From Foreign Shores: Stories of Migration

Dr. Peta Stephenson's Speech at the Brisbane Writer's Festival on 15 September 2007. Stephenson is the Author of The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian Story, UNSW Press, 2007.

Hi everyone. It’s really wonderful to be here today, especially in the company of such distinguished writers. In keeping with today’s theme, I’m going to be talking about two kinds of migration, two types of migration that are not usually discussed together. The first is the more traditional form of migration that we are all familiar with –the migration to Australia of people from foreign shores. The second kind of migration I will refer to – and we’ll discuss later how these two forms of migration are intimately connected – is an enforced internal migration, where people are taken from familiar to foreign places inside Australia.

It was actually Pauline Hanson who first led me on my journey of considering how these two forms of migration, that from outside Australia, and the other a form of exile within, are connected – the journey that led to my writing of The Outsiders Within. And since we are in the home of Hansonism, this is the perfect place to share this story with you.

As you will no doubt recall, until recently when she added Muslim communities to her long list of Australia’s least wanted migrants, Hanson targeted that nebulous group called ‘Asians’. Besides being concerned that we were about to be ‘swamped’ by Asians, she castigated them for refusing to speak English, and for living in ghettos and not assimilating. Her other main political target though, was Indigenous people. She argued that they were costing hard-working taxpayers money because of their receipt of social security payments, and other ‘special benefits’ ‘no matter how minute the Aboriginal blood’.

Unlike Hanson, I had never really considered Aborigines and Asians together. I thought about Australian history as an encounter between Indigenous and Anglo-Celtic people on the one hand, and as another encounter, unfolding more recently, between white settler and Asian interests. I hadn’t really considered them in the one story. What did Hanson know that I didn’t? Was there a long history of engagement between these two communities in Australia? And, if so, had white Australians always been anxious, paranoid even, about them in the way Hanson appeared to be? The extraordinary stories I uncovered in writing The Outsiders Within provided a resounding yes to both questions.

Hanson did not so much introduce, as respond to the racism and resentment that many of her voters were already feeling. She exploited widespread, if politically submerged, anxieties about Indigenous Australians as the internal ‘Other’ and Asians as the external ‘Other’. Indigenous Australians, intent on getting back their land, were plotting a kind of invasion from within, while Asians, who were just as intent on taking the country, were invading it through unchecked migration. Hanson had, no doubt unwittingly, articulated the very dis-ease at the heart of the white nation, which, unable to confront its own illegitimate beginnings and colonial theft, always fears what it has taken can be taken away.

The fear of outsiders within, whether coming from the outback or Asia’s teeming hordes is nothing new. My book tells how 100 years before Hanson’s rather dramatic entrance onto the political stage, other Queensland politicians were voicing their concerns about precisely these communities, largely with reference to the burgeoning pearl-shelling industry in the Torres Strait. In fact Queensland was the first state (closely followed by Western Australia and then the Northern Territory) to introduce legislation designed to prevent Aboriginal and Asian people from engaging in working and sexual partnerships. The exemption of the pearl-shelling industry from the so-called white Australia policy saw the arrival of thousands of Asian indentured labourers each year in places like Broome, Darwin and Thursday Island. The men came from Japan, China, Indonesia, West Timor, Singapore, the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In the absence of Asian women, the indentured labourers readily entered relationships with Aboriginal women. To those seeking to engineer Australia’s racial and social identity, these ‘immoral’ unions were to be stopped at all costs. They led to increases in venereal and other diseases, meant that Aboriginal women were not available for the sexual satisfaction of white men and, worst of all, led to an increase in the number of so-called ‘piebald’, ‘mongrel’ or ‘coloured’ children who, it was feared, might outnumber and swamp the white population.
It is important to remember that the North and Northwest of Australia were thinly populated by whites until the post-World War II period. Asians not only represented a territorial threat and sexual competition, they were also an economic threat – particularly when they employed Aboriginal workers. This raised the ire of local farmers and station managers who found it difficult to keep Aboriginal workers in their employ. If Aborigines worked for Chinese market gardeners, Japanese shopkeepers and other Asians, they would be unavailable for white economic endeavours and, at the same time, would contribute to the material success of Asian businesses.

These are just some of the arguments white politicians and Aboriginal protectors used to justify their introduction of legislation designed to keep Aborigines and Asians apart. But what were the symbolic issues at stake? What did Indigenous and Asian communities represent in the white imagination? What fear was at the heart of the government’s strident attempts to separate Aborigines and Asians? My book suggests that these policies of separation were the legal expression of a constant anxiety about the land being taken away.
Here’s how it works. In justifying their unlawful expropriation of Aboriginal lands, white colonists or invaders insisted that the land was empty and there for the taking. In order to maintain this lie and deny the presence of the Indigenous people, colonists introduced the legal dictum terra nullius; they murdered Indigenous people; tried to forget about them by packing them off to remote reserves and missions, or by writing them out of Australian history altogether. And when all of that didn’t work they tried to make Indigenous people disappear by assimilating them and turning them into white people.

Belief in the myth of Australia’s emptiness led inexorably to the widespread fear that someone else might come and fill it up. The fear, if you like, of the invader being invaded in turn. Anxiety about the arrival of unwelcome outsiders intent on becoming insiders, went hand in hand with another sustaining myth of Australian national identity –that Australia is isolated. It is isolated of course from Britain, but not as we all know (and as white colonists were acutely aware at the time) from Threatening Asia, the Yellow Peril, the Asian menace.
And here’s where we come back to our two forms of migration. On the one hand the state looked outward, attempting to prohibit the migration of Asians altogether, or when expediency dictated otherwise (as in the case of the pearl-shelling industry), to at least manage and control how they migrated here. Asian pearl-shellers arrived here as bonded or indentured labourers. They had little power over the terms of their labour contracts and were obliged to remain working in the pearl-shelling industry for the period of their indenture. Local governments and the pearling masters wanted the Asian migrants for their labour only. They did not want them forging societies or creating a sense of community.

And to prevent this they created another whole class of people who were internally exiled. The state and federal governments did not just look outward, they also turned their segregating gaze inward, controlling the movement and marriages of Indigenous people. In a sense then, one kind of migration precipitated another. The migration of Asians from foreign shores led to the internal migration – or perhaps exile is a better word – of Aboriginal and Islander people. As punishment for committing the crime of engaging in relationships with Asians, many Indigenous women and their Aboriginal-Asian children in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, became involuntary migrants—people sent away from their traditional country, language and kin, to live in exile in foreign places on remote reserves and missions.

Territorial anxieties about the land being taken away are still with us. It is no accident that the government has recently made such strident attempts to prevent asylum seekers, refugees and other so-called queue jumpers from gaining entry to, and a foot hold in, Australia. Asians, the more traditional source of anxiety, have now largely been replaced in the white imagination by others from different foreign shores, but the concern about losing the land to outsiders remains unchanged.

Nor is it a coincidence that the government’s recent intervention into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities has included attempts to further diminish land rights and abolish the permit system that regulates access to Indigenous communities. It’s another in a long line of strategies designed to guarantee white unilateral possession of the nation – all done to deny our own migration here from foreign shores.

(Dr. Peta Stephenson is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Her work has been widely published in specialist journals and edited collections.)