Page 143 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

within a changing configuration of international relations. If the international
acceptability of (the desire for a) White Australia depended on the hegemony
of the Colonial World Order within which it was conceived (see Lowe 1997), the
post-war process of decolonization and the emergence of a postcolonial world
unsettled the political, not to say the moral legitimacy of Australia’s policy of
racial exclusivism, which was, in Sean Brawley’s (1996: 242) words, ‘a bright red
rag to Asian sensibilities’. The dismantling of the British Empire ‘no longer offered
Australia a security umbrella’ (Goldsworthy 1997: 155), while the newly decolo-
nized nation–states in Australia’s near north posed an unprecedented challenge to
the very tenets of faith on which White Australia was built. Australian authorities
were intensely aware that the White Australia policy was liable to international
challenge in a post-Holocaust world grown more sensitive to the injustices of racial
discrimination and intolerance. But the emotional attachment and ideological
commitment to a White Australia were so great that they long remained a dominant
factor in post-war population policies.
Thus, the decision for a massive increase in immigration intake with people from
Europe – which, incidentally, implied a dilution of the definition of ‘whiteness’
beyond the preferred notion of ‘Britishness’ – was driven explicitly by a desire to
keep Australia white, and to keep Asia out. There was a strong belief that without
a massive population build-up Australia was in danger of facing annihilation:
‘populate or perish’. 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). Seen from this perspective, the post-war immigration policy,
which provided the seeds for the future policy of multiculturalism some three
decades later, was negatively motivated, inspired by fear, not by the positive
envisioning of a new, more inclusive future.
The gradual decline of the White Australian dream was given a massive impetus
in the late 1960s, when the Aborigines were finally recognized as full citizens in
1967. But it was in the mid-1970s when the social impact of the end of the White
Australia policy was only truly felt, with the admission of thousands of Indochinese
refugees in the wake of the war in Vietnam. It should be noted that Australia’s
decision to take in these refugees, too, was made in the context of high level
international pressure (Viviani 1996). The so-called ‘boat people’ ‘jarred Australians
living in their peaceful and stable society to a greater awareness of how near they
were to a turbulent South-East Asia’ (Lawrence 1983: 26). Their arrival marked
the effective beginning of Australia’s willy-nilly transformation into a multiracial
(and not just multicultural) society. This development was an unintended con-
sequence of world events beyond the nation’s own control; it was not something
actively willed by the Australian community itself.
There was, then, over the years a slow but inevitable erosion of Australia’s
sovereign capacity to retain a sense of racial/spatial singularity and separateness, as
the world changed quickly and irrevocably. The (idea of) White Australia was

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