Page 113 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

the state to exclude or, in the case of the Aborigines, who were considered a
‘doomed race’, to extinguish those considered racially undesirable, that is, those
who are not ‘white’ (McGregor 1997). In Markus’s words:

Australians rejoiced that they were able to deal with racial problems
through a policy of exclusion: they looked forward to the realisation of
a ‘white Australia’, expecting that the inferior Aboriginal people would
die out and that the small, largely male, non-European populations still
left in the country would not be able to reproduce themselves.
(1988: 18)

Of course, we know all too well now that the indigenous people of the land did
not die out, as widely predicted at an earlier age, despite concerted efforts to speed
up this process through the compulsory assimilation of Aboriginal children into the
dominant, white culture by taking them away from their Aboriginal families
8
(the so-called Stolen Generation). The increasingly powerful self-assertion of
Aboriginal Australia in Australian national discourse since they were awarded
citizenship in 1967 shattered the illusion that white Australia would be spared the
return of the repressed. Indeed, if the issue of ‘race’ looms large in contemporary
Australia, it is first and foremost in connection with the unresolved political status
and social condition of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders within the nation.
In this respect it is significant that Aboriginal people are not generally included
in debates about multiculturalism, not least because Aborigines themselves have
generally refused to be treated as ‘another ethnic minority’. In this sense, the
framing of indigenous politics in terms of the discourse of ‘race’ – more precisely,
in relation to what is commonly called black/white reconciliation – signifies the
strategic importance of ‘race’ as a point of self-identification for Aboriginal people,
an identification which, ironically, was initially imposed on them by the European
colonizers. Today, however, their status as a ‘race’ enables them to make their
distinct political claims as the original inhabitants of the land, and not to be lumped
into the non-distinct liberal pluralist imaginary of multiculturalism.
Our focus in this chapter, however, is not on how White Australia attempted,
unsuccessfully, to extinguish the trace of ‘race’ within the geographical boundaries
of the nation–state, but on the consequences of the attempt to prevent non-white
‘races’ from coming into the country during the White Australia policy. For non-
white here, read, first and foremost, ‘Asian’. It is important here to stress that
support for a ‘white Australia’ was activated in large part through popular campaigns
against ‘coloured’ workers, mostly Chinese, in the late nineteenth century
(Curthoys and Markus 1978). However, the anti-Chinese movement was a broad
alliance across all classes, reflecting the deeply ingrained nature of racism through-
out the population, and the central role of the idea of the ‘yellow peril’ in the
cementing of national unity. These ideological links between racism, populism and
nationalism were sanctioned by the state, for whom racialist nationalism became
a central ideological project and policy instrument. With the official adoption of

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