Drawing the local colour line: white Australia and the tropical north

Abstract

My title paraphrases that of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's recent book, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Melbourne 2008). As those historians explain, the distinction between white and nonwhite races was drawn with increasing rigour in the three decades or so on either side of 1900. Locally drawn lines, however, could be more substantive, inscribing boundaries across land and sea which confined white and non-white to one side or the other. The white Australia policy provides a perfect example, attempting to cordon off the continent as the exclusive preserve of the white race. However, the actual location of the colour line around white Australia was disputed in the early decades of the 20th century. While the dominant version of the white Australia policy drew the colour line somewhere north of Thursday Island, a significant body of critics insisted that it be drawn somewhere near the Tropic of Capricorn. This paper explores the arguments and assumptions of those critics.