Australia's Secret History as a White Utopia
Read this and thought of all the Straya people...every Western nation has a super racist past, but my god
I recently had reason to pick up
Control or Colour Bar?, a seminal booklet issued by a small group of University of Melbourne students and staff at the start of the 1960s that really kickstarted a lot of the thinking away from the White Australia Policy. Australia, quite frankly, was quite lucky to avoid becoming a global pariah like Apartheid-era South Africa, because its policies were not that far removed. Almost from the get-go of the colonial era the British government was startled by and unhappy with the attitudes of settlers towards Aboriginals, but by the late 1840s was unwilling to let humanitarian concerns stymie the transition to representative and responsible government.
Australia basically seems to go through waves of having a new group to hate, which then becomes integrated and part of everyday culture as a newer wave overtakes it. Asian migrants are the classic case here. There was so much fear of them in the 1980s and 1990s, but that has long since moved on. Of course, part of that is because Asians have become central to the Australian economy. Depending on the year, higher education is Australia's third or fourth largest export, and the vast majority of our international students come from Asia. Our universities would be essentially crippled if that sweet sweet international student cash dried up.
Now time for your regularly scheduled BARELY RELATED RANT. This article does something that absolutely shits me up the wall, that people do all the time, and I suspect maybe I'm the only person who actually cares (well, me and a few other historians), but the more I can persuade people of this the more funding I can get to do my job.
The country would slowly evolve by the 19th century into a collection of six distinct colonies on the enormous continent of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and the island of Tasmania. The Northern Territory would remain, as it does today, a territory.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG. Austral
asia evolved into a collection of seven distinct British colonies: New South Wales
(including what is today the Australian Capital Territory), Victoria, Queensland, South Australia
(including what is today the Northern Territory), Western Australia,
and New Zealand. If you told somebody in the 1880s that Australasian federation would be successful but that one colony would not join, they would probably be more likely to guess that Western Australia would stay out, not New Zealand. WA had a comparatively low population, it did not receive responsible government until 1890 (all the others received it during the 1850s), and at least until the gold rushes of the 1890s it had less firm ties with the eastern states than New Zealand, where towns such as Hokitika were in such close communication that they could be described as "practically a suburb of Melbourne". Only in the early 1890s did it become clear New Zealand would not participate in federation and it became a process that culminated in the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia, not Australasia, in 1901. Yet the Tasman world, the Australasian world, did not truly break down until the interwar or even postwar period when the two respective nationalisms had forged more distinctive, separate identities; why do people think we had the Anzacs or joint Olympic teams in the 1900s-1910s?
(Oh, and the article makes a silly comment about Australia becoming a "commonwealth" of the British Empire like Canada and New Zealand. They were actually dominions.)
Anyway that's a totally tangental rant but it irritates me when people try to talk about colonial Australia and forget it was an Australasian world that incorporated New Zealand. Continue.
But overall, I don't think I'd have felt that qualified to vote at that age, even though this topic is worth some discussion.
