Page 114 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS

the White Australia policy the number of Chinese and other ‘coloured’ people in
the country dwindled significantly in the course of the first half of the twentieth
century. This trend was not reversed until the final dismantling of the racially
discriminatory immigration restrictions, which took place around the same time
as the introduction of multiculturalism, in the early 1970s.
While similar policies were, of course, in place in other European settler societies
such as Canada, there is a specificity about the political and ideological desire to
be a ‘white nation’ in early twentieth-century Australia. Australia’s antipodean
geographical location as a ‘far-flung outpost of Europe’, its spatial detachment and
the seeming naturalness of its borders as an island-continent promoted the idea early
on that in Australia ‘it was possible to control contact with the rest of the world
in a manner not possible for most other nations’ (Evans et al. 1997: 205). At the
same time, as David Walker (1997: 133) puts it, ‘the need to live in relatively close
proximity to awakening Asia lent a certain drama and intensity to the Australian
situation, it conferred a special status on Australia as a continent set aside for the
development of the white race’. Indeed, the desire to keep Asians out was an
important rationale for the massive population build-up after World War Two
(about which more below). As demographer Charles Price wrote about the early
post-war period: ‘the country felt that the best answer to the international cry that
it should open its unused land and resources to Asia’s crowded millions was to
populate the continent and develop its resources with as many white persons as
possible’ (quoted in Brawley 1996: 237).
Gradually dismantled in practice from the mid-1960s, the official abolition
of the White Australia policy was formalized only in 1972, when the Labor
Government of Gough Whitlam finally scrapped all references to ‘race’ from
immigration law. This was, of course, the same government which introduced
multiculturalism as a diversity-oriented population management policy. That these
two radical policy shifts – the scrapping of racially discriminatory immigration policy
and the official sanctioning of cultural diversity through a policy of multiculturalism
– took place around the same time, the early 1970s, has made it easy for them to
be conflated in the national cultural imaginary. From this time on, it is constantly
reiterated, Australia no longer discriminates ‘on racial grounds’ when it comes to
selecting potential immigrants. John Howard too, for example, has always insisted
that ‘non-discrimination is a non-negotiable element of Australia’s immigration
programme’ (1997). This shift was indeed a qualitative change, which made it
possible for large numbers of people generally classified as ‘non-white’ – particularly
from Asian countries – to migrate to Australia, and which has resulted in the
multiracial outlook of Australian society as we know it today. 9
What we want to highlight here is that the very deletion of the reference to ‘race’
in immigration law in the early 1970s represented a radical epistemological break
in the official national discourse on who could now be included in ‘the Australian
people’. While ‘race’ was all-important in earlier times, now ‘race’ was officially,
suddenly, declared completely unimportant, at least in principle. 10 The symbolic
importance of this break for the redefinition of the nation’s imagined community

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