationalist literature

This article focuses on images of Chinese in the work of Australian nationalist writers. It discusses the manifestations of, and rationale for, images of Chinese as “others,” “scapegoats,” and “round characters” in three categories: distorted images of the lower-class Chinese, demonized images of Chinese merchants, and true-to-life Chinese images. The distorted and demonized images reveal Australians’ cultural cringe during the nationalist period and the xenophobic psychology of building a White Australia, whereas those Chinese portrayed as normal and realistic are culturally Australianized Chinese. These images of Chinese are all characteristic of a post-1880s historical moment in which racist ideas prevailed within Australian nationalist sentiment.

Protecting Australian Protected Persons

This article examines the changing concepts of racialised citizenship in two intertwined nations: the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (‘PNG’) and the Commonwealth of Australia (‘Australia’), PNG’s former colonial ruler, as the latter sought to shake off the legacies of its recently abandoned ‘White Australia’ policy. It examines the historical intersection between PNG’s developing citizenship criteria, with its racialised articulation of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’, and Australia’s efforts to recast its image on the international stage as a multi-racial, non-racist and anti-imperial nation. Specifically, it demonstrates how the intersection of these policy choices impacted on a particular cohort of so-called ‘Australian Protected Persons’ (‘APPs’). APPs who happened also to fall outside PNG’s citizenship criteria were left stateless at PNG’s independence. Drawing on newly released Australian archival material, this article casts light on the particular historical moment that allowed for this outcome.

Influxes and invaders: the intersections between the metaphoric construction of immigrant otherness and ethnonationalism

ABSTRACT Metaphors are a feature of public immigration discourse, with “undesirable” immigrants referred to as invasions, influxes, and floods both in the press and by politicians. Within Australia, such metaphors date back to the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the gold rushes (1850s), reoccurring with every large-scale arrival of non-white immigrants. Enacting racialized immigration restrictions was one of the foundational acts of the new Australian nation (1901), with whiteness enshrined as fundamental to national identity within the White Australia policy. Yet despite the abolition of the policy in the 1970s and the shift to multiculturalism, increasing non-white immigration has been accompanied by an intensification of negative immigration metaphors. I argue that this is because metaphors which construct racialized immigrant Otherness simultaneously flag ethnonationalist understandings about what it means to be Australian by implicitly centring (Anglo) whiteness as the defining feature of Australian national identity in a way no longer explicitly possible.

Social Quarantining in the Construction and Maintenance of White Australia

While medical quarantining has (again) received widespread attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparatively little consideration has been given to how medical quarantining is entangled with socio-political life. Further, there are no known studies that consider how quarantine might also be employed as a socio-political practice. This article explores the concept of social quarantine by tracing the creation of white Australia via the social construction, excise and discipline of Indigenous peoples as a potentially contagious Other. It shows how social quarantine integrates largely disparate sociological concepts/literatures (e.g. bordering, (im)mobility, confinement, enclave society, discipline, eugenics, assimilation), demonstrating how they unite under settler colonialism as a powerful assemblage of disciplinary technologies. Social quarantine also makes visible how the threat of contamination has been central to constructing and protecting Australia’s (white) imagined nationhood from the perceived disease of Otherness.

Morton’s memento? Reading Indigenous counter-networks in the ‘post’-colonial museum

This article considers the use of Indigenous counter-networks as a methodology for the research and interpretation of Pacific objects and images in Australian museum collections. A photographic album from the collections of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is used as a case study to demonstrate how historical visual materials may be comparatively analysed alongside written archives to excavate Indigenous networks. The article considers the migration of eleven Queensland South Sea Islander (SSI) men to the Australian Territory of Papua (Papua New Guinea) in 1907. It seeks to reinscribe the album with Indigenous presence and perspective, uncovering traces of SSI movement, resistance, and acculturation to colonial society in response to the White Australia policy in Queensland and Papua in the early twentieth-century.

“Am I Chinese before I am a woman or am I a woman first?”: Gender and Racial Melancholia in Brian Castro's The Garden Book

ABSTRACT The female protagonist in The Garden Book is the site of both imaginary and symbolic fantasy, as well as the melancholic real. In this article, I explore how a Chinese-Australian woman comes to inhabit a melancholic position of racial and gendered difference, and how Brian Castro, through his portrayal, deconstructs identity markers such as race, gender and nation. Born and raised in Australia, Swan is a legitimate Australian citizen. However, her Asian appearance and gender identity compromise her legitimacy as a subject of the Australian nation-state. The Chinese-Australian woman as image and fantasy of Oriental femininity becomes a spectre, an “Other” haunting the history and memory of white Australia. Castro’s writing shows how racial and sexual difference constructs and deconstructs identity, individual as well as national. In Swan’s case, gendered racialisation derived from imperialism disrupts the coherence of national citizenship. Reading the character of Swan as presented through the eyes of the men in her life, this article provides an alternative site where what is excluded, disavowed and lost in white Australia becomes visible. Swan’s racial and gendered melancholia allows us to see imperial violence and colonial eroticism at the heart of cultural essentialism and nationalism.

Black bodies, Black queens, and the Black sisterhood on social media: perspectives from young African women in Australia

ABSTRACT African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the highly racialised experiences that Black African women encounter living in bodies that are raced as Black in Australia. Within their (in)visibility and ‘otherness’ – they are looked upon in suspicion and yet also ignored, silenced and excluded. Their bodies are involuntarily marked as ‘deficit’ and ‘deviant’, resulting in disadvantage, alienation, and non-belonging. Through the theoretical lens of (in)visibility, we centre the racialisation of the Black African body as crucial to the digital practices that young Black African women in Australia engage in on social media. In drawing on a multi-method approach involving social media ethnography, the ‘scroll-back’ interview method, and sustained, ongoing dialogues on social media, this article explores the everyday social media practices of nine young Black African women in Australia. The findings indicate that social media is used to visibilise and (re)claim contemporary Black African womanhood, amongst a global digitally mediated community of Black African women. These, Black female-centred empowerment digital communities are important spaces in which young Black African women in Australia can unlearn, resist, and reject the harmful racialised ideologies that they have endured (and continue to endure) in white Australia.

Racialized (Im)mobilities: The Pandemic and Sinophobia in Australia

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. This paper examines (im)mobilities in Australia in the context of Asian, and more specifically Chinese-Australian citizens and residents, and how these have been framed in racialized discourses that justified exclusionary practices reminiscent of the White Australia ideology. The paper focuses on how Chinese Australians’ mobilities have been (mis)represented and attacked in public and political discourse with particular attention to the situation of Chinese international students’ (im)mobilities. Our conceptual attention in this paper, however, is not only on the racialization of mobilities but also immobilities, underpinned by an understanding of the relationality between Othered ‘migrants’ and hosts, as well as between mobility and immobility. We conclude by discussing future patterns of mobility, how these will impact prospective migrants including international students, and what future forms of mobilities might mean for Australia as a country highly dependent on migrants for its economic, social and cultural development.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Selling White Australia: the Asian visits fund and assimilation as a foundational concept in Australian Cold War public diplomacy

ABSTRACT The ‘Asian Visits Fund’ was the Australian Government’s first Cold War people-to-people public diplomacy programme. Standing in the Fund’s way was Australia’s racially restrictive immigration programme. A central feature of the scheme, therefore, was to present a vision of a non-racial Australia through the new national ideology of Assimilation. The treatment of indigenous Australians was showcased as one way to highlight Assimilation and debunk broader claims of racism. Ultimately, however, the Asian Visits Fund was unable to alter the negative perception of Australia’s immigration policy. It was the last major initiative aimed at selling the unsellable ‘White Australia Policy’.

Renegotiating Ireland, Transnational History, and Settler Colonialism in White Australia

AbstractEfforts to transcend island histories in Irish historiography have predominantly centered a narration of white settler pasts as an outer boundary of Irish history. This article works through the disjunctions between differently situated transnational turns in Irish and Australian historiographies by interrogating metaphors of extension, including “Greater Ireland” in the former historiography. It proposes that to decenter the nation as a historical unit, transnational Irish history requires a critical tension with white settler, and not only Irish, methodological nationalisms. The article surveys the critical possibilities presented by the transnational turn in Irish historiography while questioning its limits, with attention to the paradigm of a transnational Irish revolution. It then flags possible directions for a closer dialogue between transnational Irish history and postnational historiographies of white settler colonialism. An unsettling of discrete historiographical boundaries remains a necessary condition for tracing histories of Ireland beyond, below, and outside the nation.

Burden of the Beast

Burden of the Beast