Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Australia: Race and Empire

Abstract

In the 1830s and 1840s a racist labour immigration policy for New South Wales developed out of responses in the Colonial Office and the colony to proposals for the importation of indentured Indian labourers. Race, culture and willingness to work under conditions tantamount to slavery were thought to distinguish Asians from Britons. Temperate climates in Australia were to be British settler colonies, while tropical areas were to be plantation colonies, worked by non-European labourers. This paper examines the construction of racist imperial immigration policies and their implications for the colonies in eastern Australia.