White Australia Policy

One of the first objectives of the new federal government, established in 1901, was the design of the White Australia Policy. The White Australia policy refers to an extensive period of both official and unofficial discrimination in Australian history, during which immigration policy and citizenship requirements were heavily biased to favour white European migrants, and more specifically Anglo-Saxon migrants over other races. Although in the present day Australia generally prides itself on being one of the most multicultural of the " western-style" democracies, its past contains a period of government-endorsed racism that is perhaps exceeded only by the apartheid regime of South Africa.

The policy can be traced back to the 1850s when violence against Chinese miners led to the colonial administration introducing restrictions on Chinese immigration. Towards the end of the 19th century the kanakas (the South-east Asians recruited to work in the sugar cane fields) were the main target of discrimination on economic grounds. Squatters, plantation owners and shipowners had occasionally introduced Asian workers because they were cheaper to employ. Australians feared that if this was allowed to happen on a large scale they would have to accept the same low wages or go without jobs altogether.

A lot of Australians believed that so long as there was more than one race in Australia there would be trouble. People of different races never could get on together, they said. The Aboriginal people no longer much concerned white Australians because they

were convinced that they would soon die out. To allow any new race in would be madness, they said.

Alfred Deakin, a Victorian politician who was soon to become Prime Minister, said the main reason for the colonies agreeing to become one nation was to make the White Australia Policy an Australian law. All Australians, Deakin said, wanted to be 'one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races'.

The White Australia Policy was to be like a fence around Australia's shores.

In 1901, the new Federal Government, as its first act, passed the Immigration Restriction Act to " place certain restrictions on immigration and... for the removal... of prohibited immigrants". TheImmigration Restriction Act effectively ended all non-European immigration by providing for entrance examinations in European languages.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 stated that immigration was prohibited for any 'person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation... a passage of fifty words in a European language directed by the officer'. Not many Asians, it was soon discovered, had a good working knowledge of Bulgarian or the Transylvanian dialect of Romanian.

The Immigration Restriction Act effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated (изолированное) white society.

One of the most celebrated victims of the dictation test was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovakian communist writer who arrived in Australia in 1934 to address an anti-war congress.