sh empire, and it was a more simple although cruder response than the notion of working-class internationalism put forward by a small minority of progressives in the labour movement, and some other liberal-minded people.
In 1878 a major flashpoint was the engagement on a number of ships of Chinese labour at rates of pay much lower than the prevailing rate. This produced a bitter strike of white seamen, which was basically successful, and ultimately the Chinese seamen were removed. The sole Labor representative in parliament of that time, Angus Cameron, was an energetic and vocal leader in this anti-Chinese agitation.
This attempt of a section of the capitalist class, spearheaded by the shipowners, to import cheaper Asian labour for their own economic interests, was totally overwhelmed by the explosion of racist opposition, which gained such powerful force from the whole ethos of В«British AustraliaВ», the ethos that had been so assiduously cultivated by the British Colonial Office and the Protestant churches for the previous 70 years.
As a direct result of the success of the anti-Chinese agitation, the White Australia line of least resistance in the labour movement became quite institutionalised by the use of the rhetoric of British racism to oppose migration from non-British areas. In times of economic downturn, it even became a very popular thing in the labour movement to oppose all migration, including British migration.
The Sydney Labor Council actually employed a young John Norton (paradoxically, a British migrant himself) the same man who later became famous as the pioneer of tabloid journalism, the lineal business ancestor of Rupert Murdoch, who founded one of the tabloid titles that Murdoch now owns. The Labor Council sent Norton to London as its official delegate to publicise and campaign there for the viewpoint that migrants shouldn't come to Australia because there was unemployment here.
At this time the Labor Council frequently passed motions against the assisted migration schemes and any further immigration. All this is recounted in Cyril Pearl's wonderful, scabrous biography of Norton, Wild Men of Sydney . This book so infuriated the Norton family that they used their considerable newspaper influence to persuade the right-wing Labor government of Joe Cahill in NSW to push through the parliament a bill making it possible to take defamation actions on behalf of the dead. Happily the legislation was never used. p> By far the best book about The Bulletin is The Archibald Paradox , by Sylvia Lawson, published by Penguin in 1983. Lawson describes how the unusual and inventive editor, J.F. Archibald founded and developed The Bulletin in the 1880s and 1890s. This newspaper, with its carnival parade of styles in writing and black-and-white art, opened its pages to many thousands of contributors, among them Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, who were first published there. In her introduction, Sylvia Lawson says:
The Archibald paradox is simply the paradox of being colonial .... The Bulletin 's republicanism and nationalism flowered out of the paradox. The republicanism worked as inspiriting argument for a time; but nationalism supervened. It was expressed strongly, through the late 1880s especially, as viciously chauvinistic racism - directed especially, but not only, against the Chinese. In this the editor, with all his compassionate, world-ranging perspectives, was not alone; but he was responsible. The Bulletin would have seemed at the time simply to be playing out the stern logic of its economnic realism, and standing in necessary opposition to the laissez-faire tolerance of the pontifical daily press. The old world was murderously oppressive; the new must be just and free, untainted not only by poverty and caste but also by strangeness. Thus the paradox worked: the dominant culture, which in one breath The Bulletin lampooned and disavowed, was upheld vigorously in the next. The prospective Utopia, the dream of В«AustraliaВ» - federated, republican, democratic - was landscaped for white men only. The internationalist humanism, enacted so brilliantly in the journal's range of reference and its open-pages policy, was denied in the racist argument; it was also undermined and disfigured perennially in much of the Bulletin 's discourse on women.
The Bulletin unquestionably left a considerable imprint on Australia, particularly on the labour movement. A general republican sentiment and opposition to the pretensions of the ruling class can be traced back to The Bulletin but, unfortunately, so can the generalised anti-Asian racism that came to dominate the early years of the new century.
The strong editor, Archibald, had a veritable preoccupation with the Chinese. ( The Bulletin always referred to them a...
