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minority for social and cultural reasons was because they did not fit the ideal plan Aussis had
for their society’ (Levy, 15). At the same time, between 1830 and 1850, the image of Australia
changed from a land of punishment for England’s worst elements to a land of promise for the
sturdy, ambitious and surplus population who felt their prospects in England were limited.
Even the once spurned descendants of convicts got a reconstructed image as prosperous and
hard-working citizens in a new land of opportunity (White, 29).
The visions of rural innocence in Australia appealed to a deep-seated
resentment against the industrial revolution.
The result was that the supporters of immigration saw Australia becoming the
sort of society they imagined England to have been in the past, before it
disappeared under the grime of the industrial revolution. (White, 34)
The idea of Australia as some sort of paradise meant many things to many people. In Australia
itself it was often used to hide the problems of society, to attract labour, ignore poverty, prop
up the system, and
it also reinforced discrimination against women, children, non-whites, the
unemployed and other sections of the working class, since only the successful,
adult, white male fitted the image of the ‘workingman’ (White, 46).
The image worked to the degree that it gave Australia a sense of going somewhere, of
having a future which might be more tangible and positive than its incorrigible past. The
appropriate model for this sometimes seemed more American than British. An important
example of this is in the many Australians who returned from the California Gold Rush with
the management skills and the technology they would use in the Australian gold fields. John
McLaren writes of his grandfather, a blacksmith whose ‘bookshelves held the American
handbooks of agriculture and domestic economy that taught Australians how to survive in a
frontier society’. The 19 th century saw the birth of a perception of kinship with the American
experience and of a need for American models. It was ‘a common fantasy’ in the 19 th century
that ‘Australia was the coming United States of the South’ (McLaren, 45). Linked to its pro-
Americanism was Australia’s urge for more independence from Britain and a more democratic
society. Asians represented the antithesis of these aspirations, and so Britain was blamed for
introducing the Chinese as cheap labourers while America’s own anti-Chinese sentiments were
viewed with favour (Ouyang Yu, 1995, Bulletin, 133).
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