Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  John Langdon Parsons, the South Australian minister responsible for the Northern Territory and South Australian government resident in Darwin from 1884–1890, a former Baptist pastor who had lost his faith but retained his oratory, also wanted closer relationships with Asia and a rail link between Port Augusta and Darwin to service it. In 1901 he was brave enough to tell an Adelaide audience, ‘Australasia is South Asia.’

  After the Immigration Restriction Act was passed, Barton needed to soothe the Japanese Acting Consul-General, who claimed that there was a conflict between the Act and a protocol permitting Asian immigration to Queensland that the British had somehow made Queensland sign as part of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty in 1895. But the Act stood. Parliament sought to clean up some of the irregularities which had characterised states such as Queensland, South Australia—which would control the Northern Territory until the federal government took over in 1911—and Western Australia.

  While the members of the new parliament argued in Melbourne about excluding the Japanese and other Asians, the Asian presence in much of northern Australia would continue for some years. Japanese were delayed in their arrival in the Northern Territory and Western Australia by the 1877 revolution of the old military caste of the samurai against the modernised Japanese army, for which many young men were conscripted into the armed forces. Pearling ultimately did bring Japanese to Australia, just twelve divers to begin with, in June 1884. The Darwin pearl shell beds were soon cleaned out but a Japanese diver, Hamaura, later found more shell on the Northern Territory coast and called on other Japanese divers to come across from Western Australia. By the end of 1892 three Japanese-owned pearl luggers were working from Darwin. Having survived with their white fellow-residents the Darwin cyclone of 1897, nearly 300 Japanese lived in the Darwin area by 1898, most of them pearlers, some domestic servants and shopkeepers, some running boarding houses, and one of them a doctor.

  As a community of men, they had done well enough now to import their own prostitutes. It had become a practice with the Japanese resident in Hong Kong to smuggle girls from poor families out of Japan, generally to work in brothels. In 1899 a visiting Japanese official, H. Sato, reported that a male pimp named Takada had arrived in Darwin with five girls from Nagasaki.

  The Japanese brothels attracted condemnation, of course, and fuelled the pre-Federation White Australia fervour; though a correspondent wrote in the Bulletin in 1895 that the Japanese women transcended the services of their white rivals. They were ‘particularly clean, modest, sober, exceedingly polite’, and they did not steal from their customers.

  Japanese shopkeepers in the north meanwhile were considered courteous and fair in prices. But even after the early race legislation of the Commonwealth, Japanese divers remained in the pearl industry, and were considered essential personnel by whites in the north. Since the young Commonwealth government saw them as a lesion in the outer shell of White Australia, it decided in 1911 to replace them with Royal Navy-trained divers. This resulted in catastrophe; three of the divers died of the bends, and the others left Broome in protest. The import of Japanese divers continued despite the Immigration Restriction Act. Further divers from the south coast of Honshu were recruited for work in Broome until the eve of World War II. Many died in diving accidents, going too deep or staying down too long. Wakayama Prefecture thus lost many of its young men to the Australian pearling industry.

  Broome in particular remained a blot on White Australia. It had communities of Manilamen (Filipinos), Malays, Javanese (Indonesians) and Timorese. The pearling luggers were owned by European Australians but employed Japanese, Malay and Aboriginal divers. Offensive to all proper racial feeling, there were wild bars where the Japanese played cards, and South Sea Islanders, Filipinos and Timorese and white men involved in the pearling industry pursued their various pleasures.

  Many of the Aborigines had children by the Indonesian and Malay divers, in what seemed to be quite genial relationships like the one which had existed between Makassan (Indonesian) trepangers—harvesters of the meat of bêche-de-mer—and the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land from the seventeenth century. Henry Prinsep, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, noticed that Asian men who married native wives treated them very kindly, although he regretted that these unions produced a mongrel race.

  Some things were impervious to race laws. Others were not. As a result of the Immigration Restriction Act, Chinese wives were not allowed to join their husbands as permanent residents, and the hope was that the Chinese would become extinct. In the 1920s and 1930s Chinatowns were cleared for lack of population and for want of any public sympathy. In 1922 the mayor of Cairns was congratulated by his constituents for his ‘splendid attempt to wipe Chinatown off the face of the map of Cairns’. In Atherton, the last keeper of the Chinese temple in its Chinatown would die in 1948.

  As twin to the Immigration Restriction Act, the Pacific Island Labourers Act was passed under which Kanakas would be returned to their South Sea islands. This pleased Labor, since it meant an expansion of the job market in Queensland. As part of the cleansing the Pacific Islanders were to be repatriated to the New Hebrides and other former recruiting grounds during 1906 and 1907. Intervention from the Colonial Office in Whitehall and from islander supporters in Queensland who did not now want to see these people simply ejected irrespective of their ties to Queensland meant that some remained. Men already married into other racial groups often lay low as the police rode the Queensland hinterland looking for islanders. Some 4300 islanders, families severed or not, were returned to the islands. A man known only as Louis, who had been working in the canefields of the Burdekin River, wrote to his woman, Rosie, just before he was deported, ‘I sorry that I can’t come see you before I go home. Government he hurry up along we fellow.’

  *

  The new government soon had to greet not only soldiers returning from the Boer War, but the 451 men of the naval contingent who returned from the Boxer rebellion in China on 25 April 1901. After the incursions of Westerners from the Opium Wars onwards Chinese nationalist societies emerged, the most radical being the I-ho-Ch’uan, The Righteous and Harmonious Fists, nicknamed Boxers by Western journalists. Sensing the power of the movement, the Dowager Empress T’zu-Hsi sent Imperial Chinese troops to support the Boxers.

  The Victorian naval reservists, trained in the manner of marines, were quartered in Tientsin (Tianjin), south-east of Beijing, and were in the force allocated along with troops from eight European nations with interests in China to help capture the Chinese forts at Peitang to the north of the city. Though the Australians marched with German, French, British and other forces for seven days to assault the fortress of Pau-ting Foo, where the Chinese government was believed to have sought refuge after Beijing was taken by Western forces, they found it had already surrendered.

  Having arrived too late to lift the siege of the Embassy section of Beijing, the New South Wales contingent performed police and guard duties. Disappointed that their campaign had offered none of the confrontations young men were then innocent enough to desire, the Australians left China in March 1901.

  TOBY ABROAD

  Edmund Barton displayed considerable powers of tact and conciliation in both cabinet and in the House, but he was disorganised in administration and had never had a gift for political tactics. He needed to cobble together a different majority for almost every piece of legislation. When he delayed putting to Parliament the question of an £8000 allowance for the Governor-General, Hopetoun resigned at the delay. But when he went to England to attend the coronation of Edward VII and the Colonial Conference of 1902, he negotiated a new naval agreement with the UK. Believing an Australian navy was not yet viable, he pledged £200 000 to keep a British squadron based in Sydney. Barton now accepted a knighthood, having refused one three times before, and he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford. But Australian sectarianism burst forth when he visited the Pope and was given a Papal M
edallion. Not only was the Vatican the Whore of Babylon, but Catholics in Australia were contributing money to support those arguing for Home Rule, Irish self-government, in the Parliament in Westminster. Barton was attacked in particular by the Reverend Dill Macky, a famous sectarian, who organised a petition of condemnation signed by 30 000 Protestants.

  In 1901 Barton had said that Australia would have no foreign policy of its own separate from that of the Empire in general, but that was more piety than reality. It had long been apparent that Australia was interested in the Pacific in a way British statesmen were not. After a quarter of a century of argument, there was still a dispute with the French over the New Hebrides, the islands from which so many of the Kanakas had been ‘recruited’. The French had landed troops there to protect French businesses. In August Barton sent a French-speaking agent, Wilson le Couteur, to the New Hebrides as Australia’s first spy. In the meantime the Colonial Office did nothing to settle the matter. In 1903 Barton refused the British compromise on a joint protectorate, British and French, and urged the Colonial Office to take the New Hebrides either by purchase or treaty. He offered to subsidise their acquisition and the costs of administration.

  Back home in January 1903 Barton clashed with the new Governor-General, Lord Tennyson. Son of the renowned poet, Lord Tennyson had already made enemies while Governor of South Australia by speaking out independently, and not on his ministers’ advice, on the business of appeals to the Privy Council. Now, through his official secretary, he was commenting adversely on confidential communications with the Colonial Office over the New Herbrides and other business. Barton had to visit Government House in Melbourne and remind the Governor-General that it was his duty to accept the advice of his ministers.

  The Naval Agreement Act, to pay for a British naval squadron based in Australian waters, was carried in the House, but in July Kingston, Barton’s fellow warrior from the Whitehall battles of 1900, resigned over differences in cabinet about whether the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill he had worked so energetically to frame would apply to foreign seamen in Australian ports, as he had argued it must. The British government did not want it to, and neither did Forrest. These issues might seem small but one cannot take out of them the personal bitterness that was often invested, and in this case Kingston’s opponent was Sir John Forrest who, though a supporter of Federation, had caused Kingston and other delegates a great deal of heartache in their days of fighting with Chamberlain. Barton sided with Forrest and, in poor health, Kingston departed the ministry. Given Kingston’s radical tendencies, Chris Watson, the first federal Labor prime minister, would in 1904 offer him a place in his ministry, but Kingston was by then too sick, and would suffer from strokes until his death in 1908.

  Two months after Kingston left the cabinet, in September 1903, Barton himself resigned, sick of trouble over the same bill which had driven Kingston out but also attracted to another post offered him. It is hard to say whether Barton was designed for the prime ministership. His secretary, Atlee Hunt, would complain about Barton’s lack of application, his willingness to waste his own time and that of others, and his weakness for perception-clouding drink. Deakin took his place, though it would only be until the election of April 1904, when Labor under Chris Watson would be able to form government. Within a few days of his resignation Barton was appointed a judge of the new High Court of Australia. Sir Samuel Way, a hostile commentator, said that Barton went as a means of saving his wife and children from want and because his Protectionist party was growing dissatisfied with his leadership. Barton’s disciple Bavin had said he was ‘impatient of questions of detail’, but once away from politics he made a good judge. He served on the High Court with his friend Richard O’Connor under the leadership of Samuel Griffith of Queensland, on whose scholarship he depended. Following Griffith’s idea of balancing state and federal interests, the High Court overturned Deakin’s plans to include state employees in federal arbitration. The judges of the High Court also devised the doctrine of ‘implied immunity of instrumentalities’, which prevented the states from taxing Commonwealth public servants, but also prevented the Commonwealth from arbitrating in industrial disputes in the states’ railways. On the way they settled compensation for a man on whom a federally owned awning had collapsed.

  When World War I began, Barton was still on the High Court and agreed with the Commonwealth’s defence power and its extensive control of the civilian economy during the war. Barton enjoyed life even then. He liked to dine and go to the races, and went to Tasmania for the summer law vacations. His closest relationship was with his eldest daughter Jean. His son Wilfred was the first New South Wales Rhodes scholar and was serving in the British army in France when Sir Edmund visited England with his wife and daughter. On 10 June 1915, in the midst of the Gallipoli campaign and the generals’ plans for summer slaughters on the Western Front, he was sworn into the British Privy Council, the same body of appeals which had been so fiercely argued over in 1900. In 1919 he was disappointed at not succeeding Griffith as Chief Justice, but a heart attack the following year quieted all ambition, and led to the sudden death of Australia’s first prime minister.

  BY NAME ALONE

  For most of us the early Australian prime ministers survive chiefly as a muddle of names. Except for scholars, even Deakin is an uncertain presence. In explaining him, as in explaining Australian politicians of the early twentieth century, we learn of what formed them from their childhoods, which were in the case of Barton and Deakin native Australian but in other cases, such as that of the first Labor prime minister Chris Watson and peppery little Billy Hughes, were often spent in other parts of the world prior to immigration to Australia.

  The future Australian Labor prime minister Andrew Fisher had a background similar to that of ‘the fiery particle’, the Welshman William Hughes, except that Andrew Fisher was born in Scotland—in 1866 in Cross House, a coal mining town near Kilmarnock. He grew up in a family of seven, the children and grandchildren of militant coal miners. His grandfather, John Fisher, had for outspokenness been victimised by colliery owners, and his father was also a trade unionist and one of the founders of the local co-operative society. His own suitability for mining was diminished by impaired hearing, which would plague him his entire life. During his childhood his father grew fatally ill with pneumoconiosis, commonly known as ‘dusted lungs’. Thus, Fisher’s formal education lasted only until he was ten. From that point, his mother needed his wages, and he began to work the typical twelve-hour day in the pits. He nonetheless managed to attend night school in Kilmarnock and use the library of the local co-operative, and was particularly influenced by the works of his fellow Scots, Robbie Burns and Thomas Carlisle, and by the American Ralph Waldo Emerson. At seventeen, he was elected secretary of the Cross House branch of the Ayrshire Miners’ Union. James Keir Hardie, illegitimate son of a Scots housemaid and a miner and later credited with being the founder of the British Labour Party, held the position of general secretary of the union for some years, and Fisher was obviously influenced by him.

  Fisher had a gentle demeanour and was, like so many progressive Australian politicians, a devout Presbyterian. But he was effective enough as an organiser to have been twice blacklisted by pit owners because of his union activities. A powerful influence on him would be an 1881 strike, the so-called ‘tatty strike’, during which miners lived off potatoes given or sold on credit by friendly farmers. A bitter winter sent the miners back to work ten weeks later. The local Ayrshire organisation was destroyed by the strike, and it was then that the National Mine Workers’ movement, in which Keir Hardie was so prominent, took over its interests.

  At the end of the tatty strike, perhaps because he was open to mine owner vengeance, Fisher began intense discussions with his family about migrating to Australia. Accompanied by his brother James, he arrived in Queensland on the New Guinea in August 1885. After unsettled beginnings, and unlike many other immigrants, he found the
promises inherent in Australia fulfilled. He was involved in the sinking of a new mine at Burrum for the Queensland Colliery Company, and became the manager of the pit. By 1887 he was a miner but also shareholder of the Dudley Coal and Investment Company. He left Burrum to settle on the goldfields of Gympie. Here, too, the miners were shareholders, and were considered by miners on other fields to be too conservative in industrial matters. But working as a miner at North Phoenix Number One field, and serving on the committee of the Australian Miners’ Association, he was involved in an 1890 strike for half-holiday Saturdays for miners, and was sacked. He had acquired his engine driver’s certificate and went to work on the surface of another mine. Fisher had every chance to enter the ranks of management and capital, but consistently sided with union decisions.

  Though still a moderate, a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher who, like William Lane, considered that it was drink as well as bosses that kept the working man down, Fisher was subject to further black listings for union activity. Again, there existed in his mind no contradiction between Fisher the banned miner and Fisher the superintendent of the Presbyterian Church, the member of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, the shareholder in the Gympie Industrial Co-Operative Society he helped found, and the member of the local unit of the Colonial Defence Force. Christianity was no enemy of wage justice, industrial safety or collective action. By 1891, he was also was president of the Gympie branch of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association and president of the Gympie branch of the newly formed Labor Party. In Britain his old mentor Keir Hardie, scandalising other MPs by appearing in cloth cap and working man’s suit in the Commons, had arrived at Westminster as the first British Labour member of parliament.