Canberra: ANU Press, 2023. US$40.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760465858
The “Subjects” in Kate Bagnell’s and Peter Prince’s edited volume on nationality, law, and belonging in Australia (and to a limited extent Aotearoa New Zealand) are British subjects born in the British Empire and Dominions who were denied legal citizenship rights. “Aliens” under the law include Aboriginal Australians, immigrants, and settlers who were similarly denied citizenship rights on the basis of race and ethnicity. The editors and their contributors focus on the “racial use of ‘alien’—as a derogatory term for non-Europeans” and illustrate how it “infected the law in colonial and postcolonial Australia” through case studies and individual profiles that reveal the painful struggle to belong “in the face of exclusion and discrimination” (3). These are contested terms, fraught with contradictions in practice and in the application of the law. A Table of Authorities helpfully references 28 cases, such as Mabo v. Queensland and Namitjira v. Raabe, and 33 statutes, including a number of Commonwealth and Nationality Acts, among others.
An Introduction by the editors and six chapters based on case studies addressing the consequences for citizenship status of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and national origin comprise the volume, which developed from a 2017 symposium at the University of Wollongong on the history of nationality and citizenship in Australasia. The collection focuses on the first half of the twentieth century until January 1949 with the creation of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, granting Australian citizenship for all Australian-born and other British resident subjects in Australia for the previous five years. Even so, Australian and Torres Strait Islanders did not receive the right to enroll and vote in Commonwealth elections until 1962.
While the introduction, entitled “Australia’s ‘Alien Races’ Meet New Zealand’s ‘Race Aliens,’” focuses evenly on both nations, only chapter 3 by historian Jane McCabe discusses citizenship in New Zealand, with a focus on Dalmatian gum diggers in Northland and Chinese market garden farming families in Otago. Here, between 1908 and 1951 non-naturalized residents could not own land, a practice that McCabe argues “served as a mechanism for controlling non-British people” (48). Her case provides an examination of rural land ownership and intergenerational transmission by these non-British families.
In chapter 2, “Not Substantially of European Origin and Descent [NSEOD]: How Race Came to Shape Australian Enlistment During World War I,” historian Sophie Couchman profiles four men, all British subjects in law, who were excluded from enlistment by a race-based ban, that included men who were part Aboriginal Australian, Chinese, Afghan, and Malay-Chinese. The chapter captures the defining tension of the edited volume through an examination of the NSEOD exemption clause in the Defence Act (1901–1910) that “curtailed the legal rights and obligations” of native-born Australians from enlisting (20).
Margaret Allen in chapter 4 carefully traces the high-profile and ostensibly successful 1922 continental tour of Australia by “the silver-tongued” Indian orator Srinivasa Sastri PC to eloquently and persuasively advocate for the full citizenship rights of Indians in Australia (67). At stake were their civil and political rights as citizens for federal and state enfranchisement, ownership of property, and engagement in certain professions in the face of the unspoken White Australia policy. The tour had implications for imperial citizenship, especially for South Asians, throughout the British empire in a quest for social and political equality by virtue of their status as British subjects.
Historian of marriage and women’s history Emma Bellino, in “‘Australian is an Alien’: The Position of Australian Women Married to ‘Aliens’, 1920–1949,” draws effectively on women’s correspondence to illustrate the price of marital denaturalization by which Australian women who married aliens lost their citizenship and acquired that of their non-native-born husbands. The loss of rights followed, including the right to vote in federal elections, purchase land, obtain a passport, or retain teachers’ superannuation. Bellino poignantly and clearly illustrates the tension between women’s legal status and their deeply felt identity as Australian citizens in chapter 5.
Legal scholar and co-editor Peter Prince contributes the final two chapters (6 and 7), which focus on Western Australia’s Native Citizen Rights Act of 1944 and the actions of the High Court in denying or distorting historical truths that countered the law. In both chapters, Prince argues that the High Court “put forward an idealized view of Australian history—one that disregards or ignores the shameful legal treatment of First Nations Peoples” (183). Focusing on three personal stories, he highlights the granting of a “certificate of citizenship” to internationally renowned Indigenous artist Albert Namitjira to underscore the bitter irony of First Nations people being defined and treated as aliens in their own country, the country of their birth. Notions of belonging and citizenship demanded that First Nations peoples submit to restrictions that “dissolved [their] native associations” and live “in effect as a white person” (143). They were systematically denied the rights held by Anglo-Celtic members, including the rights to vote, of movement, and of holding political office.
Subjects and Aliens is a disturbing collection of essays. It starkly reveals systematic, willful national duplicity through the application of the White Australia project and reveals the institutionalized racism practiced through federal and state citizenship policies, taking the most extreme forms in Queensland and Western Australia. Prince poses the key question in the conclusion to the final chapter: “How can Australia acknowledge that First Nations Peoples ‘have survived the worst that the past can throw at them’ if the legal history portrayed by the highest court in the land inaccurately describes the citizenship or subject status of Aboriginal people as having always been equal to whites?” (183). The book’s strength is the continuity of its defining tension, inherent in the refusal to equate being a British subject with Australian and New Zealand citizenship. This tension effectively unites the individual chapters within the framing narrative of the introduction and has implications for the present. It will speak to scholars of the British Empire and its dominions as well as to a wider audience interested in First Nations rights and processes of belonging for immigrants and settlers.
Michèle D. Dominy
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson