Australia's Racist Past

Erwin Cabucos' review of Peta Stephenson's The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous Australian Story, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2007. RRP 39.95.

Appeared in Word's Worth - The Journal of the English Teachers Association of Queensland, December 2007 Issue, page 79, under a different title.

Remember Senator Pauline Hanson who said in her maiden speech in 1996 that Australia is in danger from being swamp by Asians? Remember her asking the government to stop giving help to the aborigines because it only separates the nation? Who can forget Professor Geoffrey Blainey and John Howard in the 1980’s who campaigned to lessen the intake of Asian immigration because Asians are only a burden to our welfare system.

White Australians’ negative views about Indigenous and Asian Australians are not new. They are traceable from the time the white population had started to settle in this land. The fact is, Asians had been trading and having sexual encounters with the Aboriginal population since the 1600’s. Goods and languages were exchanged and interracial families burgeoned.

At the turn of the 1900s, white settlers thought that since it was their land they claimed they discovered, they should have had those opportunities. They introduced laws that prohibited Asian men from having sexual relationship with aboriginal women and Asians from continuing to hold maritime trade with the indigenous population. Various reasons were cited, including the idea that Asians harmed the health of the indigenous population. It was later made clear that Aboriginal women were only reserved for aboriginal men and white men.

Families destroyed; husbands went back to Asia, leaving heartbroken wives; fathers were never to be seen again until around twenty years ago when grandchildren of Asian and aboriginal descent began to search for their heritage.

Peta Stephenson’s new book The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story, published by the University of New South Wales Press takes the reader into an engaging journey of experiencing the struggles of Indigenous and Asian Australians against the racist policies of their white, fellow Australians. Stephenson uses personal interviews, photographs, literature, art, mementos and other items in order to bring to life stories that have often been silenced in the story of our nation.

Asian Australians had been locked up for being Asians. Indigenous Australians had been dispossessed because they don’t deserve recognition in the white effort’s to preserve the purity of the white race.

World War 2 brought paranoia to white Australians: Asians were yellow perils and aborigines were traitors along with the Japanese invaders that tried to advance into Darwin. Just because they had the same colours and slant eyes, happily settled Japanese Australians were separated from their families. Their children were taken away from their indigenous mothers. Families shattered.

This is a book that boldly tells the institutionalised racism that permeated in this country for many years. It bravely tells the emotional impacts of those scrupulous treatments of the white Australians to their coloured counterparts who became the outsiders within.

With its language accuracy and cultural sensitivity, this is a piece of writing that has the voices of the marginalised sections of our society, de-stabilising ideology. It is an excellent eye-opener to every migrant who thinks that Australia simply evolved from farting koalas and hay-fever causing wattle trees.

Its blurb “White Australia has a black history, but Black Australia has an Asian one” is indeed unfaltering.

The paranoia continues. “Channel 7’s Border Security is a symptomatic phenomenon. In a ‘circus freakshow’ fashion, the program depicts Australia’s border officials exposing people as drug runners, white slavers or terrorists eroding our national security. But the appeal of the show surely lies less in its voyeuristic revelation of human venality, and more in the justification it provides for our incipient border insecurities”(p.158).

I think this book is a pertinent contemporary read for every Australian.