Chapter 4: Australia’s Racist History

The 1788 British invasion of Australia, while a general part of the globalisation of
capitalism, was not initially motivated by the need for land, primary resources or labour.
Capitalist Australia began as a penal colony. Early Dutch and French explorers — other
potential invaders — had not considered the continent a viable colonial possession.
These limited beginnings meant that, even though the First Fleet brought with it the racist
ideas flourishing in Europe at that time, there was no imperative at the outset for a sustained,
definite system of racial oppression against the indigenous population. As such, in the first years
of invasion there was no systematic elaboration, in the Australian context, of an ideological
justification of Aborigines’ innate racial inferiority based on skin colour and other physical
differences. Colonists and Aborigines were commonly distinguished by categories of “civilised”
and “savage”, not unlike the distinction between Christians and “heathens” applied by early
European colonists in the Americas. While they are still derogatory and oppressive distinctions,
they are not racist as such. Captain James Cook’s claim to eastern Australia in 1770, on the
rationale that “we never saw one inch of Cultivated land in the whole Country” 1, was simply
colonial opportunism. “Savagery” was a product of the environment and could be cultivated out
of the savage. Three leading lights of Britain’s colonial project in the 1830s, Lord Glenelg, Sir
George Grey and Sir James Stephen, exemplified one interpretation of the bourgeois
Enlightenment’s ideal of universal human progress – the “civilising mission”. Showing that
colonial conquest and Whig liberalism were genetically compatible, these learned men of
Reform Britain were patrons of the British abolitionist movement. Grey was a member of the
Aborigines Protection Society. All three had strong connections to the various missionary
societies that helped make the blood and fire of British colonialism more palatable in the
drawing rooms of polite society.
As discussed previously, the ideology of race was still being elaborated at this time in
Enlightenment Europe, emanating from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, the deep
contradiction between this trade and the trans-Atlantic bourgeois revolution meant that racist
ideology was never uniform. In fact, it has always varied in strength and explicitness, ranging
from outright white supremacy to more subtly expressed notions of innate racial differences.
Enlightenment racism was vulnerable to competing – if not antithetical – perspectives, even
from within the bourgeoisie. For instance, the romanticised notion of humanity in its state of
nature – the “noble savage” – influenced early colonial authorities. Captain Cook’s final verdict
on Aboriginal life was indicative: “[The Aborigines are] far more happier than we Europeans….
They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and
sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life.”2
This partly explains the initially benevolent, if patronising, attitude of the early colonial
authorities towards Aborigines, best summed up by the instructions to Captain Arthur Phillip
when he set out on the First Fleet in 1787: “You are to endeavour by every possible means to

1
Cited in A.T Yarwood and M.J Knowling, Race Relations in Australia: A History, Methuen Australia, North Ryde,
1982, p. 15
2
ibid., p. 12

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 1

open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects
to live in amity and kindness with them”.3
This is not to ignore the violence that did occur at the outset. Skirmishes often erupted as the
Sydney Cove settlement gradually expanded inland along the waterways. However, this
violence was sporadic and often hesitant, vacillating. It often did stem from escalating cultural
misunderstandings between individuals, particularly mutual ignorance of the different notions of
property between Aborigines and settlers. Many of the first settler-invaders morally grappled
with the question of relations with the Aborigines. Some attempted to be measured and “fair” in
their responses to Aboriginal hostility; still others sought to be conciliatory. However, in the
final instance, the clash between a primitive communist society and an invasive, transplanted
capitalist mode of production cannot be resolved through individual “amity and kindness”. Nor
is such a clash necessarily racial. But an expansionist and rapacious capitalism – economically
and militarily far stronger – was bound to embroil itself in permanent conflict and smash the
Aboriginal commune through violent conquest. In doing so, Australian capitalism required a
racist explanation and legitimisation for these predatory foundations.
As long as they remained committed to settlement and private agriculture, even those
colonists who sought to be conciliatory were eventually forced to defend their property with
force. Benign attitudes were overcome and overturned by material interests. Henry Reynolds
writes of a South Australian settler’s reluctant participation in a reprisal expedition and his later
relief at not having had to take a life. In another case, a Gippsland squatter in the 1840s wrote
that he would remorselessly shoot any black who stole his sheep, but “no consideration on earth
would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom
whenever smoke is seen”. Another South Australian wrote of his conclusion after participating
in a reprisal expedition: “[I] came to the determination to which I have adhered, never to shoot a
black unless in circumstances which would justify me in shooting a white.”4
Racism does not come down to racist ideas and attitudes alone. There must be something
more material and long-term at stake for a system of racial inequality to be established and
maintained over generations. Most central was the expansion of private property in land. With
the burgeoning of significant pastoral interests in the early 1800s a coherent social practice of
racial oppression began taking root: the steady, systematic, deliberate and calculated
expropriation of Aboriginal land by the colonial property-owning class. Land was the earliest,
and most plentiful and lucrative, form of wealth in the emerging settler colony. It was key to the
early development of capitalism and the consolidation of independent colonial bourgeoisies
throughout the Australian continent towards the mid-1800s. As Henry Reynolds writes in
Frontier, “The pastoral industry was the single most important agent in the destruction of
Aboriginal society and the squatters were often the most persistent advocates of racist
theories.”5
Aborigines were dispossessed, massacred and driven to the margins of Australian society,
not because of the racist convictions of the colonists, but because there was something really
valuable to be gained by the theft of a continent. Hostile policies and action against Aborigines
became systematised and permanent as the penal colony expanded into a strategic political-
economic annex of the British empire. Skirmishes escalated into continuous, organised frontier
military operations, chiefly by the paramilitary Native Police but often also by the
squattocracy’s own vigilante mobs. As colonisation engulfed the whole continent – a process
that continued into the twentieth century – what resulted was a war that is still officially
unacknowledged. Aboriginal societies were defeated and destroyed. Aboriginal men, women
and children were massacred and confined on reserves. This was then explained and justified by
the central racist notion of nineteenth century Australia, that the Aborigines were bound to “die
out” as an inferior race. The escalation of the frontier war conveniently coincided with the rise
of “scientific racism” in Europe and the United States. As part of this, the evolutionary law of
survival of the fittest was imported and converted for racist use against the Aborigines.

3
ibid., p. 35
4
pp. 90-1, Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Reports from the edge of white settlement, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1987
5
ibid., p. 106

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 2

 As an independent, wealthy capitalist economy flourished “on the sheep’s back”, and
primary production became ever more industrialised and expansionist, the treatment of
Aborigines became increasingly more brutal. They were slaughtered by regular “hunting”
parties well into the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly
taken away from their parents and put into camps to be trained as domestics, labourers or
stockmen — a policy fully abandoned less than three decades ago. In remote areas, large
agricultural and pastoral empires were built with the labour of Aborigines who were “paid” with
meagre rations of tea, sugar and flour. When these station owners were legally compelled to pay
wages, following the determined and courageous struggles of the Aboriginal workers in the late
1960s, these workers were sacked en masse and driven off the land.
The results of this racist history live on today in the catastrophic social indicators cited in the
first chapter. Australian capitalism is not only founded on, but continues to thrive on, the soil of
Aboriginal dispossession. Today’s chief beneficiaries of early capital accumulation based on the
theft of Aboriginal land — the powerful pastoral agribusinesses and mining monopolies — are
the social roots of continuing anti-Aboriginal racism. There has been no reversal of the extreme
social, economic and political disadvantages that have historically accumulated as a result of the
dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal societies. There have been no amends for recent
policies of racist social control. Full reparations are denied to the Stolen Generations; state
governments refuse to fully return the millions of dollars of Aboriginal wages stolen when
Aborigines were wards of the state under the racist “protector” system.6 As such, there is an
ongoing need to keep Aborigines “in their place”. The legacy of historical oppression must be
continually reproduced and racially justified. A section of Australia comprising two percent of
the population, with an even greater lack of political-economic power, attracts the level of
police, political and media attention befitting a highly organised enemy army. The use of anti-
terrorist storm troopers on Palm Island in late 2004, when islanders revolted against yet another
black death in custody, was a high-tech replay of Native Police operations of the nineteenth
century, albeit restrained by the international media spotlight. The intense policing of Sydney’s
Redfern Aboriginal community is now further aided by a high-tech remote surveillance centre
high up in the TNT building.

‘History wars’
Australian history is bitterly contested ground due to the continuing racial oppression of
Aborigines. The presentation of history is never an idle intellectual exercise. It is heavily
wrapped up in the social interests of the here and now, for history is simply the struggle of
conflicting social interests over time. The social interests of Australia at the beginning of the
21st century are only a few generations removed from those social interests that sponsored
genocidal “hunting” parties to guard stolen land and forcibly separated Aboriginal children from
their parents in an equally genocidal policy. In essence, they are the same social interests.
Reputable and important anti-racist corrections to Australian history-writing have abounded
since white supremacist racism was pushed to the margins through the post-war anti-colonial
revolutions and mass international radicalisation of the 1960s. But whereas most other colonial-
settler societies – from the Americas through to New Zealand and South Africa – have had to
acknowledge open warfare, conquest and the huge scale of bloodshed, these matters remain
contested in Australian historical debate. Arguing that massacres and bitter colonial wars
defined the very formation of modern Australia – let alone advocating a formal treaty – is still a
difficult hurdle, howled down by a legion of ruling class mouthpieces and scribes as a partisan
“black armband” view of history.7 Only colonial-settler Israel shares this sort of racist denial of
invasion and dispossession, with Zionism’s equivalent of terra nullius: “A land without people
for a people without land”.
By federation 20,000 Aborigines had perished in Australia’s colonial wars. If this staggering
number of casualties had been white, “our histories would be heavy with their story, a forest of

6
In Queensland this practice continued until 1987. See “Queensland Stolen Wages Fact Sheet”, available at the
European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights at http://www.eniar.org/action/stolen.html
7
This colourful label was coined by whitewash historian Geoffrey Blainey in April 1993.

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 3

monuments would celebrate their sacrifice.”8 Of all the colonial-settler countries, only Australia
and Israel celebrate the days of colonial conquest as their most revered national holidays
(“Australia Day” and the misnamed “Independence Day”). In the former only Anzac Day –
commemorating Australia’s participation in imperialist war – comes anywhere near the
importance of January 26. By contrast, in the United States, the Fourth of July celebrates a
revolution; Canada Day marks the federation of that country; in New Zealand Waitangi Day
commemorates the Treaty of Waitangi, akin to the founding document of modern New Zealand,
and the day is seen as a day of reconciliation.
Australia’s historical whitewash is reflected in everyday life in the, often scoffing, dismissal
of charges of racism. Individual victims of racist abuse and discrimination are often accused of
exaggerating, overreacting, being oversensitive, or “whingeing”. Especially since former prime
minister John Howard’s flirtation with Pauline Hanson in 1996-8, during which he refused to
condemn her racist inaugural speech to federal parliament, racists feel a measure of political
protection and ideological legitimacy when spouting their views. It is the victims of racism that
are on the back foot and bear the onus of proof.
This sort of “we’re-so-tolerant” self-delusion, and the writing off of the history wars and
Aboriginal inequality as even racial issues, veil the very opposite fact. In other colonial-settler
societies, even the conservative wing of the ruling class has to at least pay lip service to the
problem of racism. History wars do rage on in these countries too, but the balance of power is
somewhat more favourable to the anti-racist historians. Former US president George W. Bush
was forced to admit in a speech in 2003:
My nation’s journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did
not end with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the
bitter experience of other times.9

In a submission to the Supreme Court in the same year – ironically to advocate the further
dismantling of affirmative action programs – the Bush administration wrote the following:
Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the law. Yet we know
that our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a reality in America. It hurts many of our
citizens. As a nation, as a government, as individuals, we must be vigilant in responding to prejudice
wherever we find it…[w]e should not be satisfied with the current numbers of minorities on American
college campuses. Much progress has been made; much more is needed…and because we’re committed to
racial justice, we must make sure that America’s public schools offer a quality education to every child from
every background…. America’s long experience with the segregation we have put behind us and the racial
discrimination we still struggle to overcome requires a special effort to make real the promise of equal
opportunity for all.10

Compare this to John Howard’s arrogant declaration to the 1997 Reconciliation Convention
– a particularly special occasion marking the thirtieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum – that
Australia is “one of the fairest, most egalitarian and tolerant societies in the world”.11
Understandably, many of the 1800, mostly Aboriginal, delegates turned their backs while
Howard banged on – literally, thumping the lectern as he hectored his “audience”. The dismissal
and denial of racism is not an embarrassed silence about some taboo subject; it is proudly sung
from the rooftops.
This contrast reflects the greater political and ideological ground won by those who have
successfully challenged racist triumphalism in the US, both through history-writing and on the
streets. In Australia, land tenure is of such heightened sensitivity for a ruling class still led by
the mining and pastoral heirs of the colonial old guard. Not only are the rights of mining
exploration far more comprehensive here than anywhere else in the advanced capitalist world,
but the land question has instilled the owning class with a fanatical, combative stance toward
any attempt to redress or correct the history of coloniser and colonised. In its defence this old

8
Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, cited in Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, Allen & Unwin, St
Leonards, 1989, p. 22
9
Quoted in p. 26, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Racism in America Today”, International Socialist Review, Issue 32,
November-December 2003, pp. 26-35
10
ibid.
11
Quoted in Andrew Markus, Race: John Howard and the remaking of Australia, Alllen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, p.
107

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 4

guard has marshalled sympathetic whitewash historians such as Geoffrey Blainey and Keith
Windschuttle.
But a tactical difference did emerge for a time within the ruling class on how to settle the
results of colonisation and dispossession within the framework of capitalist law, state and
economy. Former prime minister Paul Keating told his staff on the eve of the 1993 federal
election, “I’m more convinced than ever that we’ve got to make peace with the Aborigines to
get the place right”.12 In 1992, some settlement of the land question was sought in the High
Court’s Mabo decision, which recognised the survival of Aboriginal native title under British
colonisation. Essentially, this decision sought to bring Aboriginal land rights into the fold of
common law and capitalist property relations, to a level similar to indigenous land title in the
US, Canada and New Zealand (which date back to nineteenth century court rulings). It set out
stringent tests to prove native title and immunised existing private freehold land and public land
in use from claims. The 1993 Mabo legislation extended this protection to some leasehold land.
Similarly, the High Court’s 1996 Wik decision, which allowed for Aborigines’ traditional use of
land to continue alongside pastoral leases, ensured pastoralists would prevail in any conflict of
interest.
However, not satisfied with this absorption of Indigenous land rights into the framework of
bourgeois law and property relations, the conservative wing of the ruling class launched a
massive counter-attack on the Mabo and Wik rulings. The August 7, 1992 issue of the Business
Review Weekly screamed on its cover page, “Aboriginal takeover”. Some years earlier, mining
and pastoral interests had led a successful pre-emptive strike against the Hawke government’s
proposed national land rights legislation. The Western Australian Chamber of Mines ran a TV
advertisement asking viewers:
Do you think it fair that less than 3% of the population should claim ownership of up to 50% of our land? Do
you think it fair that any one group of people should have greater rights than any other group? Do you think it
fair that any one group should control the future mineral wealth that belongs to every Western Australian?13

Both times, an intensely racist campaign of historical justification was spearheaded by Western
Mining Corporation’s executive director at the time, Hugh Morgan. Morgan is currently
president of the Business Council of Australia, the foremost association of Australian big
capital.
In a speech to English capitalists in January 1984, Morgan decried, “[T]here now seems to
be a competition between the state Labor governments and federal Labor government, as to who
can give away most land, in the shortest possible time, with the most denigration of the 19th
century Europeans who settled Australia.” In May that year, at an Australian Mining Industry
Council seminar, Morgan attacked the granting of Aboriginal land rights as “a symbolic step
back to the world of paganism, superstition, fear and darkness”. Later, Morgan claimed that
traditional vengeance killings took more Indigenous lives than “any depredations by the
Europeans”. Charges of genocide were “nonsense”, aimed “to incite resentment and animosity
within the Aboriginal community”, “to arouse… white middle-class guilt”, and “to create
expectations of compensation payments”. In a speech on Invasion Day 1985, Morgan warned,
“Our national sovereignty, and the legitimacy of the settlement that began formally on 7
February 1788, is under threat”.14
In response to the Mabo decision, Hugh Morgan warned that the overturning of terra nullius
“put at risk… the whole legal framework of property rights throughout the whole community”.
The solution was for Aborigines to “give up much of what contemporary official rhetoric
describes as their unique culture”. Morgan boasted, “Because the Europeans had the ships, the
navigation skills, the weapons, the technology, the wealth, the people, the ambition; the future
of Australia was going to be either a French or an English future, not an Aboriginal one…. The
English got here before the French, and the rest is history.”15
Other conservative bourgeoisie weighed into the historical debate. Representing agribusiness
interests, National Party leader Tim Fischer pointed out that “at no stage did Aboriginal
12
Recounted in ibid., p. 37
13
ibid., p. 59
14
Quoted in ibid., p. 60-2, 70
15
ibid., p. 72-3, 77

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 5

civilisation develop substantial buildings, roadways or even a wheeled cart…. Rightly or
wrongly dispossession of Aboriginal civilisation was always going to happen”. The former head
of the National Companies and Securities Commission, Henry Bosch, was even more blunt: “I
have the utmost contempt for political correctness, the whitewashing of Aboriginal people who
are a Stone Age people…. I think we should forget completely about any concept of Aboriginal
land rights…. I don’t want reconciliation, I don’t believe it’s necessary, nothing should be done,
let’s get on with something serious”.16

Racism and Australian nation-building

Just as the expansion of the landed frontier put race at the centre of the colonial political-
economy, race also became a driving principle in the maturing of an Australian nation and
national consciousness towards the late nineteenth century. White racial unity acted as an
ideological and social-psychological cement for the emerging Australian national identity, of
what it meant and felt to be Australian.
Every bourgeoisie needs a national home. The nation (and nation-state) is the basic unit of
capitalist economic development and political power. What ensured the Australian bourgeoisie
“a continent for a people” were the peculiarities of colonial-settler capitalism in a vast, distant
landmass free of a pre-existing agrarian and settled society: the thin spread of the settler
population, the rapid growth of highly profitable and capital-intensive export-driven primary
industries, and the ease of British financing. In quick succession, the pastoral empires of the
early 1800s and the gold diggings of the mid-1800s yielded a tremendous productive capacity
that rapidly outgrew the confines of each thinly-populated colonial market. The imperatives of
Australia-wide market integration pre-empted the slow development of each colony into distinct
national entities, a la South America and southern Africa. By the 1880s, major companies and
banks had branches in all the capital cities. In 1888 the big bourgeois formed an Australian
Federation of Employers. Soon, measures that had protected the growth of productive capacities
in each colony became an absurdity, as producers increasingly orienting to a national market hit
a wall of tariffs at each colonial boundary. In any case, the peculiarities of the Australian
political economy ensured an advance towards finance and monopoly capitalism, even before
federation overcame these limits of colonial separation.
However, for national unification to become reality, economics must go over to politics.
Thus, as the rulers of the colonies worked to meet their shared objective interests, a consciously
national bourgeoisie came to be forged in political battles and alignments. Integral to this was
the political-ideological task of winning the support and allegiance of the popular classes. The
nation-building process is a mass political movement. The French and American revolutions, the
Meiji Restoration, the Italian Risorgimento, the countless wars of independence from Ireland to
East Timor – nations are consummated by ideals and ideology, in the service of a struggle for
power. No nation can be imposed top down by a stroke of the bureaucratic or legislative pen.
This was all the more so for a scattering of small, disparate settlements separated across a vast
continent. What consummated the objective integration of these settler colonies and elevated it
into a process of conscious national-political unification was the pursuit of racial purity, a White
Australia. This racialised national identity and nationalism came to bind – and override – the
often grating class and sectional interests of the continent.
No antagonism with the mother country fuelled the kind of powerful democratic fervour that
was central to nation-building in the United States, a fervour that flung open American national
identity to sharp contestation between those who defined it in terms of racial exclusivity and
those who saw it chiefly in terms of political values and principles, that is, a politically inclusive
identity consistent with Enlightenment universalism. The formative period of American national
consciousness and nation-building was when the international bourgeoisie was, on the whole, in
its progressive ascendancy, enlightened by scientific inquiry and democratic ideals. Its
American spokespersons spawned an endogenous Enlightenment and distinct political tradition
that in turn became antithetical to the festering wound of racial slavery.

16
ibid., p. 76-8

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 6

 No such counterpoint to racism emerged to any significant degree in the formative period of
Australian nation-building and would not do so until the mid-twentieth century. On the contrary,
resentment against the mother country was often for racist reasons. Popular race consciousness
in the late nineteenth century was antagonised by Britain’s diplomatic overtures toward China
and Japan, construed as undermining the earlier prototypes of the White Australia policy.
London was castigated by the populist and workers’ press for its willingness to sell out racial
purity for profit-driven trade diplomacy. In its lead article of 2 August 1888, entitled “The
British Imperial Heathen”, The Bulletin railed: “To England the Chinese question is a matter of
profit and loss…. But to Australia the problem is one of life or living death, and her sons have
to choose between the establishment of a great nation and a new life, or the founding of a
mongrel community”. In that same year, nationalist union organiser William Lane published the
serial, “White or Yellow? A Story of the Race War of AD 1908”, warning of a plot by pro-
British politicians and wealthy Chinese to allow the latter control of Queensland in exchange for
access to the Chinese market.
But Lane need not have worried. In the build-up to federation, the dazzling power of the
appeal to racial unity was felt deeply by political elites such as Barton and Deakin; its value for
the grand project of national unification pushed all else to the margins. Moreover, the ruling
class itself was imbued with a fretfully racist geopolitical outlook during this period of rising
inter-imperialist rivalry. Australia’s founding fathers saw racial unity and purity as essential for
the fortification of a potentially besieged citadel of white British power straddling three oceans
on the southern fringes of Asia. The Melbourne Argus of 9 May 1901 articulated this well,
shortly before the first federal parliament convened: “It is good for the world that a White
Empire should grow up in these Southern-Asian seas…. The coloured races were fast creeping
down the Malayan peninsula and isles, and it is well that Australia is occupied beforehand by a
united people, who will maintain for Europe its civilisation here.”
There was a convenient amity of racism between all sides of the Australian class divide. It is
this mutually reinforcing dynamic of inter-class racism that is crucial for understanding the
origins of the White Australia policy. For, elsewhere in the European settler colonies, the
general trend was towards incorporating non-white peoples as indentured, semi-slave, and
otherwise subordinate strata of the working class, as in South Africa and the United States. This
met the twin needs of cheap industrial labour and the sowing of racial divisions. By contrast,
the Australian ruling class opted for a policy of expulsion and exclusion, not just because of its
peculiar geopolitical position but also its need to absorb popular discontent into the nation-
building project. That specific variant of racism – an exclusively white nation (for Aborigines
were thought to be “dying out”), as opposed to white supremacy in a racially hierarchical nation
– was undoubtedly a concession to popular demands, necessitated by the pursuit of national
unity. On 12 September 1901, federal attorney-general and future prime minister Alfred Deakin
told the House of Representatives:
The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race…. Unity of race is an absolute essential
to the unity of Australia. It is more, actually more in the last resort, than any other unity. After all, when the
period of confused local policies and temporary political divisions was swept aside it was this real unity that
made the Commonwealth possible.17

In fact, this general, national interest of the Australian bourgeoisie made it worth jettisoning
those capitalist factions that saw commercial advantage in the incorporation of non-white
subordinate strata, such as the sugar planters’ use of indentured Kanaka labour in Queensland.
Earlier in the same speech Deakin spelt out the necessity of such a sacrifice by pointing to the
spectre of the recent US Civil War:
…however much we may sacrifice in the way of immediate monetary gain – however much we may retard
the development of the remote and tropical portions of our territory – those sacrifices for the future of
Australia are little, and are, indeed, nothing when compared with a compensating freedom from the trials,
sufferings, and losses that nearly wrecked the great republic of the west, still left with the heritage in their
midst of a population which, no matter how splendid it may be in many qualities, is not being assimilated,
and apparently is never to be assimilated in the nation of which they are politically and nominally a part18.

17
Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives), 1901-2, vol. 4, 12 September 1901, pp. 4807
18
ibid.

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 7

 But if ruling class racism emanated from the twin imperatives of national unity and imperial
fortification, what then were the social roots of its acceptance – indeed, the clamour for a white
Australia – among the mass of working people?

The anti-Chinese movement

The anti-Chinese mobilisations of the 19th century were mainly led by middle class political
aspirants, with more than nods of approval from higher echelons. Yet, they were mass
mobilisations. At Lambing Flat 2000 to 3000 white gold prospectors, out of a total white
population of some 10,000 to 12,000, violently rioted against Chinese miners in June 1861. This
was the culmination of many months of harassment and violence. It was fuelled by the
malicious agitation of the local newspaper, referring to the Chinese as “a swarm of Mongolian
locusts” and “moon-faced barbarians”19.
All this was fuelled by fierce competition for the best diggings, water to work the diggings
and other scarce resources, in what was an arduous and fickle industry, where, despite elements
of cooperation, every digger ultimately stood or fell by his own individual labour. The Chinese
provided a large, visible target to vent the tense social psychology of such competitive
conditions and, by that logic, restrict the field of competition. But the logic of capital, in any
case, inexorably throws all but a handful to the margins of wage-labour. The racially purified
goldfields were no exception. Removing the Chinese was never going to guarantee some sort of
a mass diggers’ yeomanry. In fact, economic concentration was rapid, due to the transient nature
of alluvial mining. From the 1870s, diggings consolidated into company-run operations able to
muster the capital to dig beneath the surface soil with expensive new technology, worked by
waged miners.
The graduation of the petty-bourgeois digger into wage-worker proper did not see racism
subside. On the contrary, with increasing industrialisation, urbanisation and the growth of a
mass working class, the anti-Chinese movement grew in size, concentration and organisation.
Miners’ unions organised to exclude and expel Chinese workers. In 1874, the Amalgamated
Miners’ Association of Victoria gained the dubious honour of becoming the first major union to
formalise exclusion by passing a motion “prohibiting any member thereof from working in any
mine where Chinese are employed”, along with an amendment to “urge on the Government the
necessity of imposing a poll tax on Chinamen of such a nature as would effectually prevent any
further increase of that moral and social pest”20. Political representatives of labour wielded the
machinery of the bourgeois state to run their racist campaign. In 1875-6, a Trades and Labour
Council-funded NSW parliamentarian and member of the carpenters’ craft union, Angus
Cameron, chaired a malevolent parliamentary inquiry into the supposed immoralities and evils
of Sydney’s Chinese community.
The truly mass dimension of a new wave of urban anti-Chinese movement was first revealed
in the 1878 Seamen’s Union campaign, ostensibly against the Australasian Steam and
Navigation Company (ASN). Under competitive pressure from a Hong Kong shipping
company, the ASN had taken on Chinese sailors on half the pay of whites. The union responded
by agitating a mass anti-Chinese campaign, in which the ASN was a secondary target. The
campaign gained wide support throughout New South Wales and Queensland, where ASN
centred its mail run and southwest Pacific shipping operations. Public meetings drew thousands.
The first such meeting, organised by the Trades and Labour Council (TLC) in Sydney, attracted
1500. The TLC formed a specific anti-Chinese committee that spearheaded a petition, garnering
14,701 signatures. In a speech, one TLC leader spoke of a “war of races”. When the campaign
escalated into a strike of ASN’s white sailors in November, a TLC delegate from the engineers’
union spoke of unionists’ “sympathy with the men who had struck the first blow in the great
struggle of the Chinese question”. Thus, this was not a strike against the use of scab labour, but
against Chinese workers. Indeed, “scab” and “Chinese” were synonymous in the eyes of this

19
Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1976, p. 45
20
Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia & California, 1850-1901, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney,
1979, p. 77

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 8

racist labour nationalism. Two mass rallies in support of the strike, held at Sydney’s Hyde Park,
attracted some 10,000 people each21.
The central leader of the NSW campaign was the TLC president, Thomas White, who was
also one of the vice-presidents of the Political Reform League, formed to champion tariffs and
an end to assisted immigration. Prominent manufacturers were also among the league’s key
members, but it consciously oriented to securing a mass base among working people22. The
league later evolved into the Reform Union, whose concern over assisted immigration was then
surpassed by an anti-Chinese focus. The league and union were classic examples of cross-class
collaboration for protecting the relative privileges of both labour and capital.
In Queensland, the ASN campaign was more directly spearheaded by the bourgeoisie, from
both government and business. Brisbane’s mayor called a public meeting on 26 November that
filled the city’s town hall well before the scheduled starting time. Some 2000 were packed in,
with hundreds others outside. The official platform included cabinet members, the speaker of
the legislative assembly and several other parliamentarians. The meeting led to the later
formation of an anti-Chinese committee, at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce. The
Queensland colonial government’s threat to cancel its mail contract with ASN – worth £7000
annually – was decisive in the eventual anti-Chinese victory23.
The ASN win bolstered the growing racial-national consolidation of the colonies. Under the
recent memory of the dispute, the Intercolonial Trades Union Congress of October 1879 passed
a resolution “[t]hat the indiscriminate immigration of Chinese is…injurious – morally, socially
and politically – to the best interests of the colony…”. The following year, Melbourne joined
the new wave of anti-Chinese movement amid sharpening competition in the furniture trade,
sparked by the government’s tender for 6000 chairs for the Exhibition Building. A public
meeting called by the unions attracted 3000 and led to the reestablishment of an anti-Chinese
league. At the Intercolonial Conference of December to January 1880-81, the colonial premiers
met to draft for the first time – but without final resolution – uniform anti-Chinese legislation.
Both NSW and Victoria passed such laws in the second half of 1881. The former occurred in
the wake of a rally of some 10,000 at the Domain and a subsequent burst of mass anti-Chinese
hysteria triggered by an outbreak of smallpox24.
As with all movements, while mass mobilisation went through peaks and troughs, the work
and organisation of the activists of the anti-Chinese movement continued unabated throughout
the 1880s and 90s, underwritten by the deepening mass labour nationalist consciousness in the
emerging Australian nation. Unions and union leaders were at the forefront. In 1884, a former
president of the Sydney TLC set up a vigilance committee drawn from various unions to police
the employment of Chinese workers in the maritime industry. In 1886, the European Labourers’
Protective Society in Queensland raised an outcry against a white bricklayer who had hired a
Chinese assistant. The furniture union of Victoria set up a Stamping Committee to agitate for
laws to require the stamping of all furniture made by Chinese workers. Anti-Chinese resolutions
were passed at the second, third and fourth Intercolonial Trades Union Congresses25. The
Queensland Shearers’ Union not only excluded Chinese workers but also any white shearer
“who worked for anyone who employed Chinese, had commercial dealings with Chinese or
patronised any merchant or storekeeper who dealt with or employed Chinese”. White employers
and workers alike, if seen to be soft on the Chinese, were condemned as “white Chinamen”26.
Boycott campaigns were organised against Chinese businesses. Various anti-Chinese
organisations were established throughout the colonies. An Anti-Chinese Market Garden
Company in north Queensland attracted some 300 shares27. In July 1892, a White Woman’s Co-
operative Laundry sought the support of Melbourne Trades Hall in their competition with

21
ibid., p. 84
22
ibid., pp. 81-2
23
McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 46
24
ibid., pp. 92-7
25
Markus, Fear and Hatred, pp. 121-8
26
Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in
Colonial Queensland, Australia & New Zealand Book Company, Sydney, 1975, p. 301
27
Markus, op. cit.

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 9

Chinese launderers28. The visit to Sydney of representatives from the Chinese government in
July 1887 triggered a new round of mass activity. Large rallies, public meetings and an anti-
Chinese conference were held in Brisbane. A similar conference took place in Melbourne. The
Sydney anti-Chinese league was reorganised on the most elaborate platform to date, ranging
from a preamble accusing the Chinese commissioners of “spy[ing] out the land”, to calls for a
raft of special taxes against the Chinese, restriction of inter-marriage, stamping of Chinese-
made products, special inspections of Chinese market gardens, banning of certain Chinese
organisations and restrictions against Chinese mining. The league handed out some 20,000
leaflets to publicise this platform. It held a series of large public meetings and participated in the
Eight Hour Day procession. At this time, there was also a considerable campaign for the racial
segregation of Sydney’s trams29.
In the following year, the agitation reached a new level, as nationalist sentiments coalesced
around the celebration of a centenary of white invasion. In late April 1888, the imminent
docking in Melbourne and Sydney of the Afghan, carrying hundreds of Chinese arrivals,
triggered a mass backlash organised by the anti-Chinese leagues. A delegation from Melbourne
Trades Hall Council successfully pressured the Victorian premier to turn the ship away. The
anti-Chinese league held a mass rally on May Day to celebrate this victory. A similar reception
was prepared for the Afghan in Sydney. On 3 May a 5000-strong meeting at the Sydney Town
Hall was accompanied by a street rally outside for those who could not get in. The subsequent
march to parliament attempted to storm the chamber and forced the government to place
stringent restrictions on the Chinese arrivals. A so-called Grand National Anti-Chinese
Demonstration was held a month later, on 2 June at the Domain, attracting some 50,000 people.
By the end of that month, eleven unions and the Trades and Labour Council had formally
affiliated to the anti-Chinese league. On 30 June, a rally targeting the use of Chinese workers in
the shipping industry attracted a crowd estimated between 6000 and 50,000. Anti-Chinese
pogroms also continued in the remaining alluvial goldfields of Queensland, most notably at
Normanton in June. Violence in the cities were directed at Chinese businesses, often resulting in
serious injury and property destruction. Perpetrators who were caught generally escaped with a
fine30.
In that centennial year, on 12 June, the six colonial premiers met in Sydney to assemble –
this time successfully – uniform legislation against migrants of colour. This was the beginning
of White Australia as a formal national policy. Other formal moves to consummate national
unity abounded in these latter years of the 19th century, including the first nationwide census in
1881, the opening of the Sydney-Melbourne railway in 1883, an agreement among colonial
governments to form a Federal Council to work towards national unification, a conference of
chambers of commerce and industry in 1887 and 1888 to work towards intercolonial free trade,
the opening of the Adelaide-Melbourne railway in 1887, Sir Henry Parkes’ historic Tenterfield
federation speech in 1889, a series of intercolonial military conferences in the 1890s, the first
federation conference in 1891, the formation of a national pastoralists’ organisation also in
1891, the standardisation of time zones in 1895, and elections of delegates to the constitutional
conventions and subsequent referenda that paved the legal path to federation31.

Racism and labour nationalism

The cross-class anti-Chinese campaigns of the late 1800s comprised a popular nationalist
movement co-led by petty-bourgeois labour leaders and ruling class politicians. Through this
movement, labour and capital negotiated an equilibrium between the former’s desire for labour
market protection and the latter’s urgent need for popular unity behind its grand national project
of consolidating Australian capitalism. The ruling class’s legislative consummation of the
clamour for a White Australia was both driven by its own interests and a concession to popular
demands. These dynamics reflected a relationship of class forces that was, on the whole,
favourable to workers, principally due to a labour shortage that persisted throughout the late 19th
28
McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 48
29
Markus, op. cit., pp. 134-6
30
ibid., pp. 143-52
31
See the National Archives of Australia website at http://www.naa.gov.au/

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 10

century. At the same time, the ruling class had the wealth, founded on an exceptional market
position in Britain, to make sizable concessions, and not just in terms of racial protectionism.
The Australian political economy underwent a colossal transformation from the mid-
nineteenth century. The gold rushes of the 1850s funded a deep expansion of the colonial
infrastructure, state, industry and urban development. Victorian gold amounted to more than a
third of the world’s gold production and helped nail the international adoption of the gold
standard.32 By the 1880s Australian living standards surpassed those in the US and Britain.
There was more than enough surplus for the bourgeoisie to buy social and industrial peace:
universal male franchise was established in all the colonies in the 1850s, there was no property
qualification for elected members to the lower houses, the secret ballot was introduced, and by
1870 Victoria was paying parliamentarians. Whereas the Chartists fought tooth and nail in
Britain, their most important demands were readily conceded by Australia’s rulers. In 1856
Melbourne building workers won the 8-hour day without the bloodshed suffered 30 years later
by their US comrades at Chicago’s Haymarket.
In short, the Australian working class was rapidly incorporated into a shared vision of
national progress, ostensibly free of the stifling social hatreds of the Old World, founded on the
free and boundless soil of terra nullius. This is the material basis, the political-economic
framework that shaped popular consciousness towards the late 19th century. Not only were the
mass of working people “enfranchised free of charge”33, but the pursuit of property ownership, a
direct stake in the abundant new society, however modest, was a tangible possibility for a
significantly greater proportion than in Europe. Home ownership in the colonial capitals
exceeded 50%34, a rate unimaginable in the Old World.
The free, smallholding citizenry that formed the backbone of US bourgeois democracy at
this time found its urban match in Australia. Freed to pursue other occupations by an
inordinately efficient rural economy, the highly urbanised population replaced the organic
bonds of rural smallholding with craft unions, cooperatives and friendly societies. Labour
desired not so much to overthrow capital, but to attain an equal standing, a full recognition of
the “dignity of labour”, through collective bargaining and mutual aid. “United to relieve, not
combined to injure”, “defence not defiance” were the slogans of the day. Pride in colonial self-
government, acceptance of the institutions of bourgeois democracy and respect for individual
self-improvement were among the basic political characteristics of an early labour aristocracy
that saw itself as proud partners in the progress of the new society.
This petty-bourgeois popular consciousness, founded on exceptional material privilege, in
turn borne of the unique position of the Australian economy within the British empire, is also
the political economy of popular racism in 19th century Australia. As the Australian nation and
bourgeoisie emerged and unified, so too did a nationalism of labour, deeply imbued by a
defensive outlook toward all classes of economic competition. Protecting Australian living
standards meant sheltering local capital and excluding cheap labour.
Hence the earliest federal governments rested on a coalition between the Labor and
Protectionist parties, for whom the White Australia Policy went hand in glove with industrial
protection. When, in May 1909, Protectionist leader Alfred Deakin walked into federal
parliament, soon after fusing with the Free Traders to form the first Liberal Party behind the
backs of his former coalition colleagues, he was greeted by howls of “Judas!” from members of
a party ostensibly representing working class interests35.

32
Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Oakleigh (Australia), 1999, pp. 86-
121
33
The phrase originates with Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 181
34
Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Oakleigh (Australia), 1999, p. 111
35
Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, Penguin, Camberwell (Australia), 1995, p. 222

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 11

 Racism was mutually reinforced by the contending classes. In the process, they found
national unity. The big bourgeoisie, caught up in the imperial manoeuvres and ambitions of
Britain, looking upon itself as an Anglo-Saxon bastion in the region, imbued also with a natural
aspiration towards national strength and unity, therein saw White Australia as the organising
principle for such aims. Working class racism both reflected and reinterpreted this racism of the
bourgeoisie, envisioning an organic unity of a white yeomanry to share in the bounties of the
antipodean New World, not in some great classless collectivism, but as hard-earned personal
wealth, for which collective bargaining was one means. The nationalist and pro-capitalist nature
of working class organisation at this time enabled the colonial bourgeoisie to give it due
recognition. The image of the NSW governor Baron Charles Carrington, the Marquess of
Lincolnshire, laying the foundation stone of Sydney’s Trades Hall on 28 January 1888 is one
clarifying reminder of this.
So Australian workers were not merely duped by ruling class racist scapegoating and fear
mongering. Working people are not blank pages waiting to be passively inscribed by bourgeois
ideologists. Nor did racism take hold because it successfully deflected class antagonisms36. For
this begs the very question: why did racism in particular succeed in playing this role, in
deflecting and giving new substance to mass political anger? Why were workers so receptive to
precisely this sort of ideology and fear mongering? Yes, the racist colonial bourgeoisie and the
capitalist system are fundamentally responsible for the White Australia Policy and racial
oppression in general. But this only reveals one side of the dynamic of how and why ruling
class ideology exerts mass influence.
Nationalist movements of oppressed nations have a generally democratic thrust, pursuing the
right of self-determination and political parity vis-à-vis the oppressor nation. By contrast,
nationalist movements and programs in the advanced capitalist countries have a chauvinist and
racist character, as they rest on the preservation and protection of privilege vis-à-vis the claims
of the world’s poor. This is even more pronounced in an island continent such as Australia,
arced to its north and northeast by some of the poorest countries in the world. The peculiarity of
the embryonic nation of Australia in the late 1800s was that it arose on the basis of, firstly,
comparative material privilege (with a concomitant early labour aristocracy) and, secondly, the
global march towards imperialism that was accompanied by a renewed, even deeper penetration
of colonial rule, morally-politically justified by a more effective, pseudo-scientific reassertion of
racist ideology in all the aspiring imperialist powers, including Australia. In this context, nation-
building, federal unification and national identity could not but be racist37.

The popular and labour press

Racist ideology took more effective hold at this time, not only because it manipulated the
scientific ideas of the age, but also because of the greater ease of its propagation in the new
demographic conditions of mass literacy, public schooling, urban concentration and the mass
print media. More crucially, the people who spread racist ideas were popular cultural figures
who attracted a mass following. In Australia, a whole swag of labour nationalist publications,
poets, cartoonists and journalists played the leading part in popularising racism – ruling class
racists such as Deakin and Samuel Griffiths would not have had the popular appeal and
authority to do the same.
The populist Bulletin, whose slogan “Australia for the White Man” featured on its masthead
until 1961, brought together many of these writers and artists. It famously summed up the
democracy of white men that was the essence of labour nationalism in its lead article of 2 July
1887, titled “Australia for the Australians”:
By the term Australian we mean not those who have been merely born in Australia. All white men who come
to these shores – with a clean record – and who leave behind them the memory of the class-distinctions and
the religious differences of the old world; all men who place the happiness, the prosperity, the advancement
of their adopted country before the interests of Imperialism are Australian. In this regard all men who leave
the tyrant-ridden lands of Europe for freedom of speech and right of personal liberty are Australians before

36
See Phil Griffiths’ labour history articles at http://members.optusnet.com.au/~griff52/
37
This was a portent of what was to come in Palestine in 1948, the last of such racist nation-building projects, with its
pogroms against non-Jewish Palestinians and privileged paranoia toward the surrounding Arab masses.

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 12

 they set foot on the ship which brings them hither…. No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no
purveyor of cheap coloured labour, is an Australian. True to his grovelling and lickspittle nature, the
Chinaman in Australia is a toady and a “loyalist”, and at least a pretended worshipper of his friend Missa
Parkes, who poll-taxes him, and of the regime under which thousands of his countrymen have been
slaughtered in order that Imperial opium might be stuffed down their brothers’ throats. 38

As described earlier, the Bulletin’s sham anti-imperialism was aimed at the connivance of the
British crown to create a “huge nigger empire”39 and undermine Australia’s white purity for the
sake of trade profits with China. In its article, “The British Imperial Heathen”, the Bulletin spelt
out the consequences for Australia’s own imperial destiny:
Constant association with the now despised leper will make him more familiar and less repulsive…. which
will slowly yet surely taint the comparatively pure blood of the Caucasian race and fill Australia with an
effete, semi-Oriental nation that can never rise to greatness until in the slow course of centuries it has
outgrown the burden of the Chinese tradition and carved out for itself a new destiny.40

Similarly, any anti-capitalist sentiment was directed against those who sought to introduce
coloured workers for the sake of profit – not driven by solidarity with these workers against
such super-exploitation, but by hostility to their supposedly natural servility and inferiority that
allowed them to be used by the capitalists. When sugar planters in Queensland proposed the
revival of Pacific Islander labour, the Bulletin responded with a lead article on 26 March 1892,
titled “The Savage with a Weak Constitution”, that warned:
…what will Queensland be ten years hence? The whole middle class – small traders, artisans, white servants
– will be crushed out or reduced to the conditions of mean whites, and Queensland, glorious Queensland!
teeming with wealth, agricultural and mineral – will become a paradise of the Devil, inhabited by two classes,
the McIlwraithian capitalist and the savage with a weak constitution.41

This populist tradition continues to pulsate strongly today, seen in the likes of the poet Les
Murray, shock-jocks Alan Jones and John Laws, and the Quadrant conservatives who rail
against the “internationalists” and “elites” who would belittle and trample the (white) battler
with their political correctness and multiculturalism. Such shadow boxing with an imaginary
elite, of course, leaves untouched the real accumulators of Australian wealth who are
predominantly white and Anglo-Celtic in origin. Nor does it even glance at the large numbers of
non-white battlers who struggle daily, not only to make ends meet, but also in the added battle
against racist bigotry and humiliation. Indeed, these battlers are once again branded, at best, as
servile pawns of the dastardly elites and, at worst, savages who gang-rape virtuous white
women and desecrate by their very presence the hallowed ground of Cronulla beach.
Likewise, that great bard of the common people and leading light of the Bulletin, Henry
Lawson, limited his solidarity to the white herrenvolk. Take, for example, the following two
verses from his poem Cambaroora Star (1891), a tribute to William Lane and the labourite
Boomerang newspaper:
Diggers then had little mercy for the loafer and the scamp—
If there wasn’t law and order, there was justice in the camp;
And the manly independence that is found where diggers are
Had a sentinel to guard it in the Cambaroora Star.
There was strife about the Chinamen, who came in days of old
Like a swarm of thieves and loafers when the diggers found the gold—
Like the sneaking fortune-hunters who are always found behind,
And who only shepherd diggers till they track them to the ‘find’.
Charlie wrote a slinging leader, calling on his digger mates,
And he said: “We think that Chinkies are as bad as syndicates.
What’s the good of holding meetings where you only talk and swear?
Get a move upon the Chinkies when you’ve got an hour to spare.”
It was nine o’clock next morning when the Chows began to swarm,
But they weren’t so long in going, for the diggers’ blood was warm.

38
Reprinted, in part, in Noel Ebbels (ed.), The Australian Labor Movement 1850-1907, Australasian Book Society,
Sydney, 1960, pp. 161-2
39
Cited in Manning Clark, A History of Australia: The People Make Laws 1888-1915, vol. 5, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 132
40
Reprinted, in part, in Ebbels, op. cit., p. 163
41
ibid., p. 164

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 13

 Then the diggers held a meeting, and they shouted: “Hip hoorar!
Give three ringing cheers, my hearties, for the Cambaroora Star.”42

With white unity achieved, after 1901 Lawson’s labour nationalism grew over into a stirring
call for national strength and greatness. This became increasingly pronounced amid the
intensifying inter-imperialist rivalries of the 1900s and 1910s. Australia’s Peril, written after
Japan’s victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, ends with the following dramatic verses:
Keep the wealth you have won from the cities, spend the wealth you have won on the land,
Save the floods that run into the ocean—save the floods that sink into the sand!
Make farms fit to live on, build workshops and technical schools for your sons;
Keep the wealth of the land in Australia—make your own cloth, machines, and guns!
Clear out the Calico Jimmy, the nigger, the Chow, and his pals;
Be your foreword for years: Irrigation! Make a network of lakes and canals!
See that your daughters have children, and see that Australia is home,
And so be prepared, a strong nation, for the storm that most surely must come.
Lawson darkly saw the inter-imperialist tensions of the early 20th century as an impending,
apocalyptic East-West race war, confirmed and begun by Japan’s victory. In The Vanguard he
extends his racial solidarity to Russia43:
‘Tis the first round of the struggle of the East against the West,
Of the fearful war of races—for the White Man could not rest.
Hold them, IVAN! staggering bravely underneath your gloomy sky;
Hold them, IVAN! we shall want you pretty badly by-and-bye!
Fighting for the Indian empire, when the British pay their debt;
Never Britain watched for BLUCHER as he’ll watch for IVAN yet!
It means all to young Australia—it means life or death to us,
For the vanguard of the White Man is the vanguard of the Russ!

Looked at in this light, Henry Lawson was not the pen of an authentic Australian socialism –
as naïvely and opportunistically claimed by the Communist Party of Australia – but, rather, of
an endogenous national socialism. Lawson eulogised anti-Asian racism as the just cry of the
(white) battler. He was guilty of an equivocal anti-capitalism, aroused only when it was thought
to endanger the sacred, organic unity of the white yeoman nation.
The theme of race war, combined with a poignant sympathy for the white battler, is also to
be found in Banjo Patterson’s poetry. In A Job for McGuinness (1923) a diligent but
unemployed white worker is held up as a future hero in the coming war against the “yellow
stain”:
Oh, it’s dreadful to think in a country like this
With its chances for work – and enjoyment
That a man like McGuinness was certain to miss
Whenever he tried for employment.
He wrote to employers from Bondi to Bourke,
From Woolloomooloo to Glen Innes,
But he found – though his wife could get plenty of work –
There was never a job for McGuinness.
But perhaps – later on – when the Chow and the Jap
Begin to drift down from the tropics,
When a big yellow stain spreading over the map
Provides some disquieting topics,
Oh, it’s then when they’re wanting a man that will stand
In the trench where his own kith and kin is,
With a frown on his face and a gun in his hand –
Then there might be a job for McGuinness!44

42
Reprinted online at http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/L/LawsonHenry/index.html
43
This is the version from the collection entitled, When I was King and Other Verses, reprinted online at
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/L/LawsonHenry/verse/wheniwasking/vanguard.html
44
Reprinted online at http://www.uq.edu.au/~mlwham/banjo/index.html

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 14

The part played by Labor
The political vehicle for this populist labour nationalism has historically been the Australian
Labor Party (ALP)45. The colonial Labor parties that eventually formed the ALP were, among
working people, the most authoritative and trusted champions of the policy of racial-national
unity. A key plank in their platforms was commitment to a white Australia. In fact, race not
only united the nation, it also held together the very party of labour nationalism. For it was the
commitment to racial exclusion that cemented the first federal Labor caucus, which was
otherwise divided between opposing camps of protectionists and free traders46.
The White Australia Policy became national law when the Immigration Restriction Act of
1901, initiated by the Labor Party, was among the first to pass the new federal parliament. The
Labor leader at the time, John Christian Watson, explained his motivation for the legislation
during the parliamentary debate:
…the objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia — although I
admit it is to a large extent tinged with considerations of an industrial nature — lies in the main in the
possibility and probability of racial contamination…. The question is whether we would desire that our sisters
or our brothers should be married into any of these races to which we object. If these people are not such as
we can meet upon an equality, and not such that we can feel that it is no disgrace to intermarry with, and not
such as we can expect to give us an infusion of blood that will tend to the raising of our standard of life, and
to the improvement of the race, we should be foolish in the extreme if we did not exhaust every means of
preventing them from coming to this land, which we have made our own.47

Little known is the fact that the Immigration Restriction Act was only the centrepiece of a
package of three federal laws that made up the total White Australia Policy. The Pacific Island
Labourers Act of 1901 legislated for the deportation of Islanders from 1906. Section 15 of the
Post and Telegraph Act of 1901 required all ships carrying Australian mail to employ only
white workers, thereby directly addressing a key historic grievance of the white labour
nationalists, focused as they were on the maritime industry in the previous decades. Other such
laws joined this shameful policy in the following years, including the Commonwealth Franchise
Act of 1902, the Naturalisation Act of 1903 and the Old-Age and Invalid Pensions Act of 1908.
As early as 1890, the first meeting of the General Council of the Australian Labor Federation
had headed its “People’s Parliament Platform” with the demand for “Universal White Adult
Suffrage”48. The ALP’s first federal platform of 1900 was composed of only three planks, the
second of which was the “Total Exclusion of colored and other undesirable races”49. This was
emphatically affirmed by future Labor prime minister Billy Hughes in early 1901 when he told
the Bulletin, “Our chief plank is, of course, a White Australia. There’s no compromise about
that!”50 The 1905 federal platform of the ALP stated as its chief objective “the cultivation of an
Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity”. Moreover, both the fighting
and general platforms placed the “Maintenance of a White Australia” as the first plank51. Thus,
Humphrey McQueen was only partly accurate when he famously observed that “the Labor Party
was racist before it was socialist”52. For, by being so, the ALP had completely forfeited
whatever dubious claim to socialism it may have started out with. The ALP was and remains a
party of labour nationalism and, hence, a pro-capitalist, bourgeois party. In this light, the path
taken by “Little Digger” Billy Hughes from Labor prime minister to founder of a National Party
proper was a seamless and logical one. Similarly, the ALP’s other major split, the Democratic
Labour Party, also went sharply rightward.
45
In fact, a major factor in the success and popularity of the Coalition government under John Howard was, precisely,
their revival of white labour nationalism under conservative leadership, albeit in the less crude guises of “border
protection”, “war on terror” and hostility to “political correctness”. Howard’s political cunning lay in beating Labor
to breaking the bipartisan rejection of White Australia nationalism when neoliberal imperatives deemed such a break
both advantageous and necessary. Hence the Rudd Labor government’s failure to fully overturn the Howard legacy.
46
Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880-1900, New South Wales University
Press, Sydney, 1988, p. 295
47
Reprinted, in part, in Ebbels, op. cit., pp. 234-5
48
ibid., p. 207
49
J.T. Lang, I Remember, McNamara’s Books, Katoomba, 1980, p. 32
50
A New Britannia, p. 53
51
Ebbels, op. cit., p. 222
52
A New Britannia, p. 53

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 15

 But Hughes’ pro-conscription, militarist departure from Labor did not cleanse the party of
racism. For the 1916 victory against conscription also had its ugly racist side. In the newspaper
of the Victorian ALP, Labor Call, anti-conscription advocates explained their stance as a belief
in “keeping Australia a white man’s country”. Conscription would mean “all except those
utterly incapable of service would be gone, and this country would have to resort to importing
labour”. Similarly, the Worker declared, “If we vote to send the white workers out of the
country, we vote to bring the coloured workers in”. A week before the October referendum, the
imminent arrival of a shipload of Maltese immigrant workers – beyond the pale of what was
then a very northern European notion of whiteness – was used as a successful point of agitation
by the racist wing of the anti-conscription campaign. In response, Billy Hughes ordered the
ship’s captain to dock at the Western Australian port town of Albany and put the entire ship into
quarantine until after the referendum53. In his 1956 autobiography, I Remember, NSW Labor
leader Jack Lang passed an unequivocal verdict on the role of racism in defeating conscription
in a chapter entitled, “White Australia Policy k.o.’d conscription”54. In it he recounted a speech
he gave at an anti-conscription rally in 1916:
If Australia sent another 100,000 men to the battlefields of France, what was going to happen to this country?
… Would the women be conscripted to harvest the crops?… Or would the Government seek colored labor to
do the work? What was going to happen to the sugar crop? Would it rot in the fields, or would the Hughes
Government bring back the Kanakas?… If Hughes took another 100,000 men, how was he going to keep this
country going? From all round the big meeting came cries: “By importing Maltese and employing Chinese”.
That clinched it so far as I was concerned. For the first time I realised that we had every chance of defeating
Conscription. White Australia was going to be the trump card…. “Vote No and Keep Australia White”
became the recognised slogan of the campaign.55

Earlier in the book, Lang paid tribute to Labor’s leading part in the racial salvation of the
country, in a chapter entitled, “White Australia saved Australia”:
Had we listened to the do-gooders and the crusaders for international brotherhood and racial equality, the
barriers would have come down long ago. Our living standards would have been destroyed. We would have
had intermarriages of races, half-castes and quarter-castes with all the social dilemmas that invariably follow
such racial mixtures. We would have had a Black, Brown and Brindle streak right through every strata of our
society. Instead we risked the charge that we were drawing the color line. We decided to keep this country as
a citadel of the white peoples.56

A racial “citadel” is an apt description of Australia’s historical and geopolitical role of an

imperialist military outpost in the Asia-Pacific region, going as far back as Queensland’s
attempted annexation of eastern New Guinea, followed not long after by Australian troops’
participation in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China, counter-revolutionary wars
against Korea and Vietnam, and continuing through to its role today as neoliberal enforcer in
the island states of the southwest Pacific and resident “war on terror” mandarins in Indonesia,
the Philippines, and other southeast Asian countries. Racist labour nationalism has easily
translated into a populist imperialism – an imperialism of the little people: the 1910 federal
election manifesto of the Victorian ALP stated, “When a majority of the people of the principal
nations, such as the United States of America, Germany, and Great Britain are converted to the
Labor Gospel, war as we know it will cease. The only use for armies and navies then will be to
police the world and keep the small and less civilised nations in order.”57

Dialectics of working class racism

To argue that workers may be active agents of ruling class racism is merely to restate, in a
different way, the basic dialectic of working class sociology. That is, there is a deep
contradiction inherent in the proletariat’s position within the class structure of capitalism, a
contradiction that drives both the class’s revolutionary potential and its vulnerability to
capitalist ideology and politics.

53
A New Britannia, p. 54; Lang, op. cit., p. 71
54
Lang, pp. 67-71
55
ibid., pp. 69-70
56
ibid., p. 36
57
A New Britannia, p. 62

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 16

 The proletariat is defined by its relationship to the means of production as a seller of a
commodity – labour-power (ability to work). When conditions for its sale are favourable (as
they were in Australia for much of the 19th century), workers are more susceptible to the
influence of pro-capitalist ideas and propaganda, including racism. Even when disputes erupt
against an immediate grievance, this aspect of the dialectic – the day to day commodified social
existence of the worker – limits them to (temporary and partial) settlement within the
framework of capitalism; that is, unless there is conscious revolutionary political organisation
based on the strategic application of scientific socialism. Or, to paraphrase Lenin in What is to
be done?, the workers are spontaneously only capable of trade-union (reformist) consciousness.
Nevertheless, the very nature of the commodity they sell puts the workers at systemic odds
with the capitalist class which, in the process of purchasing their labour-power, exploits them.
This seething antagonism then ruptures into open, even revolutionary struggle when the
contradictions of capital accumulation produce economic and political crises of one sort or
another. This aspect of the dialectic contains the objective potential for the proletariat to
revolutionise capitalist society and strive towards the withering away of social classes
altogether. And such relentless, unyielding pressure towards political rupture and radicalisation
in this “epoch of wars and revolutions” contains the dynamics for anti-racist revolutionary
struggle, historically demonstrated by the heroic upheavals detailed in the previous chapter.
Fully recognising and embracing this revolutionary potential need not deny the dialectical
unity of opposites inherent in the nature of the working class. Phil Griffiths’ germ theory of
ruling class racism, of its contagious spread among workers without active mediation, is plainly
incapable of explaining why mass racism has been so persistent. If it is merely a result of the
sowing of lies, then such lies should have been well and truly exposed by now. But that is the
primitive limit faced by all such idealist conceptions of history, thoroughly exposed by Marx
and Engels around the time of the first of the racist epidemics to infect Australia’s colonial
masses.

Ch. 4: Australia’s Racist History, by Iggy Kim 17