Category: ‘White Australia Policy’
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New article on alien registration in inter-war australia
This is just a quick announcement that my article ‘The Bureaucratic Limits of a National Security Agenda: The Winding Road of Alien Registration in Interwar Australia’ has been published in Australian Historical Studies journal. You can download it here. If you don’t have access, please get in touch!
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The Communist Party and the ‘White Australia Policy’, 1920-45
To celebrate the submission of the manuscript for our edited collection on the history of the Australian far left in the Cold War era, I am posting an excerpt from a chapter by Jon Piccini and I on the Communist Party of Australia and immigration restrictions, primarily the ‘White Australia Policy’. The following section looks…
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The Communist Party of Australia and Anti-Colonial Activism in Papua New Guinea
This is the extended part of a paper that I wrote with Padraic Gibson for the Eric Richards’ Symposium in British and Australian History, which was held at Flinders University last week. The abstract for our paper was as below: Alongside the Communist Party of Australia’s (CPA) work for Aboriginal rights, the Party’s demands for…
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Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group
On Saturday June 2, 1978, a group of nine people gathered in a room of the Southern Cross Hotel in the Melbourne CBD to launch the National Front of Australia (NFA). According to the ASIO informant, nine people attended the meeting, including several well-known far right activists, a 16 year old schoolboy and an undercover…
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Public engagement ftw!
Two guest posts by yours truly have been published in the last two days. The first is on my research into the UK perspective on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and has been published by The Conversation. The second is on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their view of Australia as…
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New article on Australian Border Force for Salvage mag
This is just a quick post to let people know that the new left-wing magazine from the UK, Salvage (established by ex-SWPers China Miéville and Richard Seymour, amongst others) has just published an online article by me on the failure of Operation Fortitude and the Australian Border Force controversy. You can find the article here.…
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Communism, anti-racism and the ‘imperialist war’ phase in South Africa, USA and Australia, 1939-41
With the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War this week, this post is an extract from a paper that I am writing on the Communist Parties in South Africa, the United States and Australia and their agitation for black soldiers to join the war effort after the Soviet Union joined the Allies…
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British attitudes towards the ‘White Australia Policy’ in the inter-war period
I am currently writing a research article on the British Union of Fascists’ view of Australia and how it fit into the fascist view of empire in the inter-war period. As Paul Stocker has recently written, the fascist view of empire was predominantly an extension of already existing conservative attitudes towards the empire, but was…
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A Fascist View of Australia (1937)
As part of my research into how the British Union of Fascists viewed Australia during the inter-war period, I came across this description of Australia in the BUF weekly newspaper Action from May 1937, written by A. Raven Thomson (one of the BUF’s chief ‘theoreticians’): One of the Pivots of the Empire – A. Raven…
New Historical Express 