“English Institutions and the Irish Race”: Race and Politics in Late Nineteenth‐Century Australia

Abstract

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English‐speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely‐reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an “alien” race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English‐speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous “white” settler society.

Emigration State: Race, Citizenship and Settler Imperialism in Modern British History, c. 1850–1972

“…In the settler colonies themselves, opinion was divided over the coordinating role of Britain in its emigration state. The different diasporas from the four nations struggled over the ‘Britishness’ of ‘Greater Britain’, with some commentators differentiating between Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish migrants as different national races, challenging the idea that Europeans were all rendered equally ‘white’ at the frontiers of the settler Empire (Hall & Malcolm, 2016; McCarthy, 2017, p. 490) 21 . Yet while ethnic, racial and religious prejudices were certainly carried from the UK to the settler colonies, these differences were subsequently transformed by opposition to Asian migration and by the structure of settler‐colonial expropriation of Indigenous peoples (Lake & Reynolds, 2008).…”

A Changing Focus: The Evolution of Irish Step Dancing Competitions in Australia

“…sympathize and conspire with the murderer. (The Sydney Morning Herald 1947) This popular conceptualization of Irish people as being culturally and morally inferior is also demonstrated in nineteenth century newspaper advertisements for positions vacant, which often carried the caveat "No Irish Need Apply" along with a description of the tasks to be performed by the prospective employee (Hall and Malcolm 2016). Finally, Irish immigrants were frequently depicted in cartoons with simian facial features, a practice which had its origins in a dubious but widely accepted scientific theory which claimed that certain people groups' physical features represented particular behavioral characteristics.…”

“…The situation for Irish immigrants in Australia up until the early twentieth century was dire; they were treated with disdain by the British administration (D. Hall 2014; Hall and Malcolm 2016; O'Farrell 1986), and the subsequent positioning of the Irish immigrant community has a direct bearing on the historical analysis of Irish dancing practices in Australia. The marginalization of people who had migrated from Ireland to Australia (for whatever reason) provides fundamental contextualization for step dancing 4 within the settler society.…”