Australian History in 7 Questions by John Hirst

Author:John Hirst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

No motive power operated more universally on this continent or in the beautiful island of Tasmania, and certainly no motive power operated more powerfully in dissolving the technical and arbitrary political divisions which previously separated us than did the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races.

Deakin was well placed to speak about the federation campaign because he had devoted himself to it throughout the 1890s. He led the campaign in Victoria. The only other man who had done more for the cause was Edmund Barton, who led the campaign in New South Wales. Deakin is an attractive character. He was a profound scholar of the religions of the world; he sought nothing for himself out of public life; he was free of the cruder forms of race prejudice; he was the best of the enlightened progressive liberals who made the Commonwealth. He was also a clever politician, and these eloquent words turn out to be totally misleading.

This is the conclusion reached by Ron Norris, who subjected this claim of Deakin to very close scrutiny in his book The Emergent Commonwealth. Norris looked first at the conferences and conventions which were responsible for the writing of the constitution. At none of these meetings was immigration an important issue. Amid all the arguments advanced for why the colonies should federate, control of immigration simply did not rate. The new Commonwealth was to have power over immigration, but even here there was no sense that this was a matter crying out for national attention. In the 1891 constitution the Commonwealth was to have exclusive power over immigration; in 1897–98 the states and the Commonwealth were both to have power. The founders were envisaging that immigration could go on being a matter controlled by the states; only later would Commonwealth action be necessary.

In the referendum campaigns, extravagant claims and extravagant fears were peddled. Again, the need for national action on immigration did not rate. During the campaign, a Chinese hawker in South Australia was discovered to have leprosy. There was an outcry about this, but no one used the case to show that a national government was needed to take strong action against the Chinese.

The reason for this almost total lack of interest is obvious. The colonies had each passed more or less uniform laws against the Chinese in 1888, which went close to prohibiting Chinese immigration. Some colonies had widened the net in the 1890s and moved against the Indians and Japanese as well, using the device of a dictation test, which was the method used by the Commonwealth in 1901. The problem of Asian immigration had already been solved.

Had it not been solved, it is difficult to imagine that the Chinese would have been allowed to take such a prominent part in the federal celebrations in Melbourne in May 1901. The Chinese merchants of Little Bourke Street put up an arch and used it to get the street decorations extended to their quarter.

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