Race and the making of the Australian working class 3

Part Three: White Australia and White Labour

When the first federal Parliament assembled in Melbourne in 1901, it was faced with a dilemma: how to ban the immigration of people of colour without actually writing such terribly un-PC language into the text of a law. The problem arose because of the concerns of the British government that such language would offend the non-white subjects of its empire, as well as jeopardise its newly-forged foreign policy ties with Japan. The Barton government found a solution – a fifty-word dictation test which could be used to exclude any applicant that immigration authorities didn’t want. One of the most interesting features of the test was that it didn’t necessarily have to be conducted in English, but in ‘any European language’. This feature was partly a device to allow an undesirable English-speaking migrant to be thwarted by being given a dictation test in another language, but it also reflected the continuing move from an Anglo-Saxon to a white/European national identity.

(I won’t cover it in detail here, but the story of Egon Kisch’s attempted entry into Australia in 1936 demonstrates the hilarity that ensued when the arbitrary nature of the dictation test was exposed.)

Long after the end of convict transportation, unfree labour persisted in pockets of Australia, notably the sugar industry in Queensland, where Melanesian workers (‘Kanakas’) were often tricked into boarding ships bound for the cane fields. The replacement of these workers with whites, and their eventual deportation, became one of the causes which defined the Australian labour movement in its early decades. After the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, the white working class began to further flex its muscle, demanding the use of ‘white labour’ in the cane fields. The result was the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1902, and the eventual repatriation of all Kanakas by 1906. (Some of their descendants still live in Australia, however, which explains the ‘South Sea Islander’ category which puzzles people filling out their census forms.) A similar fate awaited the Japanese pearlers in Broome, who were swept up in the push for ‘white labour’ in 1913.

Australia was not the only country in which white workers were asserting their racial identity in order to remove competition from non-white workers. In 1922, striking Afrikaner miners revolted in South Africa, established workers’ councils, which they poignantly named using the Russian word soviet, and demanded the sacking of their black colleagues. The government responded by bombing them from the air, but by the end of the 1940s, South Africa’s elites had been won over to the idea of permanently splitting the working class. Similarly, striking white workers in Alabama in 1914 hired the Ku Klux Klan to attack black workers. The threat of bi-racial working class solidarity represented by the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (or ‘Wobblies’) was met in all three countries by state repression, usually with the Wobblies’ opposition to the First World War as a pretext. By methods such as this, the elites of all three countries punished workers who acted in a colour-blind way, while rewarding workers who accepted white supremacy with a welfare state and protections for white labour against non-white competition.

In 1912, the federal Labor government passed a bill providing for the country’s first ‘baby bonus’, a bounty of five pounds to be paid to the mother of every live white child, and – controversially for a society still steeped in Victorian morality – to be paid whether or not the child was born in wedlock. Against protest from religious authorities over the latter provision, the imperative of populating Australia with whites won out, and gave white Australians access to a government program which was denied to indigenous Australians, Asians, Africans, Maoris, and Pacific Islanders. (The bonus was paid to the natives of Papua New Guinea under Australian control, but was given to the father rather than to the mother.) It is noteworthy that the bonus was abolished in 1978, just as the White Australia Policy had been dismantled and non-white immigrants were entering the country in large numbers – rather than be expanded to non-whites, and unable to continue benefiting whites only, it was simply done away with.

As part of the early twentieth-century process of nation-building, Australia was confronted with the question of what to do with its most underdeveloped and least white-populated region, that part of South Australia lying above the twenty-sixth parallel of latitude south. In 1911, in the face of proposals that the unproductive landmass be returned to British control, it was ceded to the federal government to become the Northern Territory. While some wanted to leave it in the hands of its original inhabitants, such as this 1920s proposal for an indigenous state, the Northern Territory came to be dominated by Big Pastoralism and by Vestey’s, a British meat-packing corporation. The growth of pastoralism reduced Aboriginals’ access to water and land, forcing many into the white economy (a situation repeated many times the world over when capitalism has forced those living in a pre-industrial society to become working class, cf. the enclosures in medieval England or the Highland Clearances). Canberra, through the Aborigines Protection Boards, provided corporations such as Vestey’s with a steady supply of cheap, vulnerable indigenous labour. In the 1960s, the Vestey’s site at Wave Hill would become the scene of one of the first major Aboriginal strikes.

It should also be remembered that the Australian state’s treatment of Aboriginal workers was repeated when the country took control of Papua New Guinea, where white Australian settlers lived off the labour of indentured native workers. The policies and practices of the colonial administration shaped a low-wage and vulnerable native working class, and middle-class Australian settlers were able to employ multiple domestic servants, something which would have been out of their financial reach back home (but which is characteristic of racial hierarchies everywhere – black domestic servants were commonly employed by whites in pre-1994 South Africa and pre-1980 Rhodesia, and South Asian, Filipino, and African ones are commonly employed today by whites and wealthy Arabs in the Gulf).