Page 112 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS

Creating White Australia: ‘race’ as absent centre
When the Commonwealth of Australia was established in 1901, it immediately
adopted an Immigration Restriction Bill, which became the basis for the infamous
White Australia Policy. This bill prohibited the immigration into Australia by ‘non-
Europeans’ or ‘the coloured races’. The fact that this bill was the very first major
legislative issue dealt with by the parliament of the newly-created nation–state
suggests the perceived importance of ‘racial purity’ as the symbolic cement for
the imagined community of the fledgling nation (Markus 1979). This bluntly
exclusionary policy on the basis of ‘race’ should not simply be interpreted, with
the wisdom and political correctness of hindsight, as the mere expression of white
supremacist prejudice. After all, the policy was implemented at a critical moment
in the development of a new nation. In this respect the White Australia policy
can be seen, in an important sense, as a nationalist policy, reflecting the new
nation–state’s desire to construct a modern national identity based on (a British-
based) racial and cultural homogeneity (see further Stratton and Ang 1998). In light
of this modernist desire – not unusual in a time of intense European nationalism
and hegemonic imperialism (Hobsbawm 1990) – the exclusion of non-white
racial/cultural Others was logical and inevitable. In other words, philosophically
speaking, the White Australia policy implied the official and explicit racialization
of Australian national identity, based on a discourse of homogeneity that collapses
culture into race.
It is important to remark here that at the beginning of the twentieth century
Australia deemed itself extremely well placed to achieve a racially pure, and purely
white, utopia. The rhetoric of white racial purity was constantly rehearsed in
speeches and editorials surrounding the birth of the new nation, and was a crucial
element of the national popular consciousness. As Richard White observes:

In a society which dreaded the mixing of races as debilitating in the
struggle for survival, in a society which was becoming more and more
obsessive in its desire to protect . . . racial ‘purity’ . . . the outlook of 1901
was promising. It could be proclaimed that the new nation was 98 per cent
British, more British than any other dominion, some said more British
than Britain itself.
(1981: 112)

According to the 1901 census, the largest non-British migrant groups were the
Germans (1 per cent) and the Chinese (0.8 per cent). In this context, in contrast
to, for example, the United States where ‘race’ was historically always-already an
internal national issue because of the uneradicable legacy of slavery, in Australia the
salience of ‘race’ was elided in daily life: it was the ‘absent centre’ which made it
possible to imagine the national community as virtually completely white, where
the very issue of ‘race’ could be relegated to the realm of the outside world, far
removed from the national domestic sphere. In a very straightforward way, ‘race’
marked the conceptual limits of the national imagined community, sanctioning

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