New research offers some surprising insights into the Chinese heritage in Australia - and racist attitudes today.

By Kay Ansell

Monash historian Associate Professor Andrew Markus has spent much of his career exploring a darker side of Australia - racism in our culture, politics and public policies.

Associate Professor Andrew Markus says the White Australia Policy didnšt hinder good relations between Chinese and Anglo Australians.

In re-examining historical records, he has uncovered grey areas in the infamous White Australia Policy and in a forthcoming book explores why some Australians are fostering 1950s-style attitudes at the start of the 21st century.

Dr Markus says there are no simple causes for racism but there are common threads: "Racism feeds on anonymity - it feeds on making people into abstractions, which can fuel the hatred." Contact between people can break that hostility down, he says, but sometimes the chasm is too deep to bridge.

Contradictions

His research, spanning Australia in the 20th century, shows an apparent contradiction: while official policies aimed to keep Asians out, Chinese and Anglo-Australians generally enjoyed good relationships at a community level. For example, there were instances where Australians rallied to stop enforced deportations of Chinese-born people from their communities.

Intermarriage between Chinese and European Australians was never outlawed. "It was beyond contemplation", Dr Markus says, "that significant numbers of women would want to marry into these communities". But the reality was different, and there were a number of marriages, as illustrated by the photograph recording the family birthday gathering of the Leong family. Herbalist Lee (James) Cheung Leong married an Australian woman, and they had two children, Basil and Gloria.

Intermarriage in early 20th-century Australian society was a fact of life, as illustrated by this photograph of Basil Leongšs birthday party in 1922.

Like the Aboriginal population, the Chinese communities were expected to quietly wither, through death and departures, says Dr Markus. The immigration policy should have ensured more Chinese left than arrived. But during the late 1930s, that decline was arrested, as he revealed in a paper delivered to a recent conference in Melbourne on 'The Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation'.

Between 1909 and the 1930s, many more Chinese left Australia than arrived and extinction was a prospect, but by 1937, the figures evened out, and by 1938, for the first time, more Chinese people arrived than left.

Why? "By the 1930s, the government was persuaded that remnant Chinese populations were not a great problem," he says. "Quietly and without a fuss, compromises were being made."

The compromises included categories of admission that acted as loopholes. The categories were developed because the Chinese population was economically productive in areas that did not compete with Anglo-Australians, such as market gardens and restaurants.

And Dr Markus speculates that the Australian character contributed to this easing, "that near enough was good enough, that a total 100 per cent solution was not necessary".

His latest book, to be released early next year, is tentatively titled 'Race Politics'. Covering the past 15 years, it examines such issues as the rise of One Nation and why issues that had apparently been resolved have resurfaced.

		The School of Historical Studies produces a list of history publications written by Monash authors. To find out more, visit the school's website at www.arts.monash.edu.au /history/ publications/