I

The first demands for importation of indentured Asian and Pacific laborers into New South Wales seem to have derived mostly from economic apprehensions and hardship. As convict transportation declined in the 1830s and few free settlers could be enticed to immigrate, fears of labor scarcity in the colony grew. Merchants and landowners argued for admittance of indentured or coolie workers from India, claiming that the indents would be more tractable and sober than convicts and cheaper than free labor. In the 1830s, scores of coolies arrived in the colony, but they were treated harshly and frequently absconded. Employers complained that their indents were discontented and lazy and rarely as industrious as anticipated. Opponents of the scheme warned that servile colored labor would degrade remnant British convict labor. Some objected that coolie labor would make the colony less British in composition and tone and lead, in time, to mongrel and degenerate mixed progeny. In any case, the government in India soon obstructed the trade.Footnote ¹⁰

From the 1850s, attention turned to the Pacific as a convenient source of labor and to the Australian tropics as a place that might require preadapted colored agricultural workers. A few decades earlier, Moreton Bay, later Brisbane, was merely a dumping ground for the worst convicts, a notoriously feverous and enervating site. But free settlers soon came into surrounding country, driving herds of sheep ahead of them. At the time of separation from New South Wales in 1859, the colony of Queensland boasted more than 23,000 British residents, mostly clustered in the subtropical southeast. Relentlessly, the British moved northward to take up land and, later, to prospect for gold, establishing rough towns and ports as they went further into the tropics. In the 1860s, they began to plant sugar cane, an emblematic tropical crop, along the coast, and by the end of the century more than 60,000 acres were under cultivation. White planters started to bring in Pacific Islanders, whom they called Kanakas, as indentured laborers to harvest the cane on the plantations. Toward the end of the century, almost one-quarter of the coastal population had come from the Pacific. But the structure of the industry was changing at the end of this period from labor-intensive plantations to capital-intensive central mills taking cane from smaller farms. White workers thus came to compete with Pacific Islander laborers.Footnote ¹¹

During the late-nineteenth century, the mismatch of white bodily constitution and tropical climate was a truism, frequently repeated. Whites seemed especially vulnerable to the diseases prevalent in the tropics. It stood to reason that a race was best fitted, whether through design or evolution, to resist the ailments of its ancestral realm, and most likely to succumb to the diseases of a very different place. This became the convenient medical rationale for securing colored labor in the tropics. As Kay Saunders suggests, the “climatic-racial concept … provided the intellectual framework for the legitimation of hierarchical labour patterns on the estates in tropical Queensland.”Footnote ¹² Higher rates of sickness and death among the Pacific Islanders exploited on the Queensland cane fields could not shake this theoretical edifice. As expendable laborers, their fate elicited little epidemiological curiosity anyhow. If anyone did notice their disproportionate and paradoxical suffering, it was supposed, given their race's natural advantage in the tropics, these people must have been a particularly depraved and degraded crew, worthy of little sympathy—or perhaps just prone to fatal nostalgia.Footnote ¹³

There appeared a vague, yet pernicious, effect of the tropics on white bodies and mentalities—a systemic, and seemingly inexorable, degeneration that flouted any conventional diagnostic category. White settlers commonly felt their esteemed physical and mental qualities deteriorating in the tropical heat. They wondered if they, or their offspring, would eventually pigment and degenerate into natives—or whether the affront to the system was sufficient to cause them to die out altogether. In 1882, pugnacious conservative newspaper editor William J. Sowden reported that “with regard to the effect of the [tropical] climate upon labour, there seems to be a concensus [sic] of opinion that Europeans cannot do the hewing and the drawing. That must be undertaken by coloured folk.”Footnote ¹⁴ A plantation owner and member of the Queensland legislative council declared in 1884 that “no white man could venture into the scrub to work in it during summer without sacrificing himself.” Those reckless enough to try “would come out with utterly broken constitutions or would leave their bones in the scrub.”Footnote ¹⁵ Another parliamentarian pointed out that for whites, labor under a tropical sun “eventually ends in their premature decay and physical wreck.” He deplored the “physical and moral degradation of those [whites] engaged in exhaustive toil.”Footnote ¹⁶ In 1890, Joseph Ahearne, the first president of the North Queensland Medical Society, warned white residents of tropical Townsville that they faced degeneration of the race—especially if they persisted with manual labor. “We find ourselves in the tropics,” he said, “certainly a strange, if not an unnatural habitat for the European.” He believed that “a modification of type is in the course of formation.” He observed in white men “a pallid appearance, a wary physique, and nervous temperament.” Among white women there was “almost universal languor, the absence of energy, the frequent attacks of indisposition.”Footnote ¹⁷ In 1911, Walter B. Nisbet, reflecting on twenty years of medical practice in Townsville, warned the Australasian Medical Congress that unnatural white settlement in the tropics meant that “our race is dwindling away to a few highly exotic anaemic people incapable of producing their species unless fed with a constant strain of European migration.… Women have mammary development too deficient to sustain child rearing, they are infertile and their children are given over to convulsive seizures.”Footnote ¹⁸ According to many self-styled medical experts, coolies therefore were the natural solution to the labor needs of tropical Australia. Thus, at the same medical congress, Sydney ophthalmologist F. Antill Pockley concluded, “It would appear to be inevitable that if we are to hold this fine country we must either let it remain unproductive, or comparatively so, or we must evolve some scheme by which we develop it by using coloured labour.”Footnote ¹⁹

But demographics, economics, and white nationalism eventually came to suggest otherwise. In the late-nineteenth century, increasing numbers of whites were laboring in the cane fields without turning native or succumbing excessively to disease or degeneration. They reproduced; their children rarely suffered convulsions. As early as 1886, James Bonwick, historian and rhapsodist on Australian prospects, observed that hard working white men in far north Queensland were “by no means a nervous, dyspeptic class.” Rather, they exhibited a “robustness and vigour, a brightness of eye and elasticity of step, an energetic activity with an appreciation of pleasurable repose, equal to anything known in a temperate zone elsewhere.”Footnote ²⁰ In 1888, the Brisbane Boomerang assured readers that “white labour can be employed at sugar growing and that the presence in a country of alien or servile labour is degrading to the white workers and demoralizing to the white employer.” The paper's bohemian “Bystander” had no doubt that “white labour can work as well in the tropics as in the Arctic Circle if paid well enough.” As he put it, “race instinct” dictated that every stone would be “overturned in the endeavour to sustain white labour on the soil of the North.”Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile “Queenslander” was indignantly asserting in the Sydney Quarterly Magazine the superiority of the white worker over the imported coolie: “[H]is muscles are more inured to steady and constant toil; he is more intelligent, and puts forth his strength to greater advantage.”Footnote ²² Considerable nationalist energy thus was spent on encouraging white workers to settle in the tropics and on bolstering their claims against competing Pacific Islanders.

By 1900, on the eve of federation, the tide was turning against colored labor. When Ahearne tried to alert readers of the Bulletin to the medical fact that “the white race of Queensland is undergoing modification physically, morally and mentally,” his views were derided.Footnote ²³ The magazine's literary editor, A.G. Stephens, had grudgingly allowed the article's publication only because its “appeal differed from the appeals of other coloured labour apologists in that it assumed a scientific foundation. But it has been shown that Dr. Ahearne's foundation is no foundation in as much as his data are insufficient to yield a conclusion.” Indeed, was not Ahearne a “Townsville medico in healthy condition with a spouting kidney and not too enlarged a liver who … shows none of the signs of race deterioration which he attributes to other North Queenslanders.”Footnote ²⁴ According to Jack Elkington—fierce nationalist, admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche, and expert in tropical medicine—“the nervous savage northerner can lick the puff-muscled men from cooler climates. Damn his nerves—he can fight, and it's the fighting man who's going to succeed more than ever, the savage carnivore with alternating periods of torpor and of mad lustful, drinkful, frightful energy.”Footnote ²⁵ In rather more subdued tones, Mitty from Mackay wrote after “a hard day's work in the cane field” to point out that the white man was more than equal to the Kanaka when it came to tropical labor.Footnote ²⁶ And Samuel J. Richards, the new government medical officer at Mt. Morgan, found the children there a little darker in skin color but no less robust than their cousins down south: “So welcome Federation and a White Australia.”Footnote ²⁷

II

In the first decade after federation, scientific opinion remained equivocal on whether a working white race might successfully be implanted in the tropics. Aspiring to white purity, the new nation had signaled, rather wishfully, an end to indentured colored labor on the continent – but scientific validation of state policy was initially exiguous and partial. Responding to nationalist agitation in far north Queensland, the federal government therefore decided to set up the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine (AITM) in Townsville to settle the matter once and for all. The first research institute established in Australia, the AITM was committed to physiological studies of white workers in the cane fields and on the docks, and to investigations of microbial carriage among poor white families and residual Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal people. The physiological inquiries were expected to prove the success of the experiment in white labor in the tropics while the bacteriological studies would expose colored laborers as surreptitious germs carriers, imperiling hygienic, vulnerable whites. Microbiology spuriously amplified dangers of racial contact in the tropics, thereby naturalizing homogeneously white labor above Capricorn and endorsing the national quarantine mentality.Footnote ²⁸ Since the 1890s, nationalist physicians had been flagging this new direction of medical thinking on tropical labor. Elkington, for example, was hollering up and down the country about the vigor of white laborers in the tropics. At the same time, he warned that “the co-existence of a considerable native population undergoing the natural penalties of their unsanitary ways of living will, of course, increase the danger to white residents.”Footnote ²⁹ But where was the scientific proof?

Soon after arriving in Queensland in 1910, the founding director of the AITM, Anton Breinl, told a medical audience in Brisbane: “Only careful and detailed research carried on in the populated coastal districts of tropical Australia, where several generations have been reared, will indicate whether the great experiment of populating Australia by a working white community can be accomplished.”Footnote ³⁰ Over the following decade, Breinl and a couple of colleagues did physiological and metabolic tests on white workers and their families and conducted disease surveys across the Australian tropics and into colonial Papua.Footnote ³¹ He became particularly concerned that white workers might be vulnerable to tropical germs carried by deceptively healthy coolies. When transplanted to the tropics the medical scientist claimed, the immunity of the white race was upset, and “the organism has become exposed to the invasion of infections to which it has hitherto not been accustomed.” Thus, wrote Breinl, “parasites against which a relative impermeability has been acquired by native races, become true parasites in the newcomer, invading his organism without finding any resistance whatsoever.” Coolies and Aborigines apparently were “natural reservoirs” of such infections, having adapted to them over generations.Footnote ³² Accordingly, the stigma of originating disease was effectively transferred from some essential fact of climate to an equally essential, yet still elusive, fact of race. The etiological problem derived, it seemed, from biological disgrace and malice, not economic misfortune. “If the Asiatic aliens are permitted to live in their own highly unsanitary ways, and to have free intercourse with other elements,” Czech geographer Jirí V. Daneš explained to the Royal Society of New South Wales, “it is certain that in the near future tropical Australia will become much more dangerous to white settlement than is the case now.”Footnote ³³

In 1920, the Australasian Medical Congress met in Brisbane to allay concerns about white labor in the tropics. After reviewing research findings from the AITM, the meeting declared that “the opinion of the medical practitioners present was overwhelmingly in favour of the suitability of North Queensland for the successful implantation of a working white race.” The delegates emphasized that the “absence of semi-civilized coloured peoples in northern Australia simplifies the problem very greatly.”Footnote ³⁴ But the incoming federal director of health, J.H.L. Cumpston, cautioned against complacency. “It is all very well to have a white Australia,” he announced, “but it must be kept white. There must be immaculate cleanliness.” Cumpston argued that white laborers and their families would require unremitting surveillance, hygienic discipline, and eugenic guidance. He demanded temperance, respectable behavior, exercise, sensible clothing, and better nutrition and housing.Footnote ³⁵ The professor of physiology at the University of Melbourne, W.A. Osborne, shared the general interest in adaptation to the tropics. “We are a white population and intend to remain white,” he told the medical audience. “We hold this island continent as the citadel of the Western Pacific where momentous issues charged with destiny for the white man may one day be decided.” Predictably, Osborne pointed out that keeping white laborers and their families healthy in the tropics depended on the “absence of a large native population, for such always acts as a reservoir of infection from which epidemics spill over into the surrounding white population.” In the scientist's opinion, “the white Australia policy may become more difficult, but it will become more desirable.”Footnote ³⁶ Thus within twenty years, the white Australia policy, with its corollary of coolie prohibition, had gone from physiological impossibility to microbiological necessity.

No one promoted white labor in the tropics more vehemently than Breinl's successor at the AITM, Raphael W. Cilento. A friend and sparring partner of Elkington, Cilento dedicated his career to the development of “tropical consciousness” and white nationalism in Australia. An effective publicist, much admired in Queensland, he avoided the laboratory and the public health office. In an influential book, The White Man in the Tropics (1925), Cilento bragged that Australia had “the unique distinction of having bred up during the last seventy years a large, resident, pure-blooded white population under tropical conditions.” He described virile white men, modest white housewives and mothers, and their vigorous white children living healthily in the Australian tropics. Scientific studies had shown that “far from being an impossibility for the white man, work is the factor which will render it ultimately possible for him to adapt himself entirely to his new environment.” All a white man needed to thrive in the tropics was physical exercise, hard work, preventive medicine, and “purity of race.” “The nation that admits native labour,” Cilento declared, “abandons its birthright.”Footnote ³⁷ Later, as director of health in Queensland, he continued to extol white settlement in the tropics. In a history of Queensland, Triumph in the Tropics (1959), Cilento praised the first “successful colonization of a tropical and sub-tropical land by a population almost entirely white.” Of course, the achievement had relied upon “the absence of any teeming native coloured population riddled by endemic diseases” and medicine's “increasing capacity to control introduced diseases.”Footnote ³⁸ In the 1970s, he alerted nationalist fringe groups that there would be “more danger from Indonesian germs than Indonesian arms.” National hygiene demanded exclusion of coolie labor, selective breeding of the existing white population, and eradication of multiculturalism, which he regarded as another Jewish conspiracy.Footnote ³⁹

III

Even as Cilento issued these admonitions, white Australia was dissolving. In the 1960s and 1970s, federal governments gradually abandoned racial bans in immigration policy, though a quarantine mentality and fear of Asian invasion persisted among some bureaucrats and citizens.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the white Australia policy was formally discarded, discrimination against Aboriginal people and non-European immigrants remained entrenched. In the course of a long life, Cilento had become an outlier in the medical profession too. After World War Two, most scientists moved away from facile racial explanations of disease transmission and susceptibility, describing instead the distribution of various maladies across populations, not attached to one human type or another. Some diseases are more prevalent among some people—not racial types—because of evolutionary processes, environmental exposure, or economic deprivation and desperation. Often they can be prevented by improvements in living conditions, behavior change, vaccination, and so on—but not by racial segregation or exclusion. Few experts believe any longer that skin pigmentation is a gauge of germ carriage or that whiteness in the tropics connotes some special vulnerability to regional pathogens. Still, Cilento has his followers. In 2006, the leader of the One Nation party, Queenslander Pauline Hanson, stated that Africans inherently are a threat to white bodily integrity. “There's a huge amount coming into Australia, who have diseases; they've got AIDS,” she said.Footnote ⁴¹

Australians continue to regard northern development—filling in the big blank map—as a major national challenge. In 2015, the federal government released Our North, Our Future, a white paper on how to unlock the economic potential of the tropics.Footnote ⁴² But times have changed—or perhaps have been recycled. As in the late-nineteenth century, the government now envisages a multiracial economic powerhouse, not a place singularly given over to a virile working white race. Deploying inaptly a slogan coined long ago by E.J. Brady, a votary of white Australia, the government proposes using “Australia Unlimited branding to showcase investor ready projects and specific northern opportunities.”Footnote ⁴³ The report suggests a number of tax incentives and investment subsidies, as well as consolidating several schemes that alter labor regulations in the tropics. It endorses the Designated Area Migration Agreements to permit foreign skilled and semiskilled workers into a few northern zones. Such agreements mean that the contract workers need not speak English or receive standard wages. The report also promotes the Seasonal Worker Programme for laborers from the Pacific Islands and Timor Leste, including a new pilot program for workers from Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, it notes, will allow employers to bring in skilled Chinese workers without local labor market testing, making English-language requirements, qualifications, and “income threshold” negotiable.Footnote ⁴⁴ Not surprisingly, advocates for Australian workers have opposed these arrangements, mostly on economic grounds.

While clearly designed in part to justify expansion of foreign contract labor in tropical Australia, Our North, Our Future devotes considerable space to raising and then dispelling concerns about the importation of pathogens. Indeed, it ultimately goes so far as to recast tropical disease as an opportunity for northern industry. Predictably, foreign disease threats are framed in terms of biosecurity, preparedness, and border protection. We are told that “the Asia-Pacific region is a global epicentre for emerging infectious diseases and drug resistance.” We are reminded that “the North's proximity to our international neighbours, extensive coastline and sparse population makes it particularly vulnerable to biosecurity threats.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is hard to be sure whether place is serving here as a metonym for race. Certainly, one can detect a recurrent theme, an old obsession, in such monitory statements. In 1912, for example, W. Perrin Norris, Australia's chief quarantine officer, declared that “the chief ‘storm centre’ of the diseases against which quarantine is directed is the Continent of Asia.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A year later, Cumpston assured his fellow white citizens that “the proximity of the Asiatic endemic centres of plague and cholera, and the danger threatening Australia from these sources, is … fully recognized.”Footnote ⁴⁷ One hundred years further on, the diseases might have changed, but the origin of the peril, it seems, endures.

According to Our North, Our Future, a Tropical Health Strategy is needed to solve any biosecurity problems attendant on tropical development. Around the time of the report's release, the federal government therefore allocated $6.9 million for basic research on “priority diseases” such as dengue fever, malaria, melioidosis, Australian bat lyssavirus, Hendra virus, Nipah virus, chikungunya, and Murray Valley encephalitis—many of them dubiously tropical, but still announceable in the circumstances. Additionally, the government found a further $8.5 million to “commercialise research in new tropical therapeutics and diagnostics.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As the authors of Our North, Our Future wrote: “[I]nnovative high quality research into the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of tropical disease” provides a “substantial opportunity for Australia.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Understandably, Louis Schofield, the director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine in Townsville, a reinvention of the AITM, welcomed the investment. “By promoting commercialisation and the creation of science/industry networks,” Schofield said, “this funding initiative plays to Australia's scientific strengths in the future economy of the Pacific Rim.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The implication is that biomedical science and the pharmaceutical industry might now render foreign contract workers healthy and innocuous, safe to labor in tropical Australia. A sense of technological optimism and financial anticipation is in the air. But whether this will mollify old-fashioned xenophobes like Hanson remains to be seen.

In 1948, historian of medicine Erwin H. Ackerknecht pointed to the congruence of disease theories and economic or political goals. He recounted the spirited debates between contagionists and anticontagionists in nineteenth-century Europe, showing the “powerful social and political factors that animated this seemingly scientific discussion” of disease transmission. Contagionism perturbed many medical doctors because it led to quarantines—and “quarantines meant, to the rapidly growing class of merchants and industrialists, a source of losses, a limitation to expansion, a weapon of bureaucratic control.”Footnote ⁵¹ Ackerknecht described how economic and political ambitions might be realized through medical means. He demonstrated how technical and supposedly objective discourse could confer plausibility and dignity on crass commercial motives. Students of coolie labor practices—past and present—would do well to heed Ackerknecht. Concerns about economic exploitation, labor competition, and industrial capacity were rarely sufficient to compel political action until labor practices were refigured as matters of life and death and were represented as existential threats to race and nation. Work thus became part of stories of racialization and medicalization. Similarly, historians of racial thought and medicine need to pay closer attention to labor and economic history. Ackerknecht suggested that theories of contagionism and anticontagionism at the time balanced each other out too evenly for either to be refuted scientifically: There was no decisive experiment, no convincing data set, no obvious inconsistency in argument. “Under such conditions,” he wrote, “the accident of personal experience and temperament, and especially economic outlook and political loyalties will determine the decision.”Footnote ⁵² Note that, for a historian, he was inordinately fond of the future tense.