🪞 Australia, Take a Long, Hard Look in the Mirror
This is a nation built on the backs of Chinese labourers who arrived during the 1850s gold rush, men who endured brutal racism, violent riots, and discriminatory laws to lay the foundations of modern Australia.
Yet today, their descendants, the Chinese Australians, are still dismissed as “migrants” and lumped with recent arrivals, while post-WWII European settlers such as Greeks and Italians whose families came a century later are embraced as “true blue” Aussies.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s historical amnesia as national policy.
⛏ The Gold Rush That Australia Wants to Forget
When white settlers struggled to extract wealth from the goldfields, Chinese miners taught them efficiency.
📊 By 1858: 40,000 Chinese migrants, around 10% of Australia’s population, had arrived.
🏪 They built market gardens, storefronts, and Chinatowns.
⚔ They died defending their claims in anti-Chinese pogroms like:
- Buckland Riot (1857)
- Lambing Flats (1861)
Australia’s response? 🚫 The White Australia Policy, a century of laws designed to erase them:
- ❌ Denied citizenship
- ❌ Forcibly deported
- ❌ Barred from bringing families
Their contributions were erased from history books, their descendants treated as aliens in the only home they’d ever known.
🇬🇷🇮🇹 The Europeans Who Got a Red Carpet
After WWII, Greece and Italy were in ruins. Australia needed workers.
✈ Southern Europeans arrived en masse and were welcomed:
- ✅ Citizenship pathways
- ✅ Political representation
- ✅ Cultural acceptance
Today, Greek and Italian surnames sit comfortably in Parliament, boardrooms, and sports halls of fame. No one asks them: “Where are you really from?”
Meanwhile, Chinese Australians whose families pre-date Federation are still outsiders in their own land.
🏛 Parliament: Where White Migrants Outrank Non-White Natives
📉 Representation gap:
- 🇨🇳 Chinese Australians — 5.6% of population, 0.9% of federal MPs
- 🇮🇹 Italian Australians — 4.6%, 3.8% of MPs
- 🇬🇷 Greek Australians — 1.9%, 2.5% of MPs
Every European group is overrepresented. The oldest non-Anglo community is invisible.
No Chinese Australian has ever led a major party.
🎭 The Lie of “Multicultural Australia”
Australia’s Harmony Day marketing hides a racial hierarchy:
- 🔍 Chinese Australians profiled as spies and donors, not citizens
- 🏮 Chinatowns as tourist props, not policy voices
- 📈 Racist scapegoating rises with every China-Australia spat
This isn’t multiculturalism. It’s hierarchical assimilation with Europeans at the top and Asians at the bottom.
🌏 The World Is Watching
Shame on you, Australia.
You:
- 💰 Profit from China’s trade
- 🪖 Forget Chinese diggers who fought in WWI (and were denied veterans’ benefits)
- 🏅 Preach “fair go” while locking political power behind a white wall
Until Chinese Australians are seen, heard, and represented as the foundational Australians they are, Australia’s self-image as a fair, multicultural society is a lie.
📌 History will not forget this hypocrisy. Neither should we.
