a multicultural History of Australia

Making multicultural Australia

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Commentary on: From Colonies to Commonwealth »

Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.

Text Commentary

Marking the boundary of Federation...

1901 - Federation celebrations include a variety of national groups, but anti-Asian sentiment entrenched

White Australian attitudes towards Asians were well developed by the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the lead-up to Federation. Indeed anti-Asian attitudes provided one of the driving forces towards Federation. Phil May, a Bulletin magazine cartoonist, captured the full range of stereotype, fear and hostility in this 1886 cartoon of the Mongolian (ie Chinese) Octopus - crime, sexual seduction, corruption, gambling, undercutting fair wages, disease, drug addiction. (This view of outsiders has surfaced again and again in Australian history - with Jewish refugees from Europe in 1946, and with anti-Asian sentiment in the late 1990s.)

Federation came at a time when many pressures were forcing the Australian colonies to consider their common interests, despite strong desires to maintain their independence from each other. Some of the main factors in favour of Federation were:

1. the need to remove the borders between the colonies, which were points at which customs duties were levied on goods moving within the Australian mainland, a process which increased costs of production; and to develop common tariff barriers against the outside world to protect Australian manufacturers and workers from "unfair competition";

2. the need to enshrine a "working men's democracy", through the creation of common laws on citizenship and political participation;

3. the belief that democracy was only possible for white Europeans, whose civilisation was supposedly the only one sufficiently advanced to sustain an equitable society - this required the colonies to have common procedures to close the borders of the country to non-Europeans.

It was in this atmosphere that the Australian colonies came together - in a period of celebration of their imagined common heritage, while identifying Britain as the mother country.

The celebrations of Federation included many national groups - German and French community arches decorated the parade routes while the Italian community had a float in the Sydney parade, and the Chinese community in Melbourne filled the streets with a dancing dragon, a sign of good fortune.

Despite the festivities many immigrant workers, especially Chinese and Melanesians, were facing an uncomfortable future of limitations on their freedoms or even their expulsion from the new nation.

Further reference:
Markus, Andrew Australian Race Relations, 1788-1993, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1994.

Yarwood, A T and Knowling, M J Race Relations in Australia - a history, Sydney, Methuen, 1982.

La Nauze, J A The Making of the Australian Constitution, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1972.

Davidson, Alastair The invisible state: the formation of the Australian state 1788-1901, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1991.