White Australia policy songSheet music for “White Australia (Australia the White Man's Land),” composed by W.E. Naunton with words by Naunton and H.J.W. Gyles, 1910.
White Australia policy, in Australian history, fundamental legislation of the new Commonwealth of Australia that effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated white society. It reflected a long-standing and unifying sentiment of the various Australian colonies and remained a fundamental government policy into the mid-20th century.
anti-immigration cartoonAnti-immigration cartoon with Victoria urging the Australian federation to rid itself of the “Chinese pest,” Melbourne Punch, May 1888.
The Australian colonies had passed restrictive legislation as early as the 1860s. This was directed specifically at Chinese immigrants, but later a popular cry was raised against the increasingly numerous Japanese—especially after Japan’s victory over China in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War—and against South Asians and Kanakas (South Pacific islanders) as well. Fear of military invasion by Japan, the threat to the standard of living that was thought to be presented by the cheap but efficient Asian labourers, and white racism were the principal factors behind the White Australia movement.
The desire for a coordinated immigration bar against nonwhites was a spur in the 1890s toward Australian federation. Thus, the act was among the first pieces of commonwealth legislation enacted. In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act effectively ended all non-European immigration by providing for entrance examinations in European languages. The essential clause of the act, rather than naming particular races or groups for exclusion, provided for a dictation test in a European language to be administered to prospective immigrants. A South Asian with a knowledge of English could be given a test in French, German, or, if need be, Lithuanian. The act practically excluded all “coloured” people. Supplementary legislation in 1901 provided for the deportation by 1906 of the country’s Kanakas.
Popular support for White Australia, always strong, was bolstered at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20 when the Australian delegation led the fight to defeat a Japanese-sponsored racial-equality amendment to the League of NationsCovenant. Although progress toward its abolition was slow, the policy became less stringent from about 1950 on, first under Liberal governments and also (more markedly) under Labor from 1972 to 1975 Discrimination was removed from the citizenship application process by enactment of the Australian Citizenship Bill 1973, which was followed by passage of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Speaking in the Philippines in 1973, Al Grassby, the minister for immigration in the government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, declared the policy dead, saying: “Give me a shovel and I will bury it.” Between 1947 and 1981 the number of persons in Australia of non-European descent more than doubled. By the early 21st century about two-fifths of Australian immigrants were Asian.
Australia, the smallest continent and one of the largest countries on Earth, lying between the Pacific and Indian oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia’s capital is Canberra, located in the southeast between the larger and more important economic and cultural centres of Sydney and Melbourne.
Australia has been called “the Oldest Continent,” “the Last of Lands,” and “the Last Frontier.” Those descriptions typify the world’s fascination with Australia, but they are somewhat unsatisfactory. In simple physical terms, the age of much of the continent is certainly impressive—most of the rocks providing the foundation of Australian landforms were formed during Precambrian and Paleozoic time (some 4.6 billion to 252 million years ago)—but the ages of the cores of all the continents are approximately the same. On the other hand, whereas the landscape history of extensive areas in Europe and North America has been profoundly influenced by events and processes that occurred since late in the last Ice Age—roughly the past 25,000 years—in Australia scientists use a more extensive timescale that takes into account the great antiquity of the continent’s landscape.
Australia is the last of lands only in the sense that it was the last continent, apart from Antarctica, to be explored by Europeans. At least 60,000 years before European explorers sailed into the South Pacific, the first Aboriginal explorers had arrived from Asia, and by 20,000 years ago they had spread throughout the mainland and its chief island outlier, Tasmania. When Captain Arthur Phillip of the British Royal Navy landed with the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, there may have been between 250,000 and 500,000 Aboriginals, though some estimates are much higher. Largely nomadic hunters and gatherers, the Aboriginals had already transformed the primeval landscape, principally by the use of fire, and, contrary to common European perceptions, they had established robust, semipermanent settlements in well-favoured localities.
The American-style concept of a national “frontier” moving outward along a line of settlement is also inappropriate. There was, rather, a series of comparatively independent expansions from the margins of the various colonies, which were not joined in an independent federated union until 1901. Frontier metaphors were long employed to suggest the existence of yet another extension of Europe and especially of an outpost of Anglo-Celtic culture in the distant “antipodes.”
The most striking characteristics of the vast country are its global isolation, its low relief, and the aridity of much of its surface. If, like the English novelist D.H. Lawrence, visitors from the Northern Hemisphere are at first overwhelmed by “the vast, uninhabited land and by the grey charred bush…so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall, pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses,” they should remember that to Australians the bush—that sparsely populated Inland or Outback beyond the Great Dividing Range of mountains running along the Pacific coast and separating it from the cities in the east—is familiar and evokes nostalgia. It still retains some of the mystical quality it had for the first explorers searching for inland seas and great rivers, and it remains a symbol of Australia’s strength and independence; the Outback poem by A.B. (“Banjo”) Paterson, “Waltzing Matilda,” is the unofficial national anthem of Australia known the world over.
Great Barrier ReefThe Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
Australia’s isolation from other continents explains much of the singularity of its plant and animal life. Its unique flora and fauna include hundreds of kinds of eucalyptus trees and the only egg-laying mammals on Earth, the platypus and echidna. Other plants and animals associated with Australia are various acacias (Acacia pycnantha [golden wattle] is the national flower) and dingoes, kangaroos, koalas, and kookaburras. The Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Queensland, is the greatest mass of coral in the world and one of the world’s foremost tourist attractions. The country’s low relief results from the long and extensive erosive action of the forces of wind, rain, and the heat of the sun during the great periods of geologic time when the continental mass was elevated well above sea level.
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Isolation is also a pronounced characteristic of much of the social landscape beyond the large coastal cities. But an equally significant feature of modern Australian society is the representation of a broad spectrum of cultures drawn from many lands, a development stemming from immigration that is transforming the strong Anglo-Celtic orientation of Australian culture. Assimilation, of course, is seldom a quick and easy process, and minority rights, multiculturalism, and race-related issues have played a large part in contemporary Australian politics. In the late 1990s these issues sparked a conservative backlash.
Historically part of the British Empire and now a member of the Commonwealth, Australia is a relatively prosperous independent country. Australians are in many respects fortunate in that they do not share their continent—which is only a little smaller than the United States—with any other country. Extremely remote from their traditional allies and trading partners—it is some 12,000 miles (19,000 km) from Australia to Great Britain via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal and about 7,000 miles (11,000 km) across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the United States—Australians have become more interested in the proximity of huge potential markets in Asia and in the highly competitive industrialized economies of China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Australia, the continent and the country, may have been quite isolated at the beginning of the 20th century, but it entered the 21st century a culturally diverse land brimming with confidence, an attitude encouraged by the worldwide fascination with the land “Down Under” and demonstrated when Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympic Games.
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