Growing up under the White Australia Policy

 

By Helen Said, Melbourne, Australia

With the White Australia Policy back in the media spotlight, I have decided to share my personal story as a person from a Greek-Egyptian ethnic background.

My parents and older sister were born in Egypt and were part of a Greek speaking ethnic minority. They left Egypt as refugees from the Second Arab-Israeli War. As Greek-Maltese British Subjects living in Egypt, they had been placed under house arrest, following the tri-partite British, French and Israeli invasion, and ordered out of the country, under threat of imprisonment. My family arrived in icy London in the winter of 1956, carrying two suitcases of light Egyptian clothes and five worthless Egyptian pounds.

My parents have always been grateful for the kindness relatives and strangers showed them when they were broke and homeless, and this motivated them to later become refugee advocates in Australia. But back in 1950s London, when my parents were refugees, there were some who weren’t so welcoming.

“Flats to let. No coloured people”, “Room vacant, no coloureds.” Dad read the signs in people’s windows as he travelled to his aunt’s house, looking for a place to stay. He recalled, of those times, “I didn’t even know whether I was coloured or not.” Luckily, Dad’s aunt helped our family gain their first rental flat in London, and she also gave Dad some advice: “Get rid of that moustache… Men in England don’t wear wedding rings…. We pronounce our surname as Sed…. We don’t tell people that we are Greek ….”

Dad remained unhappy in class conscious London and he longed to migrate to Australia. Not long after I was born, my parents and Granny began seriously considering making the move.

Back then, migration was based on skin colour and ancestry, under the White Australia Policy. My maternal granny was a well-travelled Englishwoman who had married a Greek, so although Mum was born in Egypt, both her parents were white. Mum and Granny were thus accepted as migrants by Australia House.

With Dad, it was a different story. Dad was born in Egypt, his mother was a Greek from Tripoli, his father was born in Istanbul, he had a Middle Eastern derived surname and a brown skin. Australia House sent Dad an additional set of questions about each of his ancestors. Dad had to get his ancestry records from Somerset House to prove that five generations of his male ancestors were British Subjects, and to trace the male line of his family back to Malta in the 1800s. If my great, great, great grandfather had been an Arab Saȉd, with an extra dot on the i, instead of a Maltese Said, then my dad, my sister and I would have been classed as non-whites, and this could well have caused Australia House to reject us as immigrants to Australia.

Our application to migrate to Australia was held up for two years, largely because of this White Australia Policy. We finally arrived in Australia in 1962 and I started school the following year.

Prep grade was fun and easy and in early 1964 I was looking forward to starting grade 1. On my first day back from summer holidays, when we marched into the classroom, I saw three rows of tables marked with different colours – Red Row, Blue Row and Yellow Row. I was attempting to follow my neighbourhood friend, a blonde English girl, to Blue Row, when my teacher suddenly and inexplicably pulled me aside and directed me to sit on Yellow Row with two boys.

While the rest of the class was being given pencils and papers and things to read, the two boys and I were given chalk boards and told to write a big letter “a”. The work was babyish and demeaning. I felt put off by sitting with boys. I thought this was a punishment for something, and the whole time I was wracking my brain, wondering what I was being punished for.

It wasn’t until the afternoon, when we did art, that I finally realised why I had been told to sit there. It was a hot day and we were all wearing short sleeves and dipping our paint bushes into a jar of water. The two boys and I were sharing a jar, and as our three little arms met in the middle of the table, I looked from one to the other to the other, and I suddenly realised that the three of us all had brown arms. I suddenly realised that this was the reason why I had been given babyish work and wasn’t allowed to sit with the other girls, who were all much fairer skinned.

Fighting back tears, I leapt to my feet, ran to the front of the classroom and confronted my teacher. “I want to sit on Red Row!” I demanded. The teacher was furious and ordered me back to my seat. I returned, loudly crying, and sobbed for most of the afternoon.

Later on, a senior teacher entered the room. She spent some time talking to my class teacher and then called me over. In a soothing voice, she asked, “Tell me, where do you want to sit?” I caught sight of my best friend on Blue Row and pointed to her. The senior teacher told me to go and sit there. I was elated. Suddenly there was a reward, not a punishment. In fact, as my Cuisenaire rod equations grew longer, and my Ps and Qs sorted themselves out, there was a further reward - my teacher led me to Red Row, where the brightest kids were seated, and I soon became top of the class.

Not everybody was happy with my ascendency. News travelled around the school that I was brainy, and soon some angry older children started confronting me in the schoolyard, demanding to know, “Why are you so brainy? The Greeks are supposed to be dumb.” I would say, “The Greeks are not dumb,” but they were adamant that they were correct. My parents were well aware of the prejudices that we all faced and they did their best to counter these. Mum and Granny would sew matching pretty dresses for me and my sister. Dad would tell us about the advancements of ancient Greeks and Egyptians, to instil us with pride about our differences.

In grade 3, in 1966, we had a teacher who was sometimes away sick and a regular substitute teacher took her place. I can still see the substitute teacher – she was a fat middle aged woman with short dark hair. The minute she walked into the room, she looked straight at me and said, “You need to go and sit over there,” and she pointed to the side of the room where the slower learners and unruly boys had to sit.

I objected to the instruction and I said, “This is my seat. I sit here.” Obviously, the substitute teacher had grown up in an era where it was unthinkable for a darker skinned kid to be brainier, and better behaved in class than whiter kids, and she wasn’t going to allow me to sit with other well-groomed, polite, high achieving girls. She insisted that she was the teacher and I had to obey her. So, for the duration of my regular teacher’s absence, I had to change seats. Every morning at line up time, I would look to see who my teacher was, and my heart would sing when my regular teacher returned, because she liked me and she would let me sit with my friends.

Every time the substitute teacher came in, for the rest of the year, she would immediately look straight at me, point to the far side of the classroom and bark out, “You! Over there!” I would tell myself that this was only for a few days and quietly obey. There was no doubt that this was a punishment for having a brown skin – she never moved anybody else.

I couldn’t cope with the thought that my grade 1 Yellow Row experience was going to follow me forever, that having proved myself as top of the class wasn’t enough to end this treatment. I told myself I would have to forget about the substitute teacher and, somehow, I did. This memory didn’t re-surface until almost 60 years later. My attempts to talk to Anglo-Australians, and sometimes even second-generation European-Australians, about racist incidents have often ended in gaslighting, being told that I’m exaggerating, and raking over the past, so I must be too sensitive.

Even psychologists and counsellors have done this. As an adult, when I tried asking for advice about dealing with workplace casual racism and other discriminations, I was instantly disbelieved. They made no attempts to find out about any past or present racist experience. As soon as I mentioned discrimination, they retorted with psychobabble like, “You have a perception that you have been discriminated against,” and turned their attention towards my supposedly low self-esteem. In fact, my self-esteem is just fine and it is they who have a perception that there is no racism towards immigrants. These psychologists’ responses would again make burying racist experiences the safer option.

Although I was a part-Maltese Catholic, I never attended Catholic schools. While we were on the ship coming to Australia, a priest boarded and he had a list of all the Catholic immigrants on board, my dad being one them. He called Dad in for a meeting and told him that, when we arrive in Australia, it was his duty to send me and my sister to local Catholic schools. Dad wasn’t one for being told what to do. Although he had attended both Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church in Egypt, he had since abandoned his religious beliefs. In any case, we were an inter-faith family – Dad was Catholic, Mum was Greek Orthodox and Granny was an English Protestant who had been baptised Orthodox upon marrying a Greek, but ended up reverting to Protestantism in widowhood.

There was no simple religious affiliation that defined our family and Dad didn’t want us to undergo religious indoctrination. The priest’s efforts to recruit for the Catholic schools backfired and Dad vowed that we would attend local government schools, come what may. So, while most Catholic kids, mainly Italians, Maltese and Irish, attended Catholic schools in my suburb, I was among a small number of Catholics in my class at my local government school.

Back in the 1960s, government primary schools ran weekly religious instruction classes. Two separate classes ran concurrently – Catholic and Protestant. To my knowledge, there were no other religious groups in our suburb at the time because of the White Australia Policy, or if there were, they lay low. Each week, the teacher would call out, “Would all the Catholics come to the front of the room please?” About eight of us would walk to the front of the room and line up, facing about thirty other kids, who were staring, mocking and whispering, “Catholics! Catholics!” Mostly, teachers sat back and allowed this sneering chorus of “Catholics! Catholics!” to continue for several minutes.

I would do my best to zone out and block out the taunts until we were finally sent out of the room to attend Catholic Religious Instruction around the staffroom table. The rest of the class stayed in their seats for Protestant Religious Instruction.

Catholic Religious Instruction centred on keeping a pure white soul by doing good deeds and refraining from sins. As well as loving the stories of angels and Lucifer, the idea that God was keeping a tally of our good VS bad deeds appealed to my mathematical inclinations. Religious Instruction made me even more determined to obey my teachers and get good marks. After all, God was doing the maths and I wanted to become one of those angels in heaven!

At the end of grade 1, we had a Christmas pageant. In an undisguised display of the race relations of those times, the two brown skinned boys who still sat on yellow row had to play the part of the cow and the donkey, the blonde kids stood on chairs, towering above us all, decked out in sparkly angel costumes, the class fashion diva played Virgin Mary, while anyone who could sing was in the choir singing Christmas carols.

Parents were invited to see us perform and Granny came to watch while Mum was at work. I had been to choir practice nearly every day and we were coached about taking a deep breath and opening our mouths wide enough to fit three fingers inside to sing Christmas carols loudly. I loved it and I could hear my voice getting more powerful at every rehearsal. Choir practice was held in another classroom, where bigger kids were making the angel costumes. I was very excited about these costumes, which I had assumed were for us as choir singers to reward our efforts.

On the day of the performance, I saw the blonde kids, who never had to rehearse, march in wearing the dazzling white angel costumes, and stand on chairs towering over us. In my 6-year-old mind, I thought they had been chosen for heaven and we had been rejected! The music started and I was supposed to start singing, but my analytical mind was in full throttle and I had lost my voice - Didn’t the Catholic Religious Instruction teacher say we could become angels if we had a pure white soul? Or doesn’t God want people like me in heaven?

I caught sight of Granny in the audience. By then she had reverted to Protestantism and was a member of her local church choir. Granny was gazing at me and beaming. She looked so proud to see me on stage. Her smile gave me strength. I knew she wanted to hear me sing. I put my thoughts about God and angels out of my mind, opened mouth and sang as loudly as I could. I didn’t have an angel costume but I knew I had a powerful voice and I had an inkling that one day I would use it.

The White Australia Policy continued right throughout my primary school years. It prevented almost all People of Colour from entering Australia until Gough Whitlam came to power in the 1970s. For years, I remained one of the darkest skinned kids in my suburb.

Back then, there was virtually no awareness of racism; we didn’t even know words to describe this experience. I was constantly questioned by friends and strangers, children and adults, about where I was born.

“How come you’re so brown?”

“Aren’t you Maria from the green grocer shop?”

“Helen Said what? What did you say, Helen Said?” *

“Where do yoooooouuuuu come from?”

Telling them I was born in England never satisfied them. People often thought I was lying, to avoid being called a “wog”, because English people were supposed to be white. I would say what my mum told me to say, that I was Greek. But when they asked where my parents were born, I would say, “Egypt”. I could see their eyebrows rising higher and higher as many people back then thought that having a mixed ethnic background was unheard of or scandalous. They thought you had to be either one thing or the other. I see parallels with the way trans or non-binary people are often treated today.

Back then I was expected to regularly explain myself, in the street, in the playground, at parties, while visiting, explain why I didn’t have the same colouring as everybody else. But because of my mixed ethnic background, my responses raised more questions than they answered.

The thought that a social encounter could turn into an interrogation about my skin colour, birthplace or family background made socialising increasingly stressful. “Why is this happening? Will it happen again? Why didn’t I say such-and-such instead of freezing up?...” There was this constant inner dialogue, and replaying of events in my mind to achieve more understanding and feel more prepared for the next racial challenge. As a child, I had neither the wisdom nor the support to unpack what was happening to me.

My aunty, who was my mother’s sister, lived around the corner from us while I was growing up. Aunty had been doing art lessons since she was a child and her house was filled with her beautiful oil paintings. Through her artistic connections, Aunty had made some very distinguished friends from the other side of town and, one day, she invited a couple of them to an afternoon tea party. She also invited me and Mum to join them. I remember getting dressed up for the occasion and feeling quite excited.

I can still remember Aunty’s visitors. The woman was small, thin and quiet. The man was tall and he spoke in a crisp, cultured voice. As soon as we were all introduced, the man looked at me and declared, “You are so much darker than the rest of your relatives! You must be the black sheep of the family.”

I was only about 9 years old at the time and I did what I always did when people made these kinds of remarks; I blushed and zoned out and hoped the uncomfortable attention would soon end. But it didn’t. As Aunty and the small, thin woman exchanged pleasantries, the man continued to gasp and remark about my skin colour and again he called me a “black sheep”. I now wonder if he thought this was a clever pun on the idiomatic meaning of the phrase and that, if he repeated it often enough, we would grant him a polite laugh.

Mum tried to intervene by explaining that I took after my dad’s side and Dad was much darker than her and her sister, but the man paid no attention to Mum. He became more insistent, repeating, throughout the visit, “You are definitely the black sheep of your family”, despite Mum repeatedly saying, “How do you call her a black sheep? Helen looks like her father.”

By that age, I had been so conditioned to expect racist remarks that I was nervous about Mum objecting. As uncomfortable as it was, to be remarked upon by such a big, posh sounding man, I had been made to feel that it was safer to say nothing in these situations. Back then, our suburb was a poor, rough town. If you weren’t tough enough to withstand bullying you would cop more.

Mum came to see me in my room that night and said, “I didn’t like that man calling you a black sheep.” It was the first time I had to confront the fact that most people didn’t experience things that I experienced, and that the things I experienced were shocking and wrong. Mum was to approach me several more times, over the next few days, with a sad and despairing expression, to tell me how wrong this name-calling had been. I wrestled between the pressure to normalise the frequent race baiting that I was experiencing and Mum’s reminders that this was not in fact normal.

Over the years, this visit to my Aunt’s became one of many unpleasant encounters that I had to block out, rationalise away, push into the past, so that I could get on with everyday life. But I’m glad I have finally reclaimed this memory as it has made me thankful for having a mother who stuck up for me and declared that racist labelling was wrong.

Dad also spoke up about the racism my sister and I faced, but I didn’t find out about it until middle age. When I was in my forties, I began writing a series of family stories which eventually formed the basis for Dad’s biography, Five Egyptian Pounds. Dad and another relative had written a couple of personal stories, to preserve their immigration history, and they willingly turned their writings over to me, and allowed me to quote from their material, when they found out I was writing a book. And that’s when I first read about this incident, which was mostly written by Dad, with a few of my edits:

One day in 1964 a note came home from Altona West Primary School in [older daughter’s] schoolbag: “Dear Mr. Said, Please ring the headmaster to arrange an appointment.”

I rang the school, made the appointment and arranged time off work to speak with the headmaster as requested. But even before I arrived at Altona West Primary School, I had an inkling as to what this meeting would be about.

Our girls, although bright academically, were facing problems at school. Ours was one of very few families, for miles around, who hailed from a non-European country. [Older daughter] had already told me she was being teased in the playground about being born in Egypt. And during the White Australia era, Helen stood out in our neighbourhood as being noticeably dark skinned.

The headmaster stood up to greet me on that oppressively hot day. He was wearing long white socks, shorts, a short-sleeved shirt and a tie and had a very flushed complexion. He urged me to sit down and launched straight into the problem and his proposed solution. He told me [older daughter] had been crying in the playground when children asked her where she was born and that Helen was being questioned by children as well.

“You know, you could solve this problem if you all became Australian Citizens,” he advised.

“What?” I exclaimed. I was furious. “It’s your job to educate my girls, not to control us as parents through our children. It’s not your business to know whether or not we are Australian Citizens.”

The meeting didn’t last long. Although we trusted the school to teach our children to read and write, this meeting demonstrated that it was going to have to be our job, as parents, to help our children keep their self-respect, and feel pride in who we were, under difficult circumstances.

The principal thought it was my parents’ job, not his own job, to curb racism in his schoolyard! How naïve of the principal to think that Australian Citizenship was some sort of fairy dust that you could sprinkle on yourself to make racism go away! We ended up becoming Australian Citizens when we were good and ready. But the school was to continue trying to control parents, through their children, for years to come.

Some teachers would shame kids in front of the class if their parents couldn’t speak English, and order the kids to make their parents speak English at home. In late primary school, our school building was being hired out at night for migrant English classes. Several times, my teacher confronted me in front of the whole class, demanding to know why my parents were not attending the migrant English classes. I would say, “My parents can speak English,” but it was clear he didn’t believe me as he would continue to insist that they should attend.

Whenever I asked my mum what to do about putdowns and bullying, the answer was, “Just ignore them.” Indeed, there was not much else that could be done before the advent of Equal Opportunities legislation. By the time the White Australia Policy was overturned, I was a teenager and I was facing negative attention about beating the boys in maths. The list of people I needed to ignore kept growing.

By mid-high school, change was at last sweeping across Australia. The White Australia Policy had been over-turned and anti-discrimination laws were on the way. Prejudices towards Mediterraneans began to slowly recede as racists turned their hostility towards newer waves of immigrants. The introduction of multiculturalism meant that people began questioning me about exciting Greek recipes instead of my skin colour. These questions were less confronting but no easier to answer as I wasn’t developing stereotypically feminine interests in domesticity or fashion.

By the time I reached high school, university had replaced heaven as my idyllic destination. Like God who counted your good deeds VS sins, to allow you past the pearly gates into heaven, HSC examiners would soon tally up my ticks and crosses and pass me to go to university. There, I imagined it would be like the triumph over Yellow Row and the day I ascending to the top of my class. HSC was so hard that I imagined good marks would provide me with the ultimate proof that I didn’t deserve any more put-downs. I thought a university degree would be a lifelong “Get out of discrimination jail free” card.

My HSC maths and science marks were very high and Melbourne University opened its doors. But I encountered more forms of elitism within the sciences, and the academic work didn’t capture my imagination. After chopping and changing my university subjects, I finally graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in mathematics in the early 1980s. Although I was very good at maths, I found my passion lay in activism and advocacy. I was determined to change the system that had produced the White Australia Policy and dumped three little migrant kids on Yellow Row.

* please read the rest of the Well Said Helen Said blog to find the answer to this question!