Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'White Australia policy'

This thesis examines the Japanese-Australian clash over the White Australia Policy during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. It explores the questions as to why Japan strongly objected to the White Australia Policy and why Australia was uncompromising in its position of excluding Japanese immigrants by placing these issues in a broad historical and international context of the time, particularly the development of collective national identities in Japan and Australia. Japan and Australia developed their national identities almost simultaneously in the late 19th century. In the case of Japan, after embarking on a frenzied modernisation and Westernisation in order to achieve equality with the West, it attempted to establish an identity as a “civilised” nation. Australians, for their part, embraced “British race nationalism” as the core foundation of their nation and developed their identity as a white British nation. However, because of their unique historical circumstances—in Japan’s case, because of its status as the only non-white great power in a European-dominated international society, and in Australia’s, because of its peculiar geo-cultural situation of being a white colonial outpost in the Pacific surrounded by people with different race and culture—they were both insecure about the identities they created for themselves, feeling that their national identities were constantly challenged and threatened by external circumstances. This thesis suggests that both nations’ visions of, and anxieties around, national identity greatly influenced their responses to the issue of Japanese exclusion in Australia and argues that the Japanese-Australian clash over the White Australia Policy can be interpreted as a clash between a country which sought to reaffirm its civilised identity by achieving equality with the West even on immigration issues and a country which was determined to defend its identity as a culturally and racially homogeneous white British nation from the perceived threat posed by the rise of a non-white power in the region. In other words, this thesis analyses the Japanese-Australian confrontation over the White Australia Policy as a means of shedding light on how the Japanese and Australians perceived their identities in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. In so doing, it aims to contribute to the existing literature on Japanese immigration and the White Australia Policy and offer a more comprehensive analysis of the Japanese-Australian clash over the White Australia Policy.

On 25 July 1969, President Richard Nixon would announce a new direction in American foreign policy towards Asia that would have far reaching implications for its ANZUS partner in Australia. This study aims to map out the affects the Nixon Doctrine would have on Australian policy reforms in an attempt to critically examine the forces within international politics that saw Australia comprehensively engage with its Asia neighbours. This Asian region, which had previously been looked at with fear, was gradually viewed in the light of Nixon’s new policies as the only path to Australia’s long-standing future in the region.

This thesis traces the story of Australian Jewish identity from the colonial period to the end of the 1920s. Anglo-Jews aligned themselves with ‘white Australia’, arguing that their Jewishness was merely a private trait. Moments of crisis in the 1890s and 1920s, prompted by the possible and actual migration of Eastern European Jews to Australia, threatened to destabilise the place Anglo-Jews had carved out in Australian society, and forced a renegotiation of what it meant to be Jewish in Australia. These moments demonstrate that despite being notionally accepted in Australia, the whiteness of Jews was never guaranteed. Drawing on newspapers and government records, this thesis argues that since their arrival in Australia, Jews have been ambivalently and ambiguously placed in relation to Australian constructions of whiteness. As a group notoriously hard to define, Jews are an important case study in an analysis of the discursive world of ‘white Australia’, presenting new questions that challenge existing binaries of ‘white’ and ‘coloured’.

The structure of this study of William Liu will closely reflect his ideas and the major historical influences in his life, and will span the period from 1893 through ninety years spent mainly in Sydney, ending in 1983, the year before the beginning of the attack on multiculturalism launched by the historian Geoffrey Blainey. The memorialisation of Liu in the post-Blainey “immigration debate” period will then be considered. The study will also reflect the changes in protest against racially discriminatory immigration policies in Australia, as Liu moved from a period in which his was an almost isolated critique to one in which he was able to embrace the ever-widening group of people opposed to the ‘White Australia Policy’. This process has not been fully examined, perhaps due to the fact that the protest often appeared to have little impact upon policy. But the way in which Liu and other protestors expressed their view of what Australia should be and how the ‘White Australia Policy’ affected this vision sheds a great deal of light on these periods in Australian history. The structure of this thesis around Liu’s life, beginning with a period in which the ‘White Australia Policy’ was widely accepted, and ending in a period in which multiculturalism was entrenched as official policy, emphasises the cultural shift which was brought about by decades of protest against the Anglo-conformist model of Australian identity

Doctor of Philosophy
The structure of this study of William Liu will closely reflect his ideas and the major historical influences in his life, and will span the period from 1893 through ninety years spent mainly in Sydney, ending in 1983, the year before the beginning of the attack on multiculturalism launched by the historian Geoffrey Blainey. The memorialisation of Liu in the post-Blainey “immigration debate” period will then be considered. The study will also reflect the changes in protest against racially discriminatory immigration policies in Australia, as Liu moved from a period in which his was an almost isolated critique to one in which he was able to embrace the ever-widening group of people opposed to the ‘White Australia Policy’. This process has not been fully examined, perhaps due to the fact that the protest often appeared to have little impact upon policy. But the way in which Liu and other protestors expressed their view of what Australia should be and how the ‘White Australia Policy’ affected this vision sheds a great deal of light on these periods in Australian history. The structure of this thesis around Liu’s life, beginning with a period in which the ‘White Australia Policy’ was widely accepted, and ending in a period in which multiculturalism was entrenched as official policy, emphasises the cultural shift which was brought about by decades of protest against the Anglo-conformist model of Australian identity

This thesis argues that the colonial ruling class developed its first White Australia policy in 1888, creating most of the precedents for the federal legislation of 1901. White Australia was central to the making of the Australian working class, to the shaping of Australian nationalism, and the development of federal political institutions. It has long been understood as a product of labour movement mobilising, but this thesis rejects that approach, arguing that the labour movement lacked the power to impose such a fundamental national policy, and that the key decisions which led to White Australia were demonstrably not products of labour movement action. ¶ It finds three great ruling class agendas behind the decisions to exclude Chinese immigrants, and severely limit the use of indentured “coloured labour”. Chinese people were seen as a strategic threat to Anglo-Australian control of the continent, and this fear was sharpened in the mid-1880s when China was seen as a rising military power, and a necessary ally for Britain in its global rivalry with Russia. The second ruling class agenda was the building of a modern industrial economy, which might be threatened by industries resting on indentured labour in the north. The third agenda was the desire to construct an homogenous people, which was seen as necessary for containing social discontent and allowing “free institutions”, such as parliamentary democracy. ¶ These agendas, and the ruling class interests behind them, challenged other major ruling class interests and ideologies. The result was a series of dilemmas and conflicts within the ruling class, and the resolution of these moved the colonial governments towards the White Australia policy of 1901. The thesis therefore describes the conflict over the use of Pacific Islanders by pastoralists in Queensland, the campaign for indentured Indian labour by sugar planters and the radical strategy of submerging this into a campaign for North Queensland separation, and the strike and anti-Chinese campaign in opposition to the use of Chinese workers by the Australasian Steam Navigation Company in 1878. The first White Australia policy of 1888 was the outcome of three separate struggles by the majority of the Anglo-Australian ruling class—to narrowly restrict the use of indentured labour in Queensland, to assert the right of the colonies to decide their collective immigration policies independently of Britain, and to force South Australia to accept the end of Chinese immigration into its Northern Territory. The dominant elements in the ruling class had already agreed that any serious move towards federation was to be conditional on the building of a white, predominantly British, population across the whole continent, and in 1888 they imposed that policy on their own societies and the British government.

This thesis contests the assumption that Herbert Evatt’s 1940’s career was devoted to the promotion of a universal post-war human rights regime. As Australian Minister for External Affairs, Evatt developed an independent small state strategy that pursued a system of international democracy and social justice to facilitate the expansion of Australian influence in the Pacific and curb American hegemony. Evatt’s subscription to the White Australia Policy undermined the realization of human rights by strengthening domestic sovereignty against international intervention. Human rights became the vehicle through which Evatt sought to shape the post-war order for the benefit of Australian national interests.

By using little known primary sources in Chinese and English, this thesis will discuss Australia’s diplomatic relations with China, between 1901 and 1941. In March 1909, Liang Lanxun, China’s first consul-general arrived in Melbourne, Australia. Liang’s mission was to promote trade between China and Australia and as well to study the racial relations between Chinese and Australians. In 1921, Edward Little was appointed as Australia’s first trade commissioner in Shanghai, China. In 1929, the Chinese consulate moved from Melbourne to Sydney, due to the fact that Sydney had become the centre of the Chinese communities in the Oceania. I suggest that the Great Depression and the Second World War (Japan's expansion in the Pacific) forced Australian policy-makers to reconsider Australia’s geo-political position in the world. This is the first detailed research that treats Chinese diplomats in Australia and Australian diplomats in China between 1901 and 1941 as key historical subjects. In this thesis, I argue that Chinese diplomats used trade as a tool to fight against the White Australia policy between 1909 and 1941. I further argue Australia was more intertwined and connected with Asia, in this period than the existing literature suggested.

This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion of modern Chinese identity by pro-viding a case study of Cheok Hong CHEONG. It necessarily considers Australian atti-tudes towards the Chinese during the 19th century, not least the White Australia Pol-icy. The emergence of that discriminatory immigration policy over the second half of the 19th century until its national implementation in 1901 provides the background to the thesis. Cheong was the leading figure among Chinese-Australian Christians and a prominent figure in the Australian Chinese community and the thesis seeks to iden-tify a man whose contribution has largely been shadowy in other studies or, more commonly, overlooked by the parochialism of colony/state emphasis in many histo-ries of Australia. His role in the Christian church fills a space in Victorian religious history. Although Cheong accumulated great wealth he was not part of the Chinese mer-chant class of the huagong/huaquiao traditions of the overseas Chinese diaspora of the 19th and 20th centuries. His wealth was accumulated through property investments following the spectacular collapse of the Victorian banking system during the 1890s. His community leadership role arose through his position in the Christian Church rather than, as was generally the case, through business. His English language skills, resulting from his church association, were the key to his role as a Chinese community spokesman.¶ Cheok Hong Cheong left an archive of some 800 documents in the English lan-guage covering the major people, incidents and concerns of his life and times. His Let-terbooks, together with the archives of the various Christian missions to the Chinese in Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, shed light on one person’s life and more broadly, through his involvements on the complex relationships of Chinese emigrants, with the often unsympathetic majority of Australians.¶ This is a case study of a Chinese identity formed outside China and influenced by a wider set of cultural influences than any other Chinese-Australian of his time —an identity that justifies the description of him as an ‘Alien Son’. Cheong’s story is a con-tribution to the urban and family history of an important ethnic sub-group within the wider immigrant history of Australia.¶ While Cheong remained a Chinese subject his identification with Australia cannot be questioned. All his children were born in Australia and he left just twice after his arrival in 1863. He visited England in 1891-2 and in 1906 he briefly visited China. Identity and culture issues are growing in importance as part of the revived relation-ship between the Chinese of the diaspora and the economic renewal of the People’s Republic of China and this thesis is offers a contribution to that discussion.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours) at Macquarie University.
Thesis (MA (Hons))--Macquarie University (Division of Humanities, Dept. of Asian Languages), 2006.
Bibliography: leaves 137-160.
Introduction -- Anglo-Japanese relations and World War One -- Fear of Japan in Australia -- William Morris Hughes -- Japan's proposal and diplomacy at Paris -- Reasons for rejection : a discussion -- Conclusion.
Japan as an ally of Britain, since the signing of Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, entered World War One at British request. During the Great War Japan fought Germany in Asia and afforded protection to Australia. After the conclusion of the War, a peace conference was held at Paris in 1919. As a victorious ally and as one of the Five Great Powers of the day, Japan participated at the Paris Peace Conference, and proposed racial equality to be enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations. This Racial Equality Bill, despite the tireless efforts of the Japanese delegates who engaged the representatives of other countries in intense diplomatic negotiations, was rejected. The rejection, a debatable issue ever since, has inspired many explanations including the theory that it was a deliberate Japanese ploy to achieve other goals in the agenda. This thesis has researched the reasons for rejection and contends that the rejection was not due to any one particular reason. Four key factors: a) resolute opposition from Australian Prime Minister Hughes determined to protect White Australia Policy, b) lack of British support, c) lack of US support, and d) lack of support from the British dominions of New Zealand, Canada and South Africa; converged to defeat the Japanese proposal. Japanese inexperience in international diplomacy evident from strategic and tactical mistakes, their weak presentations and communications, and enormous delays in negotiations, at Paris, undermined Japan's position at the conference, but the reasons for rejection of the racial equality proposal were extrinsic.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
xii, 188 leaves

This thesis moves beyond patriarchal accounts of Chinese Australian settlement and experience in the White Australia Policy era (1901-1973) by providing an analysis of the presence and lived experiences of Chinese Australian women in this historical period. Through a historical geography approach that is deeply rooted in postcolonial feminist epistomologies, this research aimed to understand the lived experiences of Chinese Australian women as remembered and told from their own perspectives, while also providing a revised account of their demographic characteristics as officially recorded in government records. Qualitative data for this research were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nineteen Chinese Australian women who lived throughout the White Australia Policy era, while quantitative demographic data were collected from historical census records for the period between 1911 and 1966. This research makes substantive contributions to Chinese Australian research as well as feminist historical geography in Australia more broadly. By illustrating the presence of Chinese Australian women throughout the period, this research challenges androcentric accounts of the ‘bachelor society’ of Chinese Australian men, patriarchal understandings of Chinese migration, and ethnocentric understandings of national identity and belonging in the White Australia Policy era. By presenting an examination of Chinese Australian women’s lived experiences across a range of spaces and social contexts (e.g. home, school, work, and neighbourhood) and with acknowledgement of their various subject positions as gendered, classed, and racialised individuals, this research also brings to light the diversity and complexity of Chinese Australian women’s lives in regards to identity, maintenance of ‘traditional’ Chinese culture, and experiences of belonging and exclusion. The postcolonial feminist approach utilised therefore provides an alternative lens through which to examine Australia’s Chinese past and move towards a more inclusive understanding of Chinese Australian communities and experiences in White Australia. This research also highlights one way in which postcolonial and feminist research can be conducted when research ‘subjects’ lie outside the researcher’s own class, racial and privileged position.

This study investigated educational reform policies in both the United States and Australia to discern a relationship between policies of reform and racial segregation in education. This thesis took as its object of study educational reform policies from the United States between 1983 and 2015 and from Australia between the years 2008 and 2013, examining them through a (Foucauldian-inspired) poststructuralist policy discourse analysis, WPR (Bacchi, 2007, 2009; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) and theories of affect (Wetherell, 2012; Ahmed 2004, 2013, 2016), to gauge their import to the observed phenomena of inequality, and specifically segregation within schooling. With regards to educational inequality, and to racial segregation specifically, the literature is clear as to what has happened. The more pertinent questions, however, are how, despite all the information regarding its effects, it has happened -and especially with regards to inequality-how (and why) it persists. By beginning at the end, with observed human actions within the field of policy, this research project reveals the manner through which policy constructs its issues. It develops an understanding of educational segregation which first, challenges hegemonic conceptions of neoliberalism as well as the simultaneous reification and culpability of the conception of choice within the neoliberalised policy paradigm. It also problematises the pursuance of choice through policy as a form of ‘regulated autonomy’ (Marginson, 1997a) and a manufactured form of freedom, a false freedom, as it were. This combination of methodological and theoretical traditions furthers the development of policy analysis and contributes to the body of possible perspectives for policy analysis. Specifically, it demonstrates the facility of the WPR methodology through its unique pairing with theories of affect, and in the formulation of a mechanism of a model of affective policy circulation, identifies how and why policy manifests in specific ways.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Education, 2019

Through an examination of Australian Government responses to Irregular Maritime Arrivals from 1901 to 2001, this thesis will provide an assessment of the roles of race and racism in contemporary Australian Government policy regarding the treatment of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. In particular, it attempts to build on contemporary scholarship regarding Irregular Maritime Arrivals in Australia by focusing on the conjuncture of race, refugees and Australian immigration policy. While it is well known that race and racism have played important roles in Australian immigration history, contemporary Australia is principally portrayed as a diverse, egalitarian and multicultural society. With the official abandonment of the policies of White Australia in 1973, successive Australian governments have endeavoured to foster, both domestically and internationally, an image of a cohesive, egalitarian and multicultural nation. The aim of the thesis is therefore to explore whether (and how) a continuous racial thread is used politically within Australian refugee immigration discourse to maintain a covert race agenda. Centred on the principle that racism is inherently political, this thesis seeks to investigate contemporary xenophobia in order to understand the persistent support for discriminatory and exclusionist political policy. It argues that despite the rhetoric of harmonious multicultural cohesion, Australian immigration policy—specifically in regards to Irregular Maritime Arrivals—is still significantly influenced by racist ideology. While they have conceptually abandoned ideas of a White Australia, contemporary governments have strayed little from historical convictions of ‘race’ difference. In this way, the thesis suggests that successive Australian governments have successfully coalesced an overt multiculturalism with a covert racism that effectively conceals the political nature of race itself. The fundamental argument of the thesis is therefore that in the Australian context, race is often mistakenly viewed in isolated terms or attributed to its White Australia Past. Ideas of race however, are not simply a part of Australian history and rather are structural, thereby continuing to resound in Australia’s contemporary refugee policies. The thesis therefore contends that the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees on leaky boats provided (and continues to provide) a perfect opportunity for successive Australian governments to enact race ideology without appearing racist. In assessing Australia’s outward claim of multiculturalism alongside the continued maintenance of deeply exclusionist political policy, this thesis traces the development of Australian immigration policy—specifically in regards to the treatment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat—to show that ideas of race not only form an integral part of Australian history, but that they continue to resound and manifest in Australia’s contemporary refugee and immigration policies.

This thesis argues that the colonial ruling class developed its first White Australia policy in 1888, creating most of the precedents for the federal legislation of 1901. White Australia was central to the making of the Australian working class, to the shaping of Australian nationalism, and the development of federal political institutions. It has long been understood as a product of labour movement mobilising, but this thesis rejects that approach, arguing that the labour movement lacked the power to impose such a fundamental national policy, and that the key decisions which led to White Australia were demonstrably not products of labour movement action. ¶ It finds three great ruling class agendas behind the decisions to exclude Chinese immigrants, and severely limit the use of indentured “coloured labour”. ...

A hidden history of government intervention into the lives of unwed, white mothers is beginning to emerge. Most Australians are unaware that thousands of white babies were forcibly taken under a policy of assimilation during the 20th Century. This research project has attempted to explain this phenomenon by contextualising it within an historical account of ‘child removalist’ polices that were imported into Australia with British settlement. It also makes a linkage between the British treatment of its destitute, unwed mothers under the Poor Laws, the forced removal of their children and Forced Adoption/white stolen children in 20th Century Australia. From the beginning of colonial history motherhood has been constructed by the structures of patriarchy and capitalism imported along with the rigid, hierarchal legal system of Britain, and the ideology that underpinned it. In the 1800s the babies of convict mothers were taken and placed in Orphan Asylums, whilst they were sent back to work. During the late 19th century unsupported, unwed mothers had their babies forcibly taken and fostered out to country areas in order to be separated from their ‘contaminating’ influence and that of their ‘pauper’ families. Hence the beginning of the child welfare system was grounded in child removal practices, not in supporting vulnerable families stay together. By the early 1900s, a population policy moulded by two forces: eugenics and pronatalism had emerged. It was directed by the Commonwealth and enacted by State institutions. Its particular focus was to populate Australia with ‘good white stock’: legitimately born white infants, who could be called upon to defend the Empire. White Australians were not considered a homogenous grouping, but a continuum that ranged between the ‘racially superior’ elite and ‘racially inferior’ ‘degenerates’. The latter category included white, unwed mothers and their infants. Illegitimacy was seen as a threat to ‘race improvement’, and presumed to be the root of racial decay. It was assumed that if children were removed and assimilated with white, married, employed couples, their tainted biology would be neutralised. It was also a measure to expand the white, middle and upper classes. A little known fact is that there was resistance to the forced removal/assimilation policy at a grass roots level and that the majority of white unmarried mothers kept their infants. Therefore this research project hypothesised that there were two discourses that regulated the lives of unwed mothers. Mothers who had their infants taken were exposed to an institutional discourse that was comprised of motherhood, medical and eugenic discourses, imported from the ‘mother country’ and the United States. They were articulated through maternal and infant welfare representatives and their practices which included Forced Adoption. At the same time a lay discourse that had co-existed for hundreds of years was also imported. This was expressed in the language, the practices and the support given to daughters and grandchildren by their kin and was a backlash against the autocratic State practice of forced removal. The discourse that framed the mother’s pregnancy and birth experience determined whether or not she kept her infant or had it taken for adoption. Both discourses were grounded in patriarchy as the mother who kept had the protection and support of her patriarchal structured family. The unsupported unwed mother stood outside the norms of what was considered right and proper by the social work and medical elite. Her pregnant body challenged the power structure on which patriarchy rests: control of the reproductive labour of women. The language used for the justification of forced removals has evolved over the centuries. The 18th century ‘pauper’ was ‘vicious’ and wanted to rid herself of her burden, the 19th century feebleminded mother was incapable of providing a ‘moral’ environment. The rise of Freudian based social casework theory that dominated social work in Australia (1940-1970s) labelled her as too ‘immature and neurotic’ to rear her ‘unwanted’ infant. It was considered to be in ‘its best interest’ to be removed and placed with a ‘normal family’ with a ‘real’ mother and father. Unsupported, unwed white mothers did not have the same maternal rights as their married counterparts. They did not have access to their rights of citizenship, which led to major violations of their human and civil rights. The most brutal, being separated from their newborns at birth.

This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion of modern Chinese identity by providing a case study of Cheok Hong CHEONG. This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion of modern Chinese identity by pro-viding a case study of Cheok Hong CHEONG. It necessarily considers Australian atti-tudes towards the Chinese during the 19th century, not least the White Australia Pol-icy. The emergence of that discriminatory immigration policy over the second half of the 19th century until its national implementation in 1901 provides the background to the thesis. Cheong was the leading figure among Chinese-Australian Christians and a prominent figure in the Australian Chinese community and the thesis seeks to iden-tify a man whose contribution has largely been shadowy in other studies or, more commonly, overlooked by the parochialism of colony/state emphasis in many histo-ries of Australia. His role in the Christian church fills a space in Victorian religious history. ¶ ...