“White Australia” emerged as the dream of Australian nationalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century.7 Most scholarship points out that it was formed largely against the supposed threat of engulfment from Asia. White Australia entailed notions of Britishness and Anglo-Saxondom that might seem, at first sight, at odds with an Australian nationalist vision. The sense of nationness, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, is an imagined reality.10 Within Australia there developed over the period between the 1830s and the end of the Second World War a feeling of nationness among settlers that derived from a sense of common British origins. As the nineteenth century wore on, this crystallised into white Australia nationalism. White Australia encoded many meanings, and worked as a unifying ideology for otherwise disparate and conflicting interests: between colonial nationalisms, capitalist and worker, free trader and protectionist, Irish, English, Welsh and Scots, Catholic and Protestant. It was instantiated at the beginning of the twentieth century as the White Australia Policy, given effect by immigration restriction acts and acts relating to citizenship, voting rights, and rights to social benefits. -Anthony Moran
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 05:22:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015