Michael Jackson was American. Gout Gout is Australian. ‘Aussie’ is not racial property

Few things seem to irritate white nationalists more than seeing a brown face beneath the word “Aussie”.

That irritation was laid bare again in Brisbane when activists altered Peter Drew’s street posters, covering “AUSSIE” with labels including “INDIAN”, “CHINESE” and, most revealingly, “NOT”. One of the men depicted was Bella Singh, a Punjabi migrant who settled in Cairns in the late 1800s. The apparent argument was simple: an old Commonwealth document recorded Singh’s nationality as Indian, therefore calling him Aussie was somehow historically fraudulent.

It is worth thinking about what is really being claimed here.

Nobody disputes that Bella Singh was Indian. Nobody disputes that Monga Khan, another face made famous through Drew’s work, came from British India. The question is why “Indian” must cancel out “Aussie”.

Why is Aussie treated like prime real estate, a property title to be guarded, with someone standing at the gate deciding whose ancestry qualifies?

If an Indian face carrying the word Aussie is capable of living rent-free in the nationalist mind, that says rather more about nationalism than it does about the Indian.

There is another historical problem with the attempt to use Singh’s papers as a major revelation. Australian citizenship did not legally exist until 1949. At Federation, the formal civic status was British subject. Australian citizenship came into force with the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 on 26 January 1949. So demanding that Bella Singh or Monga Khan produce a modern Australian nationality from documents written decades earlier is applying a legal category that did not yet exist.

Monga Khan arrived in Victoria in 1895, worked as a hawker around regional Victoria and remained connected to Australia until his death in Ararat in 1930. Bella Singh came from Punjab to Cairns in the late nineteenth century. They were people who lived here, worked here and formed part of Australian society while laws explicitly distinguished people according to race.

Peter Drew’s posters make an argument about belonging. They do not pretend these people arrived carrying Australian passports.

And that argument should make us think.

The Australian Parliament’s own historical account of early nationhood describes Federation-era Australia as being shaped around “whiteness” and “Britishness”. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, the foundation of the White Australia policy, was designed to preserve that racial and cultural conception of the new federation.

That is history. It is not a genetic deed granting perpetual ownership of Australianness to white people.

The British imperial economy was global. Australia did not develop inside an economic glass box. British money poured into the Australian colonies. Between 1870 and 1913, about 8 per cent of Britain’s total foreign investment went to Australia, according to Reserve Bank historical analysis. Economic historians have separately documented substantial financial transfers from colonial India into Britain and their importance to Britain’s balance of payments

Go further back and the claim becomes stranger still. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are Australia’s First Peoples, with current research placing their presence on this continent at upwards of 60,000 years. If length of ancestry is going to determine who has the strongest claim to the land, an Anglo-Saxon racial hierarchy collapses before the argument has properly begun.

European settlement transformed Australia. British institutions, capital, technology, labour and migration helped build the modern state. That is also history and there is no reason to deny it.

But even this story becomes distorted when it is reduced to “our forefathers built Australia”.

Whose forefathers?

The British imperial economy was global. Australia did not develop inside an economic glass box. British money poured into the Australian colonies. Between 1870 and 1913, about 8 per cent of Britain’s total foreign investment went to Australia, according to Reserve Bank historical analysis. Economic historians have separately documented substantial financial transfers from colonial India into Britain and their importance to Britain’s balance of payments.

This does not mean we can draw a straight line from a tax collected in India to a railway sleeper laid in Australia. History is rarely that convenient. But it does mean the old imperial world was deeply interconnected, with capital and resources moving through London between colonies and continents.

Shashi Tharoor made this point famous in his Oxford Union argument on colonialism, citing historical estimates that India accounted for roughly 23 per cent of the world economy before British domination and less than 4 per cent when Britain left. Economic historian Angus Maddison’s reconstruction gives the same broad direction, estimating India at about 24.4 per cent of world GDP in 1700 and 4.2 per cent in 1950. These are historical estimates rather than an audited balance sheet, and scholars debate how much of the decline should be attributed directly to colonial rule.

That qualification matters. I would not throw around the viral US$45 trillion colonial extraction figure as though every historian accepts the calculation. It comes from economist Utsa Patnaik and depends on assumptions about accumulated transfers and interest. We do not need an extravagant number to recognise that empire involved extraction, trade, investment, military power and movement of wealth on a vast scale.

So when someone says their ancestors “built Australia”, my response is: yes, perhaps they helped. So did people whose names were never carved onto buildings. So did labourers, miners, farmers and migrants. And before any of them, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had societies, cultures, economies and law on this continent for tens of thousands of years.

The baton keeps moving.

That is what national identity does.

Michael Jackson was American. His race did not require an asterisk after the word. He was born in Gary, Indiana, grew up in an African-American family and became one of the most recognisable American cultural figures of the twentieth century.

Gout Gout is Australian.

He was born in Brisbane in 2007 after his parents migrated from South Sudan. World Athletics lists the country he represents with one word: Australia. Australian Athletics records him as Brisbane-born. Nobody watching him compete for this country needs his skin colour explained before the stopwatch starts.

Bella Singh was Indian. He was part of the Australian story.

Monga Khan was from British India. He was part of the Australian story.

Those propositions can coexist.

Modern Australia already lives this reality, whatever social media nationalists may wish. As of June 2025, 32 per cent of Australia’s population was born overseas, representing 8.8 million people. Remarkably, the overseas-born share was 32.4 per cent in 1891. Migration itself is hardly a new corruption of some previously sealed continent. What has changed most visibly is where migrants come from.

The 2021 Census found 51.5 per cent of Australians were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. English remained the most commonly reported ancestry at 33 per cent, followed by Australian at 29.9 per cent, Irish at 9.5 per cent, Scottish at 8.6 per cent and Chinese at 5.5 per cent.

That is Australia.

It does not mean migration policy cannot be questioned. It does not mean population levels, housing pressure, social cohesion or temporary migration should be beyond debate. A person can support lower immigration without believing Australia belongs to one race. Conflating every immigration sceptic with white nationalism would be lazy and unfair.

But we should be equally clear when the argument changes from how many people should Australia admit? to what colour must an Australian be?

Those are entirely different questions.

No person chooses where they are born. Nobody chooses their parents, pigmentation or ancestry. Birth is chance. Belonging is built afterwards, through family, experience, citizenship, community, contribution, memory and attachment.

And yes, it can be complicated.

An Indian Australian may cheer for India at the cricket and still love Australia. An English Australian may feel emotional watching England play. Someone may travel across the world tracing Irish grandparents without having their Australian loyalty questioned. Migrant identities accumulate rather than neatly replacing one another.

Why should that privilege of complexity belong only to some Australians?

We are living at a point when Elon Musk’s SpaceX is developing the systems it hopes will one day help establish a self-sufficient city on Mars, yet here on Earth we are still arguing over whether a turban beneath the word “Aussie” is an intolerable contradiction

Perhaps that is the useful part of these provocations.

White nationalists can paste “INDIAN” over “AUSSIE” as many times as they like. They can call multicultural Australia artificial. They can insist Australianness belongs to a racial inheritance that they alone are qualified to police.

They still cannot freeze a country in time.

Australia changed when Europeans arrived. It changed through the gold rushes. It changed after two world wars. It changed when Greeks and Italians arrived in large numbers, when Vietnamese refugees came, when migration from China and India accelerated, and it will change again in ways none of us can predict.

That is not the destruction of Australian identity.

That is how an Australian identity exists at all.

The baton was passed to us. We will add something to it and pass it on.

And nobody gets to tell the next generation that the word “Aussie” was privately owned by the last one.