‘A Fair Average Lot’: Eugenics and the Australian Immigration Act, 1912–1929

This article examines Australia’s Immigration Act beyond its usual framing as the ‘White Australia Policy’. Focusing on the 1910s and 1920s, it considers the provisions designed to keep out ‘undesirable’ white immigrants, those labelled ‘prohibited’ under the vagaries of mental and physical disease, and dysfunction. This exclusionary intent is positioned against the eugenic thinking of the time, the meanings of which had particular ramifications for the various agencies involved in ensuring that only the ‘best of British’ migrated to Australia. This article presents that aspect of Australian border control as a messy, subjective and contested business, in which the advocates of the ‘new eugenic phase’ of border control went to great lengths to persuade other key parties to buy into their ideas. Additional levels of administrative, bureaucratic and commercial negotiations fed into the recurring debates over how to best facilitate health checks on intending migrants. This new research is situated within current scholarship that shows how managing the ‘eugenically undesirable’ was further complicated by the formal and informal systems of repatriation. As such, this article provides a corrective to previous assertions that the Immigration Act was more eugenic in policy than it ever was in practice.