Saturday Extra

A history of Australia in its dynamic global context.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: Our history tends to be told from an Australian perspective: the events of Gallipoli, maybe the Western Front coming up thankfully, this particular Anzac Day; or the emergence of Federation, for instance, they're generally seen through a national lens.

But my next guest has cast her historical net wider to trace the transnational circulation of ideas and technologies that were critical here, but also for other nations. She maps a rich history of countries, including South Africa, North America and Australia, working together to exclude so-called non-whites (a great term). According to the radical New South Wales poet Daniel Denehey, this was an age when 'glorious manhood asserted its elevation, and it enshrined the white man as the model democrat.' But as systems of racial exclusion were erected in the name of stable democracy, I might add they were also challenged by international calls for racial equality.

'Drawing the Global Colour Line' is an extraordinary read, and it's co-authored by Marilyn Lake who's Personal Chair in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, and Henry Reynolds who holds the Personal Chair in History and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania.

And Marilyn Lake joins me now. Good morning, and welcome.

Marilyn Lake: Good morning, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: What really struck me, Marilyn, was how there was this paradox afoot, the desire to privilege white supremacy walked hand in hand with the push for democratic government, so it was about equality but only an equality for whites.

Marilyn Lake: Absolutely. I think that's one of the hardest issues for us today to grasp, that democracy and exclusion went hand in hand, and it was precisely because these new world democracies insisted on equality that they demanded the exclusion of those they deemed not equal. And of course when you think about it, it is a paradox, but it's also logical if you regard all not-white peoples as not your equals. And of course this issue didn't arise in Britain precisely because it was an aristocratic, propertied society based on hierarchy, and they were used to dealing with hierarchies in their political system. They didn't even have manhood suffrage until about the 1920s, so they were used to having hierarchies in which some people were superior and others inferior, whereas the new world democracies insisted on equality and therefore insisted on racial exclusion.

Geraldine Doogue: And yet you and Henry Reynolds do set this in a broader context, and you do - I think there's this great line, 'The democrat became the imperialist and the imperialist the democrat', which does suggest that the British were drawn in, to this extent.

Marilyn Lake: Well what we meant by that actually was more referring to Australia, because again, it's not fully realised the way that Australian history is written. Not only does it exclude Australia's relationship and intertwining with the rest of the world, but it also excludes Australia's own imperial ambitions. So what we had in mind there actually was the Australian democrat becoming an imperialist, just as the American democrat became an imperialist. I mean the Americans around 1900 expanded to annex Hawaii, they invaded Cuba and the Philippines, it was the beginning of their American Empire then. And similarly with Australia; it's not fully realised that one of the first acts in 1901 with the Australian Parliament, was to take over New Guinea, to write to Britain and say, 'We want to take over British New Guinea straight away', and they had plans on all of the other groups of Pacific Islands, and they asked the British Colonial Office for a map that would show them which European powers owned all the Pacific Islands, because they were about to make claims on them. And the Colonial Office thought this was so outrageous they just said to each other, 'Tell them there isn't such a map.'
Geraldine Doogue: 'Go away'.
Marilyn Lake: Exactly.
Geraldine Doogue: What was the main point of identification in this time that you chart? Was it the nation, the emerging nation-state or was it race then?

Marilyn Lake: Yes, well this is another of the points we want to make. We always take for granted that nations are both the sophis??? and the basis of history, and their outcome. But in fact, between about 1850 and about 1950, whiteness was a very, very strong basis of identification, and so the solidarity of these self-styled white men's countries, that's how they called themselves, you know, South Africa, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the solidarity was based on mutual whiteness, and being a white man you know, they thought was a great mark of distinction.

Geraldine Doogue: So this did not occur in non Anglo Saxon countries did it? I've looked through, and I can't see how much you refer for instance to European attitudes at this time.

Marilyn Lake: Yes, it's a good question, because we are concerned with English-speaking countries and that's I think because English-speaking countries set the pace really in dividing the world between white and not white. And interestingly, the French wrote to the British Foreign Office around 1903 because they knew that the British Dominions were setting the pace in this regard, and they asked the British Foreign Office to tell them whether the Japanese were to be regarded as white or not white, you know, they would take guidance here in terms of what the Dominions were doing, particularly Australia. And of course they were told that the Japanese definitely were not white.

Geraldine Doogue: That's interesting, isn't it? What is all that about? Why were the Anglo Saxon countries so particularly affected by, say, the victory of the Japanese over the Russians - was that 1904? I just lost my date.

Marilyn Lake: Yes, 1904-5.

Geraldine Doogue: Right. And the rise of the Chinese. Why was there such a panic on?

Marilyn Lake: Yes, I mean again it's really interesting to think about. I think one reason is it goes back to democracy actually, which you started with. It was the Anglo Saxon colonies, and the United States, that were the most selfconsciously democratic I think at this time, and that it was those countries and their leaders and their intellectuals who said to have a pure democracy, you cannot have a multiracial society. And that was in large part also influenced by the outcome of the American Civil War, which in fact emancipated blacks, and enfranchised blacks, you know, amazingly, people don't realise that blacks were enfranchised, they were fully politically equal after the Civil War. Until late in the century, several Southern States proceeded to roll back those democratic rights, led by Mississippi, in 1890. And one of the points we also want to make is that in Australia we often think of our dictation test as unique, or unprecedented, but in fact Mississippi led the way in introducing a literacy test in 1890, and then South Africa followed, and then Australia followed. So this was very much a circulation of ideas and technologies of racial exclusion.

Geraldine Doogue: So where does the White Australia Policy was really the Immigration Restriction Act of course, where does that fit in, because you do suggest that even though it's part of a context, it did develop its own power.

Marilyn Lake: Yes, and not least in influencing the rest of the world. I mean one of the ways that we're used to thinking about Australia in the world is to think about what overseas ideas have influenced us, but we don't enough follow the way that Australian ideas and Australian models influenced the rest of the world, because that's much harder to research of course, and you actually do need to do a lot of research to do that. But I found in the United States when I was looking at the papers of the Immigration Restriction ???? there, in 1901 in Boston, they were getting immediately all the copies of the Australian acts, and poring over them, you know Australia set the way, Australia was the model for the 20th century. And in terms of the White Australia Policy, again, we don't often remember that the White Australia Policy had at least three parts, not one. One was the Immigration Restriction Act, but just as important was the legislation to deport Pacific Islanders, the Pacific Islands Labourers' Act. And that was really important symbolically because it marked the inauguration of a modern nation state with the expulsion of an alien race, the expulsion of blacks. And that is quite unprecedented in modern times.

Geraldine Doogue: Marilyn Lake is my guest, who's Chair in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, and we're talking about the book that she co-authored with Henry Reynolds called 'Drawing the Global Colour Line'.

Incidentally, there were a couple of items, or instruments of surveillance, which was very interesting. Literacy tests you referred to, the census, and the passport. So did the passport emerge around this time too?

Marilyn Lake: Yes, the passport has an interesting history, and one of the countries to first introduce passports was the Japanese in 1896, because they wanted to be respected enough to set their own regulations, to stop their own people from emigrating, rather than to suffer the humiliation of having Japanese nationals turned back by these white men's countries. So they said, We will set the pace here, we will issue the few people we know who will be acceptable, we'll issue them with passports, merchants, students, and they can enter these countries. We don't want to have this imposed on us by others. And so the passport gradually takes off as a way to regulate the comings and goings of people. But of course a country like Britain doesn't have passports until after World War I.

Geraldine Doogue: Fascinating. Let's throw forward then to how this might have resonances today. For instance, there was a lot of discussion at the turn of the 20th century about the ascendancy of China as an economic power, which of course is extraordinary, given what we're facing.

Marilyn Lake: Absolutely. I mean whenever I see this, I can't help but think of this repeating exactly what was happening at the end of the 19th century. I mean every day now in the papers you see reports about the ascendancy of China as the world economic power. And it was exactly the same apprehension in the late 19th century, that led to these policies of exclusion and containment, that is to contain China. And Australia was so sort of cutting itself off from the rest of the world, it rendered itself so isolationist that one London Times editorial called Australia, 'a hermit democracy', you know, that it was cutting itself off from the rest of the world. And one of the things I urge now in response to this is that we don't do that, and I think it's no longer an option anyway, that we can't cut ourselves off form the rest of the world, and I think it's a perfect time when we have a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister to lead the way actually, in engaging with China, and engaging with our region, and I think this is all the more important as one of the new threats we face is climate change of course, and China is proving to be one of the increasingly large emitters.

Geraldine Doogue: You might just mention Charles Pearson, because he was such an important marker-buoy of these fears, wasn't he, a former Professor in History at King's College.

Marilyn Lake: He was indeed. Charles Pearson was a remarkable intellectual. Barton, our first Prime Minister, referred to him as 'the most remarkable intellectual statesman who has ever been in this country.' He was a Professor of History at King's College, he was a Fellow of Oriel College at Oxford, and he migrated to the colonies in the late 19th century and became a radical liberal politician in Victoria. And he's exactly the type really, because he is very much a radical liberal. He was a feminist, he was the first headmaster I think of Presbyterian Ladies' College, he was against property accumulation, he wanted a Land Tax, he wanted free secular compulsory education. In all of those ways he was a radical liberal, and precisely because of that, he led the way in advocating exclusion of Chinese migrants to Australia. But his book, 'National Life and Character' which was published in London and New York in 1893, just sent shockwaves around the world. I mean it was read by the Kaiser in Germany, by Theodore Roosevelt in the United States, by Gladstone in Britain, and all of them wrote about it and responded to it.

Geraldine Doogue: On the decline of the white man.

Marilyn Lake: That's right, the decline of the white man and the rise of the black and yellow races, you know this is exactly actually like something I read in the paper the other day where someone said we're facing the decline of the United States and the rise of China.

Geraldine Doogue: Well I suppose I was thinking of the Samuel Huntingdon thesis; it's a different thing, but the clash of civilisations thesis, again whether or not you agree with it, it's full of apprehension about imminent loss, isn't it.

Marilyn Lake: That's right, you're absolutely right, and one of the things that we write about is how these white policies were indeed a response to an apprehension of imminent loss. In the 19th century that is decolonisation, that former colonies and former colonial races were about to become independent states, and about to become powers in the world, and it was the sort of fear of that.

Geraldine Doogue: And look, I just can't let you go before I notice that there's also - your book's interesting because there's an interesting new debate, particularly in England, which we're hoping to cover soon, about the effectiveness of diversity and where you can indeed have a pluralist democracy and there's some real limits emerging.

Marilyn Lake: Isn't that interesting, you know, that we seem to be revisiting these debates again and again, and that is so relevant to the 19th century when that debate was first put, you know, Can you have a multiracial democracy? Can you have total cultural diversity and maintain democratic equality? I mean those were the debates that first came up in the 1860s and 1870s. So yes, as you say, multiculturalism as an official policy has sparked these debates again.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes. Thank you very much indeed, Marilyn, and congratulations on the book.

Marilyn Lake: Thanks very much, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: Marilyn Lake, who co-wrote with Henry Reynolds 'Drawing the Global Colour Line'. It was launched by Malcolm Fraser yesterday. It's a Melbourne University Press publication, it's historical, so you get all the usual sort of historical arguments, but it's a great read, and I think you'll find it very interesting; you might let us know your thoughts.

Guests

Marilyn Lake
Chair in the School of Historical and European Studies
La Trobe University

Publications

Title: Drawing the Global Colour Line
Author: Marilyn Lake & Henry Reynolds
Publisher: MUP

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Browning