Yesterday’s piece on Australian identity produced the kind of comments section that tells you more than any poll could. Taylor Hyslop put it plainly: “Real Australians pay their taxes, use toilets, put their rubbish in the bin and speak the language. Skin colour is irrelevant.” Then came Ron Wilton: “We have over one million Indian-born people in Australia. That’s too many from one demographic.” And Daniel Banks, who kept it brief: “Indians will never be Australian!!!”
Kate Collier, to her credit, pointed out that her Indian-heritage friends’ ancestors arrived in Australia in 1885 — the same year her own family came from the UK.
Kate’s friends are the exception. Most Indian-Australians arrived in the last two or three decades, through migration programs that Australia designed, advertised, and approved. The country invited them. Now a corner of the internet would like to uninvite them.
There is a reason this argument keeps resurfacing. It has a name, and a history, one that is specific, documented, and far more recent than most people are comfortable admitting.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was the very first piece of legislation passed by the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia. Before roads, before defence budgets, before anything a functioning nation requires, the new parliament’s opening act was to enshrine in law who was allowed to be here — based on race.
The mechanism was elegant in its cruelty. Immigration officers were given the power to administer a 50-word dictation test to any non-European arriving in the country — in any European language of the officer’s choosing. An immigrant could be fluent in English and still fail, because the officer would simply switch to Welsh, or Scottish Gaelic, or any other language the applicant was unlikely to know. A confidential government memo from 1906 instructed officials directly: if the immigrant can write English, the test must be dictated in “some other European language, one with which the immigrant is not acquainted.”
Most Indian-Australians arrived in the last two or three decades, through migration programs that Australia designed, advertised, and approved. The country invited them. Now a corner of the internet would like to uninvite them
Between 1901 and 1909, only 52 people out of 1,359 tested passed. After 1909, no one passed at all.
The test was extended in 1932 so that it could be given to anyone within their first five years of residence, an unlimited number of times. People who were already living in Australia could be expelled. In 1947, a woman named Annie O’Keefe, a refugee from Indonesia who had survived the Second World War, was pressured to leave Australia along with her seven children, despite having nowhere else to go. This was not a border policy. It was a system of racial intimidation directed at people who were already here.
There were Indians in Australia before federation. Historians put the number somewhere between 4,700 and 7,600 at the turn of the 20th century — hawkers, merchants, camel drivers in the outback, labourers, a small number of professionals. By 1911 that number had fallen to 3,698. By 1921, to around 2,200. The White Australia Policy had done its work.
Then there is the story of the Anglo-Indians, people of mixed British and Indian ancestry and products of the colonial encounter in India, who occupied an uncomfortable liminal position in the racial architecture of the Empire. In August 1947, as the violence of Partition tore through the subcontinent, around 700 Anglo-Indians arrived in Fremantle aboard the troopship HMAS Manoora, fleeing the carnage. The then-Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, had to be pressured to allow them to stay. He had stipulated that use of the Manoora “should be confined to Australians and to British people of pure European descent.” Any application from someone with one Indian parent, he declared, would be automatically ineligible.
These were people who spoke English as their mother tongue, had served in the British military, wore Western dress, had been raised on British culture — and still, the colour of their skin placed them outside the definition of who was welcome. Some eventually stayed. Their descendants are Australians today. And there is a particular, painful irony in the fact that people who fled colonial violence only to face racial bureaucracy in Australia are now claimed by descendants of that same bureaucratic system as proof that “real” Australians come in only one shade.
The White Australia Policy was formally dismantled by 1973. What followed was fifty years of genuinely remarkable multicultural nation-building — doctors, engineers, scientists, writers, teachers, athletes, public servants of every background remaking a country in real time. But history does not disappear simply because a law is repealed. The anxieties it was designed to manage do not evaporate. They recede from view, and then they find a new outlet.
What has changed globally in recent years is that those anxieties now have a megaphone — and a very specific political context. The rise of China as a superpower, the emergence of India as the world’s most populous nation and a growing economic force, and the declining share of global influence held by what might broadly be called the Anglo-American world — these shifts have produced a political reaction that was entirely predictable. Trumpism, in its various international forms, is in significant part a symptom of that reaction: a reassertion of white Western supremacy at the precise moment when it feels most under pressure. The same forces that drove Brexit, that powered the AfD’s rise in Germany, that produced the nativist convulsions across France, Hungary, and Italy, are at work in Australia. The “March for Australia” rallies of 2025, with their neo-Nazi adjacencies and their talk of “remigration,” were not a local aberration. They were an outpost of a global movement that is frightened — genuinely, viscerally frightened — of the world as it is actually becoming.
history does not disappear simply because a law is repealed. The anxieties it was designed to manage do not evaporate. They recede from view, and then they find a new outlet
The South Africa Lesson Nobody Wants to Learn
There is one historical moment that should be held up as a mirror to all of this, and it is the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
White minority rule in South Africa was not a fringe position. It was a complete system of governance, law, land ownership, education, and social control — backed by one of the most militarised states on the continent. And yet it fell. Not overnight, and not without enormous suffering, but it fell. Because the logic of using law and violence to enforce racial hierarchy is ultimately self-defeating. It cannot hold.
Elon Musk, who posts about Australians becoming “an endangered species” while styling himself as the voice of demographic common sense, is himself a product of that collapsed system. He was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, the son of a wealthy white South African family. He did not stay. He moved to Canada, then to the United States, where he made his fortune and his public identity. The world knows him as an American. Nobody questions whether he truly belongs in the United States.
That is the privilege of whiteness in the global imagination — it travels without requiring justification. A South African-born billionaire becomes simply “American.” A second-generation Indian-Australian, born and raised in Melbourne, will be asked for the rest of their life where they are really from.
One comment on the previous piece observed that Aboriginal Australians are “mostly Indian by DNA proven already.” The science is more nuanced than that, but there is something real in it. Genetic research published in journals including Nature and Scientific American has shown that some Aboriginal Australians carry traces of DNA linking to population movements from the Indian subcontinent approximately 4,000 years ago — a migration that also coincided with the arrival of the dingo, which is genetically closest to Indian dogs. More broadly, mitochondrial DNA links Indigenous Australians and certain isolated tribal groups in South India to a common ancestor from around 55,000 years ago. The ancient human story of this continent is not a story of racial separation. It is a story of migration, contact, and genetic weaving across tens of thousands of years.
And then there is the question of what “Indian” even means. India is not an ethnicity. It is a subcontinent of 1.4 billion people spanning dozens of languages, hundreds of ethnic groups, and an extraordinary range of physical appearances. A Tamil from Chennai, a Kashmiri from Srinagar, and a Naga from Nagaland look nothing alike. People from Manipur, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, the northeast states whose populations have Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian ancestry, are routinely mistaken for Chinese, Korean, or Thai. They are Indian. When someone on the internet declares that “Indians will never be Australian,” they are not describing a coherent category. They are gesturing at a skin tone and calling it a nationality. It is a confusion of race for identity, the same confusion that has been driving immigration panics for two centuries.
The change was a conscious choice in 1973, shaped by both values and economic reality. It will not be undone by social media posts, extremist rallies, or commentary from billionaires
The Change Is Already Here
The most important thing to understand about this moment is that the argument has already been lost by those making it most loudly, and the loss is not just moral. It is factual.
There are one million Indian-born people in Australia. There are communities whose grandparents built homes here in the 1970s, whose parents became doctors and ran businesses and paid into the superannuation system, whose children are now entering parliament, running hospitals, writing novels. The change that Ron Wilton and others find so alarming did not happen to Australia. It happened as Australia — as the conscious expression of a nation that decided, in 1973, to become something larger and more honest than the racial enclosure it had been.
That decision came partly from moral reckoning and partly from economic reality. It will not be undone by social media posts, by rallies with connections to neo-Nazis, or by billionaires rage-posting about fertility rates between rocket launches.
Apartheid collapsed. The White Australia Policy was dismantled. Every attempt across the modern era to legislate racial permanence has eventually broken down, without exception. The ghosts of these policies linger — in the comments sections, in the smirks at international conferences, in the pause after you say where you are from. But they are ghosts. The living have already moved on.
We are the change. We are not going anywhere.
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