Drawing the local colour line: white Australia and the tropical north
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- As those historians explain, the distinction between white and nonwhite races was drawn with increasing rigour in the three decades or so on either side of 1900.
- Locally drawn lines, however, could be more substantive, inscribing boundaries across land and sea which confined white and non-white to one side or the other.
- While the dominant version of the white Australia policy drew the colour line somewhere north of Thursday Island, a significant body of critics insisted that it be drawn somewhere near the Tropic of Capricorn.
- Focusing on this strand of critique of the white Australia policy, I have little to say about the handful of contemporary critics who based their opposition to the policy on an ideal of racial equality other than to note that those who advanced the former critique sometimes buttressed their arguments with appeals to the latter principle.
- In the debates over the development of the north on which this paper focuses, Aboriginal people featured only marginally.
Legitimate Claims
- Their differing preferences of complexion notwithstanding, supporters and critics of the white Australia policy agreed on the need to populate the north in order to validate Australia’s claim to the continent and safeguard it against invaders.
- There was ‘much to be said for an enlightened White Australia policy’, he maintained, but lamented that the policy ‘has been advocated in some cases on such purely selfish grounds, with such absurd arrogance and self-conceit, and with such unjustifiable contempt for all coloured races, that decent men are tempted to turn from it in disgust.’.
- It is difficult to assert any moral right, and it is perfectly obvious that Australia has only the power to keep it owing to British protection.
- Young dismissed the counter-argument that the coloured races would inevitably move south; like Bishop White, he considered ‘that a greater source of danger would be the contamination of the coloured people by white degenerates crossing northward’.
- 56 Chidell claimed that his scheme would achieve an immediate reduction of international tensions – even an ‘extinction of the sense of injury’ – by providing Asians with what they most desperately desired: land.
Reassessing the Tropics
- By the 1930s, debates about the north were taking a different tenor.
- Beyond the narrow strip of coastal north Queensland lay, for the most part, desolation: lands that no race could successfully develop or prolifically populate.
- They offer a window on early 20th-century Australian thinking about race, place and progress, showing that, while there were critics of the white Australia policy in the early part of the century, most critics shared key assumptions and values with supporters of the policy.
- 39 Griffith Taylor, ‘Geographical factors controlling the settlement of tropical Australia’, Queensland Geographical Journal, 32–3:18–19 (1918), 21, original emphasis.
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Frequently Asked Questions (11)
Q2. What was the reason for the change in the acclimatisation of the tropics?
He attributed the change to the ‘remarkable advances in tropical medicine and sanitation, as well as better knowledge of the geography and climatology of tropic lands’.
Q3. Why did Reynolds describe the northern communities as tolerant of non-whites?
10 Insofar as white northerners were tolerant of non-whites, it was primarily for pragmatic reasons, in recognition of their mutual dependence rather than any ideal of the brotherhood of man.
Q4. What would be the consequences of a small influx of Chinese immigrants in the tropics?
41 White people might live in those places, but they would forever struggle against the hardships and discomforts inherent to the tropics.
Q5. What was the role of geographical science in making the tropics more habitable for the white?
While medical science was rendering the tropics more habitable for the white race, geographical science was busily undercutting the prospects for success in the venture.
Q6. What was the important factor in Taylor’s assessment of the tropics?
40 In Taylor’s assessment, most of tropical Australia was too hot, dry and resource-impoverished to support a substantial population, while the small patch of better favoured country on the north-east coast was ‘too ‘‘muggy’’ for the average British settler’.
Q7. What was the way to solve the problem of the empty north?
White considered the proposition that the problem of the empty north ‘might be solved by a colour line dividing off North Australia, and that within it coloured labour and settlement might be allowed’.
Q8. What was the main argument for the inclusion of coloured races in the tropics?
14From this northern perspective, coloured races, kept in their place as a servile workforce, were an essential adjunct to white success in the tropics.
Q9. What was the purpose of Hasting Young’s 1922 critique of white Australia?
Young dismissed the counter-argument that the coloured races would inevitably move south; like Bishop White, he considered ‘that a greater source of danger would be the contamination of the coloured people by white degenerates crossing northward’.
Q10. What was the derogatory and demeaning way of portraying the northern communities?
Even those more positively disposed toward ‘coloured aliens’, such as the Cairns Morning Post, repeatedly depicted them in a derogatory and demeaning manner.
Q11. What did the bishop say about the war?
The recently concluded war, the bishop reminded his readers, demonstrated that Australians could not ignore their responsibilities to both the Empire and humanity.