ABSTRACT
This article examines the wrongful labelling in the colonial and post-federation era of Chinese Australians as ‘aliens’, ‘coloured aliens’, ‘outsiders’ or those who did not belong when in fact many had equal status under the law with white settlers as ‘British subjects’, mainly through birth in British possessions in Asia or in Australia itself. Executive, legislative and judicial pronouncements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia all played into a racial discourse of alienage overriding the common law meaning regarding Chinese Australians. Existing histories have not properly taken into account the large number of Chinese Australians who were ‘natural-born’ British subjects compared to the small proportion with subject status by naturalisation. Consequently, the extent of the unlawful labelling and treatment of ethnic Chinese who had full legal belonging in Australia has been overlooked.
