From The Enigmatic Mister Deakin (Judith Brett, 2017)
INTRODUCTION
ALFRED DEAKIN WAS born two years after Ned Kelly in the new British colony of Victoria. Kelly’s parents were an Irish ex-convict from Van Diemen’s Land and his spirited young Irish wife. Deakin was the only son of respectable gold rush immigrants, one of the thousands of young couples who left England in the late 1840s for a better life abroad. When Kelly’s father crossed Bass Strait in 1848 at the expiry of his sentence, it was only fourteen years since the Henry Brothers had settled at Portland and begun to open up the Port Phillip District to Europeans and their sheep. The white population was fifty thousand, with fifteen thousand of them living in Melbourne, which was already established as the capital.1 The indigenous population had been decimated by smallpox and venereal disease which had travelled ahead of the invaders, by the destruction of food sources when the men and sheep arrived, and by frontier violence. Richard Broome estimates that by 1850 the indigenous Population of the District was a mere 10 per cent of pre-invasion levels.
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Ch 23 ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND ACTING PRIME MINISTER (pp264-8)
ON 7 AUGUST 1901 Edmund Barton introduced the Immigration Restriction Bill to federal parliament. The achievement of a White Australia had been one of the motivations for federation. It was supported by all sectional groups, except for the sugar planters of North Queensland, who wanted to continue to import indentured Pacific Island labourers. For Labor it was the first item of its platform.
Holding a copy of Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character, Barton quoted its warnings: ‘We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus population.’ Restrictive legislation was thus based on ‘the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience’. Appealing to the precedent of colonial legislation on the Chinese question, the aim, Barton said, was uniform legislation to restrict the immigration of undesirable immigrants. The main target was coloured immigration, but also to be excluded were the criminal, the insane and the diseased.
Deakin’s eloquent second-reading speech in support of this bill has become the best-known defence of the White Australia policy, quoted repeatedly in history books and school texts. The legislation, he argued, was as much about the projected future nation as the present one, for in a population of around four million people there were only about eighty thousand ‘coloured aliens’. (The indigenous population was not included.) Today’s Australians, especially the Australian-born, he said, were conscious of their endowment of political freedom and felt an ‘obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded’. It was the note of nationality, he argued, ‘which gives dignity and importance to this debate’.
The unity of Australia is nothing if it does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix and intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals, of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought – the same constitutional training and traditions – a people qualified to live under this Constitution – the broadest and most liberal perhaps the world has yet seen reduced to writing. . .Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia. It is more, actually, in the last resort than any other unity. After all when the period of confused local politics and temporary division was swept aside it was this real unity that made the Commonwealth possible.2 ,, .
Contemporary Australians regard the White Australia policy as a blot on the nation’s past, a product of fear and loathing of a racialised other as the new nation turned away from its region to ensure its place in a white man’s world. We need to exercise our historical imagination to understand why Australians at the beginning of the twentieth century could regard it as an expression of high ideals. Yes, boundaries keep outsiders out, but they also enable those inside to co-operate to achieve common goals.
In the parliamentary debates and in the press, many different reasons were given for supporting a White Australian: physical repulsion at the prospect of interracial marriage; the protection of Australian workers’ wages and conditions from competition with lower-paid workers; avoidance of the interracial violence which had marred the south of the United States and led to the Civil War; the inability of uneducated people who did not speak English to participate as equal citizens in Australian democracy; the creation of vice-ridden ghettoes; fear that the small Australian population just starting its national journey would be swamped by people of a different culture and race; the desire to avoid significant populations of foreign nationals that would give foreign governments an excuse to intervene in Australia’s affairs; strategic fears focussed on a modernising, militarising Japan. There is a mix here of nationalism, Social Darwinism, strategic fears, racial loathing, industrial protection and social-liberal aspirations for an active citizenry.3 As a policy it was massively over-determined, with different sectional groups drawing on different strands that all led to the same conclusion: the immigration of non-white people to Australia should be restricted. When Deakin said that ‘the unity of Australia is nothing if it does not imply a united race’ he was making a claim that most westerners at the time regarded as self-evident, that people who shared a culture and history should be united in one self-governing polity. This ideal of the nation-state formed during the nineteenth century in the liberal struggles for constitutional self-government against monarchic, aristocratic and imperial rule. All Australians with an interest in public affairs knew John Stuart Mill’s chapter on nationality in his On Representative Government, and its arguments informed Deakin’s speech:
A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others – which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves, exclusively. . . Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government‘ cannot exist.
Setting out to build a new nation, which was already almost totally culturally homogeneous, it was incontrovertible to the Australian whim that they would strive to maintain it. Why would they willingly mute the sorts of racial and cultural divisions that, in their experience, led to violence, conflict and degradation for white and coloured alike? Over and again the Australians pointed to the racial violence of ‘the negro problem‘ in the United States, and of blackbirding in the Pacific. Indigenous Australians barely figured in these debates. Their welfare had been left to the states, and they were assumed to be a dying race. Deakin expressed the pious empty hope that ‘in their last hours they will be able to recognise not simply the justice but the generosity of the treatment which the white race, who are dispossessing them and entering into their heritage, are according them’. He told Morning Post readers that ‘the aboriginal race has died out in the South and is dying fast in the North and West even when most gently treated.’ Clearly It gave Australia’s native peoples barely a passing thought. They had no place in his projected future nation, and he had deaf ears and blind eyes to the violence, exploitation and neglect they had suffered at the hands of the invaders, and continued to suffer.
Nationalism was a modernising project, building identities and moral communities which transcended local and parochial identifications. Over the little more than a hundred years since white settlement began in Australia, some regional loyalties had developed, but these were weak compared with the deep-rooted provincial and ethnic identities of the old world. And the colonists had worked hard to keep sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics in check. For Deakin the nation manifested humanity’s evolution towards higher unities and expressed both natural law and divine purpose, though this upward progression had not yet embraced the universal human rights of contemporary cosmopolitanism.
The only point of contention in the legislation was how the exclusion was to be achieved. Chamberlain had made it clear that any direct reference to race would be painful to Her Majesty, as the head of an empire ‘whose traditions make no distinctions in favour or against race or colour’. Her Majesty’s Indian subjects would be offended, but so would Britain’s new ally, Japan. Japan had no objection to immigration restriction as such, and itself had measures to prevent the immigration of Chinese labourers, but it objected to its civilised subjects being classed with ‘Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians and other Eastern peoples’, and thought the Japanese should be treated in the same way as Europeans.
Faced with a similar dilemma, the small British South African colony of Natal had used an education test, and several Australian colonies had adopted similar solutions. The legislation Barton introduced proposed an English-language test. After objections that this would not exclude the clever Indian, Japanese or Chinese, but would bar many desirable prospective European immigrants, this was amended to a test in any European language. Thus, the notorious dictation test was born, with absolute discretion in the hands of the customs officers administering it to choose the language in which it would be given and so ensure that all non-white applicants would fail.
It was a devious and hypocritical solution. Why couldn’t the new nation at its outset adopt a straightforward method of exclusion and say exactly what it meant, asked the acting Opposition leader, Sir William McMillan? Labor agreed, and proposed prohibiting anyone who was an ‘aboriginal native of Asia or Africa’. If Australia stood up to Britain, would the monarch really withhold assent to the legislation? Labor and the Opposition argued for the direct approach, the government for respecting Britain’s wishes.
Barton and Deakin, proud nationalists though they were, were also loyal imperialists, and were not prepared to push a confrontation with the British government. In the final vote on the method of exclusion the Labor Party voted as one against the dictation test, for the first time pitting its disciplined strength against the government, but the Opposition could not hold all its followers and the government won by a majority of Five.
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