‘Little more than a hundred years ago,’ Alfred Deakin wrote in 1901, ‘Australia was a Dark Continent [without] a white man within its borders. Its sparse native population was black as ebony. There are now some sixty thousand of their descendants remaining and about eighty thousand coloured aliens added. In another century,’ he confidently predicted, ‘Australia will be a White Continent with not a black or even dark skin among its inhabitants.’ Deakin was, of course, celebrating the White Australia Policy, not only as embodied in the Immigration Restriction and Pacific Island Labourers Acts (designed, respectively, to prohibit Asian immigration and to expel the Melanesians indentured to work in tropical agriculture) but also as expressed in widespread complacence with the disappearance of the indigenous Australians.
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