School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBonegilla Reception and Training Centre: 1947-1971( 1985-08)In 1945 the Australian Government created the Department of Immigration. Its purpose was the promotion of a solution to Australia’s limited natural population growth in the face of defence fears and of an Australian society which, using the voices of its politicians, was increasingly willing to depict itself as an isolated and threatened British outpost. The fears themselves revolved as much around the defence of a singularly British heritage in terms of political, social and economic institutions, as a purely geographical or military threat. While the “threat” was more often perceived as assuming an Asian or non-European identity, Australians also had a history of feeling socially insecure when confronted by “non-British groups” within their own shores; the extent of that insecurity varying according to more specific ethnic categorisations within the general “non-British” label (i.e. northern c.f. southern Europeans, western c.f. eastern Europeans). The significance of the post-war period is that within two years of the formation of an Immigration bureaucracy by a party which had traditionally been hostile to immigration, an immigration programme had also begun to be formulated which would eventually allow, encourage, and financially assist, the introduction of groups which, traditionally, were depicted as posing the very threat to Australian homogeneity which immigration had been posited as assuaging.
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ItemThe Chinese in Australia 1930-45: beyond a history of racism( 1995)The present thesis is a contribution to the history of the Chinese in Australia. In it, I have endeavoured to look at the relations between European and Chinese settlers in Australia from a perspective other than that of racism. Discrimination against the Chinese was common in all settler societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the basis of archival documentation and in conjunction with contemporary sources, I would suggest that a different history can be told in regard to Australian Chinese. To look at the history of the Chinese in Australia in light of the immigration policy alone ignores other aspects of Australian-Chinese history, aspects which concern the daily lives of those Chinese who lived and worked in Australia as Australian citizens. With due regard to Federal political policies implicated at a bureaucratic level, the actual experiences and achievements of Australian Chinese still indicate that they fared better than most authors on the subject would have us believe. ..... In presenting the results of my research, I do not mean to belittle the experience of racism suffered by people of Chinese ancestry in Australia. This experience has been well documented and is, moreover, still being endured. My point is merely that racism was not the sum total of the Chinese experiences of Australian society. As a recent collection of essays shows, the time has come to write about other aspects of Australia's Chinese history. In this thesis I have documented the attitudes and efforts of the Chinese Nationals and Australian Chinese in Australia during the war years. Their efforts, combined with the Australian Chinese communities' supportive role and the increased wartime interactions with other Australians contributed during this period to establishing a greater understanding between the different communities in Australian society. (From introduction)