Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal
Volume 7, Number 2, 2011
ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2011
SPECIAL ISSUE: FUTURE STORIES/INTIMATE HISTORIES
Family Stories and ‘Race’ in Australian History
Margaret Allen
Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, The University of Adelaide
The impact of Australia’s restrictive immigration policies during the period
1901-1970s upon the family lives of non-white non-Indigenous people in
Australia have been largely ignored in the writing of Australian history. The
paper explores some dimensions of the experiences of non-white non-
Indigenous people and their transnational families in relation to state
interference.
Introduction
In A Private Empire, Stephen Foster (2010) maps the journeys of an imperial
and transnational family - the Scottish Macpherson family - beginning in
Calcutta in 1781. Their story spans Britain, Australia, Guyana and India and
ranges to the present day. In Australia, he maps two branches, the
Macphersons and the Williams: two branches of the family – both tracing their
lineage to William Macpherson (1784-1866). His sons, Allan Williams (born in
1810) - the son of ‘Countess’, a Guyanian slave woman - and Allan
Macpherson (born in Scotland in 1818) were half-brothers. Allan Macpherson
bore his father’s family name and was legitimate, while Allan Williams, was
illegitimate and was given a different surname. William Macpherson came to
Australia in 1829, bringing with him his sons, with Allan aged nineteen years
at the time and Allan aged ten years (Foster: 123-196).
Until Foster did his research, the connections between the Williams and the
Macphersons were almost forgotten, so successfully had they been buried,
even suppressed. Indeed, when Foster met the fifth Allan Williams, the greatgreat
grandson of the first Allan Williams and patriarch of a well-known and
successful Queensland agricultural family, Williams heard Foster’s account of
his ancestry, namely his descent from Countess, the slave concubine of his
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
2
great-great-grandfather in Guyana in the early nineteenth century, with some
bemusement (Foster 2010: 387). This example of the suppression of a nonwhite
history, it could be argued, is mirrored in non-white and non-Indigenous
aspects of Australian history, which have been largely suppressed and
forgotten. From Foster’s important historical work, and for the purposes of the
present paper, I wish to draw a number of points in relation to the histories of
the family life of non-Indigenous, non-white people in Australia. The histories
of such families are based here upon examples largely drawn from the
migration files of the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
But to return to Foster. Much of the book traces the history of Allan
Macpherson, through his squatting career and violent forays against the
Indigenous peoples of the Fitzroy Downs area, up to his return to the
ancestral home in Scotland where his own son went out to India in the Indian
Colonial Service. Curiously, one of his descendants - Sir William Macpherson
- was the British judge who inquired into the recent infamous Stephen
Lawrence case, a black teenager killed as he stood at a bus stop in London. In
his judgement, Sir William made important statements about the racist nature
of the British police force. His most searing indictment of the police force has
been seen as a defining moment in British race relations. The racism of the
empire had come home and been named in the metropole.
Private Empire, with its discussion of Allan Williams, crucially challenges the
assumed whiteness of Australian settlers. Here it relates to some other recent
work showing more diverse origins for settlers than previously understood.
For example, Cassandra Pybus (2006) has traced former African-American
slaves and freemen who made their way from North America to Britain and
later came to Australia, often as convicts. Ian Duffield (1992; 2001) has
written of black convicts and also of Black Scots, sometimes like Allan
Williams, children of Scottish imperialists, who were brought back to Scotland
for their education and some of whom later made their way to Australia.
Pybus (2011) has written recently about Gilbert Robertson, one-time editor of
a Van Diemen’s Land paper, the True Colonist, whose mother was a coloured
woman from Demerara in the West Indies. In my own work I have explored
the life of John Harvey, a black Scot, whose father was described as a ‘native
of St Helena’. Harvey was an early settler in the Salisbury district of South
Australia, where he was virtually the local squire. He was most likely the first
black member of an Australian parliament when he was elected in 1857 (Allen
2003). The field of Chinese-Australian history, so recently un-tilled, is now
flourishing with the work of scholars such as Kate Bagnall, Sophie Couchman,
John Fitzgerald and others (Bagnall 2006, 2011, Couchman, 2004, Fitzgerald
2007). My work on Indians in Australia has brought to light Indians who
settled across Australia before the hardening of restrictive immigration in
1901 (Allen 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011a, 2011b).
Private Empire provides another clear example of this type of work, in the
attention it pays to the discrimination, unequal treatment and lesser life
chances of a man such as Allan Williams. His career as a colonial official
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
3
began well, but soon his advancement was blocked as he was ‘a man of
colour’ (Foster 2010: 200-204). He took up farming, went to the gold diggings
and acted as manager and agent for his more fortunate half-brother. On his
return to government service in the NSW Surveyor General’s Office he was
finally able to gain a comfortable position to support his large family. It is
important that Foster represents Allan Williams as an agent, a man who made
his way despite discrimination and not merely a victim. However of his eleven
children, only two married, suggesting as Foster notes, “that in the late
nineteenth century it paid to be white” (Foster 2010: 332).i
Foster’s Private Empire also serves to remind us of the importance of
conceptualising Australian histories in a transnational frame. Only recently
have historians addressed the transnational aspects of Australian history.
Most relevant here is Lake and Reynolds’ magisterial work Drawing the Global
Colour Line (2008) which places Australia’s quest for an exclusively white
nation for the white man within a transnational circulation of people, texts,
ideologies about “race” and technologies to restrict mobility. Foster, with his
subjects ranging over Guyana, Scotland, Australia and India brings out both
the transnational and imperial aspects of this family history and of Australian
history. Thus Indians, former African slaves, Chinese and indeed all settlers
cannot be seen as confined by their lives and positioning here. Indeed William
Macpherson, son of the glen, spent a number of years in Guyana as a planter,
having three children with Countess, before coming to New South Wales with
his Scottish wife, and his sons. In Sydney, he held a government post as
Collector of Internal Revenue in NSW (Foster 2010: 196). His life and
endeavours were mixed, he had two families, one coloured and later a white
family. This family history, like all Australian family histories, is an intimate
history of racialisation, always formed in a relationship to notions of whiteness
through the driving force of nation building and the role of families in the reproduction
of nation.
The notion of the nation as a family is a powerful metaphor in political
science, and in Australian history both the nation and the family have been
pervaded by the idea of whiteness, of white sameness, purity and
homogeneity. The colonial politician, Henry Parkes, declared Australia’s unity
as a function of its British origins, employing a familial metaphor – “we are all
one family, all one blood, all one faith…in all respects we are one and the
same people” (Jayasuriya 2003: 249). From 1901, the Australian people
through their elected representatives drew a line around Australia and
declared it a white man’s country.ii The basic unit of this white nation was the
white family. As Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (2007) has argued, “the family has also
functioned within Australian colonialism in a biopolitical form to help shape
the racial composition of the nation.” Notions of the “white nation” have had
violent consequences for Indigenous people. Indigenous scholars and scholars
of Indigenous histories in Australia (see Morgan 1987; Haebich 2000) have
written about some of the implications of this for Indigenous people. As one
who is born of the settlers, to use Judith Wright’s phrase, I am deeply
implicated in these violent histories. However, in this paper I focus upon some
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
4
implications for non-white and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia, always
mindful nonetheless of the fact that the other battles that have played out in
Australia in relation to race, family and nation have played out upon land that
is illegally possessed (Moreton-Robinson 2003).
Banishing the Spectre of “A Young Chinese Race Rising in Australia”
Producing a white nation for white families meant immigration restrictions and
the denial of family to non-white non-indigenous peoples. The Immigration
Restriction Act of 1901 built upon restrictive immigration regimes, which had
developed in a number of the Australian colonies from the 1850s (Lake and
Reynolds 2005). The legislation was designed to exclude keep out “aboriginal
natives of Asia, Africa and the Pacific”. The device elaborated for this task was
a dictation test, which could be administered in any European language to
exclude such people. In addition, policy makers expressly sought to
extinguish the “Asian” communities, which had developed in the country in
the previous century. Jones notes that between 1901 and 1933, the Asian
population, which was predominantly male, fell from 44,000 to 21,000 during
a period when the total population doubled (2003: 113). As Jones points out,
the Australian population thus became whiter. With the passing of the Pacific
Islanders Act in 1904, the Commonwealth government proceeded with the
deportation of Pacific Islanders, who had lived many years in Queensland and
in northern New South Wales. However in relation to others, such as Chinese,
Indian and Japanese people, a policy of attrition was adopted. Thus in the
early years of the twentieth century, it was made very difficult for those who
had already been resident in Australia to return to Australia if they left to visit
their homeland. Although from about 1904, such people gained the right to be
recognised as domiciled in Australia, their movements across national borders
was closely regulated and under careful surveillance by Australian authorities
(Allen 2011b).
In such an environment, it was particularly difficult for these men to form a
family with a woman from their own background. The particular regimes
differed for “prohibited immigrants” from India, China and Japan and also
sometimes differed for merchants and businessmen. But all policies were
intended to limit the growth of what were seen as alien communities.
Fitzgerald notes of the Chinese
They entered communities that valued the wholesome and self-reliant family
but were not permitted to invite their own families to accompany them to
Australia without suffering impossible financial penalties levied through
discriminatory poll taxes. (Fitzgerald 2007: 23)
Stories of separation and deportation mark such family histories in Australia.
One infamous case early in the twentieth century was that of Poon Gooey who
had been a green grocer for sixteen years in Victoria.iii In 1910 he was
allowed to bring his wife from Hong Kong to spend six months with him in
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
5
Geelong (“A Hard Case”: 10). He was able to get an extension for a further
three months during which time Mrs Poon Gooey gave birth to a child and as
a newspaper report described them they formed “an affectionate family
group” (“A Hard Case”: 10). She was due to leave the country only a few
weeks later in August 1911. Poon Gooey was well liked and respected in his
community and his supporters made a deputation to meet the Acting Minister
of External Affairs, Senator Findley. This case gained a lot of publicity and the
young family were supported by a wide spectrum of people in their local
community, “by wharf labourers, artisans, tradesmen, merchants clerks and
others” (“A Hard Case”: 10). The Poon Gooey family were able to stay longer
in Australia and another child was born before they finally had to leave in
1913. The crux of the matter was candidly revealed by Senator Findlay when
he met the deputation in 1911:
If we allowed the wives to stay here we would have a young Chinese race rising
in Australia. That would be against the White Australia policy (“A Hard Case”:
10).
The government and the community in general were determined that
their would be no young Chinese race “rising” in Australia and the
general implication of this was that Chinese men resident in Australia,
even those such as Poon Gooey, who were British subjects, were not
able to bring Chinese wives into the country.iv
In fact many Chinese men married and/or had families with non-Chinese
women in Australia. Some married white women and a smaller number
married or had families with Indigenous women (McGrath 2003). Interracial
relationships were an important feature of Chinese experience in nineteenth
and twentieth Australia. Kate Bagnall (2011) estimates that in the second half
of the nineteenth century up to 1901 there were over one thousand interracial
marriages in New South Wales and Victoria. However these relationships have
been seen as degraded. For
white colonists constructed a narrative where intimate relationships between
European women and Chinese men became irrevocably intertwined with ideas
of immorality and vice, desperation and destitution, as well as with the
language of race (69).
It is only very recently that Australian historians have focussed upon aspects
of the Chinese experience in this country, and as Bagnall has argued, more
recent work has been conceptualised from a more human beginning, in other
words, the age-old story, that
white women and Chinese men came together for reasons of economics,
physical security, companionship, love, comfort, sexual fulfilment and the
formation of families. These interracial relationships occurred with a perhaps
surprising frequency, diversity and degree of toleration, such that they formed
a substantial part of nineteenth-century Chinese-Australian family life (77).
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
6
As the Poon Gooey case exemplifies, it could be very difficult for Chinese-
Australians to bring in a Chinese spouse and maintain their family life in
Australia. As Bagnall notes, intermarriage between the Chinese and others in
Australia was quite common, but such relationships were generally
represented in an unfavourable light.
The Rights of British Subjects? Indians in Australia
Even though Indians were British subjects, they were treated in a similarly
discriminatory manner as were the Chinese and other prohibited immigrants.
All ‘Asiatic’ communities in Australia declined steeply in the first decade of the
century as the government made it impossible for them to return to Australia
after a visit to their homeland. As noted above, however, from 1904-5 there
was a change in the operation of the law and those who had been in Australia
for five years and were deemed to be of good character could gain a
Certificate Exempting the Dictation Test (CEDT)v, which gave them the right
of domicile in Australia. When Indians resident in Australia left for a visit to
India, their departure was prompted by the desire to see family and to
maintain an interest in joint family property. In addition, a sojourn in
Australia could be the means of amassing funds to allow for marriage in India
and thus children and a family life. These men had to live as sojourners in
Australia and were separated from their families by long distances and
uncertain communications. Furthermore they had to negotiate their family life
within the strictures of the White Australia Policy. It was possible for the CEDT
to be renewed from India, a number of times. The NAA contains many letters
from Indian men domiciled in Australia, but written from Indian villages,
seeking renewal of CEDTs for a host of family reasons such as a child’s
impending marriage, a wife’s illness or family disputes over land (Allen
2011a).
After 1919, however, Indian men were able to apply to bring wives and minor
children to Australia. This concession came about as a result of British
pressure, for they wanted to see more favourable treatment of Indian people,
who had contributed so much to the imperial war effort. However my research
has shown that of those of those who applied to bring a family member to
Australia, many were refused (Allen 2008). Only a few were able to have any
family with them in Australia. By bringing a son, who in time would apply for
a CEDT and then go back to India to create his own family before returning
alone to Australia, applicants were able to pass on their property to their
family and also to allow for a continuous, even if very small, Indian presence
in Australia. Yet the creation of such small fragments of family within
Australia by non-white people saw the Australian officials very carefully
scrutinising CEDT and other records, birth certificates, to ascertain if the child
an Indian man sought to bring to Australia was in fact his son, or whether he
was in fact trying to bring in another relative (Allen 2008). Here the State
took it upon itself to inquire into the intimacy of a family, to appraise the
domestic settings destined for an Indian family. In particular, when
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
7
permission was sought to bring in a wife, the officials were required to check
as to whether the Indian applicant had a home suitable for a wife.vi
Permission to introduce a wife to Australia could be refused on the grounds
that the applicant did not have a suitable home nor a steady income on which
to base a respectable family life (NAA, A1 1919/14322).
The Wrestler and the Fight for Family Life in Australia
Of course, the opportunity for Indians to apply to bring in a spouse and minor
children applied only to male applicants. Men formed the overwhelming
majority of “Asiatics” in the country. However with the development of the
tiny second generation of such people, further difficulties in relation to family
could arise. The case of Australian born Mrs Marjorie Singh of Sydney is a
curious one, in that she was trying to get permission for her husband, Jaget
Singh, to stay in Australia. This case, which ran from the late 1930s until
early 1950s, highlights the difficulty of individuals seen as ”inappropriate” for
Australia could have in establishing and maintaining family life (NAA A2998,
1951/379 Jaget Singh). Although the individual circumstances of each of
these cases were sometimes different, this story is fairly representative of
many stories whose outlines can be found in NAA files.
In September 1937, Mrs Singh wrote to her local MP in Sydney, asking that
her husband Jaget be able to live in Australia. Her husband, whom she had
married in Sydney in May 1936, was Indian-born. He was “the world famous
wrestler”, Jaget Singh, who had appeared in most Australian capital cities, in
the United States, China and Hong Kong etc. He was cosmopolitan and said to
have considerable wealth, owning property in India and US, and Mrs Singh
contended that he would not be a financial burden on the Australian people or
their government. She explained that she and her mother both were
Australian born, while her father was born in India, having been in Australia
for 48 years: “all of us are pure Indian blood.” To locate her family as part of
the Australian community, she pointed out that her parents were voters and
that she too was entitled to vote but had not yet done so as she had been
travelling abroad with her husband and their baby daughter (NAA A2998,
1951/379).
If Marjorie had married someone resident in Australia, whether of Indian or
any other background, she would have not encountered any difficulty with the
authorities. Furthermore, if her husband came from outside Australia, but was
deemed to be white, there would have been no problem with his coming to
live with her in Australia. However by attempting to bring Jaget into Australia,
she was adding to the number of non-white people in Australia and thus
coming into conflict with the Immigration Restriction Act. Here was the
spectre of a young Indian “race” rising in Australia. Jaget was allowed to stay
for a further three months, before leaving in 1938, with Marjorie to tour, and
presumably to work, in Asia. In 1941, perhaps because of the advance of the
Japanese forces through Asia, he was permitted to land for six months. In
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
8
December 1941, seeking another extension of four months as his wife was
sick, he pointed out. “I may state I am a British subject, my wife is an
Australian born Indian I have always abided by the laws of your country”
(NAA A2998, 1951/379). During the war years, with a number of “prohibited”
immigrants seeking refuge in Australia from the hostilities (Tavan 2005),
some aspects of the immigration administration were relaxed and his stay
was thus extended until March 1942. Then his wife wrote in pursuit of a
further extension, as she was “in confinement”, once more re-iterating “Jaget
is a loyal British subject and I am sure that no harm can possibly exist by his
present (sic) here” (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
From his arrival in 1941 until 1950, Jaget stayed in Australia on a short-term
basis, often only for three months, but on a couple of occasions his permit ran
for twelve months. Over these years he and Marjorie settled into family life in
Australia and made significant contributions to Australian society. They had
two more children, bought a house and later an orchard, he worked on the
construction of the Warrangamba Dam, at Cockatoo Island Dockyard, and
also as an interpreter for Indians in Sydney (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
After the war, however, Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, was
determined to enforce all aspects of the policy and in 1948, on granting Jaget
a six-month extension, pronounced this as the final extension, declaring that
he must then leave. A blank deportation form was on his file - ready to be
employed. However a file note read, “This case is a snag, as wife is Australian
and press publicity will undoubtedly be given in any move is taken to deport
Jaget” (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
It is interesting to note this concern about “press publicity”, for in these postwar
years there were a series of deportation cases, which “drew strong
domestic and international criticism” (Tavan 2005: 51). The Singh family had
good reason to feel afraid, for in December 1947 the government deported a
number of Malayan seamen who had gained temporary residence in Australia
after fleeing the Japanese invasion during the war. Many were married to
Australian women, had children born in Australia and steady jobs. A case
rather similar to the Singh case was the infamous case of Annie O’Keefe
(formerly Jacob) and her children. This family had come from the Netherlands
East Indies in 1942, after the Japanese invasion. During those years Annie
had another child, but her husband Samuel Jacob was killed in 1944 (Tavan
2005: 54-57). Although in 1947, Annie married an Australian, John O’Keefe
and thus became a British subject and entitled to remaining Australia, the
government sough to deport her and most of her children as prohibited
immigrants. Annie O’Keefe took the matter to the High Court, which upheld
her right to stay. Subsequently Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell,
introduced new legislation to ensure that such people could be deported.
In the election of 1949, the Liberal party campaigned on the basis of
maintaining the White Australia Policy, but “with ‘humane and commonsense
administration in individual cases’” (Tavan 2005: 64). The Menzies Liberal
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
9
government allowed the O’Keefe family to stay. Similarly, in 1950, with a
Liberal government in power, Jaget Singh was granted a further five years
residence, subject to good health. The Singh file is closed after 1950, and I
presume he was able to stay indefinitely and this family were released from
the years of strain and worry to which they had been subjected (NAA A2998,
1951/379).
As well as having to petition the authorities, sometimes on a three monthly
basis in order to stay together - to maintain their family intimacy - this family
had also to shore up their position by enlisting support of influential people.
Jaget’s application was supported by his MPs, by the local Presbyterian
minister, and later by Fred Daly, the Labour MHR. Aspects of his family life,
such as Marjorie’s confinement in 1942 and the fact that in November 1945,
he had two children at Boronia School, were used as a lever to persuade the
authorities to make decisions favourable to him and his family.
So this family lived in fear for many years of their husband and father being
deported. This case is only one of thousands as Indians, Chinese, Japanese
and others sought to create and maintain family life in relation to policies of
restrictive immigration. Many were less successful than the Singhs.
Conclusion
Foster’s study traces the life of Allan Williams, the son of a Guyanian slave
woman, in a human and personal manner. His part in the Australian story is
explored in a frame that accords him both agency and individual personality.
He lived before the days of the White Australia policy, but nevertheless he
and his children had to contend with prejudice and discrimination. The passing
of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 consolidated the project of creating
a white nation built of white families. This put great pressure on the lives of
Chinese, Indian and other prohibited immigrants who were resident in
Australia. The bio-political project of diminishing and even extinguishing such
communities brought particular attention to family life when it involved
bringing in a spouse or children from overseas. Historical researchers in
Australia have finally turned their attention to the family stories and intimate
histories of Australians of Asian backgrounds in the period of the White
Australia Policy. Conceptualising these people as Foster has Allan Williams, as
agentic and normal, rather than as victims, oddities and degenerates, they
find them trying to make history and to make families albeit in difficult
circumstances. Their stories are run through with notions of race, imposed
upon their stories by Australian attitudes and policies.
Author Note
Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita in Gender Studies, University of Adelaide.
She is interested in transnational, postcolonial and feminist histories and
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
10
whiteness. Her current research focuses upon relationships between India and
Australia and Indians and Australians in the late 19th and early twentieth
centuries. She is working on Australian women missionaries in India as well as
exploring the ways Indian men domiciled in Australia negotiated the White
Australia Policy. She is a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on
Gender at University of Adelaide.
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Notes
i On this point see also Rebe Taylor, 2008, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of
Kangaroo Island. Wakefield Press, Adelaide.
ii Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2008) demonstrate the transnational nature of
the concept of ‘the white man’ at the end of the nineteenth century.
iii I am grateful to Kate Bagnall for bringing this important case to my attention.
iv After 1912, prosperous Chinese merchants with capital over £500 and involved in
overseas trade could apply to bring their wives to Australia for certain periods. (Jones
2005: 46-7)
v The CEDT can be seen as a type of passport for people who because of their
previous residence in Australia were exempted from the requirements of the
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
12
Immigration Restriction Act viz. the dictation test. The CEDT included photographs,
handprints and a description of the appearance of the holder. See Allen 2011b for
further information on its development.
vi Fiona Rapsey-Probyn (2009: 96) has noted that evidence of a settled domestic life
in an appropriate dwelling could be used to permit or not permit the marriage
between an Indigenous woman and a white man in early twentieth century
Queensland.
www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal
Volume 7, Number 2, 2011
ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2011
SPECIAL ISSUE: FUTURE STORIES/INTIMATE HISTORIES
Family Stories and ‘Race’ in Australian History
Margaret Allen
Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, The University of Adelaide
The impact of Australia’s restrictive immigration policies during the period
1901-1970s upon the family lives of non-white non-Indigenous people in
Australia have been largely ignored in the writing of Australian history. The
paper explores some dimensions of the experiences of non-white non-
Indigenous people and their transnational families in relation to state
interference.
Introduction
In A Private Empire, Stephen Foster (2010) maps the journeys of an imperial
and transnational family - the Scottish Macpherson family - beginning in
Calcutta in 1781. Their story spans Britain, Australia, Guyana and India and
ranges to the present day. In Australia, he maps two branches, the
Macphersons and the Williams: two branches of the family – both tracing their
lineage to William Macpherson (1784-1866). His sons, Allan Williams (born in
1810) - the son of ‘Countess’, a Guyanian slave woman - and Allan
Macpherson (born in Scotland in 1818) were half-brothers. Allan Macpherson
bore his father’s family name and was legitimate, while Allan Williams, was
illegitimate and was given a different surname. William Macpherson came to
Australia in 1829, bringing with him his sons, with Allan aged nineteen years
at the time and Allan aged ten years (Foster: 123-196).
Until Foster did his research, the connections between the Williams and the
Macphersons were almost forgotten, so successfully had they been buried,
even suppressed. Indeed, when Foster met the fifth Allan Williams, the greatgreat
grandson of the first Allan Williams and patriarch of a well-known and
successful Queensland agricultural family, Williams heard Foster’s account of
his ancestry, namely his descent from Countess, the slave concubine of his
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
2
great-great-grandfather in Guyana in the early nineteenth century, with some
bemusement (Foster 2010: 387). This example of the suppression of a nonwhite
history, it could be argued, is mirrored in non-white and non-Indigenous
aspects of Australian history, which have been largely suppressed and
forgotten. From Foster’s important historical work, and for the purposes of the
present paper, I wish to draw a number of points in relation to the histories of
the family life of non-Indigenous, non-white people in Australia. The histories
of such families are based here upon examples largely drawn from the
migration files of the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
But to return to Foster. Much of the book traces the history of Allan
Macpherson, through his squatting career and violent forays against the
Indigenous peoples of the Fitzroy Downs area, up to his return to the
ancestral home in Scotland where his own son went out to India in the Indian
Colonial Service. Curiously, one of his descendants - Sir William Macpherson
- was the British judge who inquired into the recent infamous Stephen
Lawrence case, a black teenager killed as he stood at a bus stop in London. In
his judgement, Sir William made important statements about the racist nature
of the British police force. His most searing indictment of the police force has
been seen as a defining moment in British race relations. The racism of the
empire had come home and been named in the metropole.
Private Empire, with its discussion of Allan Williams, crucially challenges the
assumed whiteness of Australian settlers. Here it relates to some other recent
work showing more diverse origins for settlers than previously understood.
For example, Cassandra Pybus (2006) has traced former African-American
slaves and freemen who made their way from North America to Britain and
later came to Australia, often as convicts. Ian Duffield (1992; 2001) has
written of black convicts and also of Black Scots, sometimes like Allan
Williams, children of Scottish imperialists, who were brought back to Scotland
for their education and some of whom later made their way to Australia.
Pybus (2011) has written recently about Gilbert Robertson, one-time editor of
a Van Diemen’s Land paper, the True Colonist, whose mother was a coloured
woman from Demerara in the West Indies. In my own work I have explored
the life of John Harvey, a black Scot, whose father was described as a ‘native
of St Helena’. Harvey was an early settler in the Salisbury district of South
Australia, where he was virtually the local squire. He was most likely the first
black member of an Australian parliament when he was elected in 1857 (Allen
2003). The field of Chinese-Australian history, so recently un-tilled, is now
flourishing with the work of scholars such as Kate Bagnall, Sophie Couchman,
John Fitzgerald and others (Bagnall 2006, 2011, Couchman, 2004, Fitzgerald
2007). My work on Indians in Australia has brought to light Indians who
settled across Australia before the hardening of restrictive immigration in
1901 (Allen 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011a, 2011b).
Private Empire provides another clear example of this type of work, in the
attention it pays to the discrimination, unequal treatment and lesser life
chances of a man such as Allan Williams. His career as a colonial official
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
3
began well, but soon his advancement was blocked as he was ‘a man of
colour’ (Foster 2010: 200-204). He took up farming, went to the gold diggings
and acted as manager and agent for his more fortunate half-brother. On his
return to government service in the NSW Surveyor General’s Office he was
finally able to gain a comfortable position to support his large family. It is
important that Foster represents Allan Williams as an agent, a man who made
his way despite discrimination and not merely a victim. However of his eleven
children, only two married, suggesting as Foster notes, “that in the late
nineteenth century it paid to be white” (Foster 2010: 332).i
Foster’s Private Empire also serves to remind us of the importance of
conceptualising Australian histories in a transnational frame. Only recently
have historians addressed the transnational aspects of Australian history.
Most relevant here is Lake and Reynolds’ magisterial work Drawing the Global
Colour Line (2008) which places Australia’s quest for an exclusively white
nation for the white man within a transnational circulation of people, texts,
ideologies about “race” and technologies to restrict mobility. Foster, with his
subjects ranging over Guyana, Scotland, Australia and India brings out both
the transnational and imperial aspects of this family history and of Australian
history. Thus Indians, former African slaves, Chinese and indeed all settlers
cannot be seen as confined by their lives and positioning here. Indeed William
Macpherson, son of the glen, spent a number of years in Guyana as a planter,
having three children with Countess, before coming to New South Wales with
his Scottish wife, and his sons. In Sydney, he held a government post as
Collector of Internal Revenue in NSW (Foster 2010: 196). His life and
endeavours were mixed, he had two families, one coloured and later a white
family. This family history, like all Australian family histories, is an intimate
history of racialisation, always formed in a relationship to notions of whiteness
through the driving force of nation building and the role of families in the reproduction
of nation.
The notion of the nation as a family is a powerful metaphor in political
science, and in Australian history both the nation and the family have been
pervaded by the idea of whiteness, of white sameness, purity and
homogeneity. The colonial politician, Henry Parkes, declared Australia’s unity
as a function of its British origins, employing a familial metaphor – “we are all
one family, all one blood, all one faith…in all respects we are one and the
same people” (Jayasuriya 2003: 249). From 1901, the Australian people
through their elected representatives drew a line around Australia and
declared it a white man’s country.ii The basic unit of this white nation was the
white family. As Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (2007) has argued, “the family has also
functioned within Australian colonialism in a biopolitical form to help shape
the racial composition of the nation.” Notions of the “white nation” have had
violent consequences for Indigenous people. Indigenous scholars and scholars
of Indigenous histories in Australia (see Morgan 1987; Haebich 2000) have
written about some of the implications of this for Indigenous people. As one
who is born of the settlers, to use Judith Wright’s phrase, I am deeply
implicated in these violent histories. However, in this paper I focus upon some
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
4
implications for non-white and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia, always
mindful nonetheless of the fact that the other battles that have played out in
Australia in relation to race, family and nation have played out upon land that
is illegally possessed (Moreton-Robinson 2003).
Banishing the Spectre of “A Young Chinese Race Rising in Australia”
Producing a white nation for white families meant immigration restrictions and
the denial of family to non-white non-indigenous peoples. The Immigration
Restriction Act of 1901 built upon restrictive immigration regimes, which had
developed in a number of the Australian colonies from the 1850s (Lake and
Reynolds 2005). The legislation was designed to exclude keep out “aboriginal
natives of Asia, Africa and the Pacific”. The device elaborated for this task was
a dictation test, which could be administered in any European language to
exclude such people. In addition, policy makers expressly sought to
extinguish the “Asian” communities, which had developed in the country in
the previous century. Jones notes that between 1901 and 1933, the Asian
population, which was predominantly male, fell from 44,000 to 21,000 during
a period when the total population doubled (2003: 113). As Jones points out,
the Australian population thus became whiter. With the passing of the Pacific
Islanders Act in 1904, the Commonwealth government proceeded with the
deportation of Pacific Islanders, who had lived many years in Queensland and
in northern New South Wales. However in relation to others, such as Chinese,
Indian and Japanese people, a policy of attrition was adopted. Thus in the
early years of the twentieth century, it was made very difficult for those who
had already been resident in Australia to return to Australia if they left to visit
their homeland. Although from about 1904, such people gained the right to be
recognised as domiciled in Australia, their movements across national borders
was closely regulated and under careful surveillance by Australian authorities
(Allen 2011b).
In such an environment, it was particularly difficult for these men to form a
family with a woman from their own background. The particular regimes
differed for “prohibited immigrants” from India, China and Japan and also
sometimes differed for merchants and businessmen. But all policies were
intended to limit the growth of what were seen as alien communities.
Fitzgerald notes of the Chinese
They entered communities that valued the wholesome and self-reliant family
but were not permitted to invite their own families to accompany them to
Australia without suffering impossible financial penalties levied through
discriminatory poll taxes. (Fitzgerald 2007: 23)
Stories of separation and deportation mark such family histories in Australia.
One infamous case early in the twentieth century was that of Poon Gooey who
had been a green grocer for sixteen years in Victoria.iii In 1910 he was
allowed to bring his wife from Hong Kong to spend six months with him in
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
5
Geelong (“A Hard Case”: 10). He was able to get an extension for a further
three months during which time Mrs Poon Gooey gave birth to a child and as
a newspaper report described them they formed “an affectionate family
group” (“A Hard Case”: 10). She was due to leave the country only a few
weeks later in August 1911. Poon Gooey was well liked and respected in his
community and his supporters made a deputation to meet the Acting Minister
of External Affairs, Senator Findley. This case gained a lot of publicity and the
young family were supported by a wide spectrum of people in their local
community, “by wharf labourers, artisans, tradesmen, merchants clerks and
others” (“A Hard Case”: 10). The Poon Gooey family were able to stay longer
in Australia and another child was born before they finally had to leave in
1913. The crux of the matter was candidly revealed by Senator Findlay when
he met the deputation in 1911:
If we allowed the wives to stay here we would have a young Chinese race rising
in Australia. That would be against the White Australia policy (“A Hard Case”:
10).
The government and the community in general were determined that
their would be no young Chinese race “rising” in Australia and the
general implication of this was that Chinese men resident in Australia,
even those such as Poon Gooey, who were British subjects, were not
able to bring Chinese wives into the country.iv
In fact many Chinese men married and/or had families with non-Chinese
women in Australia. Some married white women and a smaller number
married or had families with Indigenous women (McGrath 2003). Interracial
relationships were an important feature of Chinese experience in nineteenth
and twentieth Australia. Kate Bagnall (2011) estimates that in the second half
of the nineteenth century up to 1901 there were over one thousand interracial
marriages in New South Wales and Victoria. However these relationships have
been seen as degraded. For
white colonists constructed a narrative where intimate relationships between
European women and Chinese men became irrevocably intertwined with ideas
of immorality and vice, desperation and destitution, as well as with the
language of race (69).
It is only very recently that Australian historians have focussed upon aspects
of the Chinese experience in this country, and as Bagnall has argued, more
recent work has been conceptualised from a more human beginning, in other
words, the age-old story, that
white women and Chinese men came together for reasons of economics,
physical security, companionship, love, comfort, sexual fulfilment and the
formation of families. These interracial relationships occurred with a perhaps
surprising frequency, diversity and degree of toleration, such that they formed
a substantial part of nineteenth-century Chinese-Australian family life (77).
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
6
As the Poon Gooey case exemplifies, it could be very difficult for Chinese-
Australians to bring in a Chinese spouse and maintain their family life in
Australia. As Bagnall notes, intermarriage between the Chinese and others in
Australia was quite common, but such relationships were generally
represented in an unfavourable light.
The Rights of British Subjects? Indians in Australia
Even though Indians were British subjects, they were treated in a similarly
discriminatory manner as were the Chinese and other prohibited immigrants.
All ‘Asiatic’ communities in Australia declined steeply in the first decade of the
century as the government made it impossible for them to return to Australia
after a visit to their homeland. As noted above, however, from 1904-5 there
was a change in the operation of the law and those who had been in Australia
for five years and were deemed to be of good character could gain a
Certificate Exempting the Dictation Test (CEDT)v, which gave them the right
of domicile in Australia. When Indians resident in Australia left for a visit to
India, their departure was prompted by the desire to see family and to
maintain an interest in joint family property. In addition, a sojourn in
Australia could be the means of amassing funds to allow for marriage in India
and thus children and a family life. These men had to live as sojourners in
Australia and were separated from their families by long distances and
uncertain communications. Furthermore they had to negotiate their family life
within the strictures of the White Australia Policy. It was possible for the CEDT
to be renewed from India, a number of times. The NAA contains many letters
from Indian men domiciled in Australia, but written from Indian villages,
seeking renewal of CEDTs for a host of family reasons such as a child’s
impending marriage, a wife’s illness or family disputes over land (Allen
2011a).
After 1919, however, Indian men were able to apply to bring wives and minor
children to Australia. This concession came about as a result of British
pressure, for they wanted to see more favourable treatment of Indian people,
who had contributed so much to the imperial war effort. However my research
has shown that of those of those who applied to bring a family member to
Australia, many were refused (Allen 2008). Only a few were able to have any
family with them in Australia. By bringing a son, who in time would apply for
a CEDT and then go back to India to create his own family before returning
alone to Australia, applicants were able to pass on their property to their
family and also to allow for a continuous, even if very small, Indian presence
in Australia. Yet the creation of such small fragments of family within
Australia by non-white people saw the Australian officials very carefully
scrutinising CEDT and other records, birth certificates, to ascertain if the child
an Indian man sought to bring to Australia was in fact his son, or whether he
was in fact trying to bring in another relative (Allen 2008). Here the State
took it upon itself to inquire into the intimacy of a family, to appraise the
domestic settings destined for an Indian family. In particular, when
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
7
permission was sought to bring in a wife, the officials were required to check
as to whether the Indian applicant had a home suitable for a wife.vi
Permission to introduce a wife to Australia could be refused on the grounds
that the applicant did not have a suitable home nor a steady income on which
to base a respectable family life (NAA, A1 1919/14322).
The Wrestler and the Fight for Family Life in Australia
Of course, the opportunity for Indians to apply to bring in a spouse and minor
children applied only to male applicants. Men formed the overwhelming
majority of “Asiatics” in the country. However with the development of the
tiny second generation of such people, further difficulties in relation to family
could arise. The case of Australian born Mrs Marjorie Singh of Sydney is a
curious one, in that she was trying to get permission for her husband, Jaget
Singh, to stay in Australia. This case, which ran from the late 1930s until
early 1950s, highlights the difficulty of individuals seen as ”inappropriate” for
Australia could have in establishing and maintaining family life (NAA A2998,
1951/379 Jaget Singh). Although the individual circumstances of each of
these cases were sometimes different, this story is fairly representative of
many stories whose outlines can be found in NAA files.
In September 1937, Mrs Singh wrote to her local MP in Sydney, asking that
her husband Jaget be able to live in Australia. Her husband, whom she had
married in Sydney in May 1936, was Indian-born. He was “the world famous
wrestler”, Jaget Singh, who had appeared in most Australian capital cities, in
the United States, China and Hong Kong etc. He was cosmopolitan and said to
have considerable wealth, owning property in India and US, and Mrs Singh
contended that he would not be a financial burden on the Australian people or
their government. She explained that she and her mother both were
Australian born, while her father was born in India, having been in Australia
for 48 years: “all of us are pure Indian blood.” To locate her family as part of
the Australian community, she pointed out that her parents were voters and
that she too was entitled to vote but had not yet done so as she had been
travelling abroad with her husband and their baby daughter (NAA A2998,
1951/379).
If Marjorie had married someone resident in Australia, whether of Indian or
any other background, she would have not encountered any difficulty with the
authorities. Furthermore, if her husband came from outside Australia, but was
deemed to be white, there would have been no problem with his coming to
live with her in Australia. However by attempting to bring Jaget into Australia,
she was adding to the number of non-white people in Australia and thus
coming into conflict with the Immigration Restriction Act. Here was the
spectre of a young Indian “race” rising in Australia. Jaget was allowed to stay
for a further three months, before leaving in 1938, with Marjorie to tour, and
presumably to work, in Asia. In 1941, perhaps because of the advance of the
Japanese forces through Asia, he was permitted to land for six months. In
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
8
December 1941, seeking another extension of four months as his wife was
sick, he pointed out. “I may state I am a British subject, my wife is an
Australian born Indian I have always abided by the laws of your country”
(NAA A2998, 1951/379). During the war years, with a number of “prohibited”
immigrants seeking refuge in Australia from the hostilities (Tavan 2005),
some aspects of the immigration administration were relaxed and his stay
was thus extended until March 1942. Then his wife wrote in pursuit of a
further extension, as she was “in confinement”, once more re-iterating “Jaget
is a loyal British subject and I am sure that no harm can possibly exist by his
present (sic) here” (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
From his arrival in 1941 until 1950, Jaget stayed in Australia on a short-term
basis, often only for three months, but on a couple of occasions his permit ran
for twelve months. Over these years he and Marjorie settled into family life in
Australia and made significant contributions to Australian society. They had
two more children, bought a house and later an orchard, he worked on the
construction of the Warrangamba Dam, at Cockatoo Island Dockyard, and
also as an interpreter for Indians in Sydney (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
After the war, however, Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, was
determined to enforce all aspects of the policy and in 1948, on granting Jaget
a six-month extension, pronounced this as the final extension, declaring that
he must then leave. A blank deportation form was on his file - ready to be
employed. However a file note read, “This case is a snag, as wife is Australian
and press publicity will undoubtedly be given in any move is taken to deport
Jaget” (NAA A2998, 1951/379).
It is interesting to note this concern about “press publicity”, for in these postwar
years there were a series of deportation cases, which “drew strong
domestic and international criticism” (Tavan 2005: 51). The Singh family had
good reason to feel afraid, for in December 1947 the government deported a
number of Malayan seamen who had gained temporary residence in Australia
after fleeing the Japanese invasion during the war. Many were married to
Australian women, had children born in Australia and steady jobs. A case
rather similar to the Singh case was the infamous case of Annie O’Keefe
(formerly Jacob) and her children. This family had come from the Netherlands
East Indies in 1942, after the Japanese invasion. During those years Annie
had another child, but her husband Samuel Jacob was killed in 1944 (Tavan
2005: 54-57). Although in 1947, Annie married an Australian, John O’Keefe
and thus became a British subject and entitled to remaining Australia, the
government sough to deport her and most of her children as prohibited
immigrants. Annie O’Keefe took the matter to the High Court, which upheld
her right to stay. Subsequently Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell,
introduced new legislation to ensure that such people could be deported.
In the election of 1949, the Liberal party campaigned on the basis of
maintaining the White Australia Policy, but “with ‘humane and commonsense
administration in individual cases’” (Tavan 2005: 64). The Menzies Liberal
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
9
government allowed the O’Keefe family to stay. Similarly, in 1950, with a
Liberal government in power, Jaget Singh was granted a further five years
residence, subject to good health. The Singh file is closed after 1950, and I
presume he was able to stay indefinitely and this family were released from
the years of strain and worry to which they had been subjected (NAA A2998,
1951/379).
As well as having to petition the authorities, sometimes on a three monthly
basis in order to stay together - to maintain their family intimacy - this family
had also to shore up their position by enlisting support of influential people.
Jaget’s application was supported by his MPs, by the local Presbyterian
minister, and later by Fred Daly, the Labour MHR. Aspects of his family life,
such as Marjorie’s confinement in 1942 and the fact that in November 1945,
he had two children at Boronia School, were used as a lever to persuade the
authorities to make decisions favourable to him and his family.
So this family lived in fear for many years of their husband and father being
deported. This case is only one of thousands as Indians, Chinese, Japanese
and others sought to create and maintain family life in relation to policies of
restrictive immigration. Many were less successful than the Singhs.
Conclusion
Foster’s study traces the life of Allan Williams, the son of a Guyanian slave
woman, in a human and personal manner. His part in the Australian story is
explored in a frame that accords him both agency and individual personality.
He lived before the days of the White Australia policy, but nevertheless he
and his children had to contend with prejudice and discrimination. The passing
of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 consolidated the project of creating
a white nation built of white families. This put great pressure on the lives of
Chinese, Indian and other prohibited immigrants who were resident in
Australia. The bio-political project of diminishing and even extinguishing such
communities brought particular attention to family life when it involved
bringing in a spouse or children from overseas. Historical researchers in
Australia have finally turned their attention to the family stories and intimate
histories of Australians of Asian backgrounds in the period of the White
Australia Policy. Conceptualising these people as Foster has Allan Williams, as
agentic and normal, rather than as victims, oddities and degenerates, they
find them trying to make history and to make families albeit in difficult
circumstances. Their stories are run through with notions of race, imposed
upon their stories by Australian attitudes and policies.
Author Note
Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita in Gender Studies, University of Adelaide.
She is interested in transnational, postcolonial and feminist histories and
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
10
whiteness. Her current research focuses upon relationships between India and
Australia and Indians and Australians in the late 19th and early twentieth
centuries. She is working on Australian women missionaries in India as well as
exploring the ways Indian men domiciled in Australia negotiated the White
Australia Policy. She is a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on
Gender at University of Adelaide.
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Notes
i On this point see also Rebe Taylor, 2008, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of
Kangaroo Island. Wakefield Press, Adelaide.
ii Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2008) demonstrate the transnational nature of
the concept of ‘the white man’ at the end of the nineteenth century.
iii I am grateful to Kate Bagnall for bringing this important case to my attention.
iv After 1912, prosperous Chinese merchants with capital over £500 and involved in
overseas trade could apply to bring their wives to Australia for certain periods. (Jones
2005: 46-7)
v The CEDT can be seen as a type of passport for people who because of their
previous residence in Australia were exempted from the requirements of the
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 7.2
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Immigration Restriction Act viz. the dictation test. The CEDT included photographs,
handprints and a description of the appearance of the holder. See Allen 2011b for
further information on its development.
vi Fiona Rapsey-Probyn (2009: 96) has noted that evidence of a settled domestic life
in an appropriate dwelling could be used to permit or not permit the marriage
between an Indigenous woman and a white man in early twentieth century
Queensland.