EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 106

Government introduced the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act in 1896
(Lake and Reynolds, 2008: 144). The other colonies soon followed suit, and at
Federation the new national government passed the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 .
These Acts had their origins in anti-Chinese protests and violence from the
1850s, when miners objected to competition from these 'industrious' immigrants
(Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007). The New South Wales and
Victorian Governments introduced some restrictions on Chinese immigration soon
after, as did other countries around the world, including the United States and
Canada.
What was radical about the 1896 legislation in New South Wales was that it
banned 'all persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the Continent of
Asia or the Continent of Africa, or any island adjacent thereto, or any island in the
Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean', irrespective of a country's power, or status as an
ally, or even if an individual was a British subject (Lake and Reynolds, 2008: 144).
This angered Japan and India, and embarrassed Britain (Morris-Suzuki, 2008). It
formally divided the world into white and not white for the first time (Lake and
Reynolds, 2008). Fears fuelled by economic self-interest made the demands for
restrictions urgent, but even these were influenced by ideas about race.
It is hard to appreciate how profound a rupture the beginning of the biological
revolution must have been for nineteenth-century society. As Europeans made
their first incursions into Australia's interior, geologists began to understand that
the Earth must be millions of years old, not a few thousand. In Hunters and Collectors ,
historian Tom Griffiths conveyed their dramatic expansion in perspective: 'in the
two hundred years following the European invasion of Australia, the known age
of the earth increased from about 6000 years to 4.6 billion' (1996: 8). Soon after
the geologists made their revelations, the naturalists put forward persuasive
arguments for an even more radical theory - humans were just another animal and
differentiation of species was a random, contingent process. 'Nineteenth-century
evolutionists', wrote historian Edward J. Larson, 'envisioned the earth as a grand
laboratory or workshop of organic development: a shimmering sphere of life
spinning in a vast universe' (2004: xiii). It was the most fundamental shift to how
we viewed ourselves and other living creatures, we 'became interconnected
competitors rather than separate creations' (ibid.). Biological thought has flourished
over the last 150 years. Larson wrote: 'We now live in the shadow - or the
illumination - of this modern biologic worldview' (ibid.).
Where once God had made the world and all its creatures final and stable,
Cuvier demonstrated a world in which species could become extinct. Lamarck
argued that species change in response to environment, and Darwin recognised this
process as historical. Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History
wrote that Darwin transformed 'the prevailing view of stability - of the earth, of
all the species on earth, and not least the stability of society's strata - into a picture
of motion' (2006: 8). The hierarchy of species was a result of a dynamic process in
time - the 'lower' species were older, the 'higher' newer, and 'the struggle between
them created ever “higher” forms' (Lindqvist, 1996: 120). Different 'races' of