United We Stand

Race, class and the Road to White Australia

Across northern Australia, Aborigines tell the tale of a murderous white man. He is an invader ‘shooting all the people’ as part of ‘getting ready for the country, trying to take it away.’ In his greed, violence and dishonesty this figure represents European law as seen through black eyes.[1] The white man is Captain Cook. The saga carries a message for all of us, since the violence and coercion of the state shapes any new capitalist society. Since the rise of capitalism initially benefits only a tiny minority, that minority needs the state to impose it on everyone else.

The white settlers invaded a world quite unlike their own. The black people who had dwelt in Australia for tens of thousands of years had different relationships to their physical environment and to each other. They lived in relative harmony with the land, plants and animals, which is not to say that theirs was an undifferentiated ‘hunter-gatherer’ economy. The indigenous peoples’ economies and settlement patterns were diverse. Population densities varied widely, and while many clans lived from hunting and gathering, there were also the Dharuk who cultivated yams along the Hawkesbury River, while along the Murray the Yota-Yota and others ‘had developed such sustained harvesting of the rich fish, game and plants that they lived virtually sedentary lives in villages which were observed by the earliest white explorers.’ Grassland clans used firestick farming and on the Darling River, ‘engineering works like the extensive Brewarrina fisheries were constructed to maintain a consistent yield of fish no matter how dry or flooded the rivers might be.’[2]

But while the popular prejudice that Aborigines ‘did nothing with the land’ was nonsense, the social context was very different. Association with the land appears to have been more a matter of key sites than the sharp boundaries that white property-owners enforced. Whites wrongly took this to imply there was no fixed relationship at all. In reality social relations were expressed through relations to land, while knowledge and tradition were closely linked to location. Work was also different. Blacks often worked until they had enough for their immediate needs, then turned to ritual or social activities which they considered just as useful. The capitalist imperative to work and accumulate wealth as ends in themselves weren’t at the centre of their culture.

Social organisation was relatively egalitarian and class divisions were unheard of. The idea of some people dominating and exploiting others struck them as tragic when they encountered it among whites. A Victorian clergyman complained it was ‘difficult to get into a black-fellow’s head that one man is higher than another’.[3]

Each clan had its territory and clashes might occur at the margins, but territorial conquest was virtually unknown, since the clans’ ties to specific territories were not conceived in terms of ‘ownership’ or capital accumulation. They had well-defined clan identities but no notion of nationality or race, and initially tended to regard the Europeans as people like themselves who had developed curious customs and acquired an odd skin colour. They often tried to fit the whites into their kinship systems and didn’t at first see the conflict with white colonists in racial terms. Whites were treated as just another clan, or set of clans. Only after massacres by the invaders did they begin to see the conflict as one between all whites and all blacks, concluding ‘that white people were mutually accountable for each others’ actions and therefore fit subjects for Aboriginal attack. Colour alone was now enough to identify the enemy.’[4]

Almost immediately the new arrivals had sown the seeds of conflict, over control and use of the land and natural environment. The first fleet having brought only limited supplies, the colonists had to exploit the surrounding landscape; they found that ‘the natives were well pleased with our People until they began clearing the Ground at which they were displeased’ and that some Aborigines were enraged at the sight of convicts cutting down trees.[5] The blacks themselves sometimes cut down trees, for example to make canoes. But they had noticed the whites doing something quite different and seemingly irrational: piling up logs and stones, clearing large tracts, erecting unwieldy structures. It was their first experience of the drive to accumulate wealth that was to transform the continent.

Until the 1820s the white settlements at Sydney and Hobart were tiny. However the rapid growth of a capitalist economy after 1820, particularly the pastoral industry driven by British industry’s insatiable demand for wool, began to transform a localised, erratic conflict into a genocidal ‘100 years’ war’. Systematic warfare against the indigenous people was driven by British industry’s hunger for wool, and the local settlers’ hunger for land in order to supply it.

Thus sheep numbers in Van Dieman’s Land were around 436,000 in 1827, rising to 680,000 three years later and approaching a million by 1836.[6] There was no room for Aborigines in this new capitalist landscape; they experienced at first hand a fundamental and brutal truth of the age, that ‘what happened to land determined the life and death of most human beings in the years 1789 to 1848.’ Odd as it sounds, the Aborigines had something in common with Celtic clans forced off communal lands in the Scottish highlands to make way for capitalist sheep runs, after which Celtic bards lamented that ‘nothing was heard but the bleating of sheep and the voices of English speakers’.[7]

After the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations, a debate raged over whether to call the founding of New South Wales ‘settlement’ or ‘invasion’. Of course it was an invasion; what else do you call seizing someone’s country by force? But there is also an organic link between the two aspects. Settlement necessarily meant the violent destruction of traditional Aboriginal society precisely because the conflict was more than a race war. It was also a conflict between two incompatible modes of production and the cultures that accompanied them. Capitalism could not flourish without crushing the resistance of people who wanted to live differently, in every corner of the globe. Private property, wage labour and the drive to accumulate capital were incompatible with Aboriginal society.

The Aborigines fought back across much of the frontier. A Koori from the Hawkesbury named Musquito led a band of Tasmanian Aborigines against the whites; so skillfully planned were his raids that arrogant Europeans ‘insisted they were being led by a white man.’[8] Another leader, Walyer of the Emu Bay tribe, ‘was said to stand on a hill and give orders to the Aborigines’.[9] When banished to Penguin Island she tried to kill her captors en route. Finally she was sent to the ‘Friendly Mission’ on Swan Island, where she again tried to organise a revolt. There were many such cases. When Thomas Mitchell was exploring northern NSW in the 1840s he wrote of one district where ‘humiliating proofs that the white man had given way were visible in the remains of dairies burnt down, stockyards in ruins, untrodden roads’.[10]

No amount of cleverness or courage could stem the European onslaught. But notwithstanding inevitable defeat, the black resistance was by no means entirely futile. The Aborigines held enough ground to force the British authorities to take notice. After the ending of slavery in the 1830s, humanitarians in the home country were turning their attention to indigenous people in the colonies just as reports about massacres of Aborigines reached London. Under British pressure, colonial governments began to intervene. NSW established a Protectorate for Aborigines, with blacks’ land and cultural interests and hunting practice being recognised for the first time. These measures were limited, paternalistic and oppressive in many ways, but significant as a partial recognition of what today we know as Land Rights.

The Aboriginal clans resisted white settlement for the sake of sheer survival, but also in an attempt to maintain their traditional relationship with the land, and out of hostility to the oppressive and exploitative aspects of the invading society. This hostility was sometimes quite explicit. In 1843 two blacks intent on attacking a sheep station ‘approached a hutkeeper near Glendon and asked for the property owner. When told he was mustering sheep in another part of his property, they then enquired if the hutkeeper was a convict or a free settler. The hutkeeper replied that he was a former convict. He was then told by the Kooris that it was fortunate for him, because he was forced to come to their lands and was not like the free settler who came and took over the land and gave the Kooris nothing in return.’[11] Similarly a pioneer squatter told in 1861 of a case where blacks killed a bullock then ‘advanced on the hut of the beleaguered squatter with the animal’s kidney fat stuck on their spears. They called out to the whites offering them a share of the fat saying ‘that they were not like the whites themselves -- greedy.’’[12]

Since Aborigines traditionally shared the fruits of their labour, they rejected the European approach to private property. The differences were especially great when it came to the land, which the indigenous people did not see themselves as ‘owning’ in the capitalist sense. ‘Their system of socialism’, lamented a Queensland clergyman, hindered ‘any improvement or rightful ownership.’[13] Similarly, if individual black workers were paid more for greater efficiency, they immediately shared the payment with kin.

Because they didn’t think in terms of accumulating wealth, Aborigines didn’t live by the capitalist ‘work ethic’. A plantation owner who used black labour complained that there was ‘no means by which I could persuade them into sudden acceptance of a daily routine of toil’, and in Western Australia, Governor Hutt thought black attitudes to labour were the ‘chief and serious difficulty’ preventing assimilation.[14] It was partly in an attempt to socialise black children into ‘a habit of labour’ that schemes were hatched to separate them from their parents.[15]

After the gold rushes, with the increased small farming population in many areas of southeastern Australia, there was antagonism between white farmers and Aborigines over access to schools and other local services, which sharpened in the 1890s depression and the following drought. Governments responded to this by forcing more blacks into reserves. In some cases whites tried to usurp Aboriginal holdings, and the authorities stopped them, but at the same time imposed greater control over the blacks. At Kinchela, NSW, whites challenged black control of fertile land in 1899. The Protection Board stepped in to secure the Aborigines’ continued residency, but at the price of transforming the land into a reserve. This placated racist small-holders but the real benefits went to the employers of black labour, who advised the Board about where reserves should be located to make the best uses of labour. Once again the dynamics of capitalism lurked within the conflict between races.

How ‘White Australia’ took shape

Australian racism and ethnic hatreds developed from many sources. One important starting point was the ideology of the imperialist frontier, which sought to justify the subjugation of ‘inferior’ races, and flowered along with the war on Aborigines and expansion in the Pacific. This mentality raises its head today, when the Australian Government tells us Pacific island nations can’t run their own affairs.

Another strand was hostility to the (predominantly Catholic and working class) Irish. After an Irishman shot Prince Alfred at Clontarf (near Sydney) in 1868 there was a major (middle class) Protestant mobilisation; on one estimate the Orange Lodges enrolled 15 percent of the adult male Protestants of New South Wales.[16] This sectarian push was associated with middle class ‘wowser’ campaigns against drink, prostitution and all forms of ‘vice’, running parallel to campaigns against the opium, disease and sexual degradation supposedly associated with the Chinese.

There was also a highly ambiguous linkage to the struggle against the convict system and transportation of convicts. On the one hand this struggle had its progressive side because the semi-slave nature of convict labour was a threat to workers’ struggles and organisations, and because opposing convictism was associated with the campaign for democracy. Conversely the continuing existence of the convict system was used against the democratic movements. The anti-democratic elements in the British and colonial elites insisted that a prison couldn’t be a democracy, and demands for self-government and widening the suffrage often came up against the response that a society full of criminals wasn’t fit to rule itself. On the other hand, aspects of the the argument against ‘cheap labour’ being brought in from outside could be readily transferred to campaigns against non-white immigrants such as Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Yet another strand, of course, was the ‘yellow peril’ fears centred initially on Chinese immigrants, but later also on Japan as an emerging force in the Pacific. We’ll consider anti-Chinese paranoia in some detail below.

These strands intersected in many ways. They had a common ideological starting point in British imperialism, which was associated with colonisation and the slave trade, and gave rise to doctrines of white supremacy. The ‘moral’ campaigns against Irish workers and the Chinese both embodied an attempt to control women’s sexuality and to bolster the (white, middle class, Protestant) family. Even so, they were only loosely connected. For example: ‘Few documents ... link contemporary perceptions of Aborigines and Chinese. When anti-Chinese agitators looked for relevant examples from history, they cited the anti-transportation movement ...’[17] Anti-Irish prejudice was clearly not about skin colour at all, and was in many ways a reflection of class antagonism.

Racist ideology cohered in the latter half of the 19^th Century with the rise of ‘social Darwinism’, which gave white domination the gloss of evolutionary progress. Australian scholars produced histories that either trivialised or ignored the struggles and claims of Aboriginal people. Then in 1889 the Privy Council laid down the principle that all of Australia had become crown land because the country was terra nullius, meaning ‘practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law’.[18]

In the first part of the century, fears of Asian immigrants had been just one issue among many, generally overshadowed by agitation against transportation. But by the late 19^th Century, fear of the ‘yellow peril’ was well on its way to becoming a defining theme of Australian nationalism and a pillar of the nation state arising out of Federation.

The conventional view is that 19th Century racist agitation, and especially demands to exclude Chinese, were driven by the common people. The labour movement in particular is supposed to have forced the ruling circles to exclude Chinese from the country. On this account, White Australia (like the exclusion of women from many jobs) appears to stem from the power of organised, white, male labour. But that version of history begs some important questions.

Why and how should the workers’ movement, which proved unable to impose its will in the strike battles of the 1890s, have achieved this one political victory? That is never satisfactorily explained. Why the bourgeoisie, which fought bitterly to impose ‘freedom of contract’ in the industrial sphere, should have legislated to protect workers from Chinese competition is likewise unclear. Moreover this whole line of argument ignores the central role of racism in the British empire well before Australian trade unions became a force. The slave trade, genocide against indigenous peoples, colonial wars on several continents all preceded Australian campaigns for white Australia. Verity Burgmann, who makes these points, reminds us that the dominant ideas in capitalist society are generally those of the ruling class. So it was with colonial racism.[19]

As Phil Griffiths has pointed out in an important essay, the anti-Chinese legislation passed in colonial Australia was the product of parliaments whose membership was not paid, which meant they were all from affluent backgrounds –- these were elite institutions in the most literal sense. Griffiths goes on to explain why the bourgeoisie opted for White Australia.[20]

Firstly, they feared that should a large Chinese population settle in the north, it might be hard to control and even become a beachhead for invasion. Moreover it might begin to move south. The fear of invasion was a constant feature of late 19th Century Australian politics.

Secondly, they worried that the importation of a large non-white population might be associated with the development of a plantation economy in parts of the continent. They disliked this prospect, not out of anti-racism but because it represented a rival form of economic and social development. In the United States, conflict between the slave-based system of plantation agriculture and the northern industrial economy based on wage labour had led to a civil war. In addition, British Empire critics believed American slavery had given rise to a class of troublesome ‘poor whites’. Consequently the dominant view in both Australian and British ruling circles was that Australasia should remain a (white) British domain. James Stephen of the Colonial Office wrote: ‘As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonising North American from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.’[21] Like the genocidal war on the Aborigines, the White Australia policy can’t be understood apart from the peculiar features of the capitalist mode of production and the imperialist framework of settlement.

Thirdly, White Australia was a convenient ideology for convincing white workers they had common interests with the white ruling class. This became increasingly important as the unions grew stronger and capitalists began to fear a generalised challenge to their power. Racist agitation could help forestall such threats:

The great urban working class mobilisations against Chinese immigration all came at times of unemployment and economic distress: 1878 in New South Wales and elsewhere, 1880 in NSW, and 1888 in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bitterness at the workings of capitalism was deflected – deliberately or otherwise – onto a racialised target.[22]

When we look closely at race riots and the climate that generates them, we tend to find local merchants and politicians setting the tone, sometimes taking their cue from British imperialism. In his suitably titled newspaper, The Empire, Henry Parkes wrote in 1851 that importing ‘coloured races’ was ‘an act of treason to society’.[23] During the 1862 Lambing Flat riots in NSW Charles Allen, a prominent local shopkeeper, chaired the meeting which resolved to drive out the Chinese. In Victoria, as Jerome Small points out, ‘The first recorded voice raised against the Chinese was … William Westgarth, founder of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce in 1853.’ A few years later, just prior to the 1857 Buckland riots, the colony’s Legislative Council established a committee led by landowner John Pascoe Fawkner to keep ‘the hordes of Asia’ away from the goldfields. Restrictions designed to keep the races apart both in their work and in residential areas, imposed by governments, themselves contributed to the fears and ignorance from which racism sprang.[24] In the 1878 seamen’s strike discussed in chapter 2, it was a politician, Angus Cameron, who opened the racist campaign.

These facts help explain why Sydney’s mayor could lead a rowdy demonstration against Chinese arrivals; why the Brisbane Courier reported that local race riots in 1888 had been ‘at least encouraged by persons whose social position should have placed them above such behaviour’;[25] and why the community mobilisation associated with the 1878 Seamen’s strike was strongest in Queensland -- where it was not the unions, but prominent MPs who took the lead.

Where competition was a factor, it didn’t primarily affect wage earners. Mass agitation against the Chinese was common on the goldfields where self-employed diggers, often in economic dire straits, carried out most of the violence. The riots at Buckland and elsewhere in 1857-58, the height of the first round of anti-Chinese agitation in Victoria, came at a time of declining returns. Similarly, ‘by the time of the Lambing Flat riots in 1860-61, thousands of white diggers had come to see that series of gold strikes as a final chance to achieve wealth or to recover the investment of a life’s savings.’ They would go to extreme lengths to stop the Chinese getting in ahead of them.[26]

In addition to the petit-bourgeoisie, some big capitalists faced competitive pressures. In Melbourne, local industrialists became alarmed in 1880, when a Chinese rival tendered successfully to build 500 dozen chairs for the Exhibition Building.

‘Furthermore, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company was keen to exclude Indian labour as well as Indian capital, since cheap labour enabled smaller concerns to survive ... Likewise, the ‘lumpen petty bourgeoisie’ of Indian, Afghan or Syrian hawkers was resented by white merchants. In 1896 the Victorian government, responding to requests by the Country Traders’ Association of Victoria, passed legislation refusing hawking licenses to coloured immigrants.’ [27]

Selectors (small farmers) were close to the frontier and the on-going war against Aborigines, while in more settled areas they fought with them over access to services in the towns and tried to encroach on fringe land the blacks had occupied. We have seen examples of clashes between farmers and Aborigines in NSW. Similarly in the northern NSW sugar industry it was farmers and a local newspaper editor, not workers, who took the lead in organising agitation against non-white labour.[28]

It is true that wage earners felt similar fears, but it’s interesting to consider which ones were most alarmed: it was wage-earning miners – precisely because of the petit-bourgeois environment that surrounded them. A good example is the 1873 Clunes upheaval, in which miners rioted against Chinese who were being used as scabs. We would tend to see this as a workers’ action; but on closer examination we find that the Clunes Miners’ Association which fought the Chinese counted local businessmen among its members. We also find that in the one area where Chinese and white workers had been permitted to live side by side, Ballarat East, the miners were less racist and the local Chinese did not scab on them.[29]

While conscious anti-racism among whites was unusual, it was not unheard of, and initially tolerance for the Chinese was common enough. The first major anti-Chinese agitation on the Bendigo gold fields, in 1854, saw only a narrow majority call for restricted immigration. At Castlemaine, a spokesman told the Argus that the diggers had no feeling against the Chinese, adding that ‘Englishmen are ever ready to receive foreigners as brethren with open arms.’[30] Such tolerance faded, yet elements of it remained. Amidst the worst goldfields riots, there were always some whites who were appalled at the racial violence. There were also cases of white diggers accepting black Americans. The most dramatic example was Joseph, an African-American miner from New York, whom the authorities prosecuted first in the trials after the Eureka Stockade, presumably hoping to play on racism. ‘The jury found Joseph not guilty and he was greeted as a hero by hundreds of supporters outside the Supreme Court.'[31]

The non-whites themselves were by no means willing to be passive victims of persecution. In Victoria, ‘Chinese showed themselves willing to resist European mobs when they held a marked superiority in numbers and in several cases expelled Europeans from gold fields’ while after the Buckland riot, Chinese were ‘almost universally armed and could be seen exercising in military formation.’[32] When the government imposed special taxes on them the majority refused to pay, responding with protest meetings of thousands. In May 1859 in Bendigo they fought police in an attempt to free arrested Chinese miners and, when this failed, hundreds demanded to be arrested in a mass civil disobedience campaign. In Castlemaine some 3,000 made similar demands. In the pastoral industry later on, Chinese staged a number of strikes. At Canning Downs they took up shear blades to use as daggers and locked themselves in the wool store, while at Pikedale they marched to the homestead to complain about their wages.

Neither were other non-whites the meek and anti-union types that white racists imagined. In 1846, an employer at Tent Hill, NSW, complained that his twenty-five Indian labourers had been satisfied with their lot ‘until they were tampered with’, whereupon they demanded European rations.[33] In Bourke in 1899 the Afghans employed as camel drivers struck for higher wages and were imprisoned. Melanesians, too, began striking to push up wages, despite conditions not far from slavery -- there were actual auctions of Islanders in the seventies and one case of branding. Despite this fact their ability to win higher pay became a factor in the eventual demise of the plantation system.

Tragically, however, white unionists remained indifferent. One industry with numerous Asian workers was the furniture trades, where:

in 1885 the Chinese cabinetmakers fought a successful battle for higher wages and formed a union which enforced minimum rates of pay and a fifty hour week ... But the Europeans contemptuously ignored these efforts ... Indeed, when Chinese workers donated to a fund to aid striking shearers, the European cabinetmakers indignantly demanded that the donations ... be refused. During a strike by Chinese early in 1893, prominent trade unionists chose to avert their eyes, a leader of the Trades Hall Council remarking: ‘We can afford to laugh. It does not affect us.’[34]

Working class racism and the consolidation of White Australia

So while mass racism did not emerge with, or emanate from, organised labour it is certainly true that workers embraced it. The conventional explanation is that they felt threatened by competition from coloured labour. Let’s consider this more closely.

Few white workers competed directly with non-whites, and as for those who did, ‘where evidence is available, Chinese workers’ wages were on a par with Europeans, although they were often paid by the piece, a practice the unions strongly objected to.’[35] On any logical measure, assisted migration from the British Isles should have appeared a greater threat to the interests of white workers than Chinese or Islander labour, since in the former case the numbers were larger, and assisted white labour was more readily manipulated. Chinese labour was usually confined to certain sectors (such as the furnishing trades) and to Chinese employers, while Islanders were confined to tropical zones and plantation work. On purely economic grounds, they couldn’t be portrayed as much of a threat outside the North Queensland sugar industry.

But even for the canefields, the competition argument doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. White workers preferred mining or pastoral work and showed little enthusiasm for the canefields. ‘In 1901 the state government labour bureau agent at Gin Gin complained that despite a demand for cane cutters, unemployed European labourers had shown no interest … [and] that at one mill in the Cairns district, “409 white labourers passed through the books in order to provide and maintain a daily requirement of 88 hands”’[36] Only during the 1890s depression were whites keen to take on these jobs. This had something to do with the stigma of ‘kanakas’ work’ but also much to do with miserable pay and conditions. While white workers undoubtedly opposed the use of Islander labour, they seldom mobilised around the question; it was largely seen as an electoral issue best left to Labor politicians.

It’s quite true that workers perceived non-whites as competitors. Such anxieties accompany all opposition to immigration, and given the assumption of white supremacy, fears about non-white labour followed inexorably. These apprehensions could be quite intense, and might even become self-fulfilling, since racism itself made it easier for employers to play off one group against another. But generally they weren’t rational, and neither were they the starting point for White Australia. Economic, social, political and ideological factors formed a complex pattern that we can’t reduce to competition for jobs. If we want to emphasize one factor, it makes more sense to consider class collaboration. Workers and their unions, not confident enough to fight battles on their own, embraced racism as part of class alliances that linked them to the bosses and to society’s middle layers. Thus like sexism, racial prejudice actually reflected the weaknesses of the labour movement rather than its strengths.

The working class was not concentrated in mass production, nor even entirely in the cities. Some sections, for example the shearers, included a large proportion of people who were really small proprietors. Another large element, especially craftsmen and their families, dreamt of petit bourgeois independence from wage labour. Socialist ideas were confused and the left within the labour movement was relatively weak. Under such conditions, the temptation was strong to build unions and industrial campaigns around issues that linked the unions to middle class elements and to the employers. Race was just such an issue, precisely because important sections of the employers and small business had their own reasons to exclude Chinese and other non-Europeans. Protectionism and the family wage were other issues with similar implications.

Meanwhile the upper classes sometimes used the race issue quite blatantly to distract workers from the task of fighting the boss. In 1886, a miners’ union had no sooner formed at Charters Towers than the local newspaper editor pressed for its conversion into ‘a union of all classes against the common enemy, John Chinaman.’[37]

Employers inflamed the race question during industrial disputes. In Victoria’s quartz mines, the unions certainly used anti-Chinese agitation to recruit members, and fought to exclude them from the mines. However the employers also tried to use Chinese as strikebreakers during a long dispute over the eight hour day. The strikers and their wives drove the strikebreakers away with a hail of stones. We shouldn’t make excuses for racism – of course the unionists should have accepted the Chinese and recruited them to the union, so that they couldn’t be used to break strikes. On the other hand, the bosses were hardly innocent in the affair.

Sometimes the unions resisted racism better than other groups. Selectors who travelled the wool track were often ferociously anti-Aboriginal and this made the AWU a centre of racism, yet at the same time the shearers’ paper, The Hummer, exposed the dreadful conditions facing Aboriginal pastoral workers, and the union didn’t exclude them from its ranks. In fact the ASU’s 1891 conference voted to admit them for half the normal fee, with some delegates describing blacks as better unionists than whites.[38] In 1889 Robert Stevenson, a militant shearers’ leader, convinced the union’s Bourke branch to allow Chinese to retain membership. ‘The Bourke members, predominantly landless labourers, were more open to ideas of working class unity than members nearer the coast where small farmers predominated.’[39]

Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, white supremacy had become an essential plank of the national ideology in every sphere. It was advanced to justify the conquest of the land and the exploitation of black labour in the pastoral industry, and had provided a rationale for expansion in the Pacific and the exploitation of black labour in the Islands as well as on Queensland plantations. Meanwhile in the mainstream of domestic politics, where racism could be used to tie workers to the employers and the state, the same white supremacy meant the exclusion of coloured labour. This helps us understand why in Alfred Deakin’s eyes the strongest argument for federation was 'the desire that we should be one people, and remain one people, without the admixture of other races’.[40]

In fact racism was essential to cement Federation, because it wasn’t easy creating a capitalist nation state across the Australian continent. The colonial population lacked a strong sense of national identity. What did they all have in common, especially after the bitter class divisions of the nineties? The new state was highly federal, and Barton’s first cabinet had to contain someone from every State because centrifugul pressures were so strong. However the government’s first major legislation pushed the country towards greater centralisation. The Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Island Labourers Act

brought in their wake a whole series of administrative problems, involving such diverse matters as the dictation test and the payment of bounties to sugar-growers who employed only white labour. The solution of these problems marked a much more rapid assertion of Commonwealth authority than most people had expected, and the exercise of that authority cut sharply across conflicting state interests. Within a very short time a significant number of people in all the colonies, but most particularly in New South Wales, began to wonder whether they had not been victims of a confidence trick.[41]

Barton got away with it because his measures touched the one nerve that could arouse and unite most of the population: White Australia. That ideology also underpinned the now well established Australian imperialism, and both intersected with another pillar of the new state: conventional gender roles and the nuclear family. The male ideal was captured in a virile image of the Australian ‘Coming Man’; and beside him stood stood an image of the ideal white woman as the lynchpin of family life, reproducer of the race, guardian of its purity. British and Australian colonists took the latter issue very seriously, particularly on the frontier and in places like Fiji, ‘where the maintenance of minority power and status was seen to depend on racial purity [and] where the white woman was unquestionably the protector of the white home.’[42] In such situations, European women were under great pressure to bear lots of children, and their ability to work was particularly limited, since it would undermine white prestige if they engaged in physical labour.

Sexual morality was also particularly stifling for white females, for they were expected to provide a sharp contrast to ‘native’ women portrayed as morally lax.

Even seemingly progressive movements were all too readily poisoned by racism. Opposition to the Pacific labour trade arose partly from racist hostility to the introduction of black labour into Australia, while opposition to the Boer war arose from sympathy with another group of white settlers colonising the land of non-whites. The Worker blamed the Boer War on ‘a plot of the Jew capitalists’ and Henry Lawson warned Australian troops about ‘niggers’ crawling into their tents at night to ‘rip out your innards’.[43] Indeed there was a strong white supremacist streak in arguments both for and against the war:

Pro-Boers felt that that most cherished ideal [White Australia] was violated by a war which was engineered by financial interests to secure an assured supply of cheap labour for the mines -- black, brown, yellow or depressed white ... Supporters of the war simply dismissed this interpretation and construed their own support as a premium to insure the inviolability of White Australia…[44]

And because most critics of imperialism shared the nationalist and racist sentiments, it was easier for them to eventually embrace the imperialist logic. Although Henry Lawson had claims to being a socialist supporter of class struggles, and had sympathised with the enemy during the Boer war, the defeat of those struggles in the 1890s pushed him in a reactionary direction. By 1905 he was supporting the British presence in India, and hailing Russia as the champion of the white races in ‘the struggle of the East against the West’.[45]

The Labor Party was an important part of consolidating White Australia, but not in quite the way this is usually understood. The standard view is that Labor’s racism reflected the views of its worker supporters, which it sought to champion in parliament. Of course this is part of the story, but the great appeal of racism for the ALP was precisely that it appealed to all classes, including the party’s small farmer voting base. In Labor’s political program, racism and the land issue connected with a specifically Australian (as opposed to British) republican nationalism whose greatest appeal in the 1890s appears to have been in the bush rather than in the cities. Among unionists it was the AWU which rallied most conspicuously to the Eureka flag. Whereas the capitalist parties were generally British empire patriots, Labor could appeal to the Australian- and the Irish-born from different social layers on the basis of an apparently anti-imperialist stance, but this was inseparable from racism, for it incorporated demands for more aggressive expansionism in the Pacific than London would contemplate – there were complaints that Britain was selling out the white race in the Pacific.[46]

The Labor Party also displayed other, more progressive tendencies associated with its militant, urban working class supporters but the latter were weakened by industrial defeat in the Maritime Strike and by mass unemployment in the subsequent depression.[47] The taming of the ALP through racism was part of what is sometimes called the ‘National Settlement’ underpinning the new Australian state after Federation. It reflected, and often reinforced, the weaknesses of organised labour more than its strengths. Just as the new state was built on the oppression of women and non-whites, so it was also built on labour’s failures in the nineties.

That state remains today, its oppressive nature changed in form but not in essence. Yet the traditions of resistance also remain, with lessons to guide us in today’s struggles. Because history is usually written by the victors, all too often the traditions get obscured. That's why we need to write our own history.

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