| Book Review | Labour History, 96 | The History Cooperative

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to Labor History online. About 242 words from this article are provided below; about 427 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to Labour History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to Labour History, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of Labour History (82 - present).
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

BOOK REVIEW

Eric Richards, Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008. pp. xiii + 448. $39.95 paper.

So great is Australia's need for population that it cannot afford to be too exclusive as to categories to be regarded as eligible for admission (p. 161).

This cane cuttin', oh, it's something incredible ... The cane, it cuts you, cuts your skin like a razor ... the first week you feel all broken (pp. 86–87).

There were many familiar voices in Eric Richards' history of immigration to Australia. The opening quote of this review – taken from an immigration report circulated in 1944 – illustrates this familiar rhetoric. It is a bureaucratic voice patiently setting out the economic basis for pursuing immigration, framed here, as it so commonly was, in terms of ethnicity, point of origin, hierarchies of desirability and fears about the reception awaiting new arrivals. Any history of Australian migration necessarily includes these voices – known in short hand as the white Australia policy. Richards' history also includes many new or unfamiliar voices – those of the migrants who came to Australia. Sam Contarino – a Sicilian man arriving in Australia in 1922 to work in the cane fields of Mourilyan – evokes for the reader a sense of what it meant to be a sugar worker at this time: 'You had to cut it, load it, move the rail ... Oh we worked' (p. 87).

. . .

There are about 427 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.