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Introduction: Creating White Australia: New Perspectives On Race, Whiteness And History, Jane L. Carey, Claire Mclisky

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

As the promulgation of the White Australia Policy in 1901 would seemingly demonstrate, ‘whiteness’ was crucial to the constitution of the new Australian nation. And yet historians have paid remarkably little attention to this in their studies of Australia’s past. ‘Whiteness’, as a concept, has only recently been recognised as a significant part of the story of Australian nationalism. In seeking to understand the operations of ‘race’, historians have primarily looked towards Indigenous peoples and other ‘non-white’ groups. Creating White Australia takes a fresh approach to the questions of Australian national formation and the crucial role of race in Australian …