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Introduction
The now significant body of academic scholarship on the White Australia Policy (henceforth WAP) – Willard (1923), Nairn (1956), Yarwood (1962), Walker (1999 and 2019) and Tavan (2005) – has spanned across the history of Asian migration and policy-making initiatives in Australia. Prominent Australian scholars such as Ward (2001), Goldsworthy (2002), De Lepervanche (1984 and 2013), Allen (2005, 2008, 2009a, b, 2011, 2013 and 2017), Walker (1999), Lowe (2013), and Maclean (2015 and 2020) in their research have also focused on the impact of the British Empire and the WAP on Australia–India relations and early Indian migrants in Australia.
Recent work on Australian–Indian cultural encounters, literary depictions and on Australia and India through a more pan-Asian lens has revealed more complexity than simply dogged administration of the WAP (Sengupta, 2012; Walker, 2019; Sobocinska, 2014). Kane Collins has reminded us that, amidst the strong political consensus on the desirability of racially restrictive immigration in the early years of Australia's federation, there were also thoughtful critics from business, Christian faith and other perspectives (Collins, 2009). This article adds to this line of interrogation of the WAP through the experiences of Indian students in Australia during the first 50 years of the WAP. It shows that the educational lens is effective in revealing activists for change, both Indian and Australian, while also adding to our understanding of how different interpretations of imperial responsibility played out in the broader Australia–India relationship, and how Indian students quietly gathered attention and support in ways that foreshadowed the experiences of subsequent students arriving under the Colombo Plan.
Kama Maclean has shown in rich detail how the triangular Britain–Australia–India relationship prior to India's independence exposed imperial fault-lines in the form of differing ideas and policies towards imperial evolution and progress. Her study also strengthens suggestions that small groups mobilised to promote stronger Australian–Indian connections laid the groundwork that could be picked up later by bigger reformist groups and political parties demanding change to Australia's restrictive immigration policy (Maclean, 2020). Recovering the role of Indian students in this story is also important, as they tend to only “appear” with the dawning of the Colombo Plan era from 1951. As Lyndon Megarrity has argued, WAP was “the most influential factor dominating overseas student policy...