This week began with Australia Day and ends with the Chinese New Year. The juxtaposition suggests pertinent questions about Australian identity, especially the ways in which Australians have alternately included and excluded those seen as outsiders. This is most evident in the relationship between Australian settlers' attitudes to Indigenous Australians, but it is also seen in Australian attitudes to Chinese and other Asian peoples.
Chinese people first came to Australia in considerable numbers during the Gold Rush, and for a time formed up to seven per cent of the population. They came first as miners, and later supported themselves by farming and small business.
From the beginning their position was precarious. The colonies passed laws to exclude Asian immigration; on the gold fields there were anti-Chinese riots. The grounds of hostility lay in their virtues, not their vices: they worked so hard and were so thrifty that others found them difficult to compete with.
After Federation, hostility found expression in the White Australia policy. It was based on the threat posed by cheap imported labour to Australian workers but also reflected the belief that the Chinese and other races were inferior. In speaking to the 1901 immigration restriction bill Edmund Barton, the first Australian prime minister, was explicit on this point:
I do not think (either) that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races — I think no one wants convincing of this fact — unequal and inferior.
The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.
British opposition to measures that would inflame its relationship with its colonies deterred the legislators from explicitly excluding immigrants on the grounds of race. But the dictation test provided a genteel mechanism for exclusion, the forerunner of such smarmy devices as the exclusion of the Australian mainland from the immigration zone.
In the 1960s the policy of exclusion changed to one of inclusion as Australians began to realise that their prosperity depended on building good relationships with their Asian neighbours. The abolition of the White Australia Policy and the later grant of citizenship to Chinese students after the Tiananmen Square massacre established complex circular patterns of immigration and belonging. Chinese migrated to Australia, established citizenship and residence and then returned to China, sending their children in turn to study and gain residence.
These exchanges benefited both societies.
The alternation between exclusion and inclusion characteristic of Australian attitudes to the Chinese reflects an ambivalence in Australian identity. Many groups have been the targets of the language and measures of exclusion: Indigenous Australians, Irish, Italians, Germans, Muslims and asylum seekers.
But there have also been instances of great hospitality. The European immigration and settlement program after 1945, the popular pressure that pushed the Fraser Government to expand its intake of Indochinese refugees, and the acceptance of African immigrants have all led to a broader sense of Australian identity. Australia Day allows us to celebrate this.
The tension between a narrow and a hospitable definition of Australian identity also invites us to celebrate the lives of those who worked to establish a more generous and self-assured Australia. These include neighbours who have helped people settle in Australia and befriended them, the teachers and social workers who have honoured the gift that differences in faith, race and culture bring to our society, and the nurses and civil servants who have worked to respect cultural and linguistic differences when tending to immigrants' needs.
In times of anxiety it is never easy to argue for a hospitable and respectful society. Those who argued against the White Australia Policy, who insisted during wartime that Australians of German birth and descent were worthy of respect and freedom, who welcomed the gift that Jewish and Muslim refugees are to Australia, and who insist that people who seek asylum in Australia be received with respect, swam against the riptide and were mocked for their tenacity. But they preserved, and in so doing they sowed the seeds of a better society.
Australia Day is an occasion for celebrating those whose lives have encouraged our better selves and for renewing our commitment to a better society. The experience and presence of Chinese immigrants to our land remind us how important that commitment is and what a gift our differences are to our nation.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.