Race and the making of the Australian working class 4

Part Four: Conclusion

To conclude this series of posts, I will propose a theory of how race and class have intersected throughout the post-1788 history of Australia, and how these processes resemble those in other societies, chiefly the United States.

In the first post in this series, I referred to the book How the Irish Became White, by former Harvard academic Noel Ignatiev. To sum up the book’s arguments, Irish Catholic migrants to the U.S. in the early decades of the nineteenth century often intermingled (socially, economically, and politically) with blacks, but over the years, in order to improve their social standing, the Irish began to separate themselves from blacks and to use their white skin to gain entry into the political community of Jacksonian America, in which the benefits of citizenship were conferred on white males. They achieved this by excluding blacks from professions, by destroying black homes and churches in riots, and by siding politically with the Southern slaveocracy. Ignatiev argues that the Irish had the advantage of white skin, which allowed them the possibility of entering the dominant culture which was denied to African-Americans, but that the benefits of whiteness were not automatically afforded them, and that the actions described were their means of winning a place in the ‘white’ race.

Ignatiev is not simply telling the story of Irish-Americans, but of all migrant groups. His thesis could easily be applied to Australia, a country founded as a penal settlement in which Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Africans, and Aboriginals mixed relatively without incident, and were presided over by an elite which thought of the continent as an outpost of British civilisation. Over the course of the nineteenth century, and most intensively on the goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales during the 1850s and 1860s, ‘white’ Australians (a term broad enough to include Maoris, African-Americans, and sometimes Aboriginals) marginalised Chinese migrants, and in doing so forged a broader white/European identity based on the exclusion of those ethnic groups deemed to be unfair competitors (chiefly the Chinese, but also Japanese, Kanakas, and others).

At every stage of this process, Irish-Australians were prominent – Peter Lalor led the Eureka Rebellion, Irish miners were present at Bendigo and Lambing Flat, the Kelly Gang emerged in response to the Victorian constitutional crisis of the 1870s, Irish-Australians were the backbone of the early ALP and ACTU, and Arthur Calwell was the last major party leader to defend the White Australia Policy. Like their co-ethnics in the United States, they overcame the discrimination aimed at them by the Anglo elites by helping to articulate whiteness as the key determinant in their new homeland’s national identity – except that here, the people whom the Irish worked hard to exclude were Chinese, not African-Americans. (And indeed, they fought alongside African-Americans at Eureka.)

However, in their rush to become ‘white’, different European-descended ethnic groups had to shed their own cultural baggage and adopt a pan-European identity. In both countries, the early Anglo-centric definition of national identity slowly gave way to a white/European one as migrant groups from all over Europe were incorporated into the majority by their acceptance of the bargain between capital and (white) labour. To see how this operated in Australia, it is instructive to examine the history of Broken Hill, once a hotbed of labourism, socialism, communism, Wobblyism, et alia. In 1916, the city’s union hierarchy debated the merits of teaching Esperanto to union members, as the proliferation of ethnicities made communication difficult. At the time, Broken Hill boasted left-wing organisations comprising a host of different nationalities. In the 1998 federal election, a significant share of its white working class voted for One Nation, whose support for English-only language policies in education and immigration were a long way from the cosmopolitanism which drove the Esperanto movement. The explanation for this curious phenomenon is simple: like Ignatiev’s Irish-Americans, Broken Hill’s diverse European migrant communities became white.

In 1913, Vladimir Lenin expressed his surprise that despite ALP control of both houses of federal Parliament, the Australian working class was not in any great hurry to overthrow capitalism. Perhaps it was because of his own success in building a multi-ethnic socialist movement that he missed the key ingredient in the bargain between labour and capital in Australia: white supremacy. Ignatiev has argued that white supremacy in America has historically served to lessen the negative impact of capitalism on the white working class, and has thus functioned as the equivalent of social democracy. As the United States has never developed a welfare state as comprehensive as those of many European countries, white supremacy served to fill the gap. This analysis is somewhat applicable to Australia, with the exception that we did develop such a welfare state. But, as I showed in the previous post with the discussion of how the original (1912-1978) ‘baby bonus’ was only available to white mothers, Australia’s welfare state often served as simply another institution reproducing racial inequality.

If Australia was (and to a large extent still is) a social democracy for white people, it was its non-white inhabitants who bore the brunt of economic inequality. The Chinese Protectors appointed by Victorian authorities in the 1850s to police racial antagonism on the goldfields acceded to white demands that the Chinese be kept away from productive areas. When they moved from the goldfields to the cities, the exclusion of Chinese from unions made them easy prey for employers wanting cheap labour. In order to quell discontent among the white working class, the country’s elites would happily deport Chinese, Japanese, and Kanaka workers. If Big Pastoralism needed cheap labour in the sparsely-populated north of Australia, the Aborigines Protection Boards would provide it by forcing Aboriginal workers to work for much worse pay and conditions than whites. (Decades later, some are still fighting for the ‘stolen wages’ which white employers failed to pay them.) And in Papua New Guinea, Australia got to play the role of colonial power, with all the exploitation of native labour that implied. All this parallels the experience of the United States, where a relatively comfortable white working class won its privileges by the exclusion from unions and from secure, well-paying jobs of African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, and Native American labour, and by opposition to Chinese and Japanese immigration similar to that seen in Australia.