Chapter Four - Moment One. An Act to Regulate Chinese Immigration (1858): Celestial Migrations

Summary

Australia was not a voluntary kind of society to start with, a large part of it was enforced exile and that exile was justified in the name of criminality. There is always a kind of desire to abide and comply with – the tendency to identify with – the norms that have criminalised you and see another group as the ones who are really inferior and the really criminally indisposed. And it is almost as if you are turning against yourself and in being unable to bear the fact that you've turned on part of yourself, shifted part of the self-hatred onto others.

Interview with Ashis Nandy, 7 December 2009

This chapter presents the first of three case studies that illustrate the installation of Enlightenment values. In July 1858, the New South Wales Legislative Council appointed a committee to consider the provisions of a bill entitled An Act to Regulate Chinese Immigration. The bill had been the subject of intense debates that also coloured the broader maieutic horizons of the nascent Australian colonies and their later federation into the Commonwealth of Australia. In what has been referred to as ‘the golden decade’, 1850s Australia was a hotbed of factional interests through which the urgings of self-government percolated. Amidst the clamour for economic, social and political opportunity, there were both inclusive and exclusive attitudes towards Chinese immigrants. The responses towards the Chinese called on notions of British culture as well as Enlightenment ideas, deploying terms and structures for the public debate, which involved questions of racial and cultural difference in relationship to Australia's national identity.