Page 127 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

cultural homogeneity was seen as a necessary precondition for the new imagined
community of the Australian nation, and the desire for homogeneity inevitably
implied the exclusion of racial/cultural others. 2
Due to Australia’s geographical location, these ‘others’ were generally imagined
as coming from the ‘near north’, that is, from Asia. Indeed, one of the most salient
motives for the unification of the five separate colonies into a federated Australia
was the common desire of the colonies to develop more effective policies to keep
out Chinese immigrants (Markus 1979; Rolls 1996). The Chinese, who came to
Australia from 1848 onwards, were increasingly resented because they proved
to be highly efficient, hard-working and economically competitive. This was
experienced as a threat to the livelihood of the European settlers, who were
themselves recent arrivals in the antipodes and were still struggling to make a living
in a new, unfamiliar and barely developed environment. Webb and Enstice put it
this way:

Where Aborigines had been dismissed quite early as incapable of being
absorbed into a European economic model, the Chinese were vilified for
the very efficiency with which they fitted in. Cultural and racial differences
were merely convenient ways of identifying and attacking what – from
the point of view of the individual European immigrant trying to establish
a sound economic base – was soon perceived as the economic enemy.
(1998: 131)

If anti-Chinese sentiment in nineteenth-century Australia was born of economic
anxiety, the solution to ‘the Chinese problem’ then was an aggressive politics of
exclusion – an exclusion which was legitimated through the language of ‘race’.
Australia was emphatically appropriated ‘for the White Man’, as the masthead of
The Bulletin, the national current affairs magazine, had it until it was finally removed
as late as 1960 (Lawson 1983). Ever since the goldfield days more than a century
ago, white Australians were afraid of being ‘swamped by Asians’, as Pauline Hanson
puts it in the 1990s. This fear could be repressed, or at least held at bay, as long as
self-protective policies could be maintained which would secure keeping Australia
white. ‘The ideology of race’, observes historian Luke Trainor (1994: 89), ‘met the
needs of many elements of Australian society’ during this period.
Since the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, which formed
the basis for what came to be known as the White Australia policy, the number of
Chinese and other ‘coloured’ people (or, to use another term of exclusion, ‘non-
Europeans’) in the country dwindled significantly – a trend not reversed until the
final dismantling of the White Australia policy in the early 1970s, when a so-called
‘non-discriminatory’ immigration policy was finally introduced. 3
Interestingly, as about one hundred years ago, economic considerations are
pervasive in justifications for today’s determined elision of ‘race’ as a marker of
distinction in immigration regulations. However, in contrast with one hundred
years ago, today the official rhetoric states that it is important to include Asians

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