Listen to Nodes of Empire: Speech and Whiteness in Victorian Hawker's License Courts.

Listen to Nodes of Empire:Speech and Whiteness in Victorian Hawker’s License Courts

Nadia RhookLa Trobe University

AbstractThe late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian, Syrian and Afghan immigrants arrive in Victoria, Australia, many of whom took up the highlymobile and audible occupation of hawking. New transnational and Imperial histories have illuminated the racially circumscribed mobility ofcolonial and Imperial subjects in traveling in and across Empire(s). In this article I conceive the Hawker’s License Courts of colonial Victoria aslinguistic “nodes” where met subjects from locales in and beyond the British Empire. I argue that further than studying the mobility of colonialsubjects, and of Indian hawkers in Victoria in particular, focusing on the speech uttered by hawkers demonstrates the importance of studyingthe linguistic colonial past. Doing so brings into focus the spatially located processes by which Whiteness and English language ability weregaining affinity in the late nineteenth century.

In 1892, the proceedings of a hawker’s licensing day in the rural city of Bendigo were interrupted by an “intelligent young Hindoointerpreter.”1 When “Sergeant Fahey” requested the interpreter tell the “other Hindoos” the coroner would grant no more licensestoday since “there were enough Englishmen, Chinese, and Hindoo hawkers” in the district already, the interpreter reminded thecourt of Indians’ British subjecthood. “But… [w]e belong to Queen Victoria. All the same England, India and Australia QueenVictoria rule over us.” The bench, reported the Bendigo Advertiser, was not moved by the interpreter’s plea and “the Hindoos…discuss[ed] with deep concern the unexpected turn matters had taken.”2 In the Hawker’s License Courts of late colonial Victoria,speech was uttered by subjects born in far-flung parts of the British Empire. Like all Victorian courts, the License Courts werenormally conducted in English but in the 1890s court authorities born in England, Ireland, Scotland and the Australian coloniesheard the voices of up to 1,700 immigrants, Indians, Syrians (from current day Lebanon), and Afghans, when they attempted toanswer the requisite questions in English in order to gain a hawker’s license.

Given contemporary moves across the Australian colonies to expel people described by the generic term “Asiatic” from thecolony, i.e. Chinese, Indians, Afghans and Syrians, and the ground-level practices of linguistic discrimination enacted againstAsiatics in Victorian courts, the interpreter’s verbal assertion of Imperial belonging is poignant.3 On the one hand the interpreter’sprotest speaks of how contested were attempts to exclude Indians from British settler colonies. On the other, it illustrates somethingeven more relevant to the subject of this article. That is, how the wave of “Indians” who immigrated to Victoria from the mid-1880sthrough the 1890s, and their adoption of the trade of hawking, resulted in intensified and embodied linguistic exchanges betweenEuropean settlers and their Indian “fellow subjects” of Empire, and thus between subjects with rights equal in British liberal idealismbut different in colonial practices.4 In the Bendigo court of petty sessions, the interpreter’s employment of his English abilities,possibly gained in Britain but more likely in India and/or Australia, coincided with his opposition to racial discrimination. It is inthinking about language in this socio-linguistic sense—as embodied speech acts conditioned by learned language abilities—thatthis article takes its leave.

Over a decade ago socio-linguists such as Mary Bucholtz and Jane Hill began studying how White identities have beenconstructed in contemporary American contexts. “Racial markedness,” Bucholtz argued, “has as its corollary… linguisticmarkedness” and as such “the difficulty in seeing whites as racialized is matched by the difficulty in hearing white speakers’language as racialized.”5 In recent years historians have begun to open their ears to the linguistic colonial and Imperial past.Notably, Miles Ogborn has analysed the rules of oath-taking in British Caribbean courts to undress how “oral cultures of Empire”constructed “Imperial and colonial identities,” and most recently Antoinette Burton has adopted Judith Butler’s notion of “injuriousspeech” to analyse the late nineteenth-century career of Parsi politician Dadabhai Naoroji.6

The question of whether or not proficiency in the English language had become a precondition of social inclusion in British settlercolonies by the turn of the twentieth century is hardly in dispute. Historians of language and Empire have observed how “cultured”English speech became a marker of civility in the modern colonial era. In Colonial Voices, for instance, Joy Damousi has noted theequation of refined English speech with “civility” and “native languages” with “savagery.”7 Yet it seems the emergent relationshipbetween Whiteness and English-language proficiency in the nineteenth century has been so taken for granted it has been glossedover by scholars of the formation of Whiteness; a tendency which may be explained by what Mark Smith has described as “anunwitting visualism” which “limits the larger explanative power of the meaning of race.”8 The works of Marilyn Lake about thetransnational inspirations of the Dictation Test in Australia, and of Jeremy Martens about the education test in Natal, havedemonstrated that the 1890s was a period when language was becoming a prime means of racial designation across British settlercolonies and in the United States.9 Despite the centrality of language to such tests, scholars have yet to explore what they revealabout the linguistic identities of “White” settlers. This article seeks to extend understandings about how and where Whitenessgained affinity with English speech by examining particular spaces in which the voices of Imperial subjects became regulated by thecolonial Victorian state Hawker’s License Courts, in a particular decade, that prior to Australian Federation, during which themobility of South Asians and the language(s) in which they spoke were increasingly politicized. I argue that the systemic linguistic

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discrimination enacted against “Asiatics” in the Courts was not just a convenient means of quasi a-racial exclusion, but was thevery linguistic constitution of Whiteness.

Indians, so Burton and others have argued, were received differently in different parts of the Empire in the modern colonial era.10

In taking seriously the “power of speech” and its relation to Indians who moved with autonomy between two laterally relatedcolonies, i.e. India and Victoria, as well as at Syrians and Afghans, whose migratory journeys began outside the reach of the BritishEmpire, this article should illustrate that the construction of race in late colonial Victoria was not only a transnational process. It wasalso a linguistically and spatially circumscribed one. We might therefore conceive of the Hawker’s License Courts as local nodes ofEmpire in which speech was produced by vocal cords belonging to frequently “moving” but sometimes sedentary subjects.11 Here,“nodes” are understood in Alan Lester’s terms as locations through which continuously flowed “materials, people and… ideas” thatconnected “Britain with each of its colonies.”12 But if “people” and “ideas” moved through nodes then so too did mouths, words andlanguages. For just as the subjects in this history, Coloured and European alike, were physical bodies that traveled across land(s)and sea and walked through the doors of Victorian courtrooms, they were subjects who spoke, listened to and (mis)understoodeach other’s speech. While this history is centered in Victoria, a colony in southeast Australia where English was structurallydominant, this is not to ignore the deep pertinence of the linguistic, political and oceanic connections between Britain, India andAustralia that had been forged by the late nineteenth century.13

In order to consider how Whiteness came to be linguistically constructed in the nodes of Empire that were the License Courts, Ifirst outline how South Asian immigrants came to be hawkers in Victoria and the political-racial tensions stemming from theirtwo-fold mobility. Second, I examine how South Asians became audible in settler society via their work as hawkers, and the flexibleways they communicated while in disparate rural locations. Third, I analyse the License Courts as spatial nodes in which bodiesand voices became concentrated, and the colony’s racial taxonomy was thereby linguistically performed and enacted. I argue thatexamining the speech and movement of South Asian hawkers, and the practices and performances that took place in the LicenseCourts to effectively manage their mobility, provides an optic through which to view the relationship between race and speech inlate colonial Victoria. In particular, it offers insight into the ways European settlers constructed Whiteness via monitoring language.

South Asians in Victoria: Mobility and audibility

The late nineteenth-century wave of South Asian immigration to Victoria was at once a result of and a challenge to the extantconnection between the British self-governing colony of Victoria and the British Crown colony of India. This relationship betweenVictoria and India, described by contemporaries as “colonial cousins,” was originally forged through the reciprocal movement ofWhite government officials between the two colonies.14 Substantial numbers of Indians (around two hundred) first arrived in Victoriain the early 1880s after the Commissioner for the Indian Court suggested at the 1880 Melbourne Exhibition that Indians should beimported to labour in a new ghee industry.15 The move to employ “Indian labourers” quickly ground to a halt after Thomas Palmer,who employed around twenty-eight Indians and Afghans on his station near Warrnambool, shot and killed an Afghan, Sirdar Khan.“Indian labour” was not viable or moral, so concerned settlers argued, since “Indian coolie labourers” were obviously vulnerable toexploitation, the presence of Indians might “pollute… our descendants,” and anyway, “the Indian could not stand as much cold asthe European.”16 Despite such marred beginnings to Indian immigration, and the fact that most of the contracted workers eventuallyreturned to India, in the late 80s substantial numbers of Indians immigrated to Victoria, this time not under contract.17

While Afghans had been recruited to work in northern Australia as cameleers as early as the 1860s, there is little archivalevidence of what motivated Syrians and south and central Indians to immigrate to the Australian colonies. It is possible someIndians sought to escape the series of famines that occurred under the Raj in the 1880s and 1890s.18 W.H. McLeod suggests thatPunjabi Sikhs often left India for the first time when posted as soldiers or police to Hong Kong or Malaya, then later in the 1880smoved into civilian employment and ventured further, some to Australia, “to recoup the family honour, its izzat, and its fortunes athome,” and amass sufficient funds to purchase land in Punjab.19 Vitally, emigration from Punjab in the late nineteenth century wasenabled by its growing economic prosperity and by processes of army recruitment, as Sikhs were the Indian Government’s mostfavoured security forces.20 The Imperial networks of migration and economy that operated in and between Australia and South Asiawere underscored by Imperial networks of communication. In his study of the colonial Sikh diaspora, Tony Ballantyne suggests thatby the 1890s “word” had circulated among Sikhs in the Punjab, or perhaps those who had already migrated to Southeast Asia, thatAustralia or “Telia” was open.21 This was the wider context in which Margaret Allen placed her study of Sikh man Otim Singh, whotraveled from Moga to Sumatra, where he worked for five years supervising Indian workers on a tobacco plantation, andsubsequently with the British Mounted Police, before he arrived in Melbourne in 1890.22 There, he took up hawking and, like otherIndian, Syrian and Afghan hawkers, supplied needed food, clothes, household and luxury items such as silk handkerchiefs, pocketwatches and bamboo walking sticks direct to the homes of European and Chinese settlers in Melbourne and rural districts. OtherSouth Asian immigrants worked as labourers or ran traveling drapery, boarding house, merchant or medical businesses.23

In the 1890s, a period of intense economic depression and high unemployment, hawking became a more desirable occupation,both for the wave of newly arrived South Asians and for Europeans in Melbourne. It required no training and a foot license cost onlyone pound.24 In the context of the Depression, and in a British settler society, South Asian hawkers and their occasionalhard-earned wealth were highly visible, especially as they walked on quiet roads between farms and rural centers and because, asEuropeans often noted, they were “turban clad.”25 In this period, “hawker” was repeatedly (re)constructed as a racially markedoccupational identity in that social and legal discourse categorized, and court authorities differently treated, hawkers as “European”or “Asiatic.” The two-fold mobility of the “Asiatic hawkers” who had migrated through Empire(s) to arrive in Australia, and whocontinued to move around the colony in making their livelihoods, was increasingly resented by the Victorian Government and bysections of the public.26 It was so partly because the Government had limited powers to control the arrival or movements ofhawkers, many of who were Indian British subjects.

It is no coincidence that during the 1890s, when up to 1,700 Indians, Afghans and Syrians took up hawking, European settlers


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became increasingly anxious that Victoria was being taken over by “Asiatics.”27 As demonstrated in Marilyn Lake and HenryReynolds’ Drawing the Global Colour Line, and as Leigh Boucher has written, global migration patterns saw “the non-Europeanimmigrant” emerge as “the most prominent racial problem of the late-nineteenth-century settler empire,” and Victoria was one suchsettler colony “characterized by anxieties about a mass of non-white colonizers.”28 The institution of a series of ChineseImmigration Restriction Acts, the first of which came into effect in 1855, had limited the increase of Chinese, yet the entrance ofIndians into Victoria remained largely unrestricted. Moreover, the 1890s saw an exodus of European settlers who emigrated to findwork elsewhere, as while Victoria was in Depression gold had been discovered in Western Australia.29 Consequently, in the early1890s the racial balance of hawkers quickly changed.30 In 1892, there were around 564 “Hindoo” applicants at the License Court inMelbourne and by 1894 the vast percentage of so-called “Asiatic hawkers” were Indians and as such British subjects. With theintroduction of the Chinese Immigration Restriction Act in 1888, the high visibility of Indian hawkers, and their arrival during theDepression, anxieties about “coloured” immigration were extended, if not displaced from, Chinese to Indians.31

It should be noted that in public discourse, “Indian” and “Hindoo” variously referred to Hindu and Muslim Indians, Syrians and/orAfghans, and thus to people who had differing legal statuses, as Indians were British subjects but Syrians and Afghans were not. Inthis era, “Indian” and “Asiatic” operated as legal categories in Victorian census records but were not yet categories in Victorianimmigration laws. Indeed, just how to broaden extant immigration restrictions on the Chinese to include others “Asiatics” was thesubject of contemporary legislative debates about immigration policy.32 The recently enacted 1883 Indian Emigration Act meant thatIndians could not emigrate under a contract “to labour” but must be “free.”33 Consequently, as one member of Victorian legislativecouncil complained in 1891, “there was no legal power to prevent them [Indians] landing here, nor had the Government of Indiapower to prevent their leaving for Victoria, unless they emigrated under contract of service.”34 Hence, unlike the majority ofChinese, Indians were British subjects and thus could not be overtly legislated against without offending British liberal sensibilities.

The License Courts were performed within a wider Australian socio-political milieu that allowed for textual and oral displays ofovert “anti-Asiatic” racism, and settlers in Victoria agitated against “undesirable Asiatic immigrants” via petitions, letters to the press,and public speeches.35 Indians were perceived as a masculine “threat” to the safety of their rural female European customers.Moreover, in the settler vision “transient” hawkers were undesirable, opposite to “respectable” sedentary shopkeepers. Accordingly“Indian hawkers” became a prime site of Europeans’ intertwined economic and racial anxieties, exemplified by the claim of a FitzroyCouncilor in 1893 that “the great influx of Afghans and Syrians who went round peddling” was “one of the great causes of thedepression.”36 Hence while in the 1870s “hawker” had been associated with Chinese who sold vegetables and fish, by the 1890shawking became virtually synonymous with “Indians” and by late 1891 the “Indian Hawker nuisance” had become an urgent politicalissue. It was in this politically charged atmosphere that South Asians spoke as they applied for and were granted or denied hawkinglicenses, and attempted to sell their wares. We now turn to consider how the voices of South Asian hawkers became audible insettler society— voices that would effectively become audible to the state in the License Courts.

Speaking in a British Settler Society

Arriving from various locales in and between the British and Ottoman Empires, the majority of South Asian immigrants were to havein common the profession of hawking and, at the same time, to share the experience of negotiating life in a colony where theEnglish language was structurally privileged. Broadly speaking, European settlers—the majority of them British—hadinstitutionalized English as the lingua franca of civil life in Victoria from its foundation as a self-governing colony in 1851. Thedominance of English in colonial Victoria entailed an ongoing and contested process where colonists attempted to supplantIndigenous and other non-Anglo languages with English, the legal “language of command” of British settler colonies.37 From the1840s possibilities for Indigenous peoples to speak their languages had been increasingly curtailed via their dispossession andrelocation onto missions and reserves.38 By the 1890s English was the prime language of governance, law, education, and of manysocial institutions, notably the stock exchange, banks and post offices in Victoria. Some of those employed in colonial law werebilingual, like Hindustani-speaking detective Lionel Potter, but the regular courts were performed in English with a scattering ofLatin.39 All court authorities with decision-making power were male, European and Anglophone, and South Asians participated inthe legal system only as witnesses, defendants, and occasionally as interpreters. According with the conventions of common law,Indians, Afghans and Syrians deemed unable to speak “sufficient English” were provided with an interpreter, most oftenEngland-born Arthur Horton Pritchard, who had immigrated to Victoria via India in the late 80s.40 But if the daily courtsaccommodated linguistic diversity, in general the onus was on immigrants (as Indigenous peoples) to learn and speak English ifthey were to participate in civil life.41 As will be illustrated in the last section of this article, settler assumptions that English shouldbe the lingua franca of the colony would be clearly expressed in the License Courts.

When in Melbourne, South Asian hawkers tended to buy their goods, live, and congregate in and near Lonsdale Street andFitzroy, where merchant shops and boarding houses were centered. When selling their goods, South Asian hawkers walked longdistances and thereby became “moving subjects” dispersed across Victoria, occasionally crossing into bordering colonies.42 Likethe Chinese hawkers of the preceding decades, South Asian hawkers were conspicuous as they traveled freely through settlersociety and sold goods in remote areas.43 But in hawking South Asians did not only become extremely visible. Because theyspoke, they were, of course, also heard. Within a dominantly English-speaking settler society, the frequent travel and customerinteractions of South Asian hawkers made them highly audible, and while South Asians spoke various (in the vocabulary of the day)“Oriental” languages including Hindi, Urdu, Hindustani, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Arabic and Pashto, Europeans generally reportedthey heard them speaking either “Hindustani” or “the Indian language.”44 The hawkers spoke with numerous customers in theirdaily work, and did so, as Kate Bagnall notes in her study of Chinese hawkers in the mid-nineteenth century, on the boundaries ofEuropeans’ private spaces—standing on the doorsteps of houses and sometimes, so the Victorian court briefings document,entering their sheds and homes.45 Since very few Europeans in the colony spoke Hindustani or, for that matter, any other “Orientallanguage,” South Asian hawkers had to carry the communicative burden and speak with customers in English. Thus the experienceof hawking in the Australian colonies was significantly circumscribed by one’s English proficiency.


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The briefings of colonial Victorian courts document the face-to-face linguistic interactions between South Asian hawkers and theircustomers, and how they normally communicated in English. When it came to selling goods, the hawkers were in a relationship ofmutual need with their customers, but when hawkers asked their customers for accommodation, they were at the mercy of theircustomer’s kindness.46 Chara Singh, for instance, was turned down at least once before he found a place to spend the night whilehawking in rural areas of western Victoria. “A little after sundown” in May 1897 Chara Singh asked rural settler James Herd a favourwhen they met near Herd’s paddock girt house: “Boss I want to stop here.”47 Herd, so he testified, ordered Chara Singh “go to hellout of this” after which Singh walked to the neighbouring house and found a more generous reception. Rosanna Anderson allowedChara Singh to stay. She testified: “He said can I stop tonight and my son said yes you can stop in that shed, I said to him you canstop in that old kitchen…”48

Anderson’s testimony, as those of other Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Syrians, Afghans, and Aborigines in the colony, illustrateshow South Asians’ work as hawkers brought them into face-to-face contact, and necessarily linguistic contact, with settlers.Crucially, such speech had material outcomes. Here, Chara Singh’s conversation with Anderson enabled him to find a place tosleep and eat.49 But if speaking English greatly assisted hawkers in plying their occupation, South Asian hawkers communicatedwith their customers through flexible and varied methods.

Like Chara Singh’s customers, the clientele of hawkers in late colonial Victoria was largely English-speaking. But reflecting“Indians’” uneven access to and motivations to gain an English education, their English-language abilities varied greatly, fromvirtually no knowledge of English to complete fluency. Most of the Indian immigrants in the colony arrived as young adults, and thushad no access to state-sponsored English education in Victoria.50 Neither was an English education available to all Indians in theBritish Raj. “Macauley’s Minute” of 1835 had prescribed the creation of a “class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but Englishin… morals and in intellect.” but by the mid-nineteenth century, though some Indians had been empowered by their Englisheducation, the British education system had created a class of so-called “Babus” with rudimentary English skills.51 The diversity of“Indians’” language abilities was also due to the fact that “Indian” sometimes referred to migrants who came from Afghanistan orSyria, in which an English-medium education was not widely available. Hence, while some Indians had learned English in India, orpossibly in Britain, the court briefings and media reports suggest many of the Indians who arrived in Victoria and took up a career inhawking knew some English, though not enough to meet all their socio-legal communicative needs.

In plying their trade, hawkers had plenty of opportunities to practice speaking English with their customers and it appears likelythat many South Asians began to learn English soon after they arrived in the colony.52 Fatta Chand, for instance, was linguisticallymobile, as he spoke some English after having been in Victoria for six months and Europeans and Aborigines testified they couldunderstand him. However Chand was not proficient enough in English, so testified one of Chand’s hawking acquaintances, tobother applying for a hawker’s license.53 Chand thus circumvented the barriers of language and licensing by (illegally) hawkingalongside his “fellow countryman” Juggoo Mull, who had a license and was proficient in English.

Chand was not alone as a hawker who spoke “imperfect” English. The court briefings record numerous instances of languagebarriers between South Asian hawkers and policemen. For instance, when Constable William Johnson arrested hawker Mea Heirain 1895, Johnson reportedly “could not understand” Heira’s statement.54 Thus the construction of the “Indian hawker” being“ignorant of the English language,” which circulated throughout the 1890s, was somewhat based in reality, and was underscored byBritish Imperial structures of education.55 Most vital to note here, though, is that while hawkers’ abilities to communicate withcustomers were important, as was English ability, South Asian hawkers could and did negotiate their way around language barriersand hawk their wares by speaking “imperfect” English. Having seen how speech and mobility were vital to, and indeed defined, theraced occupation of hawking, we now move from the flexible ways hawkers communicated in rural areas to the more linguisticallyregulated spaces of the Hawker’s License Courts. If, in rural settler spaces, the voices of hawkers were audible to their multi-racialclientele, then in the License Courts, their voices became directly audible to court authorities, and thus to agents of the colonialstate. Hence as centralising nodes through which moved bodies and voices, and where South Asians and Europeans came intolinguistic contact, the Courts provide an optic through which we can see, and exercise our linguistic imaginations to hear, race inconstruction.

Linguistic Performances of Whiteness

Throughout the 1880s and 90s, gaining a hawker’s license officially required two character references and one pound for a footlicense or two pounds for a horse and cart license.56 The requirement that hawkers should hold a license meant they were yearlyfunneled from their dispersed locations across the colony into the centralising nodes of License Courts. Since all applicants weresubject to verbal questioning by court authorities before they could be granted a license, the Courts can usefully be examined aslinguistic theaters as they involved a stage (the bench and witness stand), actors (magistrates, justices of the peace and licenseand applicants) and a (polyglot, multi-racial) audience. Within these linguistic theaters, located in the imposing buildings of courtsand town halls, subjects from diverse parts of the globe came within earshot of each other. In recent years American historianshave looked at how race has been constructed through public performances: for instance, Mary Brewer examined how Whitenesswas “staged” in theaters and plays and Stephen Hoelscher has analysed the public executions of black people under Jim Crow asperformances of White supremacy.57 The latter demonstrates that theaters were not the only spaces where racial identities havebeen performed. Keeping in mind how race has been created through “linguistic markedness,” and through performances thereof,should assist in undressing the racialising effects of the License Courts.

Held annually in December, licensing days were a time when South Asian hawkers became “collectively conspicuous,” as for themajority of the year they moved on two or three month circuits, “supplying necessities that would usually only be available from thenearest township.”58 Published in The Australasian, the picture below depicts applicants waiting for the commencement of thelicensing day of 12 December 1899. The artist constructed the Indian applicant cohort as a group of faceless Hindoos, marked bytheir turbans, and the two Syrian men who look on are distinguished by their short dark beards and caps. The sign above the door,written in English in roman script, read “Magistrates and Officers of the Court Only.” Not only did it signal that the Court was a


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space of legal authority but also, and vitally, that the Court was a dominantly English-language space and as such a space ofunequal linguistic power.

Figure 1. The Australasian, Melbourne, 6 January 1900, 32View full resolution

The journalist-cum artist wrote of the “chatter” of those who waited outside the court before “the door is opened, and a mad rushensues.”59 Such “chatter” was not permitted inside the courtroom, and neither were the flexible methods hawkers employed tocommunicate in settler society such as sharing linguistic resources. The License Courts were highly controlled linguistic spaces,where only one person should speak at a time. The audience listened as each applicant took the stand to try “to satisfy themagistrate that they have sufficient knowledge of English, and [we]re able to give correct change.”60 In this sitting, wrote thejournalist, “about 300 Hindoos and Mohammedans, 10 Syrians and 40 Chinese were granted [licenses].”61

Throughout the 1880s and 90s the requisite that license applicants must have a “sufficient knowledge of English” was notinscribed in legislation, despite governmental support to do so in the failed Hawker’s License Amendment Acts of 1894 and 1899.62

Yet from the mid-1880s, when South Asian immigration began in earnest, magistrates and justices of the peace exerciseddiscretionary powers to deny licenses to South Asians, and “Indians” in particular. In 1885, for instance, Scottish-born policemagistrate Joseph Panton granted licenses to all the European applicants but “refused licenses to two [out of twelve] Indianapplicants” on a linguistic basis.63 “[T]wo of the Indian applicants… could not understand English sufficiently,” reported the Argus,“and Mr. Panton therefore refused the application.”64 Panton and other magistrates clearly saw “inadequate” English ability as a justbasis on which to deny licenses, a discriminatory logic that operated throughout the 1890s. In June 1892, for instance, J.P.srejected four “Asiatic” applicants in the licensing day of the Melbourne City Court, where “most of” the “60 applicants” were“Hindoos and Assyrians.” The J.P.s considered that “Kaleel Razook, Nany Michael, Chaker Marson, and Charley Abdoo” had a“knowledge of the English language… so imperfect as to render them unfit to act as hawkers.”65

The practice of enacting racial exclusion via testing English ability was developed against the background of tensions betweengovernmental desires to exclude “undesirable Indian immigrants” from the colony on the one hand, and to respect Indians’ Britishsubjecthood on the other. As one Legislative Assembly member put it in 1894, “the Asiatic hawkers were British subjects and it wasdifficult to bring in a measure which would inflict injury upon any of Her Majesty’s subjects....”66 At least from 1885, Panton andother magistrates and J.P.s regularly denied licenses to Indian applicants who spoke “imperfect” English, a practice that hadoverwhelming governmental consent.67 In “connection with the Indian hawker nuisance,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald inSeptember 1893, the Victorian premier “issued instructions to the police magistrates and the police” with “the view of seeing thatonly those hawkers who are conversant with the English language, and who seem to be desirable men, receive licenses.”68 Twomonths later Police Magistrate A.P. Akehurst addressed all magistrates in the colony “to invite” a “strict inquiry into all [Hawker’slicense] applications.”69 Writing on behalf of the solicitor-general, and hence representing the Crown’s ideals of racial equality,Akehurst warned that although magistrates may use their discretionary powers when issuing licenses they must be careful not todiscriminate against British subjects. Yet, characteristic of the attitude of colonial politicians, he endorsed discrimination against“Asiatics” on linguistic grounds, further advising magistrates and J.P.s that “with regard to Asiatic applicants that the Justices willsee specifically that such men are of good repute, that they sufficiently understand the English language….”70 But at the very sametime as politicians grappled with tensions between liberal ideals and the race-based exclusion of “undesirable Indians” in debatesabout hawkers’ licensing, magistrates and J.P.s continued to enact and perform language-based discrimination in the Courts.

Continuing our analysis of the linguistic construction of Whiteness, we see that the practices of the magistrates and justices ofthe peace performed the assumption of settlers and the Crown that it was just to deny licenses to Asiatic applicants, includingIndian British subjects, on linguistic grounds. Noting this assumption—that linguistic discrimination was just—is crucial. For whilemagistrates had to justify denying licenses to Asiatics on the basis of their colour—to the solicitor-general, to the public and, sosuggests the protest of the “Hindoo interpreter,” to Indians themselves—they were not expected to make similar justifications forlinguistic discrimination.71


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The structure of the License Courts, enforced by the presiding magistrate or justice of the peace, publicly constructed andmirrored the racial hierarchy of the colony and its emerging identity as a “White man’s country” to the exclusion of Asiatics.72

European applicants were issued licenses first. It seems the English abilities of European applicants were not subject to the samemonitoring as those of Asiatics. While Europeans were placed on the stand and asked questions in English, this was not aperformance of their linguistic competence but to judge whether they had a “good character.”73 According to a number of accountsEuropean applicants were followed in order by Chinese, Syrians and Afghans and finally Indians.74 The fact that Indians weregranted licenses after Chinese reflected the commonly asserted idea of legislators and lay settlers that Indians were “even more ofa nuisance” than the Chinese, and possibly the longer-term settlement of Chinese in the colony.75 Once they were inside thelicensing courts, Asiatic applicants were placed on the witness stand one at a time and asked questions, while the presidingmagistrate or J.P. judged whether they “had an adequate knowledge of English.”76 The English test component of the license test,at least as performed in the Melbourne City Court, generally involved three questions; “How long have you been in the colony?,”“What is the name of the ship you arrived on,?” and “How many shillings are there in a pound?”77

A number of European spectators wrote to the press about the spectacle of Indians’ deficient English abilities. In 1895 ananonymous author wrote to the Barrier Miner about the “Hawker’s Annual Levee” at the Melbourne City Court, describing how “inthe case of new applications each Hindoo was placed in the witness-box to ascertain whether his knowledge of English wassufficient.”78 The author went on to disparage the English abilities of “Hindoos”; “Some of the dialogues between bench andapplicant were extremely ludicrous….”79 Thus the English abilities of Asiatic applicants were subject to the critical evaluations ofEuropeans—both to legally sanctioned evaluations, when court authorities judged whether Asiatics on the witness stand couldanswer the questions in English, and also, as follows, to social evaluations, when court spectators circulated representations ofapplicants’ English abilities through the press and presumably, through word of mouth.

The Courts were spaces in which various levels of English proficiency, as well as the various languages of the “Asiatic”applicants, were spoken and heard. The contrast between the power of the language spoken by the court authorities and thosespoken by the “Asiatics” was not lost on audiences. A commentator of the Melbourne Licensing court of 1895 wrote that, before theproceedings were underway, a “white” spectator in the Licensing Courts might think that “Hindoo [or] Tamil was the languagespoken.”80 In recording the language-scape of the Court, the writer represented the legal authorities as speaking English at thesame time as “the orientals” spoke in unfamiliar tongues. In doing so, he constructed for his readers an image of a space wherelinguistic order was threatened by the use of “Tamil” and “Hindoo.” But the court, and its normal linguistic order, was brought backinto order when the court authorities spoke in English. Thus, the writer continued, a spectator would cognize where they were whenthey heard “the rich accents of Senior-constable Keane” and “further inspection revealed the fact that Mr. C. Nicolson P.M.,occupied the bench and was… engaged in granting the annual hawkers’ licenses to applicants of varying shades andnationalities.”81 In the way that Nicholson and Keane restored linguistic order in the Court, we see that the privileges associatedwith the ability to speak English were not only performed by those Asiatic applicants who took the witness stand, but also by thosewho sat behind the bench, i.e. magistrates and J.P.s.

Following theory derived largely from twentieth-century American contexts that Whiteness has tended to operate as an “invisible”position of structural privilege by which Whites have defined the racial identities of others while typically not explicitly marking theirown privilege and cultural practices, critics of Whiteness theory have urged that historians pay attention to the precise terms bywhich Whiteness has been constructed.82 It is thus important to note that parliamentarians and lay settlers repeatedly used thecategory “White” when writing about the License Courts, rather than that the category “European” usually employed in legal andmedia discourse about hawkers, and marked it as an English-speaking identity. For instance, in a report of the annual licensing dayof the Melbourne District Court, a columnist of the Herald (republished in the Traralgon Record) wrote with surprise that the “one ortwo white men” present were a minority in the court, which was “crowded with Chinese, Hindoos and Syrians… all of whom areapplicants for hawkers’ licenses.”83 The author’s censure of the Court scene was underscored by his disdain for the limited Englishabilities of the “Asiatics,” who, he wrote with indignation “can hardly speak enough English to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”84 The followingyear, another writer who had visited the Melbourne License Court complained the “Asiatic hawker” applicants “were ludicrouslyignorant of the English language….”85 As this representation indicates, while court spectators drew on their aural experiences ofthe “dialogues” of the courts to represent Hindoos as linguistically inferior, the term “White” was explicitly used in place of thecategories of “European” that had been more commonly employed in public and legal discourse about hawkers. Asiatic (and moreoften “Indian”) hawkers who spoke less than perfect English on the witness stand thus became an example of what colonial societyshould not be, i.e. coloured and non-English-speaking, thus conversely defining what colonial society should be, i.e. White andEnglish-speaking. Hence the meaning of Whiteness was both visible and audible to those in the Courts, in which “White men”identified with English-language proficiency, and against those who did not speak “our language.”

If newspaper representations of the Courts suggest that Whiteness was defined via the aural experience of hearing “Asiatics”speak “imperfect” English, then an examination of legislative discourse about hawkers confirms this. As we have already seen ofpress reports, self-described “White” settlers repeatedly asserted their identification with the English language when confrontedface-to-face, or “mouth-to-ear” as it were, with the perceived “imperfect” English abilities of Indians who, despite being “fellowsubjects of Empire,” did not all speak “our language” sufficiently. This discursive pattern was mirrored in debates about proposedHawker’s License Amendments performed in Melbourne’s Parliament House, in which many legislators agreed that Asiatics’(perceived) lack of English abilities was offensive. In July 1894, Premier James Patterson complained: “Many of these men did notunderstand the English language, and although they might be harmless, they were occasioning much annoyance.”86 Five yearslater, member for Kyneton, Mr. Rawson, asserted that “Asiatic hawkers [know] little about the circumstances of our people [and]less about our language...” to argue that “Her Majesty’s subjects from Asia” need not be granted the same rights as those “metedout to her white subjects.”87 Here, Rawson’s use of the possessive pronoun in “our language” again illustrates how Whiteness wasdefined by positing “Asiatics” outside the settler community and, at the same time, by an overt—indeed, an affective—identificationwith English proficiency.


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Examining the practices of hawker’s licensing and reading the courts as theaters of racial performance brings into sharp relief theaffiliation between Whiteness and the English language, and vitally, the exclusionary edge of this affiliation. The linguisticallydiscriminatory practices of magistrates and justices of the peace constituted a legal assertion of Victoria as a colony where Englishwas, and should be, the social and economic lingua franca; an assertion demonstrated in the earshot, and to the exclusion, ofIndian British subjects. Thus the way the License Courts functioned as linguistic nodes of Empire was clearly materially anddiscursively productive in the conflation of Whiteness with English ability, and in the simultaneous positioning of Indian Britishsubjects outside of settler belonging. In view of the structural privileging of English-language speakers, the testing of English-language abilities in the Courts appears to have been more than a pragmatic way to target Asiatics, though it certainly was that. Itwas also an opportunity to (re)assert English, and fluent English in particular, as the natural language of the colony.

Conclusion

In moving into and dispersing through Victoria, South Asians perturbed the colony’s English-dominated language-scape as theymet and spoke with settlers in rural areas. When hawking, South Asians circumvented language barriers and, importantly, hadpossibilities to speak and practice English and thus be(come) linguistically mobile. The speech of South Asian hawkers wasregularly distilled and monitored by the state in the Hawker’s License Courts, which functioned as nodes through which moved andin which spoke subjects from diverse parts of the British Empire and globe. In the Courts, bodies that had moved through the websof Empire(s) and had been traveling around the colony of Victoria became temporarily sedentary to listen to and participate inlicensing proceedings. And it was when doing so that the languages and vitally, the English abilities, of South Asians becameaudible to European court authorities and to “White” spectators.

The linguistic performances that took place in the centralising nodes of the Courts were of consequence, for within theirsound-and body-enclosing walls race was linguistically performed and enacted on a number of levels: First, because the practicesof licensing publicly demonstrated the inclusion of Asiatics in the colonial economy was dependent on the ability to speak English.Second, and at the same time, because in the License Courts Europeans demonstrated their legally sanctioned power to judgewhether Asiatic applicants knew “sufficient English,” thereby performing the affinity of White privilege with English ability—an affinitythat was not only structural but was at moments overtly claimed by settlers who observed and heard the Court proceedings.

The ways settlers fused Whiteness with English ability via the Courts suggest that, if we are to undress the linguistic colonialpast, we might pay attention to the language(s) spoken in particular nodes of Empire, and as such, to the contingent intersectionsbetween hierarchies of mobility and of language. Further research might be undertaken into how the discourses about andpractices in the Victorian License Courts were part of a wider “linguification” of racial identities across and beyond settler colonies.Following the 1890s, the global colour line was to be drawn in Australia via another language test, different from that used in theLicense Courts. From Federation in 1901, the institution of a Dictation Test given in a “European language” chosen at the discretionof the immigration officer would facilitate a steady decline in the South Asian population in Victoria and across Australia.88 Unlikethe Hawker’s License test, there could be no studying for the Dictation Test.

For correspondence: [email protected].

The author wishes to thank Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Ben Silverstein, and the anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. “The Licensing Court: The Number of Hawkers to be Restricted,” The Bendigo Advertiser, Victoria, 10 December 1890, 4.

2. “The Licensing Court.”

3. For references to the transnational move to exclude Indians in the process of whitening settler colonies see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds,Drawing the Global Colour Line (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 125, 187.

4. Some Europeans identified with Indians as British subjects. See “Help Solicited,” The Inquirer and Commercial News, Perth, 5 February 1897, 4.

5. Mary Bucholtz, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and racial markedness,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11/1 (2001): 86.

6. Miles Ogborn, “The Power of Speech: Orality, oaths and evidence in the British Atlantic world, 1650–1800,” Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 36 (2010): 125; Joy Damousi, Colonial Voices: A cultural history of English in Australis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);Antoinette Burton, “Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's ‘Black Man’ and the boundaries of imperial democracy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History42/3 (2000): 647–48.

7. Damousi, Colonial Voices, 24

8. Mark Smith, “Making Sense of Social History,” Journal of Social History 37/1 (2003): 177.

9. See Jeremy Martens, “A Transnational History of Immigration Restriction: Natal and New South Wales 1896–97,” The Journal of Imperial andCommonwealth History 34/3 (2006): 331; Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: The invention of the literacy test as a technology ofracial exclusion,” in Connected Worlds: History in transnational perspective, eds. Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), 213.

10. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),19–20.

11. For discussions of Imperial mobility see Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, mobility and intimacy in an age ofglobal empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

12. Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54/1 (2002): 25. For further discussion of Imperialcommunication networks see Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

13. See Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyde, Colonial Cousins: A surprising history of connections between India and Australia (Kent Town: WakefieldPress, 2010); For discussion about British linguist engagement with India see Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 20–26.

14. Westrip and Holroyde, Colonial Cousins, 351


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15. Elizabeth O’Callaghan, Alien to Us: The 19th Century importation of Indian labour into the Warrnambool District (Melbourne: Prahran MechanicsInstitute, 2005), 7.

16. O’Callaghan, Alien to Us, 12–13.

17. In the 1830s and 40s proposals to use indentured Indian labour were rejected. Jane Doust, “Setting up Boundaries in Colonial Eastern Australia:Race and Empire,” Australian Historical Studies 35/123 (2004): 152–66.

18. For reference to “plague stricken” India see “Help Solicited.”

19. W. H. McLeod, The Sikhs in the Modern World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 105–6.

20. The first wave of Sikhs arrived in Hong Kong in 1867. See Darshan Singh Tatla, “Sikh Free and Military Migration during the Colonial Period,” in TheCambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Robin Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

21. Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Cultural formations in an imperial world (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 74.

22. Margaret Allen, “‘A Fine Type of Hindoo’ Meets ‘the Australian Type’: British Indians in Australia and diverse masculinities,” in Transnational Ties:Australian lives in the world, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), 41–58.

23. For evidence about two “Indian Oculists” see The Queen v Assaf and Ranja, Supreme Court, Ballarat, 14 December 1898, PROV, VPRS30/P0, Unit1161, Case 516.

24. Brewster, “The Indian Hawker Nuisance,” 6.

25. William Rowarth, Depositions, The Queen v John Bachelor, Supreme Court, Geelong, 20 August 1896, PROV, VPRS30/P0, Unit 1066, Case 362.

26. “The Syrian Invasion,” The Sydney Morning Herald, New South Wales, 17 January 1893, 6.

27. For a compilation of government statistics about Indian hawkers see Brewster, “The Indian Hawker Nuisance,” Appendix A, i–iii.

28. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Leigh Boucher, “‘Whiteness,’ Geopolitical Configuration, and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Politics,” in Re-Orienting Whiteness, ed. Leigh Boucher et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 47.

29. Boucher, “‘Whiteness.’”

30. Immigration of Hindoos, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, State Library of Victoria (SLV), 4 August 1891.

31. May suggests European’s attitudes towards Indians were more negative than those toward the Chinese. Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life(Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1999), 163.

32. Robert Huttenbach, Racism and Empire: White settlers and colored immigrants in the British self-governing colonies: 1830–1910 (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 1976), 116.

33. See Radhika Viyas Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A history of the passport,’ in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the nation,ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 200.

34. Immigration of Hindoos, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 4 August 1891, 243.

35. Indians including Musa Khan resisted the ideas of this League. See “The Anti-Asiatic League,” The Inquirer and Commercial News, Perth, 24 April1895, 7; In 1904 the A.N.A. proposed to make an Anti-Asiatic League. See “Bendigo,” The Argus, Melbourne, 26 March 1904, 16.

36. “Ordinary Meeting,” The Independent, Footscray, 2 September 1893, 3.

37. Cohn discusses the importance of commanding language for British rule of India. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

38. Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal cultures of writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006).

39. Potter’s Hindustani abilities were noted by Arthur Dungey, Depositions, The Queen v Louis Samuels, Melbourne Supreme Court, 15 June 1894, Unit981, Case 323.

40. “A Melbourne Scandal,” Marlborough Express, Volume XXIV, Issue 258, 20 November 1888, 4.

41. For discussion of linguistic assimilation see Damousi, Colonial Voices, 26–27.

42. Court briefings document how Little Lonsdale Street housed South Asians. For instance Poola Ram, Depositions, The Queen v Louis Samuels.

43. For instance Afghan merchant Azoomoo Khan ran his business in Fitzroy and housed a number of Indian boarders. Azoomoo Khan, Depositions,The Queen v Fatta Chand, Supreme Court, Melbourne, 15 December 1890, PROV, VPRS30/P0, Unit 821, Case 42.

44. For instance see William St Andrew Jordan, Depositions, The Queen v Isar Das, Supreme Court, Melbourne, 15 November 1898, Public RecordsOffice of Victoria, VPRS30/P0, Unit 1159, Case 496.

45. For evidence of the interactions between South Asian hawkers and Europeans, Aborigines and Chinese see The Queen v Fatta Chand and TheQueen v Chara Singh, Supreme Court, Stawell, 8 June 1897, PROV, VPRS30/P0, Unit 1105, Case 267; Kate Bagnall, “Across the Threshold: Whitewomen and Chinese hawkers in the white colonial imaginary,” Hecate 28/2 (2002): 11.

46. Bagnall analyses the power relationship between Chinese hawkers and their customers. See Bagnall, “Across the Threshold.”

47. James Herd, Depositions, The Queen v Chara Singh.

48. Rosanna Anderson, Depositions, The Queen v Chara Singh. Emphasis mine.

49. Evidence of Indians speaking with Europeans and Aborigines while hawking is found in The Queen v Fatta Chand.

50. For reference to the diverse origins of “Indians” see Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, 163.

51. Stephen Evans, “Macauley’s Minute Revisited: Colonial language policy in nineteenth-century India,” Journal of Multilingual and MulticulturalDevelopment 23/4 (2002): 278.

52. Otim Singh studied English in Melbourne before he began work as a hawker. See Margaret Allen, “Otim Singh in White Australia,” in Something Rich


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and Strange: Sea changes, beaches and the littoral in the Antipodes, ed. Susan Hosking (Adelaide: Wakefield, 2009), 195.

53. See The Queen v Fatta Chand.

54. William Johnson, Depositions, The Queen v Mea Heira, PROV, VPRS30/P0, Unit 1136, Case 186.

55. For instance, it was reported that the Indian hawker applicants in Melbourne were “ludicrously ignorant of the English language.” BairnsdaleAdvertiser, Victoria, 18 January 1896, 2.

56. “The applicant for a license to hawk on foot has to produce a certificate of good character from two known and respectable persons....” ImmigrationRestriction Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 17 August 1899, 709.

57. Mary Brewer, Staging Whiteness (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005); Stephen Hoelscher, “Making Place, Making Race:Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93/3 (2003): 657–86.

58. Brewster, “The Indian Hawker Nuisance,” 25.

59. L.J.J., “Hawker’s Licensing Day: A morning with the Hindoo hawkers,” The Australasian, 6 January 1900, 32.

60. L.J.J., “Hawker’s Licensing Day.”

61. L.J.J., “Hawker’s Licensing Day.”

62. The Hawker’s Law Amendment Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 18 July 1894, 868–69; Hawkers and Pedlars LawAmendment Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 17 August 1899, 714–15

63. “The Hawker’s Licensing Court,” The Argus, Melbourne, 9 September 1885, 10.

64. “The Hawker’s Licensing Court.”

65. “Issue of Hawking Licenses,” The Argus, Melbourne, 15 June 1892, 7.

66. Hawkers Law, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 18 July 1894, 883.

67. The denial of licenses to Indians unable to speak English also operated in country courts. For instance see “Alberton,” The Argus, Melbourne, 13December 1893, 7.

68. “The Indian Hawker Nuisance,” The Sydney Morning Herald, New South Wales, 18 September 1893, 5.

69. A.P. Akehurst, to Crown Solicitor’s Office, Attorney General’s Correspondence, Victoria, 29 November 1893.

70. Akehurst, to Crown Solicitor’s Office, 29 November 1893.

71. The Hawker’s Law Amendment Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 18 July 1894.

72. See Marilyn Lake, “‘White Man’s Country’: The trans-national history of a national project,” Australian Historical Studies 34/122 (2003).

73. Immigration Restriction Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 17 August 1899, 709.

74. The Herald, Melbourne, 11 December 1894, cited in Brewster, “The Indian Hawker Nuisance,” 7.

75. William Maloney argued “there was not one single Chinese peddler who… was not justly entitled to the Hawker’s License.” Immigration RestrictionBill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 17 August 1899, 10.

76. “The Hawker’s Annual Levee: Licensing Day at the Melbourne District Court,” Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, 16 December 1895, 3.

77. “The Hawker’s Annual Levee.”





82. Anderson suggests that settlers in Australia started to describe themselves as “White’ in the 1880s when they “came to feel serious competition fromAsians.” Warwick Anderson, ‘Traveling White’, in Re-orienting Whiteness, ed. Leigh Boucher et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 97; Boucher,“‘Whiteness,’” 48.

83. “The Foreign Hawking Nuisance,” The Traralgon Record, Victoria, 5 August 1892, 4.

84. “The Foreign Hawking Nuisance.”

85. Bairnsdale Advertiser and Tambo and Omeo Chronicle, Victoria, 18 January 1896, 2. “[V]ery few licenses for hawking are leased to the ordinary whiteman [my emphasis].” “The Foreign Hawking Nuisance.”

86. The Hawker’s Law Amendment Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 18 July 1894.

87. Hawker’s and Pedler’s Amendment Bill, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, SLV, 18 August 1899, 711.

88. Marie Lepervanche, Indians in a White Australia (Sydney: George, Allen & Unwin, 1984), 57.

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Listen to Nodes of Empire: Speech and Whiteness in Victorian Hawker's License Courts.

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Transcript of Listen to Nodes of Empire: Speech and Whiteness in Victorian Hawker's License Courts.