Podcasts

Janak Rogers’ podcast Australia Fair investigates the legacy of the shameful White Australia policy through the lens of personal experience. By Louisa Lim.

Janak Rogers unveils the rage in Australia Fair

A board game from the 1920s.

Credit: National Archives of Australia

In the 1920s, Australian children could play a board game called the White Australia Game. Players moved counters that represented white men and people of colour around a map of Australia. It had one simple aim, which also echoed government policy: “Get the Coloured Men Out and the White Men In.”

It’s one of the telling details revealed by Australia Fair: The Long Tail of the White Australia Policy (SBS), an ambitious eight-part series interrogating Australia’s racist history of immigration and exclusion.

The podcast is uncomfortable but necessary listening as it walks through some of the most shameful passages of Australia’s history. It is a reflection of the country’s racist roots that one of the very first pieces of legislation passed by Australia’s first government in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act, designed in particular to keep out Chinese goldminers. But Australia Fair also reveals just how unthinkingly Australians embraced the White Australia policy and for how long – racially based immigration restrictions were only legally repealed in 1973, under Gough Whitlam.

One jaw-dropping example comes in the form of a 1962 ABC interview about the policy with three middle-aged women, who are described as wearing “neat bonnets”. “It’s good and they should really have it and keep out the coloured races,” says the first in clipped British tones. Another expresses support for the policy. When asked why, she replies with the certainty of someone who has never had her convictions questioned, “I have no particular reason.” Another woman pipes up: “The coloured races, when they get into a white nation, they want to intermarry and I don’t think it’s fair on the children.”

One of those children, journalist and RMIT associate lecturer Janak Rogers, is responsible for Australia Fair. His mother was a petite Indian socialite and his father a 190-centimetre £10 Pom, a scheme that Rogers finds himself re-evaluating in light of his research. “If you actually stress test that project, it is disgusting,” he tells me. “It is the last spasm of racial engineering in a country that really felt it had to import white stock to protect it against some sort of cultural deterioration. The root system for that is clearly eugenics.”

Rogers grew up in Sydney’s heavily white northern suburbs and his resulting sense of alienation animates this podcast. He introduces the first episode by saying, “There’s a moment that happens for me pretty much every day that I’m in Australia. I ask myself: do I belong here? Like, actually belong in this country? And what does it mean to be part of this country?” Such basic questions of belonging will be horribly familiar to any Australians of colour, illustrating how race still bifurcates the Australian experience.

Rogers has produced an oral counter-history that sidesteps the orthodox narrative of the First Fleet and the feisty larrikin settlers. Instead, he starts and finishes with the original multicultural Australia in the form of the interconnected pre-colonisation patchwork of First Nations clans with their own languages and cultures. Along the way he explores flashpoints in Australia’s immigration history, including the treatment of Chinese goldminers, the Tampa affair and the fallout from Israel’s destruction of Gaza. His visit to the Bonegilla migrant camp, where generations of certain types of “new Australians” were taken to be schooled in whiteness, proves especially instructive.

Australia Fair is a considered response to the flagship 2011 SBS television series Immigration Nation, whose four key experts were all white academics. “The migrant experience was bolted on as anecdotal colour,” Rogers says. His retelling of Australia’s immigration history is narrated by the people who made that history, such as Tam Tac Lam, who arrived on the first refugee boat from Vietnam, and Emelda Davis, whose grandparents were blackbirded into indentured labour in Australia from Vanuatu.

Musing on Australia’s racist past, human rights activist and writer Behrouz Boochani coins a telling metaphor, “It’s like a cave and there’s a rope, and you follow that rope, and you go into that cave. And then from a story, you go to another story. And you just discover it. These stories are connected.” The story skein woven by these voices is revelatory on multiple levels.

One takeaway is that these voices are still missing from our airwaves, exposing just how exclusionary our public sphere continues to be. SBS aside, Australian broadcasters’ resistance to airing Australians with migrant accents is not so much due to timidity as to racism. Their gatekeeping of the airwaves for accent purity limits Australians’ rights to speak and be heard. The loss is not just to migrants facing discrimination but also to the wider public, who are shielded from broader perspectives. The resulting failure to train listeners’ ears to accept a wider variety of accents continues to reinforce White Australia-era stereotypes about what Australia sounds like.

In this way, Australia Fair lays bare the fiction of the country’s multiculturalism, placing it squarely as an example of what anthropologist Ghassan Hage terms “white multiculturalism”. This is a society in which multiculturalism is controlled and managed by the white population, which decides how much diversity is acceptable, ultimately reinforcing white supremacy.

Grounding each episode in his own past, Rogers proves a thoughtful and engaging guide to these racial faultlines. However, the most moving section of the podcast is easily missed, since it comes after the end of the final episode. It is Rogers’ tribute to his mother, who died while he was writing the series.

She was an Indian diplomat’s daughter, who moved around the world in a cloud of Chanel N°5 with a business card embossed with the words, in pink: “Woman Extraordinary. Plenipotentiary. Citizen of the World, Origin India.” Throughout her years in Sydney, she never gave up being Indian or wearing a sari, which Rogers describes as “a credit to her and to Australia”. The richness of this tiny vignette reveals just how carefully he navigates the subjective, lifting the curtain only so far but ultimately shying away from delving too deep into personal territory.

The sound design, done by Rogers himself, makes fine use of archival audio, though the overuse of a jaunty theme tune becomes grating. That musical uplift serves its purpose, though, brightening a national origin story that is in equal parts enraging and traumatising to listeners of colour. The soundtrack matches Rogers’ tone, which remains wry and unruffled despite the bleakness of Australia’s history.

“I do think anger is quite blinding,” he tells me, describing how he maintained his equanimity over the two years working on the podcast. “I don’t know how you live in a country [being] angry all the time.” It is a reminder of yet another legacy of the White Australia policy: the expectation for people of colour to remain positive, even in their rage.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 12, 2025 as "White locus".

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