What racist events have happened in Australia's past?

Answer 1

Australian history is, unfortunately, littered with many instances of massacres against the indigenous people, known as the Australian Aborigines.

• In the early 1800s, the "Black War" began, eventually leading to the complete wiping out of full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. Instigated by the colonists, this genocide also gained the support of sealers and whalers. This plan also involved the systematic removal of all Aborigines to Flinders Island, where they were supposed to be looked after and kept safe from the sealers, whalers and settlers. Conditions on Flinders Island were appalling and completely unsuitable for the Aborigines, and disease and death were rife.
• 1838 saw the Myall Creek Massacre, in which 28 women, children and elderly aboriignal men were rounded up and slaughtered by stockmen bent on revenge.
• As recently as 1928, over 30 Aborigines were murdered over a period of several weeks in the Coniston Massacre, by a policeman also bent on revenge.

There are far more examples of aboriginal massacres. See the related Wikipedia link below.

However, Australian Aborigines were not the only ones to be subjected to racist treatment. The Chinese on the goldfields were frequently targetted by the European miners, because they were hard-working and tended to keep to themselves. The Chinese at Lambing Flat (now the town of Young) endured scalping, torture, loss of possessions and other horrific treatment during the Lambing Flat riots in June 1861. The anger generated by the presence of the Chinese led to the introduction of the "White Australia Policy" after Federation, whereby severe limits were placed on people of Asian ethnicity coming to Australia.

Germans were another group targetted. At the commencement of World War 1, the Australian government immediately stood down any German politicians or those of obvious German descent. This was despite the fact that Germans, as a cultural and social group, had made huge contributions to Australian society ever since the arrival of the first immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s. During World War I, many Germans were held at internment camps around Australia. There was fear that seemingly innocent German immigrants could be spying for the German government. German clubs were closed, businesses were shut down, many Lutheran schools were closed (all of the Lutheran schools in SA were closed), and the leaders of the community, including Lutheran pastors, were interned. (Six of the Qld pastors who were interned were British naturalised subjects, and two of them had actually been born in Australia). German, as a language, ceased to be taught in some schools. The Germans were often ferried for long distances by rail, during which they were subjected to harsh treatment, including unnecessary handcuffing and general abuse. Their luggage was searched, or just stolen and/or destroyed. German-sounding place names were anglicised, and some German families avoided internment and harassment by anglicising their names.