It has been argued that Australia must face up to the anxieties of its past to engage with China with less anxiety now. An essential starting point is that ‘construction of an Asian-Chinese Other’ in nineteenth and twentieth century Australia involved disrespect for the rule of law.

This paper examines the wrongful labelling in the colonial and post-federation era of Chinese Australians as ‘aliens’, as ‘outsiders’ or those who did not belong when in fact many, perhaps even the majority, had equal status under the law with white settlers as ‘British subjects’, mainly through birth in British possessions in Asia or in Australia itself. Legal cases from this period demonstrate a presumption that any person who looked Chinese could not be a British subject. Even official census records failed to accurately register the number of Chinese British subjects in Australia.

The failure to accept the role of the Chinese in building modern Australia is due both to the considerable reduction in their presence under the White Australia Policy and because they were persistently classed as the ‘aliens’ or ‘outsiders’, despite having as much right as other settler groups to be seen as ‘belonging’ or as ‘one of us’.