Enemy article:
https://www.amren.com/news/2023/01/the-rise-and-decline-of-anglo-australia/beginning in 1787, Britain shipped convicts to Australia. The plan was also for them to be the founding population of a British colony to counter France in the South Pacific. The first governor, Arthur Phillip, accordingly set the pattern: Once an exile had served his term he was to be treated as if his record had been wiped clean.
...
convicts were chosen in part because they were healthy and would make good settlers.
In other words, it's OK for convicts to be "white".
In contrast:
The first rejection of non-white immigration goes back to the 1830s. By then, landowners had large holdings and wanted cheap labor. They petitioned to bring in Chinese coolies, but both the colonial and British governments refused to consider admitting people of “an inferior and servile description.”
Because convicts are supposedly superior (but only if they are "white").
It was the gold rushes, starting in 1851, that brought the first non-whites. Chinese began coming in 1854, and by 1858 there were 40,000 in the gold fields of Victoria. White miners disliked their alien habits and complained that when Chinese were successful they sent their earnings back to China.
As if Britain received no revenue from Australia? Oh wait, that's the point: earnings sent back to China reduced the revenues gained by Britain!
Tensions peaked in 1857, when 700 white miners attacked a camp of 2,000 Chinese. In what is known as the riot of Buckland River, they looted the camp, burned down a temple, and killed a handful of Chinese. Other Chinese drowned in the river trying to escape. It took the police three days to get out to the campsite and restore order. Thirteen white rioters were arrested, but juries refused to convict nine of them, and the remaining four got only nine months of prison.
In 1860, whites in the colony of New South Wales killed two more Chinese miners, and insisted on complete exclusion. They also set new words to the popular patriotic song, “Rule Britannia:”
Rule Britannia:
Britannia rules the waves.
No more Chinamen allowed
In New South Wales.
The colonial government found itself spending so much money protecting Chinese miners that it finally gave in and restricted Chinese immigration in 1861. In 1888 it passed a bill completely excluding Chinese.
In 1901, what had been separate British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia, and its citizens wanted the commonwealth to stay white. As the first prime minister Edmund Barton explained, “We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilization.” The second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, was even more explicit: “Unity of race is absolutely essential to the unity of Australia. It is more, actually more in the last resort, than any other unity . . . .”
Mr. James points out that this was the overwhelming view. In its very first year, the commonwealth passed a law to exclude all non-whites. Britain maintained veto power over some legislation, however, and could have overruled explicitly racial legislation. Australia therefore adopted the method pioneered by the South African colony of Natal and known as “the Natal formula.” This required prospective immigrants to take a dictation test in a European language. It could be any European language, so an English-speaking Indian could be given a dictation test in Italian, which he would certainly fail.
Labour was the only party that opposed this law; it insisted on an undisguised racial ban. As was the case in the United States at the period, spokesmen for working people were open advocates for whites. When a commonwealth-wide Labour Party was established in 1900, the number-two plank in its platform was “Total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races.” For Australians, non-white immigration was unthinkable.
...
“Australia, the White Man’s Land,” was a piece of music published and first performed in 1910. It included such words as:
Sunny south of Old Britannia’s sons,
Australia the white man’s land,
defended by the white man’s guns.
God bless and help us to protect our glorious land Australia.
In 1919, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes attended the Paris Peace Conference. During the negotiations to draft the covenant of the League of Nations, Japanese proposed a declaration of racial equality. Hughes successfully led the opposition to what he saw as an assault on the White Australian Policy.
...
Mr. James is proud of his British heritage, just like the Australian majority. He sees “ethnic diversification” as an open assault not just on white Australia but British Australia.
Unlike the United States, Australia did not have to fight for independence and for generations maintained ties to Britain that verged on veneration. When the British general, Charles “Chinese” Gordon was killed in Khartoum in 1885, a British expeditionary force was formed to avenge him. No fewer than 770 volunteers sailed from Sydney to join it, and two-thirds of the city’s population is said to have seen them off. Sixteen thousand Australian volunteers fought for the British in the Boer War and other wars in Southern Africa. Australian volunteers wanted to help put down the Boxer Rebellion but arrived too late to take part. An astonishing 60,000 men — all volunteers — died for Britain in the First World War. Mr. James sees these sacrifices as entirely natural for men who believed they were fighting for their kinfolk and for the empire.
...
Mr. James looks back with nostalgia on Anglo-Australia. He notes that until the 1970s, school children in the state of Victoria saluted the Australian flag every day, and listened to “God Save the Queen.” Until the 1960s, cinema played “God Save the Queen” before the movie — and everyone rose. The queen’s portrait was in government buildings, scouting halls, schools, and council chambers, but these began to disappear in the 1970s.