Since invasion and subsequent colonisation, Australia has a history of preferring and privileging people who have white skin. As I have remarked elsewhere:

Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

The title of this paper is taken from a testimonial signed by a number of Gundagai residents on the departure for China in 1903 of Mark Loong after sixteen years in the district. That the notion of a person ‘sojourning’ in China is a contradiction of the prevailing ‘sojourner’ concept usually held about early Chinese migrants in Australia is the result the failure of Australian-Chinese research to fully appreciate the significance of family and district links between Australia and China and their impact upon the motivation, organisation and settlement patterns of Chinese people in Australia before the middle of the twentieth century. Without such an appreciation most research into Australian-Chinese history has focused only on those who established families in Australia or who ran successful businesses. This paper will focus on describing some features of these family and districts links with regard to that generation who arrived after the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1870s but before the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, who originated in one south China district, Zhongshan , and who lived primarily in one Australian city, Sydney. These restraints are partly due to reliance on sources such as the administrative files of the Immigration Restriction Act which begin only in 1901, and partly to the fact that this research represents a first step in the investigation of the significance of district of origin and the people of Zhongshan district in Sydney are the first to be investigated.

Congratulations to the organisers of the ‘Unmasking Whiteness’ conference for their courage in putting on the first ever conference dealing specifically with Whiteness in Australia. It does indeed take courage given that whiteness is, I have found, a disturbing and perturbing topic, not only to white people but also, I believe, to people of colour.

I'd therefore like to preface my paper by stating that I am speaking about my experience only, my life only, my interpretation only. I speak only for myself. I definitely am not speaking on behalf of others, especially other Aboriginal people. I state this up front, for just as whites who question their whiteness are often considered traitors to their race, I have found the same reaction when I have said to certain Aboriginal people who misunderstand my point and my pain: ‘I'd really like to be white, for a change’. Such a statement has been seen as a betrayal and a violation of Aboriginality when in fact it is a cry from the heart which has been ravaged by racism.

Thus should anybody, black or white, be offended by my remarks, I take no responsibility for your interpretation, only for my intention, which is to share rather than to offend. I would also like to say that my paper is not an academic one, for which I make no apologies.

In 1824, a group of London businessmen established the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC), Australia's oldest chartered company. Their prospectus listed amongst their objectives, after the raising of sheep and cattle, the production ‘at a more distant time, of Wine, Olive-Oil, Hemp, Flax, Silk, Opium, &c. as articles of export to Great Britain’. In 1828, a local manager reported that he thought that ‘if the labour of the Blacks can be procured for the operative part the culture [of opium] would likely prove profitable to the Company.’ And in 1833, the Australian manager of the company sent the London Board a sample of the first opium grown on company lands in the Hunter River area. The board had it evaluated by a pharmacist, who reported that it was ‘of fair, merchantable quality, about equal to Egyptian Opium. — It contains two thirds of the quantity of Morphia usually found in the best Turkey Opium. In this market, when Turkey Opium is worth 15s./ p lb., we have no doubt that such Opium as your Sample would sell for 14s/ p Ib. On the basis of this disappointing assessment, the Australian Agricultural Company abandoned opium growing — and opium growing was abandoned in Australia for another hundred and fifty years.

Black Heart
My heart is black as Cherbourg although my skin is fair, my Goorie blood predominant though European shared.
My heart is black as Cherbourg where both my parents raised, State wards for their protection, deculturised, enslaved.
Grandmothers were traditional, born of sacred land; Dalungbara, Jugera the heritage I claim. Grandfathers anonymous, one English one a Dane, black women, sex, come children, disowned to disguise shame.
My heart is black as Cherbourg, until the day I die, where my ashes will be scattered this place my mother lies.

If, as a famous dead white European man once suggested, the point of studying racism is to change it, what can we learn about ending racism by studying it as whiteness? The first part of the paper summarizes some of the major issues and findings of recent studies of whiteness in the United States. It suggests that there is a hidden life at the heart of whiteness which is about preserving a set of specifically white constructions of masculinity and femininity, and that whites' lack of consciousness about this, and about white privilege in general, have undermined antiracist efforts. It summarizes some of the ways in which working-class white privilege is gendered, and how notions of masculinity and femininity are racial. Part II examines whiteness as ambivalence about the privileges and costs of whiteness as a useful entry point for understanding impulses to white antiracism.

From the late 19th century, a scattering of small Japanese communities gradually established themselves around the northern coast of Australia. These communities existed as ethnic minorities within already established communities of Europeans and indigenous Australians in towns such as Broome, Darwin and in the sugargrowing areas of northern Queensland. The largest of these communities were found on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, and Broome, in Western Australia. At the outbreak of World War II, Thursday Island was the largest Japanese community in the country.

This paper examines the ‘Malay’ community in pre-war Darwin, focusing on those men who were brought to Australia to work in the pearling industry. It considers their status within the community, and questions the degree to which the White Australia policy impinged upon their lives. The tenn ‘Malay’ in this context does not refer to the ‘Malays’ of present-day Malaysia, but rather to the ambiguous colonial construction which was loosely based on notions of ‘racial’ grouping. Adrian Vickers’ study of South-East Asian ‘Malay’ identity points to its multiple forms: the colonial constructions of the British and the Dutch; the existence of non-Muslim Malays; and the many ethnic groups whose identities cut across the national boundaries which form present-day Malaysia and Indonesia and the southern Philippines. In the Australian context, the works of John Mulvaney and Campbell Macknight have examined Macassan contact with northern Aboriginal groups, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria. According to Mulvaney, the term ‘Macassan’ was used to refer to the Bugis and Macassan seafarers who came to Australia from southern Sulawesi. He notes, however, that nineteenth-century Europeans, such as French commander Baudin and Matthew Flinders referred to them as ‘Malays’.

When I first saw the newspaper advertisementsfor the Coalition's proposed tax reform I was struck by the people in it — their whiteness and their white (British) names — Marge and Dave, Doug and Betty, Sylvia and Alistair and their children Alex and Kate, Michelle and her daughter Chelsea and so on. It was not that it came as a surprise; rather it was the recognition of a normalising of white culture firmly based in British traditions and heritage. Here was ‘white’ presented as homogeneous (we are all white), which denies the degrees of whiteness referred to by writers on whiteness. It caused me to reflect on John Howard's understanding of Australia, his view of Australia's past. His focus on a British white heritage is mirrored by his focus on Aboriginality. This is the key to understanding what the government sponsored advertisements reveal, either consciously or unconsciously, and the particularity of their representation of ‘white’ society. I argue that the implicit agenda of the tax reform advertisement campaign, with its concept of homogeneous whiteness, is the demise of Aboriginality as well as multiculturalism, and the effacing of otherness.

Romantic Broome — the pearling centre of the North West … the locale of exciting novels! White-sailed luggers skimming across azure seas in the early dawn. Colowful Asiatics jostling in Sheba Lane — the famous street 0’ Pearls. And languorous tropical nights beneath the glittering southern Cross.

Analyses or descriptions of the history of race relations (and cultural production) in what has been called Australia for about a hundred years, have frequently been informed by two orientations that might be simply categorised as the white blindfold and the black armband positions. In many cases, these two mindsets can be observed in other Western cultures although the interaction between them, and the society around them, gets played out differently in particular places at particular times.

The last decade of the twentieth century has seen some highly significant symbolic advances for Indigenous people in Australia and Canada representing golden opportunities for their respective governments to advance the reconciliation process. But the political will to capitalise on them has varied enormously. This paper focuses on two case studies drawn from Australia and Canada which look at Indigenous people's continuing struggle for land rights.