On her arrival in Sydney on 18 August 1902, Vida was greeted at the wharf by a breathless Rose Scott and the exclamation: We’ve got it! Isn’t it lovely?
Vida didn’t immediately understand why her friend and mentor was so animated. The Federal Franchise Act had passed in July; she knew that already—she had celebrated the victory all over America. But this news of Scott’s was hot off the presses. The bullish New South Wales Legislative Council had finally passed one of the suffrage bills that the lower house regularly sent up: New South Wales women now had adult suffrage. It did not yet include the right to stand for parliament, but surely the scales had been irrevocably tipped. It was only a matter of time before Vida’s own state of Victoria enfranchised her women too.
That night at a meeting of the Womanhood Suffrage League Vida congratulated Scott on adding one more star to the suffrage flag.1 The gathered women were cheerful almost to the degree of hilarity, reported the DAILY TELEGRAPH.
Almost. Vida was not so certain that victory in New South Wales made adult suffrage in Victoria a lay-down misère.
In fact, there had not even been anything inevitable about the passage of the Federal Franchise Act, despite section 41 of the constitution. After all, it was not womanhood suffrage that had been enshrined in the founding document, just the promise that no citizens would lose their existing voting rights in the federal arena. This assurance sounded admirable in the making, but had proved complicated in the enacting, as Vida could now read in HANSARD.
The first parliament, inaugurated on that great day in May 1901, had pledged to introduce at an early date a measure to concede the Federal Franchise to women, as Louisa Lawson happily published in THE DAWN.2 Edmund Barton was on side. Originally an Anti, Barton had been outmanoeuvred into accepting adult suffrage at the constitutional convention in Adelaide in 1897 and, by the time he was sworn in as Australia’s first prime minister, he had completed a full U-turn, having publicly changed his tune in his election speech at Maitland on 17 January 1901.
The suffragists, having learnt from bitter experience not to take such commitments at face value, put their shoulders to the wheel of Barton’s new bandwagon. In early 1901, Vida Goldstein wrote to him seeking clarification of his position as prime minister of the new nation. Would he kindly give us an assurance that the Bill will be introduced in the first session of the Federal Parliament…? Rose Scott amped up the pressure in March, writing to enquire whether Barton would advocate the immediate and uniform enfranchisement of women? The Equal Franchise Association of Brisbane expressed its expectation that you may succeed in striking the political shackles from a class which is half the world and Mother of the other half.
Countering the barrage, Mr P. J. Gandon, Honorary Secretary of the Anti-Suffrage League, urged Barton to reconsider his stance and recognise that the evils underlying such an extension of the Franchise are both insidious and far-reaching. It was only a few women who agitate for votes…a mere handful of ladies with masculine ambitions.3
Barton did not renege. The Franchise Bill was scheduled to be introduced in the second session of parliament. The business end of legislation came first: the Consolidated Revenue Act (nos 1 and 3), the Acts Interpretation Act (no. 2), the Audit Act (no. 4), the Customs Act (no. 6): the machinery measures. But after they were out of the way, the path was clear to introduce bills that would regulate the lives of citizens rather than the processes of government.
No time was lost, noted William Guthrie Spence, a Scots-born union organiser and the Labor member for Darling, in tackling the big measures—immigration, adult suffrage and the deportation of Pacific Islanders from Queensland. Integral to all three measures, was the question [of] how white the Federation is to be, as the Perth WESTERN MAIL bluntly stated.4
The first of the acts that would determine this question was the Immigration Restriction Act, designed to implement what was known at the time, and has been known ever since, as the White Australia Policy. There was no gilding the lily about its intentions and no perceived need to obfuscate the desired result. As Spence wrote in his history of the labour movement, AUSTRALIA’S AWAKENING:
The exclusion of alien and coloured races gives a chance for the development on the Australian island continent of a great nation of the white races…that ideal has come to stay.5
It was Australia’s special destiny to make brighter the lives of the masses, and to thinkers and policymakers like Spence, ‘bright’ meant untinted white.
The unambiguous top plank of the Labor Party platform was from the start a White Australia. The party stands for racial purity and racial efficiency, explained Spence, industrially, mentally, morally and intellectually. It was not only that brown or black men must not be allowed to do the jobs of white men for a lower wage, and thus degrade the living standards of Australian families. It was also about national character: maintaining the necessary high standard required that there be no admixture with the white race.
As Methodist lay preacher William Judkins wrote in the Australian REVIEW OF REVIEWS, Our contiguity to Asia, with its teeming millions of dusky and yellow people ever on the look out for fresh fields in which to settle, constitutes a menace. The highly politically loaded word ‘protection’ referred, then as now, not just to certain levers that could be pulled to regulate the Australian economy—as in tariff protection. It also implied control of Australia’s population: border protection. The White Australia Policy, Judkins argued (articulating a generally held opinion), was based not on animosity to coloured people but on an ideal of life which can only be realized by means of a living wage. This ideal pertained to material prosperity, to be sure—but a prosperity that rested on the bedrock of unquestioned racial superiority.
We hold Australia in trust for the white race, with its nobler ideals of religion and social culture…that indefinable pride of race, which, like a family tie, holds us to all the traditions of the past.6
A family that could abide no strangers coming to dinner. A table at which there was room for only one race: the British ‘race’.
White Australia was already a well-established Australian doctrine and practice by Federation, with the various colonies having decreed restrictions against non-Europeans and Chinese migrants since the 1840s.7 The Immigration Restriction Act simply affirmed the principle in federal law. It was also a way for the new upstart nation to publicly pronounce its undiminished loyalty to the mother country. Nationalism would not interfere with imperialism, for the racial blood tie—the crimson thread of kinship—inextricably bound Australia to Britain. Indeed, some contemporary commentators, like expat Australian author Florence Gay, argued that the imperial movement was practically inaugurated by the Commonwealth’s Act of Federation in 1901.8
If the Labor Party nailed its (monochromatic) colours to the mast of racial purity, so too did Australian liberals. The need for the Immigration Restriction Act is the one matter on which the Commonwealth is united, reported the London MORNING POST in September 1901; White Australia was an article of the national faith.9 Alfred Deakin’s election platform included fiscal peace and preferential trade for White Australia, binding the issues of tariff protection and racial self-protection in one.10 Deakin even claimed that Australia’s national ideals were Liberal ideals: the ideal of the Constitution is equality and uniformity in all national matters…a white man’s country from north to south.11 Liberals like Deakin saw themselves as the natural progressives, and cast Labor Party members in the role of reactionary obstructionists.
This division emerged in the debate of the Immigration Restriction Act in that first parliamentary session. Though all sides of politics agreed with the policy (Conservatives completing the triangle) the mechanisms for exclusion were contested. How would impure aliens be detected at the border? After all, many British subjects in the Crown colonies and protectorates were decidedly dusky.
An education test was the preferred method, out of consideration for English fears and prejudices. William Spence explained the Liberals’ approach:
If the person desirous of entering Australia is considered undesirable the department finds out some language which it knows he does not understand, and then dictates fifty words to him. Of course he fails, and is then deported back to where he came from.
Labor didn’t approve. This is a round-about and mean sort of way to accomplish the end sought, argued Spence. It also depended too much on customs officials who may not in all cases be in sympathy with the spirit of the Act itself. No, it was better to say straight out that we didn’t want any other than the white race here.12
The question of whiteness—of purity and danger—did not end at immigration, the regulation of who could come to Australia’s shores and under what circumstances. It also infused debate in the Franchise Bill, regulating the rights of those who were already Australian. For it was this piece of legislation that would determine eligibility for the fundamental right of citizenship: the right to vote for those who make the laws that bind us.13
It was not only women who were now being considered for citizenship status. If the new nation had a higher aspiration for a pure-bred population capable of full citizenship, as the MORNING POST correspondent read the situation, who would make the grade of purity?14 Who would qualify, or be disqualified? The ideally fair basis, said the WESTERN MAIL, would be to recognise no colour line inside the Commonwealth, however much stress may be laid on it in dealing with new immigrants.15
But politics is rarely ‘ideally’ anything, as the women’s suffrage debate in Western Australia had shown. There, just three years earlier, women were given the right to vote by a Parliament to whom the idea had been abhorrent, as the KALGOORLIE MINER, the mouthpiece of the miners, knew only too well. Could the obverse now be true? Could a house of fair-minded liberals shoot itself in the democratic foot?
From its inauguration, the Federal Parliament contained more than its share of progressives. Political reactionaries were in the minority, as might be expected in a uniquely representative institution elected on the basis of ‘one man, one vote’ in four states, and ‘one adult, one vote’ in two. Except for matters of the tariff, which were hotly contested, broad democratic rights were not a source of contention. As the KALGOORLIE MINER put it, the anti-democrats in either Federal Chamber are too few to make a decent fight.16 The issue was more to do with what complexion of democracy Australia wanted.
The root policy question to be determined by the Federal Parliament was not who would qualify for the franchise (all adults), but whom to disqualify. It was like a game of citizenship Kerplunk: pulling out democratic planks and watching which marbles might fall through the gaps.17
On 10 April 1902, Bill no. 8 of 1902 was introduced into the Senate by Richard O’Connor, a native-born New South Welshman, and a member of Barton’s ministry.18 It was autumn in Melbourne, where the Federal Parliament was still squatting in the sandstone buildings of the Victorian Parliament while the new capital was built, and the days were getting shorter. The Franchise Bill was succinct too. It had only five sections.
The principal one was section 3, which in its original draft form provided for one man one vote.19 By the time it reached the Senate, the bill provided that all adult persons not under 21 years of age, whether male or female, married or unmarried, could vote in a federal election. The qualifications were: such adults must be born in Australia (natural born) or be a naturalised British subject; they must have lived in Australia for six months continuously prior to the election and be on the electoral roll of any federal electoral division. It was section 4 that began pulling out the planks and sending the marbles tumbling.
Some disqualifications were universally agreed: those attainted of treason or under sentence for an offence punishable by more than one year’s imprisonment in any part of the King’s dominions, or of unsound mind were automatically excluded.20
The clause that stirred debate was this: No aboriginal native of Asia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific or person of the half blood. These were the words of the original bill. Subsequent amendments saw the word Australia inked in after Asia, person of the half blood crossed out, and an exemption made for Maoris, so that the clause as it was finally debated read: No aboriginal native of Asia Australia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand.21 One other important rider was added: unless so entitled under Section 41 of the Constitution. This provision would save some Indigenous Australians from what was about to happen next.
On the question of the female franchise, most members were in favour—at least on the constitutional grounds of uniformity if not on the principle of political equality. Labor senator for Queensland Thomas Glassey dubbed it a Bill of no mean order.
I believe that when the history of the Parliament of the Commonwealth comes to be written, the conferring of this immense boon upon so many people, not as a privilege, but on the grounds of justice and equity, will receive the commendation of the historian.
Not all believed that the parliament was on the right side of history. Senator Edward Pulsford (Free Trade Party, NSW) tried to have the word ‘male’ inserted as a qualification. This measure is being forced upon us against the general feeling and against the general tendency of legislation in Anglo Saxon countries, he barked.22 As a point of order, Senator Higgs reminded his colleagues that section 41 of the constitution prohibited such an amendment, whereupon Pulsford suggested that Western Australia and South Australia may in their wisdom consider it to drop woman suffrage and then the franchise would be uniform. (He was dreaming.)
Senator Major Albert Gould (Free Trade, NSW) was also against the measure. He put the very fact of the bill’s existence down to the persistency of certain ladies—there was no doubt the community at large did not want it. John Downer (Conservative, SA) said he would only vote for the bill because he believed that women of independent means should have the right to safeguard their property interests. All other women would simply vote just as their husbands, fathers, brothers or sweethearts vote. It was not a progressive bill at all, Downer corrected, but rather a highly conservative measure which he would vote for solely on that account.
James Stewart came to the same point from a completely different direction. The opposition to the female franchise, held the Queensland Labor senator, comes from the rich. Women going down coal mines because male labour is too dear, now that is degrading, he argued; voting was not. And another stupid assertion: that women would neglect their homes. Election day is one out of every three years, he scoffed.
Does anyone imagine that in the interval between one election and another a woman will interest herself in nothing but politics—that she will devote her mornings and her noons and her evenings to politics! politics! politics!—nothing but politics? Do they believe that when her husband gets up in the morning, instead of his breakfast, she will give him Hansard?
And as for the ridiculous proposition that women would only vote for young and handsome members, well, the honourable senators returned from South Australia do not number a single dude amongst them… all fine, big, rough, upstanding men, but not particularly handsome.
Stewart had the last say that night, before the Senate adjourned at 10.20 p.m.:
I hope that the Bill will become law very speedily [so] that every man and woman on this continent will be invested with full political power; that in this matter Australia will show an example to the whole civilized world.
Lofty sentiments. But would every man and woman in Australia really get a vote, or only the so-called ‘civilised’ ones?
Senators of all stripes—Labor, Liberal and Tory, Free Trade and Protectionist—were simply apoplectic at the idea that Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants might be considered in the democratic catchall: all adult persons not under 21 years of age, whether male or female, married or unmarried. It was not simply that Aboriginal Australians were considered racially inferior. In the thinking of the day, the Aborigines were an historical anomaly.
Little more than a hundred years ago, wrote the MORNING POST correspondent, expressing a near universal sentiment, Australia was a Dark Continent in every sense of the term. There were no white men and the native population—as black as ebony—was sparse at best. Now there were at least sixty thousand Aborigines but, in another century, the probability is that Australia will be a white continent with not a black or even dark skin among its inhabitants…the yellow, the brown, the copper-coloured are to be forbidden to land anywhere. The Aboriginal race had died out in the south and were dying out in the north and west, even though most gently treated. 23 It was an existential anomaly to legislate for the citizenship of people who barely existed now and would soon cease to do so at all.
The debate was passionate, fiery and breathtakingly candid. It was Scots-born, Harrow-educated Western Australian senator Alexander Matheson, 3rd Baronet, who introduced the amendment to add Australians to the list of debarred aboriginal natives. It appears hardly credible, he reasoned, but apparently it is a fact, that in South Australia any aboriginal is entitled to be placed upon the roll. And by ‘any’, he meant the shocking fact of ‘every’: so far as I can judge any lubra or gin is entitled to the same privilege.24 Matheson asked the South Australian members in the Senate whether any such person had taken advantage of this privilege. Senator Playford reassured him that it was rarely the case, except for one or two natives who have become civilized, by which, he clarified, they had acquired property and been educated by white men.
Matheson conceded that under section 41, no federal legislation could retract the rights of Indigenous South Australians. But, he demanded: why go out of the way in our federal legislation to give rights to aborigines which they do not possess today?
Surely it is absolutely repugnant to the greater number of the people of the Commonwealth that an aboriginal man, or aboriginal lubra or gin—a horrible, degraded, dirty creature—should have the same rights, simply by virtue of being 21 years of age, that we have, after some debate to-day, decided to give to our wives and daughters.
Apart from the prospect being repugnant and absurd, Senator Matheson believed the enfranchisement of the Aboriginal population was illogical, as section 127 of the constitution, which provided for boundaries and quotas for electoral rolls, expressly excluded Indigenous Australians. In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, Matheson cited, aboriginal natives shall not be counted. If they did not count for the purposes of the electoral rolls, reckoned Matheson, how could they possibly count as voters?
And if Indigenous Australians were counted—if the sixty thousand-odd Aborigines of Western Australia were registered as citizens—why, it would entitle that state to have an extra representative in the House, surely a subversion of the democratic process. Not only that—Matheson turned to the problem of the feudal outback—if Aborigines had the franchise, there would be no stopping the mischief of the real old crusted conservatives, the squatters of Western Australia. These money-grubbers would put every one of these savages and their gins upon the federal rolls. The nation will be swamped by aboriginal votes. It would be the same in Queensland and the Northern Territory, which swarms with the most active aboriginals.
Matheson’s views were echoed, slightly less luridly, by other senators. While I believe in the widest franchise possible for people of our own colour, race and civilisation, began Stewart, I draw the line very strictly at uncivilised barbarians like the aborigines of Australia.25 It was all very well for the southern states to shine liberal largesse on the Aborigines, he argued—they were states which in a very great measure have got rid of the black evil.
It was Senator Miles Staniford Smith (WA) who drilled down to the real heart of the issue. It would be a travesty on our legislature, he bellowed, to give the aborigines votes and put them on the same plane of citizenship as ourselves. Aborigines were simply not equal: how could one treat them as such? Further, given women’s imminent eligibility to stand for parliament, if Aborigines had the vote there would exist the possibility of their sending to the Senate or the House of Representatives a black gin!26
‘Ladies with masculine ambitions’ was a bitter enough pill to swallow. Black ladies with the legal capacity to emulate white men was a bridge too far.
There were those in the Senate who strenuously opposed inserting the word Australia in the disqualification of aboriginal natives. One of the more heated exchanges serves to illustrate the complex notion of sovereignty. South Australian Senator Playford defended the rights of the unfortunate aboriginal, whose forefathers were here perhaps tens of thousands of years before we came here. To exclude them from the franchise would be a heartless thing…and it is absurd that we should say we are so frightened of the original inhabitants of this continent that we dare not allow them the right to vote. To this preposterous notion, Senator Matheson had one thing to say:
MATHESON: Cannibals.
GLASSEY: What progress have the aborigines made?
PLAYFORD: That is no reason why we should take away from them what is their right.
GLASSEY: Simply because they have been here for a number of years we are asked to enfranchise them.
STUART: If he was an intelligent man, I should be the last to refuse him the franchise, but he is not.
Senator O’Connor, who had first introduced the bill into parliament, shook his head in shame. He rose to defend the principles of the Commonwealth as it was envisioned by those who had thrashed out the constitutional accord:
It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard of piece of savagery on our part, to treat the aboriginals, whose land we were occupying, in such a manner as to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country, simply on the ground of their colour and because they were aboriginals…surely we are not going to apply this doctrine [of] a white Australia, not only with irregularity but with a savagery which is quite unworthy of the beginning of this federation? It is a monstrous and savage application of this principle of a white Australia.27
The nation would remain white, but it must uphold that which was right. Aboriginal Australians had a claim to citizenship on the grounds of natural justice.
On that note, the Senate voted, and on 10 April, by a tally of twelve noes to eight ayes, it rejected including the word Australia in the list of aboriginal exclusions. The nation’s borders would be protected, but so too would the rights of its original inhabitants.
Temporarily. The amendment was not dead, and when it was debated in the House of Representatives two weeks later, it was the Western Australia problem that had the most purchase. Labor MP Chris Watson (later prime minister) argued that the Aborigines of Western Australia and Queensland were practically the slaves of those squatters. They could be used to turn the tide of an election. Savages and slaves would be running electorates. Hugh Mahon, the Labor member for Coolgardie (WA), argued it would be distinctly dangerous to allow the squatters of Western Australia to muster up their niggers and drive them to the polling booth to vote.
If the democrats in the House were confronted by this language, they didn’t express it. Henry Bournes Higgins, one of Victoria’s most celebrated liberals, argued that it was utterly inappropriate to grant the franchise to the aborigines, or to ask them to exercise an intelligent vote. There might be a duty to extend the suffrage to women but there was no similar constitutional obligation on the community for a uniform franchise for the aborigines. Isaac Isaacs, a fellow Victorian member and key participant in the 1897 federal convention, agreed with Higgins. He sided with Senator Matheson’s constitutional argument, that being excluded from counting on the rolls was an intimation that it was intended to exclude natives from participating in power. And he queried whether the Federation Fathers’ vision of ‘One Nation, One Destiny’ could be fulfilled if aborigines voted. How, for instance, he asked, would these blacks vote on the question of a white Australia? Tasmanian Edward Braddon, the oldest member of the House at seventy-one, remarked that the only thing worse than conceding the female franchise was the giving of it to any of the numerous gins of the blackfellows…it can even less be claimed that the gins would give a vote which would be intelligible.
Vaiben Louis Solomon countered this argument with experience. In South Australia, he averred, the aborigines have a perfect right to the franchise and they exercise it. But Braddon was having no truck with the contention that the aborigines either deserved or were owed the franchise.
As an argument for including Australian aborigines within the provision of this measure, we are told that we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of their country by giving them votes.
Certainly the Aborigines would not be asked for their opinion on that.
In the end, when the House divided on the proposition that the word to be inserted be so inserted the ayes had it: twenty-seven to five.28
When the bill returned to the Senate a month later, O’Connor reaffirmed his strong view against depriving Aborigines of the franchise, but he conceded that the House of Representatives had decided otherwise. The prospect of our giving the franchise to the half-wild gins living with their tribe, he owned, seems to have startled some of our friends in the other House. That vision did not so startle O’Connor, but he wasn’t prepared to die in a ditch for it. We cannot have ideal consistency in this world…It is not worthwhile, for the sake of this particular provision, to stand out for our own way and so run the risk of losing the Bill.29
He would not sacrifice the most pressing issue of the day—womanhood suffrage—for the sins of the past or untold consequences in the future. In the end, the Senate accepted the House’s amendment. The Commonwealth Franchise Act was voted in without a division in the Senate, and by twenty-nine votes to six in the House of Representatives.
Commentators noted the small proportion of the seventy-five members of the House who were present to vote on the bill. Barton was absent. Deakin was paired. This is significant, noted the KALGOORLIE MINER, as showing that the victory for the rights of women was a foregone conclusion. The division was taken late at night, and many pro-suffrage members had gone home, not thinking it necessary for them to wait to vote, as the motion was certain to be carried. The MINER considered this an indication of the marvellous advance in public opinion.30
The Commonwealth Franchise Act received royal assent on 12 June 1901. It was now race, not gender, that defined the limits of Australian citizenship.31 If any of the women present in parliament to witness their historic victory were uncomfortable with the racial sting in the tail of this exceptional democracy, they were keeping mum.