Abstract
There is a common perception of close ties between India and Australia deriving from a history of both emerging as nations from the British spaces of Empire and the international spaces of Commonwealth. This chapter tracks back to early distinctions between ‘Dominion’ and ‘Colony’—mainly differentiated as ‘white’ and ‘coloured’—showing how this led to the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’ that affected Australia-India relations for many years and examining Churchill’s role in consolidating the distinction with regard to India. In more recent times Australia’s shift to multiculturalism and greater Asian immigration as well as international political shifts enable new political and economic relations with India.
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Notes
- 1.
I have borrowed the term from the Honest History Project (n.d.) and its efforts to promote a more ‘balanced consideration of Australian history by offering contesting, evidence-based interpretations’ that ‘challenge the misuse of history to serve political or other agendas’. http://honesthistory.net.au/.
- 2.
This movement included my nephew Nathan Coulter-Nile, who debuted for the Delhi Daredevils in 2013 before being snapped up by the Kolkata Knight Riders in 2017.
- 3.
For example, Australians tend overlook the NZ, in the nationally sanctified acronym Anzac.
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Nile, R. (2022). White Commonwealth and Coloured Empire: Unmasking the ‘Shared’ Colonial History of Australia and India. In: Sharrad, P., Bandyopadhyay, D.N. (eds) Transnational Spaces of India and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81325-3_13
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