Australian History

It is deeply sobering to be writing about the depth of the history of multicultural Australia only days after rallies against immigration have been held and in the midst of a palpable and disturbing negative response to non-white immigration. There are echoes of the shameful twentieth-century White Australia policy. Far from being a recent phenomenon, multiculturalism has been an integral aspect of Australian society since European settlement in the late eighteenth century. This collection, edited by the artist Zhou Xiaoping, is the outcome of a three-year research project and is the companion monograph for Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese people in Australia, a free, ground-breaking exhibition currently at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra that will run until late January 2026.

Soon after the conclusion of the 1948 Arnhem Land expedition, its leader, Charles Pearcy Mountford, an ethnologist and filmmaker, was celebrated by the National Geographic Society, a key sponsor of the expedition, along with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Commonwealth Department of Information. In presenting Mountford with the Franklin L. Burr Prize and praising his ‘outstanding leadership’, the Society effectively honoured his success in presenting himself as the leader of a team of scientists working together in pursuit of new frontiers of knowledge. But this presentation is best read as theatre. The expedition’s scientific achievements were middling at best and, behind the scenes, the turmoil and disagreement that had characterised the expedition continued to rage.

The ‘bungalow’ of Living in Tin’s subtitle was a rough tin shed, erected in Mpwartne (Alice Springs) in 1914 to house Aboriginal children of mixed descent. Described by one observer as ‘a place of squalid horror’, it was managed first by Arabana woman Topsy Smith, and then placed under the supervision of a white matron, Ida Standley. The two women ran the Bungalow until 1929 but the institution survived until 1942. At least one hundred children were housed in the Bungalow over its lifetime, sleeping on the dirt floor of one room with no doors or windows, provided with meagre rations and only the most basic education.

The fence post was wrapped in old newspaper and kept in the shed. It was all that Aunty Loretta Parsley, Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter, had left to touch of his life. ‘His hands touching that,’ she told Katherine Biber, ‘that’s why I asked you to open it. Because you need to connect with this story.’ Overwhelmed, Biber felt the ‘immense responsibility’ entrusted to her.

Australians and New Zealanders loved Paul Robeson. Socialists, peace activists, and trade unionists held him up as their champion, the face of defiance amid Cold War harassment. Conservative theatre critics swooned at his golden bass baritone. Māori rugby players called him ‘brother’. Eastern European migrants wept to his song about the Warsaw Ghetto. Even an FBI informant could not deny he was a ‘great and superb artist’.

Many Australians are unaware of the extent and severity of formalised racial segregation in the country prior to the 1967 referendum. In this meticulously researched study, Roland See examines the evolution of segregation and assimilation practices in the Western Australian wheatbelt town of York between 1924 – when the town’s Aboriginal reserve was first gazetted – and 1974, the year it was formally disestablished. Unlike in South Africa, where apartheid policies were highly centralised, in Western Australia racial segregation was often initiated and enforced at the municipal level. The state’s Aborigines Act, first enacted in 1905 and amended several times in the following decades, provided local governments with broad authority to create ‘native reserves’ and whites-only areas, enforce curfews, and regulate Indigenous people’s access to public amenities and services. Consequently, municipal councillors were particularly sensitive to the prejudices of their white electors. As See points out, although it was state legislation that enabled racial segregation and persecution of Aboriginal communities, ‘the local position was often the deciding factor in the implementation of such provisions and inhumane injustices’.

You Are What You Make Yourself To Be is the documented personal history of one Victorian Aboriginal family. The author’s story is interspersed with researched documented facts intended to authenticate and support the narrative but at times these lengthy italicized notes work against the continuity of the story.

Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

For many Victorians their impressions of the squatting age have been formed by visits to Como or to Werribee Park. These mansions, of course, reflect the ultimate achievement of the squatters’ aspirations but tell us little of the struggles involved in realising those aspirations. These tangible proofs of squatter opulence, coupled with historical accounts of the squatter-selector battles, have inevitably cast the squatters in the role of the ‘bad guy.’ But to Heather Ronald her squatters, the Chirnsides, are the ‘good guys.’ ‘I dispute the oft-repeated statement,’ she says, ‘that squatters set themselves up as a class above everyone else … Many of the earliest successful squatters came from good families and were educated people; their attitudes were moulded by the way of life in rural Scotland, with its Squire and tenant system … Thomas and Andrew, in their estate management, were only following the example set by good landlords at home.’ But this was precisely why many Australians opposed them.