A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

The Chinese might be religious in that they offered up prayers for the politicians who
voted to allow cheap labour into the country, 1 but the fact remains that they are
presented as a source of opium, of fan-tan and other malicious forms of gambling and
of prostitution in the ghettos they have formed in Sydney. So very early in his
journalistic career Brady tells of a visit to “Chow-Town” accompanied by a
policeman, and pulls out all the emotional stops:
Presently we found ourselves treading the mazes of ‘The Rocks’. Hereabouts
the houses, balconyless, yardless, airless, comfortless and gaping in iniquity
are packed and jammed together in narrow London-like lanes. Outside they
appear dark, gloomy and forbidding; inside they are gay enough after a
fashion and full of life that liveth and dreadeth to die. At the doors of these
rockeries STAND SHAMELESS WOMEN who, with bare heads and arms
akimbo freely invite the male passerby to accept the hot hospitality of vice. 2
Going on to talk of the opium dens, pak-a-pu and fantan joints where mariners go
with money and clothes and depart clad in the Evening News or the Echo, he deplores
the fact that good Australians are being “driven to the wall by the cheap dirty Syrian
and Chow”. 3 Brady was still campaigning for “Australia-for the Australians” in The
Labor Call in the 1930’s and in a Bulletin poem as late as 1947 protested how the
voice of people such as himself is muted and warnings about the dangers of an open
immigration policy are ignored. The poet in this verse shouted day and night “Get
busy while the chance is/To make Australia white” but the result was “They buried
him in quicklime/ And went on just the same.” He instanced the negro question in
America as an example of the kind of problem we would be inviting by such an open
policy.
The lesson that we, as Australians, are invited by the anti-color authorities to
learn from the negro question in America, which has caused one great war
and numberless troubles and anxieties for our American cousins, is that there
must be no tampering with the color question, and whether in deference to the
views of England we exclude Asiatics and the black race by a language test, or
absolutely exclude them by law directly, there must be no possibility of them
entering our Commonwealth. 4
Such directness is leavened at times with humour. The State Minister for Works
urged that all new vessels of his department should have aboriginal names to preserve
them as a recompense for the white man’s taking away of their land. Humorously
Brady suggests some tongue twisters (“Murrowolaroi” for a government punt;
“Minyagoyigilla” (“Why weepest thou?”) for a mud dredge) and comments:
In the history of the world’s politics the eternal fitness of things has never
been so well-expressed as in the large and liberal ideas of Mr. O’Sullivan,
Minister for Culture and Works for the State of New South Wales. God Save
the King! 5
1 “The Coloured Curse”, Bird-O’-Freedom, 1.10.1892
2 “Chow-Town”, Bird-O’-Freedom, 23.3.1893
3 “The Asiatic Curse”, The Grip, 30.9.1901
4 “Black Labor and Its Exclusion”, The Grip, 24.10.1901
5 “O”Sullivan, The Nigger’s Friend”, The Grip, 13.1.1902
63