Free speech, bigotry, from a Chinese Australian perspective

Since the release of the Exposure Draft, the media have canvassed personal observations on how free speech has caused unconscionable suffering to those not in a position to defend themselves. Henry Herzog ‘s letter in the Australian on 7 April 2014 is a succinct example.

I would like to add my observations, as a Chinese Australian who came here in 1962 as a Colombo Plan student from Sarawak, imbued with the vision of a beauteous God-loving white society that the joyful matronly Southern Methodist missionaries from America had planted in my soul during my primary school years. 

It took the anti-Asian campaign of Professor Geoffrey Blainey in 1984 for me to hear the wake-up call!  Twelve years later, in 1996, the apparent endorsement of Pauline Hanson’s tirade against Asian Australians by John Howard, the PM, a Methodist converted to Anglicanism, put paid to my rosy outlook that multiculturalism had blossomed on the terrain of our racist past. And when Kim Beasley, the Opposition Leader, a Catholic, caved in to John Howard’s opportunistic scapegoating of the Tampa asylum seekers during the 2001 election campaign, my faith in our political leaders doing the right thing when circumstances demand, plummeted. In all this, the media played an enthusiastic role in selectively fertilising the populist strain, and manoeuvred political leaders into straying from their ethical and moral bearings. 

When the Chinese first appeared in any number during the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s they were subject to free speech torments and intimidation: face to face, in newspapers, and in rallies.

And as newspaper articles and cartoons of the time attest they were treated as vermin for the half century before Federation. In time they also became convenient scapegoats for the major political parties, a fate that seems to have befallen the asylum seekers who have come by boat since the Tampa machinations of 2001.

“Free speech” gave birth to developments which condemned the Chinese in Australia to a hundred years of systematic and institutionalised oppression until after the end of WWII.

One brief re-telling of Brisbane’s own Night of Broken Glass will remind us of the vulnerability and callousness of civil society to untrammelled free speech from those with personal or political agendas and ready access to the media.  

At about 8pm, Saturday, 5 May 1888, a ‘Chinaman’ was seen chasing a white youth running from that Chinaman’s tobacconist shop into Albert St. The lad had not paid for goods he had taken.  In no time the Chinaman was set upon by a bunch of white youths who knocked him to the ground and relieved him of his wallet. Realising his mistake, Ding Chee turned tail and managed to get back into his shop. It was then that the first stone crashed onto a glass window on the upper storey. In the ensuing  four hours a white mob, reaching 2000 at its peak, managed to stone, and loot at will, most if not all Chinese premises in Brisbane city and the Fortitude Valley.

It was election night, and most of the crowd tarrying in Albert St had remained to celebrate the anticipated victory of the Opposition Leader, Sir Thomas McIlraith. They were rewarded: he won by an unprecedented margin. He had campaigned on the ‘total and immediate exclusion of the Chinese’. The Premier, Sir Samuel Griffith, had pleaded that the Chinese question was essentially resolved by various legislation which had reduced the number of Chinese in the colony. But the media and cultural warriors were adamant that only Sir Thomas would do to rid them of the Chinese. There were then 200 Chinese in Brisbane, one to every 430 Europeans – just .23% of the population. Yet the people in Brisbane were readily duped into believing that they were being swamped by these despicable celestials from an unyieldingly ancient and heathen empire.

In due course the Brisbane Supreme Court found Robert Walsh, the only man arrested on the night, not guilty of malicious damage to property; and soon afterward the Queensland Government declined a request from the Chinese for compensation.

What was the role of free speech in all this?

On the morning of the election The Boomerang published the 12^th and last weekly episode of William Lane’s dystopian novel of race war, White or Yellow. Ray Evans wrote:

By this final episode, Lane’s fertile imagination and his crescendos of rhetoric had led his Brisbane readers through the extended novelty of viewing their city as a centre for interracial bloodshed. As his plot unfolded, fictional Chinese were forcibly subdued and even lynched for their “desecration” of white women and their assumption of wealth and power…

At the beginning of Evans’ chapter on Night of Broken Glass he quoted William Lane’s article in The Boomerang on 3 March 1888:

Up jumped John Saxby… ‘If we give these heathens time to organise they’ll be too strong for us. They are all men and we have our women. We have got our fellows mad with excitement … Let us strike while the iron is hot and before they are ready … Let us terrorise them so they will never recover … we can fire Chinatown within the hour. We can burn down every Chinese store and house and plough up every Chinese garden … And we can start to do this throughout Queensland, perhaps throughout Australia, this very night.

This was just one article amongst many of the same kind over the previous months and years.

How much credit can we give to this series of well organised free speech in the media to the conflagration of Brisbane’s’ Night of Broken Glass, which preceded Kristallnacht by half a century? It must have helped.

Mulling over this dark page of our history reminds me of the efforts of a talkback radio host who added fuel to the Cronulla Riots with his free speech urging his listeners to gather at Cronulla beach to teach the “usurping” Lebanese a lesson on who owns the beach. 

And I despair over the way we have free-speeched ourselves into accepting that the boat people are a threat to our national sovereignty, our way of life, just as the Chinese were made into the likeness of swarming pests in the decades leading up to Federation. This continuing drama, opportunistically premiered in the Tampa elections of 2001, has had more episodes than the Danish television series The Killing only that ours is a real life tragedy played out through political one-upmanship, not unlike that which led to Brisbane’s Night of Broken Glass 125 years ago.

In an ideal society the able minded might indeed use ridicule to dismiss the free speech of bigots, as our newly installed Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson, has opined in The Australian. But history tells a different story. The Jews in Germany were by any measure outstanding citizens well integrated into German society.  Yet they were not in a position to effectively neutralise Hilter’s free speech that fomented anti-Jewish feelings among the common people, much less to engage in ridicule.  In Australia, before 1901, the Chinese were regarded as vermin to be got rid of by hook or by crook. In contrast to the Jews in Germany, the Chinese were largely poverty stricken peasants, duped by the dream of gold in a foreign land; they had no means of speaking up and resorted largely to keeping out of trouble. And few in the mainstream felt strongly enough to speak up on their behalf.

After 1901, they became tolerated aliens whose lives would be roundly curtailed until they would expire entirely under the strangling tentacles of the White Australia Policy. Nevertheless this newly allotted status - from vermin to tolerated aliens - was for the Chinese a reprieve. This trend would continue in Australian fiction, during the following decades. The ‘Chinaman’ would be rehabilitated as a hard-working, honest and dependable minion who was above all loyal to his white employer. They had gained a new persona: “Chinese with white hearts”, yellow outside but white inside, now deemed to have  absorbed the values of our Anglo culture. A price was paid in due course however: for generations many Chinese families, in Queensland at least, would deliberately not hand down any of their cultural heritage to their children, to give them their best chance in life, to fulfil the perceived expectations of White Australia.

Thus the consequence of untrammelled free speech by the powerful at the expense of those with little power brought about cultural and identity denial for at least a generation or two after 1901.

These days Chinese immigrants are doing all right. Too right they are. Our immigration policies are biased in favour of those with money and/or skills, a proxy for brains. But we seem to have been free-speeched, again, by politicians and cultural warriors, to become insensitive to the cries of the mentally disintegrating boat people jam-packed into barb-wired camps purchased in third world countries, the very people who will on past experience mostly end up in Australia as genuine refugees to weave in time another patch onto our Australian canvas.

In our increasingly corporatized winner-takes-all society, free speech, in a realistic and effective sense, is largely available only to those with money to buy space in the media, with an established persona attractive to media corporations, or favoured by editors and custodians in cultural institutions.  The recent WA Senate re-run is a portent that as a society we have yet to reach a maturity when free speech can be relied upon to fertilise our democratic spirit in a wholesome and even-handed manner.

Section 18C ain’t broke.  I have read that most cases it has midwifed have ended up with reconciliated undertakings. Only a small proportion goes to court. This does not seem an unwholesome outcome. There is of course the Bolt case, but one inconvenient judgement for a powerful and well buttressed journalist, found to have been sloppy with facts and scant on acting in good faith, does not make for the wholesale jettisoning of a cultural compass refined over decades of agonising over the stains of our racist birth at Federation.

So given my observations, I cannot help but feel that it would be wise to safeguard our maturing society against a return of the days when a powerful few could readily incite the ordinary many, to revel in their intimidation of those people they took a dislike to. The Exposure Draft, regrettably, has the potential to embolden bigots and cultural warriors to do just that.