A review of a history of racism against Kiwi-Indians
Anyone with an Indian passport resident in New Zealand would be familiar with one absurdity that stands in their way whenever they are looking to travel north or west from here – the Australian transit visa. This is a permission that requires almost as much form-filling, expense and effort to obtain as any other short-stay visa, except what you’re seeking is the privilege of stepping off a plane and entering merely the transit area of an Australian airport. Yes, you need one no matter how brief your stay, and also yes, the transit area is that part of an airport that no passenger flying onward is able to leave anyway, which normally you don’t even go through immigration to access.
Such is the degree of suspicion with which people from well over half the world’s nations are regarded by the Australian authorities that it ends up undermining the usually non-partisan capitalist imperative to try and corner everybody’s travel dollars: many of us simply look for alternative flights bypassing Australia and her airlines. I had long assumed that this visa is part of the legacy of 9/11. Not so. Invisible, Jacqueline Leckie’s newly published history of exclusions endured by people of Indian origin in New Zealand, reveals that Australian transit restrictions upon people of colour date back to the adoption of the White Australia policy itself, specifically the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. Leckie gives examples of New Zealanders such as Harnam Singh who had been a resident of Australia and then Blenheim for over 25 years, but was refused passage through Australia when trying to visit India and had to travel (by ship) “the circuitous route to India via Argentina and London”!! The double exclamation marks are mine, to nudge you to take an extra moment to ponder the scale of the detour, caused solely by racial prejudice.
Leckie’s research brings out further dimensions that would be disturbing to New Zealanders as well. She notes that “Kiwi-Indians, along with Chinese and Māori, […] continued to face discrimination when visiting or transiting through Australia” up until the early 1970s. “They were only granted a 72-hour transit visa, but other New Zealanders did not require a visa or were stamped with an automatic three-month visa upon arrival in Australia.” Here’s the kicker, though, as recalled in a 2007 ‘Report on Indian Community Grievances’ by Nigel Murphy: “Although not a New Zealand policy, the New Zealand government tacitly agreed with the Australian government, and offered no assistance to Indian and Chinese New Zealanders’ campaign to remove it.” Only in 1972, after extensive protest and lobbying, were Chinese and Indian New Zealanders granted equal rights of entry to Australia along with other New Zealanders.
To a present-day New Zealander of colour, this might be the unkindest cut, the repeated discovery in the pages of Leckie’s book that even when you were a citizen, for much of the history of this country your government didn’t (want to) have your back. Then prime minister Peter Fraser could dodge media questions posed to him in Sri Lanka in 1948 with the claim that there was no discrimination against Indians in New Zealand “because no white policy on Australian lines operated there.” However, a confidential government memo from 1953 was more candid. “Our immigration is based firmly on the principle that we are and intend to remain a country of European development. It is inevitably discriminatory against Asians […] Whereas we have done much to encourage immigration from Europe, we do everything to discourage it from Asia.”
Leckie records numerous instances in which early Indian migrants refer, in their letters of protest against discrimination they have encountered, to the explicit guarantee made by Queen Victoria herself to every British subject, that within the bounds of her empire “there shall not be in the eye of the law any distinction or disqualification whatever founded on mere distinction of colour, origin, language or creed but the protection of the law in letter or substance shall be extended impartially to all alike.” (To me, these appeals felt poignantly analogous to the long, ongoing battle of generations of tangata whenua to hold the Crown to the promises implicit in the Māori text of the Treaty of Waitangi.) Yet, in an attempt to de-legitimise precisely this basis for equality and recognition, a 1914 draft of an Immigration Restriction Amendment Bill in New Zealand recommended eliminating “the term ‘British subjects’ from the principal Act, thus doing away with the possibility of the illiterate Hindu being regarded as a British subject in law.” The bill also proposed a fun-sounding dictation test, a language roulette to be thrust upon disembarking would-be migrants of colour after weeks at sea, that involved “copying, in not more than twenty minutes, fifty words in any European language dictated by a Customs officer or an interpreter.” (My italics: one wonders how many white British subjects would have passed such an immigration requirement). Leckie drily notes about this bill’s fate that “war broke out in August 1914, and India’s cooperation was essential, so [it] was dropped.”
But even for those Indians who were permitted to become citizens, it seems every subsequent right they should have taken for granted was withheld and begrudged until it was eventually won. The right to a pension after a lifetime of working and paying taxes in this country, the right to send money to India either to support family or to build towards one’s retirement plans (which would have been an especial Catch 22 – imagine being barred from a New Zealand pension and also not being allowed to plan to retire in India), the right to take out life insurance, the right to a widows’ pension, even the right as a citizen to return to New Zealand without a time-bound re-entry permit. The rights to take up professions in which Indians were relatively numerous at the time – for example, growing and selling fruits and vegetables - as well as those in which there were still few, such as teaching. This, from the Wairarapa Daily Times, April 1921: “It is astounding to find that our Education Department is favourable to the introduction of the Hindu among our school children. Those officials of the Education Department who are responsible for this policy are in the wrong country – they should be in Russia.”
One irony that Leckie brings out again and again is that while the positive contributions, and indeed the full humanity, of many New Zealand Indians have often been tragically invisible, they have at the same time been so remarkably visible to those who insisted on seeing them as a threat, even when the actual numbers in question were as yet tiny. For instance, at a time when local racists felt the need to form a White New Zealand League in Pukekohe in December 1925, with a key aim being to push for “legislation making it illegal to lease or sell land to Asiatics”, the number of people of Indian descent recorded to be living in Franklin County and Pukekohe Borough was 17. Although you can see why a racist might feel swamped: these numbers had alarmingly risen from the previous two censuses, 3 Indians in 1921 and 1 in 1916, as well as 10 and 5 Chinese respectively.
Duncan Garner went to buy his year’s supply of undies at K-Mart and suddenly wasn’t even sure if he was still in New Zealand
Leckie brings this history up to the present moment, moving from the era of Indian New Zealanders encountering explicit prejudice at every level to a more recognisable contemporary landscape, in which more dispersed instances of casual racism, social micro-aggressions, stereotyping, bias of all kinds (conscious, unconscious, institutional, individual) in sectors ranging from housing to employment, and instances of outright violence - in attacks on dairy owners of Indian origin, for example - are still reported unacceptably often. This was also the portion of the book that overlapped with my own time in Aotearoa. I moved to Wellington in mid-September 2010, and one unfortunate memory I will always associate with those first weeks is of Paul Henry mocking certain Indian surnames in the lead-up to the New Delhi Commonwealth Games. There were immediate protests from both within and beyond the Indian community, but a short while later, from the same prominent position on the same platform (TVNZ), Henry still felt he could ask the prime minister whether the then governor-general, Sir Anand Satyanand, was “even a New Zealander”, following this up by demanding of John Key: “Are you going to choose a New Zealander who looks and sounds like a New Zealander this time?” Leckie also makes sure to record TVNZ’s initial response to the many complaints that followed: in their view, Henry said “the things we quietly think but are scared to say out loud.”
In December 2017, Duncan Garner went to buy his year’s supply of undies at K-Mart (TMI already, if you ask me) and suddenly wasn’t even sure if he was still in New Zealand. “I looked around, it could have been anywhere in South East Asia. […] Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Syrians and many others.” Rather than interpreting the long queue as a sign that K-Mart needed to have more counters open the week before Christmas, Garner drew out the far grander extrapolation that New Zealand as a nation has no idea of what it is doing with an immigration policy that led to this “massive human snake”, which, to his now wide-open eyes, even appears as a harbinger of the country as a future “international cot case” and a place of “broken dreams”. Garner’s restrained conclusion: “Immigration is great, but I’m not sure our traditional standard of living is enhanced by it.” My restrained conclusion: thank God it was only Duncan Garner, who takes the trouble, twice, to reassure us that his column intends in no way “to be racist or anti-foreigner”, and not an actual racist shopping for undies that fateful Wednesday.
Or even Shane Jones, who might have spotted in that snaky queue a whole Indian village! Leckie reminds us how in 2019, when Immigration New Zealand tightened its partnership visa category, leaving only those couples eligible who could furnish proof of having lived together (ironically, this was the visa that enabled me to move here with my Kiwi partner), Indians in recently arranged marriages found themselves excluded, because they wouldn’t as yet have cohabited with their new spouses. This was Jones’ entirely relevant contribution to the debate: “You have no legitimate expectations in my view to bring your whole village to New Zealand, and if you don’t like it and you’re threatening to go home, then catch the next flight home.”
Thankfully, Immigration New Zealand took its counsel from other sources as well, and a new category of “culturally arranged marriage visitor’s visa” was created not long after. Leckie’s citing of Jones and Paul Henry, besides bringing a brief, utterly non-misty ‘where are they now’ look to my eyes, also revived the immense satisfaction I felt last year watching the election results come in from Northland. Not only did Jones’ defeat mean, at least for a while, his invisibility in public life, but also the scale of the drubbing (he came in a distant third) served as confirmation that his home-brewed Trumpism had found few takers in present-day Aotearoa. The multi-ethnic queue had snaked right around these angry men holding their undies, and voted for a different country.
Occasionally, I try to freak out our nine-year-old daughter with visions of worlds in which everything about our part-Pākehā, part Indian family would be socially unacceptable if not outright illegal: my relationship with her mum, our right to be together, her own existence as a person of mixed ethnicity. I think, more than her, I freak myself out, because, as of now, I still have the greater awareness of how not far away such worlds are in time from our own. With extraordinary archival research, Leckie has brought to life those eras and some of their lingering echoes right here in New Zealand, reminding us that such entrenched discrimination isn’t just to be associated with the White Australia policy or apartheid South Africa or the old American South, then comfortably dismissed. But she has also made sure to record numerous stories of individual, and collective, resistance and protest, thereby emphasising the links between the rights, legal protections, and the levels of freedom and mutual respect in everyday life that people of all backgrounds rightly take as a given in present-day Aotearoa, and the invisible heroes who fought for them.
We, who have come later, stand on their shoulders.
Invisible: New Zealand's history of excluding Kiwi-Indians by Jacqueline Leckie (Massey University Press, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
