White Australia’s Less Colourful Past

Some of my generation will remember it from history, but my children certainly knew nothing of it before today, and I suspect the generation older were probably denied the knowledge, unless they remember living through it. One of the first things the fledgling Australian Federation did was pass the “White Australia Policy”.

Crazy as it may seem now, it was apparently a perfectly natural state of affairs 110 years ago. The effect of it was to deny aboriginal existence as people, which was not remedied in any way really until the 1967 referendum conferring on them citizenship. It also flew in the face of what was happening in the real Australia. While it should have been obvious to those that must have cooked up the policy in Sydney and Melbourne, that the real wealth on which the new country was based, that of the recent gold rushes in Bathurst and Ballarat and Bendigo, the policy would have devastating effects in Broome.

While the gold rushes attracted many Chinese  immigrants, initially to work the diggings, but later more importantly to provide the trading, infrastructure and services to the mining towns, they were probably never in the majority. In Broome it was different. At almost no time in the first 80 years of its existence did the European population account for more than about a quarter of the people in town. The remainder were primarily Asian, although “Blackbirded” aborigines did cycle through, usually only one way.

The White Australia Policy effectively ended the importing of Asian divers on which the industry was almost completely based. British occupied the hierarchy, but Asians did the work. In an attempt to prove that in fact the Asians were not superior, a group of ex British navy divers were seconded to work the pearlers, with deadly results. In the end, Broome was granted an exemption to the policy, accepting in the end that indeed the Asians were superior.

However, the policy was not without effect. Diving for pearls was a dangerous game. In any one season, up to 20% of divers would die on the job. However, because the divers were not “White”, their was no advocacy for their position, and little incentive for those in high places to do anything about the mortality of the job. The state blamed the Federal government for their immigration policy, and the Federal blamed the state for not effectively policing safety.

Dubious business practices also abounded. Divers were often hired under labour contracts of two seasons duration. Any diver dying under contract would often not be paid. The diver would only be paid at the end of the contract his wages, minus any expenses for extras bought out of the “ships store”. There was no regulation on the prices charged in these monopoly markets, so sometimes the contract balance was small. A diver dying at sea would be buried at sea, usually the same day, to avoid the expense of a funeral on land, and the pearl shell cargo that would have to be foregone in repatriating the body. Divers were also encouraged to take risks by paying more successful divers at a higher rate. However, the more successful divers usually stayed down longer, increasing their mortality.

The most successful divers came from a small area of Japan. It was a whaling centre, devastated by the loss of almost a generation of men in a single whaling accident (or revenge by a mother whale – depending on your point of view). With no whaling future, the younger men heard tales of money to be made in pearling in the south seas, and left in droves, later forming the core of the divers.

So, when we talk of the horror wreaked on the world by the German’s theory of the Aryan master race, really how far removed from that same thinking were we?