Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation (Contemporary Issues (Nedlands, W.a.).)

The White Australia policy continues to haunt Australia. Here, leading Australian scholars provide an informed debate on the essential issues of race, identity and nation that will determine our attitudes to immigration, multiculturalism and Australian-Asian engagement in the twenty-first century. More than one hundred years after it first appeared in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and thirty years after it was reportedly put to rest, the so-called White Australia policy continues to haunt the Australian political landscape. In the new millennium the Tampa incident and controversy surrounding asylum seekers have fuelled renewed speculation about the enduring legacies of White Australia. In this volume, leading Australian scholars critically re-examine a hundred years of White Australia to provide a foundational contribution to an informed debate on the essential issues of race, identity and nation that will determine attitudes to immigration, multiculturalism and Australian-Asian engagement in the twenty-first century. Eleven papers have been drawn from a conference held in 2001 to commemorate, but not celebrate, the centennial anniversary of Australia's Immigration Restriction Act, legislation, which inaugurated decades of a racist White Australia policy that was only dismantled, piecemeal and incompletely according to a number of these authors, in the 1960s and 1970s. While many commentators have tendency to declare the policy over and done with, the contributors collectively argue that the lingering impact of the policy and its cultural, social, and political roots continue to affect Australian society and its relationship with the wider world. Distributed in the US by ISBS Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR