Free speech, bigotry, from a Chinese Australian perspective

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.