Check out the podcast episode on the same topic.

I remember getting on the bus before any big COVID-19 restrictions were in place. I remember feeling uneasy, that I had to be more cautious and somehow less sick than everyone else. I remember thinking that one small cough from me, as opposed to someone else, would attract all these stares. I had to be clean. I had to be the ‘good’ Asian.

COVID-19 has had major impacts on us all, but it has affected Asians in a distinct way. From “go back to your own country” being yelled at on the streets, and having your garage door graffitied with “COVID-19 CHINA DIE”, to even being physically hit and kicked, people who look Chinese have become targets for racist attacks. This is in spite of more than 80% of Australian cases coming from Europe, cruise ships, or the US and not China. So why aren’t we seeing attacks against ‘European’ looking people instead? Where does this seemingly anti-Chinese sentiment come from? 

Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University argues that racism runs deep in our blood because of our history.

“I think my fear is that there's a kind of deep cultural well of racism in Australia,” says Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. “The exclusion policies of the late 19th century that became entrenched in the White Australia policy were the lived daily reality as well as the public international face of Australia for the whole first half of the 20th century.”

Chinese Australian history

After British settlement in 1788, we started seeing small numbers of Chinese arriving in Australia as indentured labourers (contracted to work for someone to pay off a debt). However once gold was discovered, we saw a much greater influx of immigrants from all over the world, including the Chinese. The Chinese were often segregated and would work on the least desirable part of the gold field (perhaps one that Europeans had already been through), yet often managed to find more gold.

“Chinese people would go and work it in kind of labor intensive ways where they would find more, and because it was so hard work with fewer rewards, Europeans weren't so willing to do it,” says Professor Woollacott.

The Chinese became well known for being extremely hard working and resourceful, yet faced many challenges. Despite Australian immigrants arriving from many parts of the world, state governments started to implement restrictions that specifically targeted Chinese people.

Legislation based on race

In 1850, Victoria was the first place in the world to put a colour bar in place. 

“That is, if you are a certain colour or race, you cannot enter this territory,” says Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australian history lecturer at the University of Sydney. “Then we have laws stating that Chinese have to live in a certain part of the goldfield. They're segregated; segregation laws based on race.”

On top of this, some states introduced a poll tax on Chinese people as they entered, which could be around 10 pounds (the equivalent of around 1300 pounds when adjusted for inflation today). Additionally, a dictation test was also introduced in some states aimed at excluding non-Europeans.

“The British Imperial government said, ‘you can't just do it by race,’ partly because the British empire includes subjects of all kinds of races around Southeast Asia and Hong Kong,” says Professor Woollacott. “So it was done by a dictation test. When people arrived in Australia, immigration officials had the power to make them do a dictation test in any European language.” 

The officials would often choose a lesser known language that no Chinese person arriving in Australia would know - Hungarian or Lithuanian for example, and this would give them legal cause to not allow them to enter Australia. All of these ideas seem completely ludicrous to most Australians today, yet for 19th and early 20th century Australians, this was seen as not just normal, but good for Australia.

The common enemy of Australia

After our federation of 1901, this dictation test was one of the first policies passed by our new national government, and continued for many decades. In fact, one theory suggests that our borders as we know them today wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the desire to exclude Chinese immigrants. After all, we’re looking at a time where Catholics couldn't marry Protestants, different villages in Scotland hated each other, the Scotts and Irish hated each other, the Irish and English hated each other - there wasn’t racial harmony amongst the Europeans themselves. Dr Loy-Wilson explains this theory from historian Marilyn Lake supported by Adam McEwen.

“She argues that these people wouldn't have banded together in Australia if it hadn't been for the mutual hatred of the Chinese. The arrival of the Chinese allows these white people to unify and form a government. But underpinning that unification was racial hatred and fear.”

Whether you agree with this argument or not, the desire to have a federal policy of racial exclusion was definitely one of the major factors that led our country to federate. Australia was established because we wanted to formally legalise racial exclusion.

“I think we're looking at something akin to slavery here in terms of the structural racial hatred that develops,” explains Dr Loy-Wilson. “It's one thing to have racism, okay, a belief that the Chinese are inferior, a threat. It's another thing to put that into law. So in Australia, we structurally translate our racism into a legal system.”

However, this still begs the question: Why the fear of the Chinese in particular? With immigrants from all over the world arriving in Australia, why did we seem to band against the Chinese?

The vilification of the Chinese

Professor Woollacott offers some explanation of this. She says there are many factors, religion being one, and the Chinese weren’t Christian. “So in the 19th century, the British Australian settlers were very dominantly Christian. Christianity and religion was extremely important. So the Chinese were seen as pagan, as other in that sense.”

She also argues that language is another factor, with very few British having any Chinese language skills. And of course clothing and cultural practices that were very foreign to the Europeans.

Dr Loy-Wilson offers a few other theories, including the seemingly large scale of migration, and the seemingly organised nature of it. The Chinese often travelled to Australia in small groups, and even though they weren’t the largest immigrant population, it would be very clear when a large influx of Chinese people arrived in Australia.

Another explanation she gives is the competition for resources. “The Chinese thought about water in a very different way to Europeans. From the early days, they weren't working as individual miners; they often worked together, and they built beautiful water races (like aqueducts) to transfer water from very long distances. This was confronting for the Europeans.”

We see this echoed in statements from politicians at the time. Even our second Prime Minister Alfred Deakin stated, “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us... It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.”

Whilst there isn’t one clear answer to this question, what is clear is the Chinese were made into the common enemy for the rest of the nation, and when you have statements like this from the Prime Minister, it’s obvious this wasn’t a small, unfriendly section of Australia that believed this - it was widespread and institutionalised.

Racism outside the law

But beyond legislation that targeted the Chinese, there was also a lot of day-to-day racism going on. Professor Woollacott talks about the ‘larrikin’ of the late 19th Century being those who were known to be tough and violent - quite different from how we see it today. “One of the activities they would engage in was to throw stones at Chinese people.”

Race based attacks were also commonplace at the gold mines. Theft, the breaking of tools, the burning of tents and housing and even physical attacks were all known to have happened, and were designed to try and push the Chinese out. Most famously, the Lambing Flat riots saw a planned attack by large numbers of European miners.

“it's not spontaneous. It's not some European guy suddenly punching a Chinese guy. This is planned, KKK style,” explains Dr Loy-Wilson.

These miners get a banner saying ‘No Chinese, Chinese out’ (which still exists today), and march into the camp burning Chinese tents, stealing Chinese belongings and destroying the tools of the Chinese. The exact level of violence is still debated today, but violence occurs nonetheless.

The carry-over from our racist past

Our White Australia Policy starts to relax from the late 1940’s and is dismantled by 1973, but our racist past still haunts us. Whilst overt racism isn’t common today, sparks like COVID-19 show us that we’ve just become good at hiding it.

“I think Australian culture has integrally included racism for so long historically that it's kind of been built into the fabric of Australian history and culture,” says Professor Woollacott. “It's not too hard to scratch the surface in Australia and for racism to come to the fore. And it's very sad that that happens.”

If our racist views lie dormant and only come out overtly in time like these, it becomes hard for us to acknowledge that there is a problem. Our history of legalised and accepted racism means that it’s an unfortunate part of our culture that didn’t just magically vanish with the White Australia policy. Our deeper cultural views require reflection and action to change.

“We are not a multicultural nation,” says Dr Loy-Wilson. “Using that word is offensive for those people, because it says to them, ‘we’re multicultural - what are you complaining about?’ It's superficial. It doesn't deal with the heart of the matter.”

Racism isn’t just in our history, it’s our present and our future. And that’s now on us to change.

For references, check out the show notes of the podcast episode on the same topic.

Cover image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.