Naming Charlie: Inscribing British Indian Identities in White Australia,

1901-1940

Kama Maclean, UNSW1

This is a pre-publication version. If citing, please consult the printed version in:

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Jane Buckingham (eds), Indians and the Antipodes: Networks, Boundaries and Circulation, Delhi: , 2018, pp. 94- 128.

The various forms of nomenclature applied to South Asian residents of the newly federated Commonwealth in the early decades of the twentieth century provide a useful lens for examining their place in White Australia. These reveal a predictable process of distancing Indians from the process of nation formation, but also a politics of naming which sought to disable Indian and British claims to membership of a shared imperium. Each of the collective names used, especially those in government and newspaper debates, carried a range of largely negative connotations and functioned to position those described firmly outside the nascent white nation. Such naming practices created barriers for individual Indians resident in the Commonwealth after 1901, as they struggled to transcend stereotypes and gain acceptance in their communities.2

Imperial Identities: Colour and the Question of Subjects and Citizens

1 This was first presented at the workshop, ‘Indian migration to the Pacific and Indian Ocean States’, organised by the Research Institute and the New Zealand South Asia Center, held at the University of Canterbury, April 15, 2015. Thanks are due to Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Jane Buckingham, and to colleagues at the workshop who commented on the presentation, as well as Zora Simic, who provided valuable comments on an early draft. I am grateful to Joanne Daniels, John Solomon and Lisa Plotkin for research conducted in the National Archives of Australia (henceforth NAA), National Archives of (NAI), and the UK National Archives, respectively. This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Imagining India in White Australia: Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, DP 120102053. 2 For the purposes of this paper, ‘Indian’ is intended to be read as shorthand for ‘British Indian’, in keeping with the usage of the sources and the period under consideration, and not to differentiate Indian from other postcolonial identities, such as Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Unassisted migrants from India began to arrive in the colonies in substantial numbers from the 1880s (Allen 2005). According to figures compiled by the India Office in London, by 1891, there were 5237 Indians resident in the Australian colonies (Table 1), mostly working as cameleers, hawkers, farmers and labourers. Strident attempts to create a politics to arrest Indian arrivals began in the 1890s, as anti-Chinese immigration restriction began to be implemented across the colonies. In 1890 the Premier of Victoria wrote directly to the Government of India, requesting it to arrest the further migration of Indians, after the arrival of 500 men seeking work as hawkers, who invariably ‘spread over the country, visit lonely dwellings in the absence of men, annoy women and children by their pertinacity in pressing their wares, or frighten them by their vehemence’.3 This accusation, highly loaded with gendered inferences, would become a refrain in the agitation to extend attempts to prevent Chinese immigration to all ‘Asiatics’. By 1897, such legislation was being advanced in most colonies (Lake and Reynolds 2010, 125).

Table 1: Numbers of British Indians in Australia, 1891-1921

Year 1891 1901 1911 1921 1881 1592 1183 700 Victoria 1720 780 729 400 Queensland 425 939 373 300 South Australia 539* 439* 439 200 Western Australia 301 748 555 300 Tasmania 371 361 15 100 NT/ACT No data No data 4/2 No data Total 5237 4859 3300 2000 * Figures for South Australia include ‘Singhalese’.

Data for ‘British Indians’ in 1891 and 1901 from the India Office. British Library (henceforth BL), India Office Records (IOR), L/PJ/5/462, p. 15. The 1911 figures were extracted from the Australian Census, which counted ‘Hindus’, and made a distinction between ‘full’ and ‘half blood’ Hindus.4 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Part VIII, Non-European Races, Commonwealth Statistician, 1912, pp. 904-5. Data 1921 is taken from India Office statistics, BL, IOR, L/E/7/1220, pp. 212-3. The figures have clearly been rounded off, and so are indicative. Figures held in the National Archives of India indicate that the population in 1921 was 2881, suggesting that the India Office

3 ‘Status of British Indians in Colonies and Dominions’, British Library (henceforth BL), IOR: L/PJ/5/462, p. 5. 4 To keep the 1921 figures comparable, I have not included the category ‘Half Caste Hindus’ here, as they do not seem to have been included in the 1891 and 1901 counts. rounded down, rather than up, perhaps in an attempt to downplay the problem of discrimination against British Indians in Australia. 5

As a result of pressure from Britain, Indians already domiciled in Australia at the time of federation were conceded some rights of residency, although these were quite limited (Allen 2008). Following the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act, Indians were defined as ‘prohibited migrants’. After several Indians landed at Australian ports, failed the Dictation Test and were promptly turned around and put back on the ship, the British Government of India was reluctantly forced to warn its subjects not to make an expensive, arduous and fruitless ocean voyage south.6 ‘Disabilities’ against Indians in the Commonwealth were regularly detailed in the Indian press, although these were often subsumed by greater injustices exerted on a larger diaspora in South Africa and Canada. In India, over the twentieth century ‘White Australia’ came to denote a racially-constituted geographical territory, rather than an immigration policy (Jeffrey 2010).

The Indian population in Australia at federation was overwhelmingly male; the 1911 Census counted 98 ‘full blood’ ‘Hindu’ women, against 3201 ‘full blood’ Hindu men.7 The administration of the Immigration Restriction Act enabled Indian residents to visit India and re-enter Australia within a three-year period, if they fulfilled the stringent requirements of the Department. Bringing family members was well-nigh impossible until 1919, and even then, extremely difficult (Allen 2008, 49). In addition to the strictures of the Immigration Restriction Act, other legislation passed in the new parliament impacted substantially on Indian lives.8 The labour movement lobbied for and achieved legislation restricting ‘Asiatics’ from working across a range of industries, including furniture manufacturing, sugar, hospitality and mining in most states, with Western Australia and Queensland implementing the most restrictive Acts.9 Such harsh measures and the hostility that shaped them led to a substantial

5 Indians Overseas: Disabilities within the British Empire: Statement showing the action taken by the Government. NAI Education, Health and Lands, Overseas, F. 15-47/36-L and O, 1937, p. 11. 6 Memo, Government of India, September 25, 1905. NAI, Commerce and Industry, Emigration, File 72 of 1905. 7 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Part VIII, Non-European Races, Commonwealth Statistician, 1912, pp. 904-5. 8 For a list, see ‘Disabilities and Restrictions on Asiatic Aliens in Australia’, NAA: A1, 1915/9330, 32908. 9 Disqualifications placed on natives of India and Afghanistan in Western Australia, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/637, 1903. depletion of the Indian community in Australia, with many permanently returning to the subcontinent within the first two decades of federation.

In the debates around such legislation, Indians were frequently subsumed under the generic category of ‘Asiatic’, which by the closing decades of the nineteenth century had been rendered a disqualifying moniker – an obviously racial term, synonymous with a willingness to work for low rates of pay, thus undermining one of the pillars of White Australia as a protected worker’s environment. Other forms of nomenclature applied to Indians in the collective sense in the press and parliamentary debates – in no particular order, such names included Aliens (sometimes ‘coloured Aliens’, or ‘Asiatic Aliens’), Afghans, Hindoos, East Indians, Coolies, or Natives of India – demonstrated a very deliberate politics of naming. Indians and those who sought to champion their rights to residency (including the India Office) frequently emphasised their status as British Indians, who shared an imperial identity, and with it a legitimate claim to residence. This claim was based around a particular interpretation of Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation in India following the rebellion, which pledged (among other things) that Indians would be treated equally in the empire (Maclean 2015, 117- 8).

This interpretation been hinted at by Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a speech made at a conference of Australian Premiers of the Colonies in London in 1897. Chamberlain began by expressions of sympathy for the colonies’ fears of ‘an influx of people alien in civilization, alien in religion, alien in customs’. But how was this to be reconciled this with ‘the traditions of the Empire, which makes no distinction in favour of, or against, race and colour’? This appeared to be irreconcilable with the sentiments of

that enormous Empire of India, with 300,000,000 of subjects, who are as loyal to the Crown as you are yourselves, and among them there are hundreds and thousands of men every whit as civilized as we are ourselves, who are, if that is anything, better born in the same sense that they have cultivation, men of distinguished valour, men who have brought whole armies and placed them before the service of the Queen, and have in times of great difficulty and trouble, such as for instance on the occasion of the Indian Mutiny, saved the

Empire by their loyalty.10

The pressure from the Colonial Office in London in shaping the framing, and especially the wording, of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 was substantial. Yarwood, in his pioneering work on the Act in the 1960s, argued that anti-Indian sentiment accounted for ‘only a small part of the motivation of the colonial delegates who decided in March 1896 to extend the anti-Chinese acts so as to exclude all coloured races [sic]’ (Yarwood 1964, 124). However a closer reading of the debates in the House of Representatives leading up to the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 makes it clear that it was explicitly intended to prevent the entry of non-white British subjects into the Commonwealth. Protectionist Alfred Deakin and Labor member Chris Watson agreed that scrupulous administration at ports might keep ‘coloured aliens’ out of Australia, but only legislation could prevent the arrival of nonwhite British subjects.11

The question of whether it was incumbent upon the Commonwealth to respect Chamberlain’s request was debated hotly in the Parliament. The Protectionist member for North , Henry Higgins, preferred ‘to state outright that we do not want yellow and black faces in Australia’ than to fret about treaty obligations or the niceties of imperial diplomacy.12 Some parliamentarians, such as Sir Isaac Isaacs, argued that Australia had no power to legislate over subjects of the British empire, with one speaker seemingly outdoing the other in catastrophising the consequences:

Isaacs: There cannot be an Act of State against a State’s own subjects.

Mr O’Malley: Then the whole of India may come in.

Mr Barton: That is so, unless this Bill is passed.13

Other Australian Parliamentarians met Chamberlain’s request that the Immigration Restriction Act not insult the Queen’s Indian subjects with indignant protests about

10 ‘Proceedings of a conference between the Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Premiers of the self-governing colonies, at the Colonial Office’, London: June and July 1897, p. 6. 11 Hansard, Representatives, October 9, 1901, p. 5827. See also debates on October 1, 1901, p. 5358. 12 Hansard, Representatives, September 20, 1901. 13 Hansard, Representatives, September 12, 1901, p. 4843. the infringement to the new federation’s right to self-government. But additionally, it was pointed out that the British themselves overtly discriminated against Indians, so why not the Commonwealth? In the words of Watson:

the British Government do not think of putting the Hindoo or any other native of India upon the same plane as the people of the United Kingdom. The ground I take is that the natives of India are British subjects and subjects only, whilst the people of the United Kingdom are citizens as well, and British subjects in Australia are citizens also. That constitutes a wide distinction.14

Watson smartly remarked that if the British Government gave India self-government, this would force a reconsideration, but he was confident that this was not about to happen. The distinction between subject and citizen of empire was affirmed by King O’Malley, a Canadian-born member of the Australian Labor Party in Tasmania, who reiterated Watson’s observation:

I hold that the Commonwealth of Australia should not be called upon to give more rights to a black man in Australia from India than the Government of the United Kingdom extend to him themselves. The people of Australia are citizen subjects, but the people of India are subject citizens.15

The definition of ‘citizen’, Daniel Gorman argues, was ‘an ambiguous concept in the British empire’, which the parliamentarians were happy to exploit (Gorman 2002). The discussion in Parliament was quick to made a clear distinction between colonies and dependencies in the Empire, as William McMillan from Wentworth argued:

Great Britain has two functions to perform in a world-wide empire. She has one destiny in sending out her surplus population – people of her own grit and blood – to populate the uncovered portions of the earth. She has another destiny, by Providence placed in her hands, of rendering possible order, good government, and humanity in the great empire of India, which for centuries was wrecked and knocked to pieces by every usurper and tyrant in the eastern part of the world.16

14 Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4634. 15 Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4638. 16 Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4628-9. The rationale used to justify the Immigration Restriction Act was mostly economic in nature, although this was frequently expressed in florid racist language, to the extent that it becomes difficult to separate economic and a populist race nationalism. Class was also held to be a factor, as Braddon stated:

I know, as well as anybody, the desirability of keeping this fair land free from any large incursion of our fellow British subjects of India. Unfortunately, those who are likely to come here from India are not the better classes, but the mere sweepings of the bazaars and seaports – persons inferior morally as well as socially – who would be no desirable acquisition to our community.17

However from other debates it is clear that that it was the very success of Britain’s civilising mission that rendered the presence of the educated ‘Baboo Hindoo’ objectionable.18 It was realised at the outset that the educational test that was to regulate the arrival of non-white migrants would not, in the words of O’Malley, ‘shut out the Indian “toff” who becomes a human parasite preying upon the people of the country’.19 Indeed the expansion of education in India was leading to an undesirable spirit of adventurism, warned Higgins, who boasted that

When I was in India a few years ago I was told by one of the Rajahs that if they travelled over the dark waters they would, in the next transmigration of souls, become asses, and they did not want that to happen. However, I believe these ideas are being broken down, and we have to fear an influx from all the eastern countries.20

Despite this anxiety, the more immediate threat to white Australia, given the impending expulsion of ‘Alien’ sugar plantation workers who would be impacted by the concurrent Pacific Islands Labourers Bill, was the labourer, and not the educated Indian. No way around implementing the Dictation Test to preclude Indians who could speak English could be perceived in 1901; it would not be until 1903 that the Government would devise a workaround, requiring erstwhile migrants to take the Dictation Test in a European language (Maclean 2015, 120).

17 Hansard, Representatives, October 9, 1901, p. 5807. 18 See the statements of Chris Watson, Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, p. 4636; Hume Cook, Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4639. 19 Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, p. 4638. 20 Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4659. Collective Categories

A reading of various archives makes it clear that Indians in Australia were frequently confused with other non-white residents, aggregated into a generic category of undesirableness. The terms Alien and Asiatic did not lend themselves to a great deal of precision, other than to indicate ineligibility, and were frequently used as a way of eliding the implications of imperial membership. Indian communities in Australia were alert to this discursive manoeuvre, and were remarkably forthright about it. A lobby of ten Indians claiming to represent ‘the Indian community resident in Victoria’ wrote a letter to Edmund Barton objecting most indignantly to being classed as ‘Alien’, or even on the same footing as the Chinese, who they described as ‘a defeated and dying race’:

We respectfully ask, “what does ‘Alien’ mean?” It if means ‘outside’, we would ask, “Who has the right to call the Indian people Outsiders?” We have proved ourselves to be such valuable subjects of the British Government that all the nations of the world are jealous of Britain and are anxious to get possession of India and have us under their rule; especially Russia, of whom we have heard through our fathers, that she wants to get us, but she cannot put her tooth on India because the Indian people are obedient and faithful to the British Government […] As has been proved no later than the present Chinese war, the Indian people are ANXIOUS to give their blood wherever the British Government has asked for water.21

Copies of this letter were also sent to William Lyne, the Minister for Home Affairs, and to the Governor General, the Earl of Hopetoun. The response from the government was dismissive, denying that there was any intention of disputing the contribution of Indian soldiers to the security of the empire, and pointing out that there was no wording in the Immigration Restriction Bill ‘which couples the Indian with the Chinese races’, nor was there any use of the word ‘alien’. This was, strictly speaking, true of the Bill, yet disingenuous, for the most cursory attention to the parliamentary and press debates demonstrates that the language of Alienness was applied regularly and equally to Chinese, Japanese and Indian alike. As for the

21 Letter from Mahomed Khan and others, to Edmund Barton, October 25, 1901. NAA: A8, 1901/27/24. question of military service, there was a clause in paragraph 4 of the Bill about exemptions that might apply to members of the ‘King’s land and sea forces’. When Watson pointed out in Parliament that this provided a loophole for ‘a large number of Hindoos [who] are discharged soldiers or reserve men of the Indian army’, Barton and Deakin agreed that it only would apply to serving men, who by definition would be unlikely to be travelling as free migrants. 22 The gap between legislation and administration of the Act was exploited to evade the demands of the empire.

The term ‘coolie’ was frequently raised in the newly federated parliament, a term synonymous with servility, used extensively in South Africa and elsewhere. In Australia, it still carried with it the charged politics of an earlier, successful ‘no-coolie’ campaign that had been orchestrated in New South Wales to oppose the importation of indentured Indians to replace convict labour. This concerted movement, Tony Ohlsson argues, contained the seeds of the impetus behind the White Australia policy, including its concerns for race purity and to protect the conditions of white labourers, both articulated in concerns of anti-slavery, including the difficulties in managing a segregated society (Ohlsson 2011). Coolie was therefore an often-invoked trigger word in political debates. Indeed Deakin was pulled up by Sir Edward Braddon, who, citing his India experience, 23 objected to his use of the word ‘coolie’, forcing Deakin to concede that ‘the right honourable member for Tasmania is quite right: his knowledge of India is large and exact … those who come here are low caste tribes, who are not Hindoos in the ordinary sense, and are not properly known as coolies’.24 This statement makes no sense at all, even when held against colonial knowledge of the turn of the century, but it underscores a general confusion about Indian identities in Australia.

The language and assumptions of British imperialism was heavily invoked in the debates around the Immigration Restriction Act. The term Hindoo, as we have already seen above, was extensively used in officialdom in Australia, not as a religious marker, but as a form of nationality that included all Indians, including Muslims Kabir 2006, 203-4). This was consistent with European usage of the word in the

22 Hansard, Representatives, October 1, 1901, pp. 5372-3. 23 Braddon spent his early career in India, from 1847 to 1878, as a clerk, in a volunteer brigade during the 1857 rebellion, and then in the administration of the Santal Parganas (Bennett 1979). 24 See the debates in Hansard, Representatives, October 9, 1901, especially p. 5822. subcontinent, where, as Sir Henry Yule observed in his Anglo-Indian glossary, Hobson-Jobson, Hindoo denoted ‘a person of Indian religion and race’ (Yule 1886 [1996], 415). Religious distinctions were frequently made, however, for example by Deakin, who during the debates in 1901 commented that ‘Hardly any Hindoos come here. The natives of India who come here are nearly all Mohammedans, from the outside districts’.25 The use of the word Hindoo played heavily to prevalent colonial discourses emphasising the otherness of the Indian, based around the strangeness of his ‘heathen’ rituals. Emphasising heathenness very firmly placed Indians outside of the realm of obligation of the Australian community, which was a normatively Christian one.26 The Collector of Customs put out an order in 1902 to publish the Immigration Restriction Act in ‘Chinese and Hindoo languages’ for distribution in Australia, with 500 copies of the former and 150 of the latter printed, along with a stern warning that any ‘Indian or coloured person’ found to be sheltering prohibited immigrants would be fined and imprisoned.27 The usage of ‘Hindoo’ in Australian government discourses may have been carried from or bolstered by persistent Canadian application, where the category was maintained as a way of differentiating subcontinental migrants from indigenous North Americans, widely known in this period as Indians (Tinker 1976, 28).

Kipling, Turbans and Tea

The usage of ‘Hindoo’ in Australia at the turn of the century seems to have been helped along by the popularity of Rudyard Kipling’s writings in the Commonwealth (Walker 2009, 29-30). Given the geographical isolation of Australia from India, and the relatively small population of Indians in Australia, Kipling’s observations about the subcontinent came to have a disproportionate impact in the public sphere. Kipling’s visit to Australia, in 1891 while he was still a young journalist, created a minor sensation (Kennedy and Pinney 2000). The frequent confusion in Australia

25 Deakin, Hansard, Representatives, 27 September 1901, p. 5341. This was indeed the case, noted in the Sastri report of 1922. See ‘Dr Sastri - Visit to Australia’, NAA, A1, 1923/7187, p. 3. 26 See the complaints in the Advocate (Lucknow), October 28, 1906, in Selections from Native Newspapers, United Provinces, 1905. BL, IOR, L/5/81, p. 747. 27 Collector of Customs to Secretary of External Affairs, February 12, 1902. NAA: A8, 1902/52/11, 12225953. Unfortunately, no copies survive. between Indians and Afghans might have been helped along by with the political intrigues of the Great Game, that was the backdrop to Kipling’s 1901 masterpiece Kim. The question of how far into Central Asia the British Empire would reach allowed for a certain fluidity in identities between Indians and Afghan; indeed the terms were often used in the aggregate, or interchangeably. In 1903 six Indian and Afghan residents in Western Australia joined forces to petition London on the behalf of ‘about 500 natives of India or Afghans’, appealing against the ‘legislative disqualifications’ they faced in the state, which the Commonwealth claimed it had no jurisdiction to overrule.28 The petition sent to the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, by Indian and Afghani camel drivers did not produce much traction; claims to represent Afghanis in later petitions were dropped, as appeals began to be more tightly framed within the discourse of imperial justice.29

Kipling was one of Australia’s favourite writers between 1890s and the 1920s (Lyons and Taksa 1992), and many of his phrases and tropes anchored the ways in which India was imagined in Australia. Kipling’s collection of short stories, In Black and White, was described in the Argus as a compendium ‘of native life, and most of them [i.e. the stories] told by natives in that English style which is affected by the children of our civilisation, of which is a literal translation of the Hindustani.’30 The reviewer predicted that the caricatures in the book would not be appreciated by readers unacquainted with India, but it is demonstrable that even the cover image was influential (Image 1), evidenced by its replication in Australian advertising.

28 Letter from Tennyson, Governor General, to SS for the Colonies, October 20, 1903. BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/654. 29 Letter from Colonial Office to India Office, September 4, 1903. BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/646. 30 ‘Current Literature’, Argus, December 6, 1890, p. 4.

Image 1: Kipling’s In Black and White, 1888.

In the late nineteenth century, Australian engagement with India was largely reducible to a vibrant trade in foodstuffs (Kingston 1990). Recent studies have made much of the strength of Indo-Australian trade relations (Allbrook 2012), which it frequently read as evidence of a hearty colonial kinship between Australia and India (Westrip and Holroyde 2010). Rather, it is indicative of a robust and extractive imperial economy, for this commerce was largely conducted through the hands of and for the profit of English businesses based in India. Kingston demonstrates that in the context of a campaign against buying Chinese goods in the Australian colonies, Indian-made produce was marketed as more desirable and even cleaner, with ‘British supervision’ of Indian manufacturers lauded as an explicit marketing angle (Kingston 1990, 42-3). In 1894, ‘The Hindoo Brand’ was trademarked in Australia by John Connell and Co., Ltd, featuring a richly turbaned figure deployed to market a range of ‘pickles, baking powder, essences, vinegar, jams and sarsaparilla being a non-alcoholic cordial, tomato sauce and starch used as food’ (Image 2). Similarly, ‘Hindoo Blend’ of tea, trademarked in 1886 by Inglis, Brown and Co., which also bore a turbaned profile referencing Kipling, along with assurances of its ‘absolutely pure’ quality (Image 3).

Image 2: The Hindoo Brand Label, trademarked in Australia in 1894. NAA: Series A11731, 3736. 1894.

Image 3: Hindoo Blend Pure Tea (‘Guaranteed Absolutely Pure’), Lithograph on card, Troedel & Co., c. 1880-1890. State Library of Victoria, Troedel Collection.

That rival companies adopted the term and associated turbaned visuals would suggest that the image of the Hindoo was perhaps not uniformly negative in late nineteenth century imperial trade circles. James ‘Rajah’ Inglis, the businessman behind the ‘Hindoo’ brand, who relocated to Sydney from Calcutta in 1877, was known on occasion to sport a turban himself (Rutledge 1972; Walker 2009, 112). Such attempts by companies, however, to explicitly capitalise on the Indianness of their goods were short-lived, for Inglis soon resorted to marketing his teas by appealing to more Australian idioms, such as Billy Tea and Cooee Blend, indicating the weak sales of teas branded as ‘Hindoo’ (Kingston 1990, 43). It is difficult to imagine that any blend of tea could transcend the derogatory connotations associated with a name that had become the basis of Australian public discourse around the ‘Hindoo Hawker’ as ‘a decided curse’.31 Indeed in 1895, the Troedel & Co’s brand was invoked in a newspaper article railing against Indian itinerant salesmen:

The “Hindoo blend” of hawker will not take no for an answer, and positively TERRIFIES MANY WOMEN INTO PURCHASING to get rid of him. … An Englishman’s house used to be supposed to be his castle. Now, in Australia, it is practically given over to the Indians, Chinese and other Asiatic hawkers’.32

The term Hindu, invoked to refer to a nationality, dropped from administrative usage as well, although this was a slower process. As late as 1911, the Australian Census enumerated Indians as ‘Hindu’, as a subcategory of ‘Asiatic’, along with the Australian Chinese, Japanese, Syrian and Malay populations. In the religious section of the 1911 census, ‘Hindu’ was acknowledged and counted along with other subsets, apparently volunteered by the respondents, including ‘Hindoo Sikh’, ‘Brahmin’ and ‘Vedantin’ in the Non-Christian category of religions, and in ‘Others – indefinite’ was the category of ‘Idolator’.33 Of the 2,881 Indians counted in the Australian Census of 1921, it was observed that ‘the bulk of the Indians belong to the Punjab, and Muhammadans predominate in all the States. Only a few Sikhs are to be found, in New South Wales and Queensland’.34 By 1933, the census categories had shifted, and ‘Indian’, clarified in a reference note as ‘Native of India’, became a category in a section on ‘Race’, counting a total of 2404 ‘Indians’, in all of Australia; of whom only 212 identified as Hindu. Interestingly, after 1933, ‘Indian’ as a national identity became submerged under an aggregated population ‘British Possessions in Asia’,

31 Chester Manifold, Hansard, Representatives, September 6, 1901, pp. 4663. 32 ‘Indian Hawkers’, Sunday Times, Sydney. September 22, 1895, p. 3. 33 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1933, Part IV, Religions, pp. 756-7. 34 Indians Overseas: Disabilities within the British Empire: Statement showing the action taken by the Government. NAI Education, Health and Lands, Overseas, F. 15-47/36-L and O, 1937, p. 11. signalling a significant shift away from earlier denials of British imperial brotherhood, following the pressure placed on Australia and other dominions after the Great War.35

Naming in Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs)

The inexact nature of identities in Australian officialdom is at its most apparent in the changing categories employed to describe Indians on Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs). CEDTs were a passport-like document, bearing the name, photograph and signature of its holder – by definition, an ‘Alien’ who had entered Australia before 1901, and who was unlikely to pass the dictation test without the certificate – allowing them to re-enter Australia after a finite period.36 An amendment in 1905 allowed for residents who had been in Australia for more than five years to apply for the certificate, although there seems to have been a great deal of contingency in the process, for the officer processing the application had the discretion to refuse to issue one ‘without assigning any reason’.37 Indeed the precise operation and administration of the Act, including the issuance of CEDTs, remains rather vague. Prime Minister Barton advised External Affairs to communicate instructions to officers implementing the Act verbally, and to avoid setting out clear guidelines on paper, creating a strategic slipperiness (Davies 1968, 60).

While at one level, the certificate was a limited recognition of rights of residency, it also functioned as a form of state surveillance, requiring the holder to be photographed and fingerprinted. Margaret Allen describes the process of obtaining a CEDT as onerous and invasive, in which the onus was on applicants to prove their respectability, for they ‘had to provide references form members of the European community as to their character, and the local police checked with their referees and made inquiries into their activities and financial standing’ (Allen 2008, 48). 38 The certificate was only given to an applicant when he was ‘on board ship and about to

35 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1933, Part XII, Race, p. 902; Part XI, Nationality, p. 878. 36 A glance at the digital history project, ‘The Real Face of White Australia’, demonstrates the dominance of the Asian male subject in CEDTs. http://invisibleaustralians.org/faces/ On this point, see Bagnall 2012. 37 Modifications in the Australian Restriction Act of 1901. NAI, Foreign, External, Progs., Nos. 222-223, November 1906, Part B, 1906, p. 3. 38 For further detail about the CEDT administration, see Bagnall 2010. leave port’, requiring a special gathering of non-white passengers and crew on deck. On return to Australia the CEDT was taken at customs and stored securely, ‘presumably to ensure that no other person could make illegal use of it to gain entry to Australia’ (Allen 2008, 49).

The CEDT therefore monitored the movement and identities of non-white residents. The resultant government archive of CEDTs provides an impressive, if overwhelming resource for means of retrieving the past lives of ‘those who suffered under the restrictions of the White Australia policy’ (Sherratt 2011). The blank fields on the form obliged the Collector of Customs to name the applicant’s nationality, birthplace, and other biodata, presumably in consultation with him or her. Reading a range of CEDTs identifying residents born in India, it emerges that the category of ‘nationality’ was a somewhat flexible one in the early years of federation, although moments of administrative confusion are also apparent. A CEDT from 1915 demonstrates one such moment, when Charlie Phillips was initially inscribed as ‘Chinese’, which was then corrected to ‘Hindoo’, under ‘nationality’ (Image 4). Similarly, there are dozens of records that demonstrate befuddlement over the names Sing and Singh.39

39 See for example, Ah Singh’s application for a CEDT, that he might visit China. NAA: SP42/1, C1917/9228, 9414430; and the record of Gunga Singh aka Gungah Sing, NAA: SP42/1, C1938/162, 31099742.

Image 4: Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) - Name: Charlie Phillips (of Woree) - Nationality: Hindoo - Birthplace: India. NAA: J2483, 175/33, 1915.

A determined resident might, over the course of a lifetime, leave and re-enter Australia several times. The collected CEDTs of such a resident then provide a telling record of his movements, with the accompanying portraits progressively tracking his aging (Image 5). A longitudinal comparison of the CEDTs of the same individual also reveal the shifts in categories used to fill out description (complexion of the same individual could range over the decades from ‘copper’ to ‘dark’, as in Charlie Duleep Singh’s case, below), as well as an ongoing flexibility to spelling place names (Singh was recorded as being born in Budapin in 1921, Barapind in 1924, and Barupind in 1937).

Image 5: Charlie Duleep Singh’s last CEDT, in 1937, aged 70. A comparison with the earlier certificates and photographs in Images 6 and 8 reveals shifts in state categories, while also tracking Singh’s life and aging.

A comparison of the certificates of Charlie Duleep Singh points to the shifts in identifying nationalities in Australian officialdom. His nationality is first described as ‘Native of India’, in 1915;40 in 1918, he has become ‘Hindoo’.41 In 1924, 1927 and again in 1937, he is simply ‘Indian’. In early twentieth century India, the government was increasingly coming under pressure to refrain from using the term ‘native’. A moderate newspaper, The Indian People, criticised Joseph Chamberlain for using the term during his tour of India in 1903, pointing out it was only ever used to refer to ‘what are called the coloured races’, carrying the objectionable inference that they were ‘barbarous creatures’.42 That this indignant report was re-published in the government’s compilation of ‘Native Newspapers’ (a weekly digest of opinion published in Indian periodicals) would indicate that the Government of India itself would take some re-training in this regard.

In Australia, the word ‘native of India’ was still in currency in 1943, when not long after the appointment of an Australian Trade Commission in India, its Commissioner, H. R. Gollan, wrote formally to the Australian Government to advise that the word ‘gives offence in India’, gently suggesting that officials refrain from its use.43 Gollan’s intervention had been prompted by D. G. Mulherkar, of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, who overheard an Australian Customs Minister refer to an initiative to send millions of garments to cloak ‘British and native troops’. Mulherkar pointed out that the ‘reference exhibits a trait of racial arrogance, which your as well as my countrymen are fighting to eliminate from the world in the present struggle against the claim of the Nazis to rule over the world as the superior Aryan race’. Gollan had assured Mulkerkar that ‘the word “native” has no stigma in Australia’; while confidentially consoling the Australian government that:

From the above, you will realise that people in India are really hypersensitive on these matters and that the greatest care must be exercised in using terms which to us have an entirely different meaning, but give offence in this country.44

40 CEDT, NAA: J2483, 190/31, 9110933. 41 CEDT, NAA: J2483, 265/13, 9104977. 42 Indian People, June 19, 1903. Selections from the Native Newspapers Published in the United Provinces, BL, IOR, L/R/5/80, Received up to 27 June 1903, p. 266. 43 NAA: A989, 1944/43/430/7/1. 44 Australian Government Trade Commissioner, Simla, to Information Department, December 4, 1943. NAA: A989, 1944/43/430/7/1. Returning to the CEDTs, it is difficult to discern whether any of the individuals they identified offered their nationalities as ‘Hindoo’, Indian, or as a ‘Native of India’ to fill into the blank section, or whether they chose predetermined categories, although my sense is that had they been given the ability to do so, smaller, more fuzzy caste or religious identities might have prevailed on the form, as they did with census identities when it came to religion. Given the trend towards certain phrasings within a given timeframe, it appears that there was a finite, agreed set of options that were recognised as a nationality in the early years of the administration of the policy, partly dependent on the respondent’s identification, which narrowed as the decades went on, until ‘Indian’ became a more fixed category in Australian officialdom.

‘Proper’ Names: the Recurrence of Charlie

The CEDTs are particularly useful in tracking state-naming practises, but are equally revealing of self-naming practices. It is rather striking that the name Charlie recurs over and over again in the certificates of Indian-born holders. Examples include ‘Charlie Natto’, whose CEDT registers him as leaving Townsville for India at the age of 50, in 1925, but who never returned,45 and I have already mentioned the cases of Charlie Phillips and Charlie Duleep Singh. Most of these Charlies have signed their name across their photographs, indicating a practised acceptance of the name. Some of these men may of course have been named Charlie from birth. Of these, the most likely candidate is Charlie Phillips, for his surname indicates that he may be a Christian. However the use of a ‘Christian’ name, especially in juxtaposition with a recognisably Hindu or Sikh set of names and sartorial identities (Image 5, for example, demonstrates Charlie Duleep Singh wearing a turban tied in the fashion of a Sikh), cannot be presumed to indicate a conversion to Christianity, by that particular Charlie or by his forebears.

45 NAA: J2483, 364/62, 9587296.

Image 6: Charlie Duleep Singh’s first Image 7: Charlie Duleep Singh’s CEDT, charting his departure from Supplementary Certificate, extending Cairns in 1916, and return to Sydney, the three years normally permissible in 1921. This certificate has a full under the administration of the Act. handprint on the verso. NAA: J2483, 1919. NAA: J2483, 265/13, 9104977. 190/31, 9110933.

Image 8: Charlie Duleep Singh’s Image 9: Charlie Duleep Singh’s CEDT, 1924. J2483, 365/86, 9587418. CEDT, 1927, extending the 1924 certificate. J2483, 429/72, 9582844.

For their usefulness in creating a visual archive of Indians resident in Australia, the CEDTs do raise difficulties in tracking single individuals, for it was not unusual for Indians to be known by multiple names, nor were names necessarily reducible to a fixed transliteration in English. 46 The Victorian hawker, horseman and farmer, Besanta Singh (Image 10), for example, was ‘sometimes known as Basant Singh, and sometimes as Gurra Singh, and sometimes as Charlie Besanta Singh’.47 There was also Charlie Ammondeen, who was recorded working as an itinerant hawker in 1909, later marrying an Australian and starting a family; when he died the age of 83 in 1959, he was a grazier.48 Elsewhere, we find Charlie Lalah, called as a witness in a court

46 An 1890 article by the Oxford Orientalist, Monier Williams, set out a system to standardise name spellings, demonstrating an anxiety about the difficulty in tracking identities (Monier Williams 1890). For a sense of Indian naming practices see Friedlander 2017. 47 ‘Besanta Singh’, law notice to find the heir to his estate of £1946, upon his death in 1947. Argus, February 22, 1947, p. 17. 48 SMH, December 19, 1959; New South Wales Death Certificate, 31678/1959. case in Lismore, in 1929, and who when given a glass of water to swear an oath from, put the court into peals of derisive laughter by drinking from it.49

Image 10: William (Bill) Boyd, ‘A Sikh Horse Handler’, Nandaly, Victoria, 1920. Photograph of Charlie Besanta Singh, Museum Victoria, http://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/771550 (Public Domain).

What is significant is that most of the men came to be named Charlie after their arrival in Australia. In Charlie Duleep Singh’s case, it is not clear when (other than prior to 1901) or where he first landed in Australia (although it was most likely on the eastern seaboard, as there were substantial obstacles to Indians moving between states, especially from Western Australia). 50 A search of ship arrival records for free migrants prior to 1901 throws up many Duleep Singhs (variously spelled), but none with the prefix Charlie, indicating that he adopted the name some time after his arrival in Australia. While it is difficult to retrieve the precise process by which these migrant men came to be known as Charlie, what is clear in many of these instances is that the

49 ‘Hindus in Court’, Northern Star, October 15, 1929, p. 9. The glass of water was supposed to symbolise the Ganga; and in British India it had become established as the Hindu equivalent of swearing on the bible. 50 ‘Disabilities on natives of India in Western Australia’, BL, IOR: L/PJ/6/654, 1903. men themselves either resigned themselves to the moniker, or came to accept it, using it on official forms.

The prominence of Charlies among South Asians in Australia has curious analogies in other naming practices. Indigenous Australians, for example, were routinely named ‘Jackie’, and came to detest its use and dismissive connotations.51 Likewise, Samia Khatun notes that ‘printed records from around the turn of the century reveal that “Charley” or “Charlie” was a very common English name both assigned to and adopted by many Aboriginal workers in the region stretching from Marree to Charlotte Waters’ (Khatun 2012, 259). Charlie was by no means the only ‘proper’ name to be adopted by Indians in Australia; CEDTs held in the National Archives of Australia tell of a John Puran Singh,52 and newspapers reported the death of one ‘Jimmy Jumna, a native of India’, who died in suspicious circumstances in Sydney in 1919.53 When Johar Singh attempted to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces in Melbourne in 1915, he did so under the phonetically similar ‘George Sims’.54

As a noun, ‘Charlie’ has a particular history of application in Australian usage. To be a ‘proper’ or a ‘right Charlie’ was, and is, to be a fool, and from the early nineteenth century it was ‘a familiar form of address to a (male) stranger’ (OED Online 2015).55 It is therefore simultaneously a conscious fashion of invoking unbelongingness, while advancing an undue familiarity. Of course, ‘Charles’ was demonstrably a popular name in Australia, yet it is notable that ‘Charlie’ – as a diminutive, that would normally be used for boys – was tagged to these men, in a gesture towards infantalising and subordinating them.56 It is unlikely that these nuances of language were apparent to Charlie Duleep Singh, or to any of the others who adopted the name. It is a testament to the personal isolation that many Indians lived in in Australia that some lost their original identities altogether. The Clarence and Richmond Examiner in 1909 recorded the death of ‘a coloured man, well known as “Charlie”’ on a public

51 I am grateful to Heather Goodall for this point. Personal communication, April 14, 2015. 52 NAA: BP234/1, SB1939/1648, 1703097. 53 ‘Indian found dead’, Barrier Miner, February 8, 1910, p. 2. 54 SIMS, George (AKA SINGH, Johar), NAA, B2455, 8084524. 55 I am grateful to Kate Burridge for this point. Personal communication, April 10, 2015. By the 1960s in the US, ‘Charlie’ had taken on explicitly racial overtones, used by US soldiers in the Vietnam war to describe the Vietcong, but the OED also notes that it had entered ‘US Black English’ to describe a white man (OED Online 2015). 56 I am grateful to Heather Goodall for this point. Personal communication, April 14, 2015. wharf, who had been ‘in poor health for some time, and left home on that morning with the intention of going to the hospital for medical treatment.’57 In this Charley’s case, his former identity was entirely occluded. His death certificate named him simply as ‘Charley, A Hindoo’, noting that he was ‘unknown by any other name’, despite living in New South Wales for 24 years.58

In 1935, the Kilmore Free Press reported at length on the death of

Galeb Cashmere – or Charlie the Indian, as he was familiarly called. Charlie was well and very favourably known in Kilmore and for many miles around. He had travelled the district for over thirty years as an itinerant salesman of drapery and the usual adjuncts thereto. His integrity was never doubted, and during his long connection with the district he enjoyed what might be termed its freedom. His familiar turnout of big wagon, drawn by the grey and bay horses – in too fat condition actually for strenuously rapid work – sauntered quietly from one place to another at fairly regular intervals, camping in appointed spots, where Charlie cooked his johnny cakes and poultry, he being very partial to the latter. These two items, with full supplies of milk and butter, made up the greater part of his modest bill of fare. He was, however, a master hand in the construction of curry, as is the wont of his nationality. He was devoted to his horses, and they reciprocated in no uncertain way, following him about in a similar manner to pet dogs. After his long years of travel Charlie’s health commenced to fail and during the last few weeks of his career he did little more than get about. He was of an independent disposition, and respectfully declined assistance offered him by friends. It was not until he collapsed at Kilmore East a few weeks ago that he gave in. He was brought to Kilmore hospital for treatment, and, at the request of his people, he was removed to Melbourne, where he passed away on the day after he left Kilmore. Charlie was born in Hindoostan, and came to Victoria when quite a young man. He was twice married and leaves a son and a daughter. About eighteen months ago his daughter was married to a full blooded Hindoo in Melbourne,

57 Clarence and Richmond Examiner, May 4, 1909, p.8. 58 New South Wales Death Certificate, ‘Charley, A Hindoo’, 1909/005982. this being the first and only marriage under Hindoo custom ever celebrated in Melbourne.59

This later statement is more likely indicative of the rarity of a Hindu wedding in Melbourne, than its ‘first and only’. Reading the obituary against the grain, Galeb Cashmere is established as an exceptional Indian, trusted and accepted by the community, but who in his declining years kept at a remove from it, preferring the company of his horses. What might at one level be read as a fond obituary, however, degenerates into a detailed description of the sale of Charlie’s estate. A tone of elation at the ‘bargains galore’ that were sold at auction follows the above, where ‘the crowd was in excellent humour, and well it might be, because the bargains sought were there in abundance’. The bargains to be had overrides the pathos of Charlie’s final years.

That Galeb Cashmere became ‘familiarly’ known as ‘Charlie the Indian’ might be interpreted as a token of incorporation into the Kilmore community; he was given an English name, and incorporated into a somewhat more familiar and predictable framework, was able to ‘enjoy the freedom’ of the district as a white resident might. Yet the prefixes ‘Hindoo’ or ‘Indian’ undercut any familiarity intended by the name, marking Charlie as a perpetual outsider in white Australia; this is underscored by his apparent solitude in his final years (consciously styled by the journalist as Charlie’s choice).

It was not unusual for migrant communities to adopt names that help them to negotiate their new homelands and to craft workable identities and a degree of acceptance. Perhaps the Chinese community in Australia provided a precedent for Indians to render themselves more familiar to the state by adopting an English name. A cursory search for other CEDTs at the National Archives of Australia indicates long lists of Charlies, many of them Chinese; however, given the low subcontinental population in Australia by the 1930s, the recurrence of Indian-born Charlies remains salient. The figure of Indian/Hindoo Charlie can therefore be seen as a counterpart to ‘John Chinaman’, a trope that became the basis for understanding the figure of the Chinese in Australia. John Chinaman was a ‘type’, embodying a particular set of racial and cultural characteristics, that had the effect of reducing the subject to a fixed, if not rigid, identity, normatively ‘inconsistent with the values and beliefs of others

59 ‘Charlie the Indian’, Kilmore Free Press, November 14, 1935, p. 2. (white Australians, for example)’ (Fitzgerald 2007, 21); such a naming strategy operated to confine the options and scope available to Chinese Australians. The limitations of being ‘Indian Charlie’ may have been less than that of ‘John Chinaman’, who became something of an institution, a recurrent character representing ‘the Asiatic’ in Australia, brought to life through a range of caricatures and cartoonists.60 The recurrence of Indian Charlies in the record is therefore evidence of a similar attempt to reduce them to a cultural stereotype.

The distancing strategy that I have suggested in naming Charlie can be further demonstrated in a photograph album taken in 1928 by L.G. Watt, who worked for the New South Wales Board of Fire Commissioners (Image 11).

Image 11: Album of L. G. Watt, New South Wales Board of Fire Commissioners, 1928.

The album is inscribed in white marker, providing brief commentary on Watt’s visit to the north coast, with the photograph (middle left) marked with ‘Indian Charlie and his Pipe. Harwood Island Punt’. A closer inspection of the photograph makes it clear that ‘Indian Charlie’ is Charlie Duleep Singh (Image 12).

60 Indicative publications include Livingstone, 1890 and Cockburn, 1896. See also images from the Bulletin (Broinowski 1992, 10).

Image 12: From the album of L. G. Watt, ‘Indian Charlie and his Pipe – Harwood Island Punt. State Records, New South Wales. August 11, 1929. Digital ID 549_a029_a029000153.

From an elevated position, Watt’s image focuses on Charlie, surrounded by six suited men, pressed close around his cart due to the lack of space. Charlie holds a hookah, a curious smoking accessory that captivates the attention of the onlookers. One of the men obligingly offers Charlie a light, craning his neck to watch the strange bubbling of the hookah, an object that solicited much attention not only in White Australia, but elsewhere, as a quintessentially Oriental object (Caouachi 2006). The novelty of the hookah in Australia, and its association with the Indian community is apparent from the title of the photograph, but also from other photographs of the period.61 Behind Charlie looms a sign, a stern reminder of on No Smoking on the ferry, which apparently concerns no one. The horse’s emaciation gives us a sense of Charlie’s poverty. The dynamic between the men on the punt appears rather stiff.

Fourteen years later, Charlie died of pneumonia on July 29, 1943 at Lismore Base Hospital, at the age of 80. His remains were interred in the ‘Hindu cemetery Lismore’, in a ceremony ministered by one Harnam Singh. His death certificate listed him as simply Duleep Singh, although there was sufficient information known about him that

61 ‘A man smoking an Indian Hookah’, Victoria, c. 1925. From Mrs E. Collier, 1988. The Biggest Family Album of Australia, Museum Victoria. http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/770942/negative-victoria-circa-1925 his father’s and mother’s names were also listed on the form.62 That he had during his lifetime signed a range of government paperwork in the name of Charlie Duleep Singh suggests his own agency in adopting the name, although it does not appear that he, or any of the other Charlies who signed it onto their CEDTs, apprehended its derogatory implications.

Names and How to Transcend Them

James C. Scott et al have described naming practices as ‘designed to make the human and physical landscape legible, by sharply identifying a unique individual’, and then inserting them into unambiguous, aggregated identities (Scott et al 2002, 4). It is evident that politicians and the press after federation engaged a set of naming practices that established discourse of Indian undesirability, that justified the Immigration Restriction Act. It was hardly surprising that this language drew heavily on the discourse of imperialism, given that the composition of Australia was heavily British. Yet in the opening decades of the twentieth century in India, this language of colonialism – which has now been subjected to extensive postcolonial analysis – was beginning to shift, in response to both the expansion of colonial knowledge. ‘Hindoo’, to infer race or ethnicity, fell into disuse, becoming instead a majoritarian, communal category, that was to become a primary tool of colonial statecraft (Kaviraj 1997).

The term ‘native’, too, would increasingly come under question, following sustained complaints about its derogatory implications from nationalist circles. Australia, however, was relatively unexposed to such shifts, as the reluctant host of a disenfranchised Indian population that halved in in the first decades after federation. In the 1940s, Edwin Tylor Brown, the Australian author of the Raj classic, Curry and Rice, would remark on the transition of names from Asiatic to Asian, and from Colonies and Dominions to ‘members of the Commonwealth’, with the derisive observation that ‘instead of changing the thing, one changes the name, in the magic belief that names are the fundamental reality’.63 Post-structuralism has subsequently demonstrated that names matter, actively constructing and conscribing subjectivities.

62 New South Wales Death Certificate, 19710/1943. 63 Edwin Tylor Brown, ‘Essay on Euphemisms’, typescript. State Library of Victoria, Edwin Tylor Brown papers, Box 1. It is often argued that the impetus for immigration restriction in Australia from the early 1900s did not emanate from any popular demand, but from politicians (Yarwood 1964; Ohlsson 2011; Tavan 2004). Prime Minister Barton, for example, when challenged in London in 1902 on the implications that white Australia would have for the empire, evaded the question by stating ‘that in the present temper of the Australian people it would be useless to attempt any amendment of the Act.’64 It is also notable that some of the most prominent Australian parliamentarians speaking in favour of passing the Immigration Restriction Act, such as Deakin, Braddon and Higgins, actively cited their recent experience in India to dignify their arguments. Parliamentarians were in a position to perpetuate a range of negative stereotypes about Indians and other non-white residents of the Commonwealth, advancing a vigorous race nationalism. The mutual reinforcement between the press and parliament made discourses about white Australia seem tenacious.

Assumptions about Aliens, Asiatics, Coolies, Afghans, Hindoos, and so on created structures which individual Indians resident in Australia had to contend with. That there was a discernible trend in smaller communities towards naming locally-based Indians ‘Charlie’ suggests that publics played a role in distancing them too. It was left to these individuals to negotiate the stereotypes given to them; some were more successful than others in transcending their designated Charlieness. Charlie Ammondeen married an Australian woman and enjoyed some wealth before dying as a grazier. Charlie Besanta Singh enjoyed the company of an Australian ‘lady friend’, although both were apparently stigmatised for their transgression (Bate 1989, 129). Galeb Cashmere was ceded the right to move around his district freely, but preferred keeping to himself. Others died in such isolation that their true identities remain a mystery.

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