Towards White Australia:
The shadow of Mill and the spectre of slavery in the
1880s debates on Chinese immigration
PHIL GRIFFITHS
(School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra)
Paper presented to the 11th Biennial National Conference of the 
Australian Historical Association, Brisbane, 4 July 2002
IN JANUARY 1888, in the midst of a growing Australian hysteria about Chinese immigration, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies sent a stiffly-worded “please-explain” to the Australian governors demanding a report outlining all “exceptional legislation affecting Chinese subjects” and the reasons for it. Perhaps the most interesting and complete reply came from Tasmania’s young Attorney-General, Andrew Inglis Clark, who argued that if significant numbers of Chinese people should come to the colonies they would either threaten the “the supremacy of the present legislative and administrative authorities”, or, if they accepted an inferior social or political status, they
…would create a combined political and industrial division of society upon the basis of a racial distinction. This would inevitably produce in the majority of the remainder of the population a degraded estimate of manual labour similar to that which has always existed in those communities where African slavery has been permitted, and thereby call into existence a class similar in habit and character to the “mean whites” of the Southern States of the American Union before the Civil War. Societies so divided produce particular vices in exaggerated proportions, and are doomed to certain deterioration.
It is important to note that Clark was not arguing that Chinese immigrants would undercut established wage levels for European labourers; he was saying that in sufficient numbers, Chinese immigrants might produce a fundamental change in the economic, social and political structure of Australian colonial society.
Most other writers discussing the White Australia policy have failed to take this strategic concern seriously. Not so Keith Hancock. In his 1929 history, Australia, Hancock presents the question as one in which a mixed race society is a danger to everyone; threatening “demoralisation of the coolie over-driven by white capital, demoralisation of the poor white overwhelmed by coolie competition, demoralisation of the half-breed children of coolie and poor white who can find no firm place in either of the competing civilisations.” There is more than a whiff of the politics that led to the “stolen generations” in this. Politically it would be dangerous to “give a share of political power to aliens”, but dangerous too would be the alternative: “a successful tyranny over Orientals would destroy the character of [Australian] democracy”.
What we are dealing with here are two separate, but related objections to allowing the Australian colonies to become some kind of mixed race society. The first is a concern to avoid the economic and social backwardness that would result from allowing any slave-style regime to arise. The second is a belief that parliamentary democracy was impossible in a mixed race society.
These fears were given shape by a structure of pre-existing British political and economic theory, in two distinct but related guises. The first influence is the mainstream bourgeois critique of slavery, which embodied both humanitarianism and laissez-faire economics. The second is the political theory of John Stuart Mill, and in particular in his enormously influential, Considerations on Representative Government. To read the speeches of Australia’s colonial politicians, and the editorials of our colonial newspapers, is to constantly encounter the ideas in Considerations.
Fears that Australia could spawn some kind of semi-slave society were focused on colonial ruling class dilemmas and debates over how to exploit and develop the tropical north. Failure to develop capitalist enterprise in the tropics was unthinkable. But Australia’s leading politicians were largely convinced of the racist myth, that legacy of British colonialism, that “white men” could not do manual labour in the tropics. They were left with the terrible thought that the only form of economic development that was possible involved plantation-based agricultural production using some form of indentured “coloured labour”. But this in turn raised the spectre of slavery, or at least, of economic backwardness. A “black north” also involved the possibility of importing a massive population of “coloured aliens” who would be a standing menace to the safety and economic and political structure of both the northern and the more conventional southern colonies.
All these fears and dilemmas were sharpened by the experience of Pacific island labour on the sugar plantations of Queensland, and in the late 1880s, by the refusal of the South Australian Parliament to close the door to Chinese immigration through Darwin.
Australia’s rulers had, of course, other reasons to exclude Chinese immigration. Their first and most fundamental concern was strategic: that a significant Chinese immigration, especially into areas of low European population, could involve the risk of weakening or even loss of British/Australian control of that part of the continent, the possibility of future war with China, or the possibility that a large Chinese population could be a fifth column during a war with one of the major European powers. These concerns were aroused with the influx of Chinese miners during the Palmer River gold rush in Far North Queensland from 1874, and become intense in the wake of China’s resistance to French attack in 1883-5, and her subsequent purchases of modern warships and arms.
Finally, in the 1880s, Australia’s rulers were faced with the emergence of the organised labour movement, and a wider political radicalisation which challenged the way the Australian colonies were being run. Anti-Chinese racism could deflect working class anger away from employers and politicians, and unite the rulers and the ruled, the rich and poor, and give new impetus to British empire loyalism at a time when the imperial link was being questioned.
These and other agendas form the substance of my PhD thesis, which takes as its starting point a rejection of the hegemonic view of White Australia as primarily a labour movement creation and a labour movement victory; and then focuses on ruling class agendas for excluding Chinese immigrants and promoting anti-Chinese racism. I see the period 1875-1888 as decisive in shaping what became the White Australia policy.
In this paper I will focus on the developing ruling class hegemony against a mixed-race society, and the way it helped drive an agenda of anti-Chinese racism, and laws to restrict Chinese immigration, which culminated in practical exclusion in 1888.

The spectre of slavery
Slavery is today rightly remembered for its racism and utter brutality. But the success of the dominant, bourgeois anti-slavery movement had also rested also on its argument that slavery was inefficient and an obstacle to economic progress. “A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible,” argued Adam Smith in The wealth of nations.  Work “can be squeezed out of him by violence only”. For those contemplating the cheapest form of labour, he warned that, “The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.”  Writing seventy years later, John Stuart Mill repeated: “All processes carried on by slave labor are conducted in the rudest and most unimproved manner.” Perhaps worst of all, slavery “by its vile associations, to degrade honest industry, and make men ashamed of useful occupations". According to Thomas Halliwell, slavery “brings labor into contempt, and fixes it to the badge of degradation”. In the slave states of America, those white people without slaves therefore lacked any useful role in society. The work of artisans could largely be done on the plantations, and there was little demand for white, free, manual labourers. They were thus reduced to a “promiscuous horde” who were “little removed from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence by hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves out for occasional jobs, by plunder.” They became known as “mean whites”, or “white trash”—and it was this social layer Andrew Inglis-Clark feared in his reply to the Colonial Office. As a consequence, there could be no substantial immigration of “white” labourers into a slave or plantation economy; and no building of a prosperous, advanced, European-style, industrial economy.
The problem was, that while slavery was disastrous in the medium or longer term, in the short term it could be enormously profitable for a few planters; and there were always capitalists prepared to put their own gain ahead of the wider interests of society. Thus the struggle to eliminate slavery came to be seen by capitalist politicians inherently as a struggle against a minority of their own class.
The slave trade was banned by the British empire from 1808 and slavery in the British empire abolished in the bill of 1833. In its place grew a system of indentured labour, in which Indian, Chinese and other labourers “contracted” to work for a number of years for a set wage in a remote plantation economy. Gone was the ownership of the labourer; in its place some of the paraphernalia of freely-contracted wage labour. But for many middle class reformers, this was simply a rebadging of slavery, and they were soon pointing to the abuses of the new system, and its similarity to slavery.
The issue of indentured “coloured” labour was theorised by Herman Merivale in his enormously influential Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, mostly based on lectures given at Oxford University from 1839-1841. Merivale distinguished two paths of economic development for new colonies; one which focused on meeting the wants of the colonists, the other which focused primarily on production for export. In the first category were Canada and the northern colonies of America, some of which were established purely as places of refuge from religious persecution; in the second category were the plantation colonies of the American south and the West Indies. In the latter, the production of exportable commodities could be so profitable as to produce an insatiable demand for labour, which was met through the horrors of slavery or indentured labour. But such prosperity was inevitably short lived; the profits of Jamaica’s sugar planters having fallen, for example to just 3% by 1812, and sustained only by a massive differential tariff. The entire lesson of Merivale’s survey was of the durability and long term prosperity of slower, more rounded growth, which came from an economy based on small farmers and free labour, and of the need to restrain the greedy planter who was just out for quick profits.
These were no mere academic issues in Australia. One of the first, great social movements—against the transportation of convicts in the 1830s and 1840s—was built almost entirely within the discourse of anti-slavery, and against some of the very richest people in New South Wales—the pastoralists who so craved their labour. And the pastoralists’ answer to the drying up of convict labour, the importation of a few thousand Chinese labourers and other so-called “coolies” in the 1840s and early 1850s, was seen as an attempt to consolidate a semi-slave regime, and the Chinese were themselves branded by this as slaves, or slaves-in-waiting.
Economic historian Chris Lloyd has argued that this struggle, coincident with the economic crisis of the 1840s, was a struggle over the fundamentals of economic structure, and the result was the defeat of the “Argentinian” model, based on indentured labour, and the triumph of the free-labour, small farmer structure, a triumph which unleashed broad-based economic development in New South Wales, as well as economic growth. One essential element to that long period of economic development was assisted immigration: a colossal effort, ultimately costing tens of millions of pounds, to attract British immigrants, and especially agricultural labourers, to migrate to the Australian colonies. It was widely believed that the presence of indentured “coloured” labour discouraged free European immigration. The two strategies were mutually contradictory, and the majority of the colonial bourgeoisie developed an immense commitment to building a free-labour economy. It is important to note that while the working class in the colonies opposed indentured labour, it also opposed assisted immigration, especially at times of recession. Thus, the economic development strategy being fought over was not theirs, but that of their masters.
And it was not just the businesspeople and artisans of Sydney who were opposed to the Australian colonies being developed on the basis of “coolie” labour. In 1841, the British Colonial Secretary, Sir James Stephen, warned the Governor of NSW:
To expedite augmentation of wealth in New South Wales by introducing the black race there from India would, in my mind, be one of the most unreasonable preferences of the present to the future which it would be possible to make. There is not on the globe a social interest more momentous...than that of reserving the continent of New Holland as a place where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste. As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonising North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.
Thus the Australian colonies represented both poles of Merivale’s dichotomy. The wool and sugar industries produced massive quantities of commodities for export to an expanding world market, and both were sources of rapid expansion leading to labour shortages and at various times demands for unfree labour. At the same time, there was a very large economy of small farmers (selectors), manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, prospectors and miners who were a bulwark against indentured labour. The result was a struggle within the Australian bourgeoisie over indentured labour, a struggle that went on to 1901 and beyond.
Rather than ban indentured labour, rather than protect the rights and conditions of the labourer, rather than legislate against discrimination according to race, the liberal majority of the colonial bourgeoisie imposed its economic development agenda by blaming the victims for the crimes of their exploiters. So Chinese people themselves were seen as a material factor in this struggle. In the debates over Chinese immigration during the late 1870s and 1880s, we constantly find the fear expressed that Chinese immigrants will bring with them the elements of a slave-based economy. At one level, it was argued that Chinese immigrant labourers were themselves actually slaves or semi-slaves. So when NSW MLA Angus Cameron, a trade unionist turned businessman, moved in 1880 to restrict Chinese immigration, he spent more than a quarter of his speech asserting that Chinese people did not come as free men, they could not call their bodies or their souls their own, they were closer to being slaves than anything else; and these were arguments echoed by other MPs in that debate. When William Box debated the 1877 Gold Fields Amendment Act in the Queensland parliament, he called the Chinese serfs in their own country, a point repeated by Postmaster General, CS Mein, in the upper house debate.
There is a second version of the Chinese as bearers of slavery, the one expressed by Andrew Inglis-Clark and WK Hancock. It is the argument that the presence of a sufficient number of people from a supposedly “inferior race”—for instance, a situation in which the number of Chinese was broadly equal to, or more than, the number of “whites”— would create a racial division in the labour market, with in this case the Chinese doing the menial and labouring work in slave-like conditions. Part of the problem is simply that white businesspeople will impose an economic tyranny on “coloured people” which will then spread and reshape the whole of society. There is nothing the Chinese can do about it.
Henry Parkes, for instance, saw “the elements of an embryo slavery in the attempt to work Chinese labour in conjunction with British interests”.  The Brisbane Courier saw the choice before the colony as a civilised society of free men or one of “a million Chinese coolies and a thousand employers”. When Attorney General, HJ Wrixon, was helping draft Victoria’s reply to the “please explain” from Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1888, he accused the Chinese of “introducing an element rather of slave then of free labour among us”. In the SA Legislative Council in 1888, the colony’s Chief Secretary, JG Ramsay, quoted from the US Commission which reported to the Senate, that Chinese labourers “can be managed and controlled like unthinking slaves.” John Darling told the same chamber that he:
found from history that wherever whites and colored people mingled the weaker race was debased and enslaved. He did not wish the history of Australia to be similar to that of America so far as the slave trade went. The slave system of America arose from a small beginning, but the result was that a great civil war had to be fought to put an end to it…he feared that the result of the introduction of large numbers of Chinese into this colony would result in the degradation of the European colonists by their attempts to debase and enslave the Chinese.
Kathryn Cronin attacked historians for taking this rhetoric at face value, saying they disregarded “the essential point that the so-called ‘economic’ threat posed by Chinese was closely tied to the racist acceptance of them as irrevocably servile.” While Cronin was discussing this rhetoric of “servile Chinese” in the context of labour movement agitation, her point is nonetheless extremely important. Chinese people in Australia were not “servile” and there is a long litany of European ruling class complaints about their willingness to stand up for their rights. In accepting the view of the Chinese as “servile”, the European/Australian labour movement undermined significant possibilities for solidarity. The point here, however, is different. Extensive plantation production actually existed in Australia in the 1880s, built on the basis of unfree labour. The possibilities were believed to exist, and perhaps really did exist, for a radical expansion of plantation production, particularly in the Northern Territory, and possibly in North Queensland. If such production could be organised, Australian capitalists would have been able to recruit Chinese and other so-called “coloured labourers” to do the work in unfree conditions. This reflects not just the racism of Australian capitalists and the Australian political system, but the poverty of ordinary people in China and the immense global economic and political power of the British empire. The issue for most colonial political leaders and newspaper editors was, that such an expansion of plantation production would be dangerous for the glorious economic and political future they had mapped out for their colonies, and the continent as a whole.
Associated with the danger of some kind of semi-slavery arising on the basis of the availability of Chinese labour was the sheer number of Chinese people; and their supposed ability to swamp the Australian colonies with a million or more Chinese immigrants, thus producing a racially divided society in which white people are limited to managerial roles. This version was given its most thorough exposition in Charles Henry Pearson’s racist “classic”, National Life and Character, published in 1894.
We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year's surplus of population... Transform the Northern half of our continent into a Natal with thirteen out of fourteen belonging to an inferior race, and the Southern half will speedily approximate to the condition of a Cape Colony, where the whites are indeed a masterful minority, but still only as one in four.
And what is the fate of a country into which an “inferior” people is admitted in large numbers?
Its colonists would soon be divided into a wealthy ruling caste, planters or miners, and mean whites; while the blacks, servile or semi-servile, would increase year by year, because their labour was necessary to maintain and extend the fortunes of the governing caste.
The problem for colonial liberals in the 1880s was that this nightmare simply would not go away.

The shadow of Mill
The second theoretical strand underpinning Australian bourgeois hostility to any kind of multicultural society was expressed most prominently by John Stuart Mill, in his Considerations on Representative Government. Mill has a reputation as one of the most extreme democrats in mid-nineteenth century British politics. In fact, his own stance was far more equivocal and contradictory. In theory, Mill was an advocate of the widest possible franchise, seeing in representative government “the ideal type of the most perfect polity”; because it created the most energetic citizens. Thus “all free communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others”. 
But representative government is only suitable if the particular society is already progressive and coherent enough. It is unfit for passive nationalities—amongst which the Chinese were pre-eminent—because ”they would inevitably choose their tyrants as their representatives, and the yoke would be made heavier on them”. Similarly, to deserve representative government a people must be prepared to “co-operate actively with the law and the public authorities in the repression of evil-doers”, unlike “the Hindoos”, who had shaken the British Empire by their mutiny just a few years previously in 1857. Finally, a common nationality is essential for free institutions to prosper; and these are “next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another.
And for a federation to succeed, “there should be a sufficient amount of mutual sympathy among the populations... The sympathies available for the purpose are those of race, language, religion, and, above all, of political institutions, as conducing most to a feeling of identity of political interest.” These were ideas which greatly exercised Australia’s politicians in the late 1880s and 1890s as they wrestled with the steps necessary to create the Australian federation they almost all wanted.
Mill’s democracy was extremely limited and cautious; he opposed universal suffrage because it meant giving the vote to people without property, who paid no taxes, inviting them to spend other people’s money. He was for restricting the vote to people with some education, and for plural voting, to avoid any domination by the majority working class. This was clearly a political manifesto for the industrialist capitalists and middle classes of England; a theoretical justification for further liberalising the political structure in a way that would not threaten the power of the existing economic and political elite. The price for this pathetic version of “free institutions” was racial homogeneity, a dominant nationalism, and strong law and order. When Henry Reynolds discovered Mill, he commented:
It seems to me, then, that we could have had Australian nationalism much as it was, with restrictive immigration, with deportation of the Kanakas, with restrictions on Aborigines, if it had just been based on Mill's liberal nationalism and not on Social Darwinism.
In fact, I would argue, that White Australia owed far more to Mill than Social Darwinism. No colonial politician was more driven by the idea that democracy required racial homogeneity than many-times New South Wales Premier, Sir Henry Parkes. In 1873, Sir Henry wrote to his Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson, explaining that his plea that Britain, not NSW, annexe Fiji was not a desire to avoid expense: “the system of representative Government under which we live could not by any possible adjustment be extended to a mixed population the great majority of whom are in the condition of the aboriginal inhabitants of Fiji.” This concern extended to European immigrants; Parkes resisted attempts to form Irish settlements within New South Wales, as distinct from dispersing Irish people through the wider population. In 1881, Parkes visited 200 Italian colonists who had arrived in Sydney destitute after the failure of a scheme to colonise New Ireland. He told them they were welcome, but that they could not live together in the one district.
The customs of the country and other circumstances render it undesirable, indeed almost impossible, for them to settle down altogether in one locality. Even if this were practicable, it would not be for their own good to do so. They need for their own welfare to get some knowledge of the English language, and to learn the way of the English people, and this only can be done by their engaging with English employers.
The strategy of assimilation was fundamental to the political world-view of colonial politicians. On a trip to Rockhampton in 1862, Sir George Bowen was delighted when three foreigners sang national songs, at the request of the Mayor, and
afterwards joined in a chant of “God save the Queen,” declaring that they now regard that as their only national anthem, and that they yield in loyalty to no one among their fellow colonists...[all] have married in the Colony, and...their children can speak no language but English. Is not their position a strong proof of what has been called the “assimilating power of the Anglo-Saxon race”?
This attachment to racial and national homogeneity was sincerely held, and pursued, by Australian governments, to the point of economic disadvantage. Most Australian governments involved in schemes of assisted immigration to the colonies insisted that the proportion of immigrants coming from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had to be in rough proportion to their numbers in the total British population. Far more immigrants could have been attracted and possibly more cheaply if the colonies had been prepared to tap into the enormous Irish emigration, which so boosted the United States; but Irish Catholics were feared as disloyal. That could not be said in quite the same way of German, Italian and Swedish people, who also flocked to America, but colonial governments imposed tight limits on assistance to European immigrants; and insisted that all newcomers disperse and integrate into the broader British/Australian community.
But “coloured” people could not assimilate. Queensland’s Sir Samuel Griffith argued that the Queensland sugar industry had to give up its reliance on Pacific islander labour, because “a free selfgoverning population and a servile population not admitted to a share of the government cannot exist in the same country.”
Again, it is easy to see this as nothing more than racism at the level of ideas, but Australian capitalism had been built on the dispossession and genocide of a “primitive people”; and around the British empire there were colonies of “servile people” ruled by tiny numbers of whites. To admit the equality of “coloured” and white people would be to contradict, and even threaten, the entire practice of the empire. More practically, there was the business of social control. The essential message of Mill is that the widest possible franchise, and the involvement of the citizenry in government, can produce a stable society, with the safety of property assured, but it requires the inculcation of a sense of common nationality, a sense that the people are homogenous, and a widespread respect for the law. Mill’s is a strategy for a ruling class to strengthen is social control in an advanced capitalist economy by a process of incorporation.
 Mill’s appeal lies in his simultaneous “radicalism” for English people—and most colonial politicians were proud of the “advanced” state of Australian colonial democracy—and recognition and acceptance of the realities involved in ruling the British empire. One of the reasons he gave for writing Considerations was the dangerous implications of the democratic theorising of the past: ”it was customary to claim representative democracy for England or France by arguments which would equally have proved it the only fit form of government for Bedouins or Malays.” He praised dictatorship over “people in a state of savage independence”, because “progress in civilisation” is impossible until they have “learnt to obey” and been forced to engage in systematic labour.
Mill’s theory spoke to the problems faced by the colonial ruling class. Keeping Chinese people under control was difficult. Most did not speak English. They had their own societies, and it was believed they were indifferent to Australian law. They were not Christians, so the exhortations of bishops and priests—so important in disciplining the British/Australian working class—had no impact on them. There were constant uproars created about Chinese camps in the country towns—which were portrayed as havens of vice, sheltering both immoral Chinese and immoral Europeans from the discipline of the European community—and the living conditions in Chinese boarding houses. In this scenario, the facts were unimportant: the fact that Chinese were no more likely to be in jail than other people, the fact that most of the immorality scares were unfounded. The most important fact was that the government and the ideologists and newspaper editors felt that they had little direct control over this section of the population.
And so the formulas of John Stuart Mill were turned into an indictment against the presence of Chinese people in the Australian community. When Parsons reported to the South Australian Legislative Assembly on the Intercolonial Conference of January 1881, as part of introducing that colony’s anti-Chinese bill, he commented that, “It was almost impossible from such diverse elements [ie British and Chinese] to be able to build up a solid, compact, and well-welded State.” Seven years later, the South Australian Premier told the same chamber how at the anti-Chinese Intercolonial Conference of 1888, Sir Henry Parkes had been persuaded that Chinese people who were British subjects should be excluded as well. This was no easy task, as Sir Henry “looked on British citizenship as something sacred”. But Victorian Premier Duncan Gillies
pointed out most effectually to Sir Henry Parkes that he (Sir Henry) had all along objected to the Chinese, not because of their vices, but because they were different from us, and would not assimilate with our people so as to form a homogenous whole by-and bye; in fact, he had objected to Chinamen on the score of race. The result was that Sir Henry Parkes gave way.
There was nothing Chinese people could really do about all this. The British/Australian definition of them as a “separate nationality” embodying a radically different culture made them a potential threat, irrespective of their actual behaviour.
Who will do our work in the tropics?
All these fears were brought into sharpest relief by the problem of “the north”. More than a third of the Australian land mass was in the tropics, and it was widely believed that “white men” could not do labouring work in the tropical sun.  The area involved was colossal, around three million square kilometres, two-thirds the size of India. No progressive empire could leave such a colony undeveloped, and anyway, there were profits to be had, but development seemed to threaten the kind of future warned against by Merivale and feared by colonial liberals: plantation agriculture resting on coloured labour, supervised by a small minority of whites, ultimately threatening the wider future of the colonies.
The rapid growth of the Queensland sugar industry through the 1870s, based as it was on the brutal exploitation of indentured Pacific islanders, seemed to confirm some of those fears. Indeed, from the mid 1870s to the early 1890s, indentured Pacific island labour became the issue which divided government from opposition in Queensland colonial politics. Thus successful development of the north could mean hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions of coloured labourers with a much smaller white population of supervisors, artisans, businesspeople and government officials. Once in Australia, how could these coloured labourers be confined to the north? Here the issue of China’s fabled population of 400 million came uniquely into play; it was one of the few societies capable of supplying such a large labour force; but who could control the Chinese once they were here?
The result was an extraordinarily confused and agonised debate within the ruling class. Typical was Sir Samuel Way, Chief Justice of South Australia, writing to Sir Henry Parkes in that month of crisis, May 1888:
I believe the Chinese have work to do for us especially in tropical Australia -- but I do not yield to you in the wish to make extra tropical Australia the home of an Anglo Saxon race free from any admixture of Mongolian blood. 
While Way proposed different rules for tropical and temperate Australian colonies, others were completely contradictory. In a strident, racist speech in the Queensland Legislative Council in July 1877, for stopping the tide of Chinese immigration, Kevin O’Doherty conceded that it was fortunate that there were many Chinese in the north who “will prove valuable as cheap labourers in tropical agriculture.” 
This was a uniquely ruling class dilemma; the labour movement had no interest in promoting plantations in the north, which is one reason it seems so much more strident on the issue. But we should not confuse stridency with the power to make legislation.
Few in the ruling class argued that there simply wasn’t a problem, but many saw the problem as exaggerated. These were most often conservatives, usually large landowners or squatters. Richard Chaffey Baker, an immensely rich and powerful landowner, and the dominant figure in South Australian conservatism, told the Legislative Council that the Northern Territory would either have to be peopled by “Asiatics” or abandoned. But he did not entirely dismiss the possibility of danger, saying that he would not want to see 100,000 Chinese people in the Territory, and quoted approvingly from a letter from the Territory: “If there was any danger of the place being flooded with Celestials it would be another matter. There is no danger of the kind”. 
Many of the leading liberal politicians, who introduced the anti-Chinese laws between 1876 and 1888, accepted the “need” for coloured labour in the tropics, and this represented a seemingly intractable problem. When Queensland Premier John Douglas spoke to his government’s anti-Chinese Gold Fields Amendment Bill, in August 1876, he conceded that “under proper control, they [Chinese people] would very likely be the very best class they could introduce for developing the tropical resources of North Queensland.” The problem was that there were too many of them. The Premier of Tasmania, PO Fysh, dissented from the resolutions of the 1888 Intercolonial Conference, called to develop a united policy among the Australian colonies to practically prohibit Chinese immigration. Fysh’s government had passed the colony’s first Chinese Immigration Act in 1887, but he attacked the proposed new law as disregarding “the climatic characteristics of the Northern territories of Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, which are a barrier to successful occupation, except in pursuit of avocations peculiarly tropical and unsuitable to European labour.”
Typically, it was Sir Henry Parkes who tested the limits of this ruling class dilemma. In a remarkable article he wrote for the Melbourne Review of October 1879, Parkes proposed an amalgamation—not a federation—of Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. What is most significant, is his pointed rejection of Queensland as part of this merger, “because her capabilities of soil and climate so clearly mark her out for a colonizing career dissimilar from that of her elder sisters”. In other words—although Parkes does not say this explicitly in the article—because of her tropical climate, Queensland will be a plantation colony, dependent on “coloured labour”. Parkes accepted that Queensland would be different: in 1883 he asked the British government to appreciate the “necessity that labourers accustomed to tropical heat must be found for carrying on outdoors industries in tropical Australia, or that otherwise the land must remain unoccupied.” But such a society could never be integrated with the British-style liberal capitalism of NSW and the southern colonies. By contrast, he can happily propose the merger of the three because of “the corresponding character of their leading pursuits, and their equality of promise in their future capabilities” and these can lead to “a reciprocity of patriotic feeling”, a phrase that again invokes JS Mill.
Parkes’ proposal to form an “Australia” without Queensland was rejected by the former Premier of that colony, John Douglas, in a reply three months later in which he declared that virtually nobody in Queensland imagined “the existence here of a separate nationality except in association with the rest of the Australian states”.
Parkes pursued his proposal with the utmost seriousness. He wrote to British Liberal leader WS Gladstone about it, putting his proposal more explicitly: “The Colony of Queensland, embracing a large part of northern territory suited to the growth of cotton, sugar & tropical products, seems destined to form a nation quite distinct from these south-western colonies.” 
I believe he used the Intercolonial Conference of November-December 1880, held in Melbourne, to push it along. Unlike the Intercolonial Conference of January 1881, held in Sydney (with which it is often, mistakenly, merged), only three colonies were invited: the three Parkes wanted to unify. The conference had been originally proposed to discuss common action against Chinese immigration (and this is what was done in Sydney in January 1881), but when faced with a lukewarm response, Parkes suggested a conference between the three colonies he wanted to unify to discuss border tariffs. The Sydney Morning Herald had a partial understanding of Parkes agenda, writing during the conference that:
[NSW Governor] Lord Augustus Loftus remarked, some little time ago, that it had been his lot to witness the union of Germany begin in a Customs Convention, and grow to what the world has seen. A little Conference is being held in Melbourne, at which the idea of a Customs agreement between the three southern colonies of Australia is being discussed, to see how far it is possible at present, and how far it is impossible. That is, no doubt, the natural beginning of federation, and apart from compulsion arising from external danger, that is the natural beginning for closer union.
Once the conference was agreed to by the three colonies, he urged them to try and find “some common ground for alliance”, pointing to, “The immense territory of Western Australia and the northern part of Queensland [which] appear to me to be destined to a separate political existence”: words entirely reminiscent of his Melbourne Review article. In the end, Parkes’ unification proposal appears to have been rejected by the other colonies.
There were three Australian colonies with extensive tropical territories: Western Australia, South Australia (which owned the Northern Territory until 1911), and Queensland. In the 1880s, they were at very different stages of economic and social development, and adopted very different strategies to coloured labour in general, and Chinese immigration in particular. Western Australia was the least advanced of the three, not gaining responsible government until 1890. In 1880, the colony’s Legislative Council tried to solve a labour shortage in the north by offering subsidies for the importation of Chinese labourers, an action which galvanised the other Australian colonies at the Intercolonial Conference of 1881 into protesting to the Colonial Office in an attempt to get the WA legislation struck down. But as angry as they were with WA, it was of minor importance to the coloured labour debate in this period.
Queensland’s tropical industries were the most advanced of the three, and its non-European, non-indigenous population was the largest. The sugar industry had become explosively profitable. It relied on the efforts of indentured Pacific island labourers, and some sugar plantations around tropical Mackay had involved tens of thousands of pounds (vast sums in those days) investment in land development, equipment, and construction. By 1881, there were around 6000 Pacific islanders in Queensland, with over 3000 in tropical areas and some 2300 employed, mostly on sugar plantations, and most in the coastal areas near Maryborough and Bundaberg. No colony was more divided on the issue of coloured labour; the conservatives representing the sugar planters, defended it while the Liberals wanted to restrict and abolish it, condemning it as a variant of slavery. In 1885, Griffith wrote to the Governor, Musgrave, that “the function of manual labour is regarded as degrading, and if any numbers of the white race continue to be engaged in it, they degenerate in social estimation, and are looked down upon as ‘mean whites’”. This was a common complaint, and one which linked the social impact of indentured islander labour to the social impact of slavery in the US South. In Queen Victoria’s address to the British Parliament in 1872, the British government condemned “the slave trade and practices scarcely distinguished from slave trading...in the South Seas [which have dishonoured] the name of the British Empire.” Similar attitudes pervaded the correspondence between Queensland governors and the Colonial Office in the late 1870s and 1880s. While indentured labour was not slavery, slavery in North America had had its origins in indentured labour. According to Kay Saunders, "It was feared, both in Australia and Great Britain, that indeed this transition could be duplicated in nineteenth century Queensland."
Those fears were made more acute by the extensive agitation led by sugar planters for North Queensland to separate into a new colony with its capital at Townsville. This agitation was renewed with great vigour in 1885, after the Liberal government of Samuel Griffith passed new laws to further restrict the employment of Pacific islanders and legislation to ban the labour trade from 1890. Despite presenting this campaign as a result of neglect by Brisbane, it was privately admitted that the aim was to free the planters from southerners controlling their labour supply. Northern separation raised the spectre of a “black colony”, peopled by “coloured labourers” and run by a ruthless aristocracy of planters, with all hope of advancement denied to white immigrants. Such a “black colony” might also contain the sees of a future Australian civil war, as had happened so recently in the United States. This fear of possible future civil war runs through many of the debates on Chinese immigration, and Helen Irving has commented that “the long shadow of the Civil War hung over [federation] debates throughout the 1890s.”
This is the context in which Chinese immigration was debated in Queensland. Faced with increasing difficulties recruiting and maintaining islander labour, when the newly elected liberal government repealed legislation that would have enabled the recruitment of labourers from India, it seems that many planters did recruit Chinese labourers, with over 2500 entering the colony in 1883. This showed the potential for tropical industries to be a vehicle for Chinese immigration. The response of the government was to immediately introduce a new and much harsher Chinese immigration restriction bill.
The bill passed easily through the Queensland parliament, supported by he majority of the Queensland conservative party, including the sugar planters and their representatives. In fact, it seems that Queensland’s sugar planters had long been politically opposed to the use of Chinese labour—despite individual planters employing Chinese labourers. In 1878, during the famous Seamen’s strike against the Australasian Steam Navigation Company, which replaced some European seafarers with Chinese workers, it was the planters of Mackay who called a public meeting in the town, moved a resolution of support for the Seamen’s Union, and began a fund to relieve the distress caused by the strike—to the visible annoyance of the town liberals. Both the Mackay Standard and the Mackay Mercury opposed Chinese immigration, despite both being pro-planter and pro-islander labour newspapers. When John Potts, the anti-Chinese agitator, took his crusade to Mackay, it was the political leader of the planters in Parliament, Hume Black, who accommodated him and chaired his meeting. Then in the viciously fought 1888 elections, the conservative McIlwraith and the liberal Griffith fought to prove who was most anti-Chinese, with McIlwraith’s victory being celebrated by a riot in Brisbane’s Chinatown.
I cannot as yet account for the position of the Queensland planters: certainly their newspapers portrayed Chinese immigrants as potential business rivals, and the rush of Chinese miners to the Palmer in 1874-7 had created fears that the government would lose control of the far north, something no planter wanted to see. Perhaps their anti-Chinese position was a way of gaining acceptance for their employment of Pacific islanders, and perhaps Indian labourers, by posing sugar as an exceptional industry that needed special conditions, and that those conditions would not come to characterise Queensland society as a whole. Perhaps too, the anti-Chinese stand of the planters was a vehicle for building an alliance with north Queensland mining communities in the campaign for North Queensland separation—which is something they did achieve. Either way, the anti-Chinese position of Queensland conservatives was decisive in shaping White Australia. There was to be no “black state” in Queensland, leaving South Australia’s politicians isolated in their quest to build a plantation economy in their Northern Territory.
This, then, was the third of Australia’s tropical colonies and it was Chinese immigration into the Northern Territory that became one of the battlegrounds that led to the extreme legislation of 1888. South Australian capitalists and politicians looked at the rich sugar industry in Queensland and fantasised about the profits to be made when the Northern Territory was developed; and the SA government spent large sums on infrastructure, research and incentives to get tropical industries started. The assumption behind all their plans was that labouring work would be done by “coloured” labourers, but attempts to organise the recruitment of labourers from India, Japan, Mauritius and other places all failed. The one group of “coloured” labourers who did come to the Territory were Chinese people; initially to work in the gold mines or prospect on their own account. There were two periods in which a relatively large number of Chinese people came to the Northern Territory: 1878-1880, and 1886-1887. From a few hundred in early 1878, by 1880 there were over 4000 Chinese in the Territory, outnumbering Europeans six to one. And it was these Chinese labourers that largely built the town of Palmerston (Darwin): its public buildings and roads, and its large botanical gardens, much of this work done on a relief rate of 1s a day. The influx in 1887 was largely due to recruitment of labourers for the building of the Pine Creek railway, which employed up to 3000 Chinese workers. Both influxes created alarm in the eastern colonies.
Between 1880 and 1887, the South Australian House of Assembly passed five separate bills to restrict Chinese immigration into the Northern Territory, every single one of them failing in the Legislative Council. This should not be taken to imply that South Australia’s liberal politicians were opposed to indentured “coloured” labour on plantations; at the same time that they were passing anti-Chinese resolutions in 1880, the House of Assembly was approving enormous grants of land and other incentives to get potential sugar planters to set up in the Territory. The contract for building the Pine Creek railway in the Territory, signed in 1886, allowed the contractor to use Chinese labour. The primary objection of the Liberals to Chinese immigration was that the Chinese would take away their gold—that great lever for economic development and white immigration—and compete too effectively with Europeans. With that in mind, the SA Parliament passed a Gold Fields Act in 1886 to exclude Chinese miners for two years from new goldfields discovered by Europeans.
The result was that until 1888, Port Darwin represented an open door for Chinese immigrants. When the colonial premiers met to discuss common action to restrict Chinese immigration in 1881, they anticipated that South Australia might be a problem, so they were pleasantly surprised that the government agreed; but that agreement proved pointless when the Legislative Council exempted the Northern Territory from the 1881 legislation.
The 1887 influx of Chinese people into Port Darwin brought the issue to a head, coming as it did at a time of general strategic insecurity, with the Chinese Commissioners visiting the colonies (see below). By then, the situation had significantly changed. Chinese businesses had begun to assume a more significant position; Europeans wanting to hire Chinese labour had to subcontract it through Chinese storekeepers, giving Chinese employers an advantage. Close links were developing between Chinese-owned businesses in Darwin and Singapore and other centres of Chinese population, and Chinese entrepreneurs spoke of turning Port Darwin into a second Singapore. Such a prospect horrified Australian liberals. Where once the European businesspeople of Port Darwin had welcomed Chinese labour, now they began protesting against it, with the editor of the Northern Territory Times, VL Solomon, travelling the southern colonies to appeal for pressure to be applied to the government in Adelaide to close the open door. From Queensland came hysteria that Chinese people might enter Queensland via the overland route from Port Darwin. In September 1887, six weeks after the Chinese Commissioners had departed, Sir Henry Parkes travelled to Melbourne and Adelaide to put pressure on the South Australian government. In Melbourne, NSW and Victoria agreed to act together regarding “military federation”; but in Adelaide he was told by the Premier, Playford, that while the government favoured prohibition for the south, Chinese labour would be needed in the Territory, provided they brought their wives.
There is no space to describe in detail the rising tide of rumour and hysteria which engulfed the colonies over this period. Smallpox broke out in the Territory, a thousand Chinese arrived in December 1887, and there were rumours of 500 travelling overland to mine for rubies which raised the spectre of an influx into the southern colonies. Parkes and Griffith continued to pressure Playford and London over Chinese immigration into the Territory; and finally the South Australian government used an outbreak of smallpox to declare all Chinese ports “infected”, meaning that ships carrying Chinese people would be forced to spend weeks in quarantine at enormous expense. SA also imposed a poll (entry) tax of £10, subject to parliamentary approval. Right through this period, southern liberals were looking for an opportunity to bring the Chinese immigration issue to a head. The arrival of the SS Afghan in Melbourne on 27 April 1888 provided the trigger they were looking for, just as the Tampa would do for John Howard 113 years later.
The colonial liberals finally got their way with South Australia when elections for a third of the Legislative Council, held at the height of the crisis significantly changed the balance of opinion in that chamber, creating the possibility that an anti-Chinese law might pass that chamber. Playford called for an intercolonial conference and was given the opportunity of proposing the legislation the colonies were to all agree on.
South Australian governments still tried to find a way to develop the Northern Territory on the plantation model. Even after pushing through his colony’s anti-Chinese laws of 1888, SA Premier Thomas Playford visited India in 1892 in an unsuccessful attempt to organise temporary Indian agricultural labourers for the Territory. Such options for economic development were more generally becoming redundant, and were closed down by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901.
One of the keys to understanding this debate is to realise that the British/Australian ruling class had seized a vast land mass they were incapable of exploiting, and incapable of populating, and really incapable of militarily defending, but insisted on keeping possession of it nonetheless; a vast land situated close to heavily populated areas of Asia, peoples they profoundly wished to keep away. Thus our ruling class addressed the issue of the north from a position of weakness, paralysis and fear. Some of this is expressed in a comment made by “Marquis” Tseng (Tseng Chi-tse), a member of the Tsungli Yamen, China’s quasi-foreign office, in January 1887, in which he attacked countries that hunger “for land they do not and cannot make use of”—a clear reference to Australia.
The policy of excluding Chinese, and later all non-“white”, immigrants proved immensely durable for many reasons. Strategic fears of a Chinese invasion in the 1880s may have been overblown, but were easily replaced by fears of Japan that seemed more realistic. Indentured labour on plantations became less and less profitable globally, leading to the destruction of the plantation system for raising sugar in Queensland and removing most economic opposition to White Australia for a considerable period. Fear of Asian competition proved successful in helping incorporate the more conservative sections of the labour movement into helping administer Australian capitalism, and White Australia was successful as a foundation for a new Australian nationalism, a more convincing ideology than the British nationalism it supplanted and one entirely consistent with loyalty to the British empire and dependence on the British fleet—at least until 1941.
The defeat and collapse of plantation indentured labour systems tended to make the anti-slavery element of the anti-Chinese campaign seem crass and unconvincing, and its significance was, I believe, largely lost to historians after the Second World War. The politics of assimilation were far more durable, and were part of mainstream bourgeois politics until the 1970s and after, although not necessarily in the strident form given to them by JS Mill and Sir Henry Parkes. By then, however, the ideas of Parkes and his contemporaries came to be seen as simply an expression of racism, rather than as a strategy of social control. This is, on both counts I believe, to misunderstand the powerful ruling class agendas at work in late colonial Australia.