MYTHICAL “WHITE AUSTRALIA.”

King Country Chronicle, Volume XIX, Issue 2050, 2 December 1924, Page 2

MYTHICAL “WHITE AUSTRALIA.”

COLOUR TESTS IN FAR NORTH. The White Australia policy is the most vital plank in Australia’s national ideal, and each year from now will make it more vital. Most people in the south believe that Australia is already white. It is time that sorry impression was dispelled, with a view to the problem being’ effectively handled (writes M. H. Ellis, special commissioner of .the Sydney Daily Telegraph.) North of a line drawn from Cooktown to Alice Springs, and from Broome to the safne dusky city, there is. no White Australia. White Australia there is a myth, a half-caste realm, in which all the bloods of half-a-dozen nations mingle into a sinister human broth; in which the dominating figure in the near coastal towns is the Asiatic (often entrenched by an Australian birthline as long as 50 years), and in the stations, either the pure Australian native gone civilised (which means Bolshevik and insanitary), or the hybrid, which haunts every woodheap and which is all the more horrible because often it is so nearly white that one cannot tell it from pure British stock, except for its rheumy, blackfellow’s eyes. Go to Thursday Island. There are 700 to 900 Japanese there, according to the season, endless Papuans, Torres aborigines, Malays, and the inevitable mixtures. Thursday Island is a decadent and despairing village, with a huddle of tin huts in Yokohama —the Japanese quarter. If there were a moving picture of Yokohama shown on every screen, enthusiasm for W r hite Australia would increase. Broome is the same. Pass on to the towns of the Gulf of Carpentaria—the old white towns like Burketown. I have not been there for years, but people who have tell me that they have fallen almost into ruin. Their white population has almost completely left. The legacy of the pioneers and of the Chinese miners is the half-caste.

Turn down the Queensland border and cross the Barkley Tableland. You find the following settlement obvious to the ■ passing traveller (and mark that it is all the settlement): — The Rankine has a store. When I passed through in June there were two white men and three half-castes in it. Brunette Station, the next stop, had eight or nine white station employees and one white woman, who was away. I counted 23 half-breeds, some with a Chinese infusion. Anthony’s Lagoon had a white policewhite storekeeper and a horde of black gins and semi-coloured children. WalhalTow Downs had one white man. Five young gins sat out on the wood-heap. The eldest might possibly have been 16. Three had half-caste babies. The McArthur Station manager was away. The place was in charge of the Chinese cook. There was no white man at home. Portion of the population on the place consisted of intermingled white, black and Oriental blood woven in and out through three or four generations, with horrible results. The small boys and girls were (in hue only) white — horribly and tropically white —and they were playing, when we arrived, on a wood-heap with diseased, dirty and wretched black children. Boorooloola has a white population. Its average age is over 60. There is no white woman there. But there is a Chinese garden, overrun with gins and half-castes. The permanent whites number 11. Leave Boorooloola and travel well on for 200 miles to Tanumbirini. On the way you may meet an armed mail-man and an armed roadmaker or an odd drover. ,

Nutwood Station had a half-caste manager (an unusually high type of man), a Chinese cook, Chinese blacksmith, and the same population setting as the other places we had passed through. The only white humanity about it was the owner. The same could be said of Maryvale, 40 miles farther on. The owner was the man who also has Nutwood. Three teamsters along the road, one with a young girl, apparently a Chin-ese-white-black blend, and perhaps 1(5 years old, on the wagon. The rest of his party were black. At the Katherine (having missed Maranboy, where there were four, two of them single) we saw our first white woman in 1000 miles since leaving Camooweal, and our first white child. Black was, however, the dominant tone, and at least half the whites were official. At Eumungalan (Katherine railhead) nearly all the stores are Chinese. The officials are white, and so are one or twc. traders and roadmakers. There were 27 whites employed in building the Katherine railway bridge. They were all on strike. There were no Chinese on strike anywhere. Few of the whites appeared to have their wives; all the Chinese seemed to have theirs.

The journey from the Katherine to Darwin was tinged with the same hues. The railway men were white. Often —more eften than not —their children were hybrid. A few people at Pine Creek were white. But 80 per cent, of the young population was either black or yellow, or bad a touch of the tar-brush. Darwin divides itself under three heads. There are the officials —pure while and itiner-

ant, many of whom keep their wives in the south. They do nothing to add appreciably to the wealth or the white population. There is the white commercial side. The newer section of this is transitory—Vestey’s men, for instance, whose wives go away for the summer. The older section is permanent, for one of three reasons. Either it owes a Chinese more than five pounds, and is liable to imprisonment as a defaulting debtor if it leaves; it has work at about eight shillings an hour on the wharves, but will eventually go south without having done anything for White Australia, or it has been in the North a very long time, has achieved commercial success, and has fallen into the customs of the country. The leading resident magnate of the Territory, who owns half the retail “white” commercial enterprises and most of the public utilities of Darwin, has a Japanese wife, a dainty half-Japanese daughter, a Chinese manager in his principal business with a veritable flower garden of a staff coloured all human shades; halfcaste managers on his stations (a very fine man, one of them, at least); Chinese cooks and artisans, and halfcaste and black labour entirely. Chinatown is the commercial centre of things in Darwin, just as much as it is in Rabaul. The one complete street of shops in the whole Territory is in Chinatown. Eighty per cent, of the retail business of the place is done in Chinatown. The Tree of Knowledge (meeting place of the White Australian Labour Party) is in Chinatown. So is the Patagonian Restaurant, the A.W.U. agent, the Manila barber. The picture show is Chinese, and it is worth visiting in pursuit of the study of White Australia. Apart from the thin row of officials’ wives and typistes, who pay the Orient five shillings to sit “on the canvas,” the remainder of the attendance is best sorted out in the dark when the hero kisses the heroine, and the audience counts him out. Most of the counting is done in Chinese; the remainder largely in silvery half-caste tones.