Introduction: Creating White Australia: new perspectives on race, whiteness and history

As the promulgation of the White Australia Policy in 1901 would

seemingly demonstrate, ‘whiteness’ was crucial to the constitution of the

new Australian nation. And yet historians have paid remarkably little

attention to this in their studies of Australia’s past. ‘Whiteness’, as a

concept, has only recently been recognised as a significant part of the

story of Australian nationalism. In seeking to understand the operations

of ‘race’, historians have primarily looked towards Indigenous peoples

and other ‘non-white’ groups. Creating White Australia takes a fresh

approach to the questions of Australian national formation and the

crucial role of race in Australian history. Including contributions from

some of the leading scholars in Australian history as well as the work of

emerging historians, it argues that ‘whiteness’ has been central to the

racial regimes which have so profoundly shaped the development of the

Australian nation.