5 - ‘Not Altogether of a Hopeful Character’

Summary

During the consolidation of free migration to Australia in the late 1840s and 1850s, there remained much conflict about the kind of emigrants the Australian authorities wanted, and the kind the British authorities were able to procure. Australian criticisms of immigrants’ shortcomings as workers and moral agents were greatly exaggerated, however. Assisted emigration to Australia was, in fact, exceptionally well regulated. The vast majority of assisted women appear to have settled into productive work followed by fertile domesticity, and the overall quality of assisted Australian immigrants was high by any reasonable standard. Still, the gender ratio and strengthening Australia’s moral fibre were nevertheless abiding concerns throughout the 1850s and remained a source of chronic tension between the Colonial Office and the Australian authorities, as the gold rush to Victoria brought a vast influx of ‘masterless’ single young men. Controversies riddled the effort to counteract their potentially corrupt influence through the recruitment of the proper kind of immigrants. This effort, in turn, marked the origin of Chinese exclusion and the White Australia policies designed to protect the racial purity of Australia’s ‘civilised’ temperate regions. By the 1860s, eastern Australia was overwhelmingly white and British because carefully planned migration policies had made it so.