The Evolution of 'Whiteness' in Australia: From Colonial Dangers to National Identity

1. Doctoring National Identity HI269 Week 13

2. Climate, Nation, and the Science of Race Races of the GlobeReproduced from The White Australia Question, by Edward William Cole (Melbourne: E.W. Cole Book Arcade, 1903)

3. So what is ‘whiteness’ in the tropics? • Earliest concerns: Could ‘white’ people survive in new climes and conditions and still retain the characteristics of their ‘race’? Fears of degeneration and discussions of the medical distinctiveness of the tropics • ‘whiteness’ not just the opposite of ‘blackness’, but also a discourse of settlement and endeavour • Shift, 1860s-70 in medical view of Australia: move to emphasis ‘temperate normality’ and Australia as ‘New London’, naturally ‘white’ • Biological vs cultural conceptions of race

4. The role of ‘race’ in realizing ‘nation’: Building a White Australia ‘A study in comparative populations’, Million Farms Campaign Committee Record, 1921 Cover, The New Australian (magazine of the Big Brother Movement for child immigration), 1929

5. Social vs climatological pathogenesis • Rise of concerns about contagion – and thus focus on ‘dangers’ of class and race instead of the newly ‘healthy’ geography of Australia • ‘Discourse of hygienic white citizenship’

6. Population= Power, but immigration= menace?Responses:exclusion (eg. Chinese Exclusion under White Australia policy, and immigration restriction Act of 1901-- only repealed 1957) quarantine ( eg Federal Quarantine Act 1908)‘dictation test’ ‘Keep Australia White’, New Settlers League, 1924

7. “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.”Alfred Deakin, 2nd Prime Minister of Australia, c.1901

8. ‘Australia’s black heart’, ‘the yellow hordes’, and the role of medicine Whitening Australia’s Northern Tropics • Role of hereditarianism • Role of preventive medicine • Creation of ‘tropical hygiene’ • Social problems have medical solutions • BUT dangers of ‘transgressive contact’ with Aboriginal population, • Dangers TO Aboriginal population of partial civilization • Dangers of the wrong sort of white person, whether Southern European, or poor and urban Alf Vincent, ‘The Thin Black Line’, Bulletin, 18 July 1907 Image reproduced courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library, New South Wales.

9. Speech reflecting on Australia’s declaration of war on Japan 8 days earlier • Establishes Australia’s national identity AS a racial identity: Australia as British and European, NOT Asian. • Defines WWII as a race war, not just a a national war; • Intended to lay the groundwork for post war immigration policy… (but it failed!) White Australia: Outpost of empire, outpost of ‘the British Race’

10. Race, Identity and Identification: A prelude… • Chinese migrants to Australia required to submit to handprinting. Why? • What does the combination of photo, print and ‘identifying features’ imply about official perceptions of the Chinese in Australia?