Leviathan (11 page)

Before the late 1870s this anti-migrant feeling was largely confined to periods of economic distress. After that the disparate, largely working class anti-immigration forces set themselves to the task of eliminating government assistance for migration and did not rest until they saw their goals achieved. In 1886 the Premier Sir Patrick Jennings finally promised to cut the immigration item from the New South Wales budget. Macquarie Street had long resisted all approaches on the issue, but the combination of massive public pressure, a drought and large scale unemployment forced their hand.

Throughout these years of agitation, the anti-immigration movement had never objected to the migrants themselves. A large percentage of the colony's population had been born in the UK and were unlikely to find fault with migrants who were cut from the same cloth as them. Their objections were simply economic; an oversupplied labour market could not keep the Australian working man in the style to which he had become accustomed. In 1878, however, in the early days of the concerted push to close off British access to local jobs, another migration issue arose which had little to do with rational economic or political debate. In November of that year a strike broke out on the Sydney waterfront which soon spread around the country. The summer winds of 1878 blew hot with racism and hatred and the seeds of the White Australia Policy.

The
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
recounts the arrival of the Chinese in Australia's metro centres as an alien invasion, more curious than threatening to begin with, as though some fantastic plant or animal had sprung fully formed from the ruptured earth of the first gold diggings. Their disturbing
otherness
could only increase with their numbers and growing impact on the goldfields. Hailing from ‘a grimly Malthusian setting where thrift and industry were essential for survival', the southern Chinese were a remote and perplexing yet universal feature of the countryside during the rush years. They were a race apart, remarked the
Journal
, and intended to remain so. On the fields they camped together, remained aloof and laboured in concert, a massive hive of worker bees swarming over the tailings with unbelievable patience and brutal unremitting toil. Surviving on the thinnest of margins, they could earn a living off fields abandoned by the whites as unprofitable. In the process they also earned the undying enmity of the diggers. Fears that the Chinese would undercut local working conditions and somehow eat up all the gold in the ground by themselves, combined with darker fears of being overrun and bred out of existence by the ‘yellow hordes'.

Before the gate was closed on them, the Chinese constituted by far the largest non-European migrant group in Australia. Three separate phases had marked their coming. Before the discovery of gold a small number of indentured rural peasants arrived to work the land; they were followed by two massive waves of gold seekers. Sailing from Kwangtung Province in South China, they poured into Victoria and later into Queensland. The census of 1853 showed the Chinese population of Victoria at 2000. Two years later, when the Victorian Parliament passed laws restricting their entry, they numbered 17 000. Harsh as they were, the laws failed to stop the numbers of Chinese swelling to 40 000 within another two years. New South Wales passed its own anti-Chinese statutes in 1861, but the petering out of the gold rush was a more effective deterrent. Contrary to popular fears, the Chinese were not really interested in staying, and as the opportunities for profiting on the goldfields disappeared, so did they, only returning in great numbers with the discovery of more gold reserves in Queensland.

In the mid to late 1860s both Victoria and New South Wales repealed laws passed to staunch the Chinese inflow, leaving their people feeling exposed when the Chinese reappeared on northern goldfields in the 1870s. The national industrial dispute which started with seamen in Sydney Harbour, however, was not directly related to trouble on the diggings; instead it arose from general fears of economic and racial displacement which crystallised around the issue of Chinese sailors being employed by an Australian shipping company in local waters. Although the strike by workers of the Australian Steamship Navigation Company (ASN) began as a fairly simple action to protect local jobs, sparks from the clash soon lit upon a tinder-dry undergrowth of xenophobia.

The employment of non-Europeans was mostly restricted to the tropical north, which had a severe labour shortage and needed workers ‘biologically adapted' to the extreme conditions. British migrants were more suited to southern business and industry, generally made up of small concerns which could not afford to import labour in any case. ASN was a bit different. Based in Sydney but running services right up the east coast and deep into the Pacific, it had access to cheap skilled Chinese seamen and the capital to employ them in significant numbers. It was also in direct competition with the Hong Kong-based Eastern Australian Mail Steamship Company, which already employed Chinese and so could undercut ASN. Under the chairmanship of George Dibbs, later a premier of New South Wales, ASN replaced European workers with Chinese on three ships in April 1878.

The union movement reacted as a whole, the Seamen's Union gaining the support of the Trades and Labor Council for a campaign seeking the legislative restriction of any Chinese immigration. Ann Curthoys, who sketches a brief but comprehensive outline of the ensuing battle in
Who Are Our Enemies?
, writes that this strategy was in line with earlier responses to Asian immigration which thought that ‘the best solution to Chinese economic competition was to exclude Chinese from the colony altogether'. At that time trade unions were small bodies, representing skilled urban tradesmen, but they were growing in sophistication and power. The Sydney Trades and Labor Council (TLC), which had been formed in 1871, gained experience in campaigning against assisted British immigration in 1877.

Within a year the prospect of otherwise respectable British workers supplanting locals from their jobs had been replaced by the alarming spectre of millions of ‘flat-faced, flat-footed heathen Chinese' driving the white race out completely. That at least was the awful vision tormenting those who attended a rally on 23 July to protest all Chinese immigration. There were just under 1000 Chinese resident in Sydney then, considerably less than the 1500 working men who squeezed into the city's guild hall, with many more spilling out onto Castlereagh Street. Sydney's Chinese community, almost entirely male, lived crammed into small dank terraces around the inner city. Some were market gardeners, exercising a skill – farming in dry, poor soils – of great use and some mystery to white Australians. Many others were employed in the furniture trade, centred on George Street, arousing the rally's indignation on behalf of white cabinet-makers driven out of their trade by ‘coolie labour'. Most of the evening's considerable heat and anger was not generated by economic debate but by the belief that the Chinese were inherently immoral and a danger to the virtue of the city's females. Curthoys records that by November 1878, 181 European women were married to Chinese men, a further 171 were ‘living in sin' with them. These outrageous liaisons had also brought forth 586 Anglo-Chinese children. The ‘twin issues of economic competition and immorality' were only exacerbated by the fact that ‘Chinese arrivals were again, for the first time since 1861, exceeding departures'. Although the vast majority of the Chinese were to be found in remote mining districts and although, almost to a man, they wished only to build up a very small pile and return home, their passage through the metro centres, the small remnant populations they deposited there, and the memories of earlier bloodshed on the goldfields had snagged like a fishhook in the national psyche.

The angry tradesmen were addressed by Seamen's Union reps and a group of anti-Chinese politicians, including Angus Cameron, a carpenter and a member of the Legislative Assembly who was one of the original organisers of the push against British migration. To roars of approval, he denounced the Chinese invasion, proclaiming, ‘We came here to better our position and we will not have this moral pestilence – we will have none of them!'

A little earlier Thomas White, the President of the Seamen's Union, had first linked their dispute with ASN to the wider issue of Chinese immigration. White's was one of the wilder performances that night. He told the crowd that he had seen ‘old schoolmates and young girls with whom he had gone to church' fallen into depravity in the Chinese dens of the city. He tore into the newspapers, most notably the
Herald
, for going arm in arm with the Chinese merchants responsible for importing the ‘pestilence'. And he referred to the parliamentary report on common lodging houses, saying it was not possible for a man to read the evidence of witnesses like Inspector Seymour without disgust. Cameron, who had chaired the committee which produced the report, described its findings as loathsome and beastly, but nothing compared to what the audience might see for themselves in the Chinese quarter that very night. Whipping his listeners into a frenzy, he declared that the Chinese did not just threaten their individual livelihoods but the nation's very character, along with the virtue and character of their wives and daughters. ‘Their presence here means moral and political degradation in every sense of the term'.

Some of the audience who were not in the habit of keeping up with Parliament's publications were very keen for the offending passages to be read out. And they were especially keen to hear from Inspector Seymour. Given the fevered atmosphere, White and Cameron were probably wise in recommending that the men read it for themselves later. Seymour, an ‘Inspector of Nuisances' for the city council, had spent a good deal of time amongst the Chinese and was not shy about passing on his findings. Asked simply whether he knew if the Chinese kept lodging houses in the city, Seymour peeled off into a long colourful diatribe about the conditions to be found in opium dens, some of which were just down the street from the guild hall.

Seymour went on to explain that he found scenes of this sort repeated up and down Cyrus Lane, the girls telling him that they were enslaved to the Chinese through their addiction to opium. The smokers' dens could be found all through the central city, in dangerous, filthy warrens like Abercrombie Lane and Rowe Street and throughout Surry Hills, where many of the Chinese lived. It was enough to drive God-fearing white men to violence. However, the Inspector of Nuisances may not have taken into account that many of the couples – 181 of them at least – whose boudoirs he had happily barged into were married. And the rest, ‘women of the town' as he called them, were unlikely to be the object of societal concern under normal circumstances. Elsewhere in the report the witnesses and their parliamentary questioners are less solicitous of the city's ‘lowest sort' of women. When shacked up in cheap lodgings with poor white trash they were little better than Ralph Clark's abandoned trollops. Only when they started snorting up drugs and throwing their legs over Chinamen's shoulders was there any concern expressed for their ‘virtue and character'. It seems that the workshop was not the only place where white men had to worry about the special skills of the Chinese.

Curthoys writes that while Thomas White briefly described Chinese labour as unfair competition, because they could live on virtually nothing and had no families to support, he canvassed non-economic objections to the Chinese at length; the dangers of cohabitation with young white women, the dangers to British institutions of secret tribunals and societies, their lack of respect for the law. Whereas twelve months previously he had decried the assisted migration of British workers to Australia, he now told the meeting he would ‘rather see all the convicts of Great Britain in New South Wales than one Chinaman'. The
Evening News
reported that a rousing cheer went up as he said he would be the first to shoulder a musket to prevent the Chinese coming to drive out the Caucasian race. When the Anglo-Saxon smelt blood there was no holding him back, he declared, adding quickly that he hoped it wouldn't come to that. But he continued that he also hoped decent people would decline to travel in any ship where Chinese were employed, or dine in a hotel where they ate, or buy furniture from a factory where they worked. The crowd erupted again when he said it was their duty to shove aside any Chinaman they encountered on the footpath.