Race and the making of the Australian working class 2

Part Two: Gold, Sugar, and Federation

Among the participants in the Eureka Rebellion, John Joseph is perhaps the most intriguing. An African-American originally from New York, he moved from California’s gold rush to Victoria’s in time to take up arms in support of the rights of miners. The Ballarat goldfields on which he worked were a welcoming home to all nationalities – British, Irish, Italians, Maoris, African-Americans…all except the Chinese. As a result of his involvement, Joseph was the first of the thirteen men charged with treason to be tried, as it was believed that his skin colour would increase the chances of a guilty verdict. The colonial authorities miscalculated, however, and Joseph was found not guilty.

The reason that the authorities made their assumption was because they knew that the miners were disturbed by the presence of non-whites on the goldfields. Earlier in 1854, anti-Chinese protests had taken place in Bendigo, and even before Eureka, the colonial authorities (headed by Governor Hotham) had begun to propose anti-Chinese legislation in order to quell the simmering discontent which threatened their oligarchic control of the colony. The parallels with the post-Bacon’s Rebellion actions of Virginia’s elites are obvious – faced with the threat of rebellion from below, Victoria’s elites sought to pre-empt it by driving a wedge between the (mostly) white majority of miners and the ethnic group which they most distrusted. Eureka was not just the birth of Australian democracy, but also one of the milestones in the shaping of a white Australian working class.

Beginning in 1855 in Victoria and 1858 in New South Wales, legislation was passed to specifically shape the lives of Chinese migrants. In 1855, Victoria established Chinese Protectors, who helped to move Chinese miners away from whites – usually to places where whites had already taken most of the gold. This system, in name as well as in practice, paralleled the Aborigines Protection Boards which were a feature of the dispossession of indigenous Australians in every state and territory. Over the next few years, both colonies levied taxes on the entry and residence of Chinese (Victoria’s entry tax was once hilariously flouted by a group of Chinese miners who disembarked at Robe in South Australia and walked across the border) and the experience was repeated by Queensland when Chinese descended on its goldfields in the 1870s and 1880s. As part of a second wave of anti-Chinese resentment in the 1880s, Victoria and South Australia barred Chinese from voting – a measure which stands in stark contrast to the lack of legal barriers to Aboriginal suffrage in both places, and to South Australia’s pioneering of female suffrage.

In Jacksonian America, sections of the Irish-American working class used strikes, boycotts, and violence to displace African-Americans from trades and occupations which they had performed for decades, and to exclude non-white labour from those callings (the history of which is the subject of How the Irish Became White). Australia had its equivalents, and the first outbreak of violence against non-whites occurred at Lambing Flat, near Young in New South Wales, where white miners rallied to the symbols of earlier miner rebellion (such as the Eureka Flag) and forced Chinese miners off their goldfields on the pretence that the Chinese were a source of unfair competition. The creation of a legal distinction between Chinese and non-Chinese had succeeded in stopping revolts against the colonial authorities, but served to encourage whites to further marginalise the Chinese. By 1888, the anti-Chinese agitation had moved beyond the goldfields, and had fuelled a nationwide push for legislation to stop Chinese immigration.

The labour press of the period, particularly the Bulletin magazine, treated these efforts, which culminated in the various Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1888, as the successor to the struggle against convict transportation, a fight which was within living memory for many of its readers. Given that the convicts whose entry into Australia was opposed in the 1840s and 1850s were mostly white and British, it is clear that something is different between the two periods – namely, that at some point a white working class identity had formed. The ethnic groups which had struggled together at Ballarat, Bendigo, and Lambing Flat had forged an identity which was more inclusive than the original, Anglo-centric model of Australianness, but which specifically excluded the Chinese (along with other Asian groups, and sometimes indigenous Australians).

Although the ban on Chinese immigration was a working class cause, there were no representatives of the working class in the colonial parliaments which passed it – the Australian Labo(u)r Party was not founded until 1891. It was the colonies’ elites – both liberal and conservative – who rushed to meet the demands of white workers for anti-Chinese legislation. This shouldn’t be surprising when we consider the role of American industrial capital in scuttling Reconstruction or the role of South Africa’s (largely Anglo-Saxon) elites in setting up apartheid in order to protect the Afrikaner working class from Black competition. It suits the interest of the economic elites to keep the working class divided, and the social problems, whether real or perceived, in communities of colour provide opportunities for social conservatives to stir up moral panics (something Chinese-Australians experienced with regards to opium usage and accusations of trafficking white girls as sex slaves).

Just like their American counterparts, Australian workers used union membership as a means of excluding non-whites from the fruits of their struggles. The 1903 by-laws of the Australian Workers’ Union excluded “Chinese, Japanese, Kanakas, Afghans, or coloured aliens other than Maoris, American Negroes, and children of mixed parentage born in Australia.” Notably, Aboriginals were generally not excluded, and indeed some unions offered them membership at discount rates – the colour bar was primarily aimed at Chinese and Kanakas. (Note also the specific derogations for Maoris and African-Americans, two groups whose members fought alongside whites at Eureka.) The examples of non-racial Australian workers’ organisations were exceptions which proved the rule – most noteworthy among them were the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party of Australia (which in the early 1930s proposed to abolish the Aborigines Protection Boards and establish independent Aboriginal republics in the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia).

Australia’s nineteenth century finished on a high note, as the six colonies secured formal independence from Britain and federated as the Commonwealth of Australia. For the incipient nation’s political leaders, the 1890s were spent in a series of constitutional conventions, in which the issue of race reared its head. At the time, the pro-Southern interpretation of the meaning of Reconstruction in American history was dominant (a view known as the Dunning School and centred on Columbia University), and it was no surprise that Australia’s founding fathers, when fixated on racial questions, looked across the Pacific with horror. While they allowed the states the responsibility of legislating for indigenous affairs, the federal government was tasked with policing other non-white groups, and the new nation quickly set about avoiding a repetition of what it saw as the United States’ ‘Negro problem’.