Page 139 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

As a nation, Australia has a relatively short and peculiar history. As we all know,
the modern nation–state of Australia grew out of a violent history of settler
colonialism, which was literally a process of land-grabbing on a huge scale. Once
the British Europeans had colonized the country, they claimed it as their own.
Moreover, they proceeded to claim exclusiveness of posession: Australia was to be
for them only, that is, for ‘the white man’ (as the famous slogan of The Bulletin,
Australia’s premier news magazine, stated). The very idea of a ‘white Australia’ was
an assertion of racial and spatial symbiosis, or at least the desirability thereof. The
fantasy was that the entire territorial space of Australia was to be for one race only,
the white race. The presence of all those who were not white was considered
undesirable, on the grounds that a superior race – the white race – should not mix
with inferior races. The seriousness of the matter was debated extensively in
Parliament in 1901, where most politicians were in agreement that, in the words
of one member , it is ‘our duty to preserve this island continent for all eternity for
the white race’ (King O’Malley, quoted in R. Hall 1998: 138). Measures were
therefore put in place to ensure, as much as possible, their removal from the
continent (for an overview, see Hay 1996). Conveniently, the original inhabitants
of the land, the Aborigines, who according to the racial theories that prevailed in
the late nineteenth century were placed on the lowest rank on the racial hierarchy,
were assumed to be a doomed race that would soon die out, assisted by actively
genocidal policies and practices of the British colonizers (McGregor 1997). On the
other hand, the ‘coloured races’, in particular the Chinese, Japanese and other
Asians, had to be kept from entering and settling into the country (and many of
those already in the country were thrown out). A central mechanism in the pursuit
of this objective was the Immigration Restriction Bill, implemented in 1901 as
soon as the new, federated nation–state of Australia was established. This measure
came to be known as the White Australia policy.
Of course, white racism was nothing extraordinary at the turn of the twentieth
century. It was, after all, a hallmark of the European sense of racial superiority at
a time when European imperialist hegemony was at its height. However, white
racism in the Australian context has peculiarities which have to do with the spatial
dimensions of this settler colonial project. Geographically, modern Australia was
on the other side of the (European) world from which it was born. The contra-
dictions of being ‘a far-flung outpost of Europe’ were deeply ingrained on the
white colonial Australian mind: the ‘mother country’ was so far away and yet so
emotionally overpowering. This produced a particularly antipodean sense of place,
a spatial consciousness of self and of the world moulded by the experience of
occupying this vast, distant land, which was perceived as nearly empty. The fact that
the gravity of settlement was largely in the southeast corner, where Captain Cook
first landed, only added to the sense of isolation and separateness.
After 1788, the great Southern land was progressively claimed by the expanding
British Empire until it annexed the entire Australian landmass in 1829. This huge
territorial claim was an act of supreme imperial might: unlike, for example, Canada,
which to this day has to negotiate the legacy of two competing European colonial

128