2.11 The Compass Needle Swings from Britain to Asia
The impact of the British Isles on Australia, for more than a century and a half,
was powerful. Britain was the main source of the democracy, the language,
new technology, education methods, the system of justice, and all but one of
the major religious denominations—the Lutherans. In defence and com-
merce, Britain and Australia were tightly linked, though the trading ties were
slowly loosening after about 1880, when Germany and France increased their
share of Australian commerce. The First World War and the opening years of
the Second World War temporarily enhanced those British ties. In population,
defence, and political and many other ties, Britain remained central.
Proximity to South and East Asia made Australia unlike the typical British-
settler colonies and dominions. Thus, in the 1850s, Victoria attracted an early
wave of Chinese migration. Other waves followed, to NSW, Queensland,
Tasmania, and South Australia’s own Northern Territory. On at leastfive
occasions in the period 1857–77, Chinese diggers on the goldfields, their
favourite destination, were attacked by mobs.
Not once in the nineteenth century were the Chinese as an ethnic group
entirely banned from entering Australia, but they were heavily taxed at the
point of arrival. Such taxes increasingly prevented them from arriving in a
faster stream, and sometimes prohibited them from working on new gold-
fields. Western Australia was the last to receive Chinese migrants in some
numbers, but, like the other colonies, itfirmly restricted them in 1897.
Finally, in 1901, the new federal parliament resolved, with a few trivial
exceptions, to admit no Chinese, Indians, Pacific Islanders, or other forms of
cheap and energetic labour. The decision, for decades, had strong economic
consequences. Australia, in effect, declared itself to be a dear-labour country.
Henceforth, any natural resources or industries that required very cheap
labour tended to be neglected or abandoned.
Hitherto, much of the economic development inside the four tenths of the
nation which lay in the tropics had been fostered by cheap labour. The
economy in the tropics had relied on the Afghan camel-drivers, the Chinese
railway builders and gardeners in the Northern Territory, and the Chinese
gold miners in most of the new goldfields. It had also depended on the Pacific
Islanders working on the sugar plantations on the Pacific coast, and the
Japanese and other Asians who manned the pearlingfleets in a few Australian
tropical ports. The pastoral industry before 1900 had also relied on imported
low-wage labour as well as the local Aborigines. With the decline of imported
labour, the Aborigines were the main workers on numerous cattle stations, but
they had little interest in sheep stations and sugar farms and—until recent
years—in most of the semi-skilled and unskilled occupations in tropical
Australia.
Australian Exceptionalism: A Personal View