Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888–1988 By Ouyang Yu

Each of the four countries—Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand—had its full share of legislative restrictions. The American Congress passed its Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882; New Zealand adopted the Natal Act to exclude Chinese in 1899;⁴⁷ and Canada passed its first anti-Chinese bill in 1885.⁴⁸

However, it is not in those white countries but in Australia that anti-Chinese, anti-Asian feelings turned into a unanimous national policy in White Australia and helped unite the six colonies into a federation.⁴⁹ The twofold significance of this follows: first, Australia as a nation was founded on the basis of excluding coloured people in general and the Chinese in particular; and second, that on a metaphysical level, the Chinese, along with other coloured races, were to remain the underground and shadowy counterpart of this White Australia in its process of nation-building for a long time to come.

Mid-Period (1902–1949)

Since the adoption of the White Australia policy in 1901, a central concern of the new Australian nation was to maintain its whiteness, so that, in the words of Manning Clark, it would become ‘the only white nation’ in the world.⁵⁰ Thus each succeeding government, whether conservative or radical, clung to the White Australia policy as one ‘means of protection’⁵¹ of national safety.

The establishment of the policy and its ruthless, though effective, administration had a marked and disastrous effect on the Chinese population in Australia. The original 30,000 Chinese in 1901 had been reduced to 9,000 by 1947, with 3,700 Australian born and 5,416 Chinese born, of whom 1,921 had been in Australia for forty years. The number of females was much smaller: 265 in 1911 and 219 in 1933, gradually growing to 746 in 1961.⁵² Nowhere is this intention to exclude the Chinese population better expressed than in William Liu’s remembrance of a past event in his life during his recollection around 1912: