Inauguration

In 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in an act of racial expulsion when the first parliament legislated to expel several thousand Pacific Islanders – or ‘Kanakas’ – who had been brought to labour in the sugar cane fields of north Queensland during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Further legislation – the Immigration Restriction Act – was passed to ensure that other ‘non-whites’ would be prevented from coming to settle in Australia any time in the future. ‘The two things go hand in hand’, advised the Liberal Attorney General and future Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin. They were ‘the necessary complement of a single policy – the policy of securing a “White Australia”.’

When the first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, rose to speak in support of the Immigration Restriction Bill, he held in his hand a copy of National Life and Character: A Forecast by Charles Pearson – ‘one of the most intellectual statesmen who ever lived in this country’ – from which he quoted Pearson's now famous warning that ‘The day will come’ when the European observer will wake to find the black and yellow races no longer under tutelage, but forming independent governments, in control of their own trade and industry, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies by the civilised world. When that day came, Pearson had suggested, the white man's ‘pride of place’ in the world would be ‘humiliated’.