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“Border Barbarisms”, Albury 1902: Greeks and the Ambiguity of Whiteness

This article focuses on the surfacing of ambiguous racial attitudes towards Greeks during the immediate post-Federation period. It investigates how Greeks were located within the contested politics of whiteness and argues that the ways in which Greeks were racialised within the delamination of Australian racial imaginings were linked to broader British preoccupations with Greece and Greek people. Such preoccupations divergently racialised Greeks as either a virtuous Christian people with alluring civilisational qualities or a degenerate race. Through an examination of articulations raised in the press and federal parliament, the racial ambiguity levelled against Greek people will expose discursive intersections between whiteness, philhellenism, and migrancy. The article will then examine two border incidents that occurred in Albury during 1902. Each incident prevented newly arrived Greeks from crossing the colonial-cum-interstate border between Victoria and New South Wales and became a heated flash point in the initial implementation of the Immigration Restriction Act (1901). They expose an unexamined account of how Greek people were located within the hardening politics of immigration restriction, and provide us with a localised delineation of how whiteness was, in some ways, connected to a British fascination with Greece.