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Creating White Australia

Edited by Jane Carey and Claire McLisky

Regular price $35.00 Sale

Format: paperback
254 pages
ISBN: 9781920899424

Publication: 16 Nov 2009

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Read online: Open access

The adoption of White Australia as government policy in 1901 demonstrates that whiteness was crucial to the ways in which the new nation of Australia was constituted. And yet, historians have largely overlooked whiteness in their studies of Australia's racial past. Creating White Australia takes a fresh approach to the question of ‘race’ in Australian history. It demonstrates that Australia's racial foundations can only be understood by recognising whiteness too as 'race'. Including contributions from some of the leading as well as emerging scholars in Australian history, it breaks new ground by arguing that ‘whiteness’ was central to the racial ideologies that created the Australian nation.

This book pursues the foundations of white Australia across diverse locales. It also situates the development of Australian whiteness within broader imperial and global influences. As the recent apology to the Stolen Generations, the Northern Territory Intervention and controversies over asylum seekers reveal, the legacies of these histories are still very much with us today.