The Real Face of White Australia
Reviewed by: R.C.
Review started: February 27, 2023
Review last updated: February 27, 2023
Site Link
Data and Sources
- The National Archives of Australia
- Records from the White Australia Policy administration
- Transcribed text
- Portrait Photography
- Hand and thumbprints
Processes
- Transcription of the national archives to extract data, image and handprints
- Portrait Collage (photo wall and randomization option)
Presentation
The real face of White Australia is a simple website with interactive features that allows user to:
- Gain an understanding of the often lack of diverse representation in early twentieth century Australia.
- View a photo wall of faces from the archive
- Generate a photo wall with 100 random faces from the archive
- Contribute (join as volunteer transcribers)
Digital Tools Used
- Python
- GitHub
- Heroku
- Amazon AWS
Languages
- Site is in English, although some archival photos in github contain Chinese characters.
Review
The Real Face of White Australia (Living under the White Australia Policy) is a project that aims to showcase Australian diversity in the early twentieth century Australia, in direct contrast to the country’s self-identification as “a white man’s country” during that period. In fact, there were many thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Afghans, Syrians and Malays living in Australia during that time, in addition to the Indigenous population. Like other minorities in white-settler-colonial countries, many non-white Austrlaians faced discriminatory laws and policies designed to maintain white-favoring racial power dynamics. This reminded me of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States in the late 19th century.
The project website has a user-friendly design that tells this story by showing archival images of the faces of thousands of non-Europeans of the era. There is a gallery wall that showcases all the non-white faces, and the option for site visitors to generate a gallery of 100 images randomly selected from the archive. These images appear to be official photos for personal documents, all of in black and white with many stamped and/or dated.
The project website also provides access to the underlying data and the python code used to generate the interactive photo arrays. The project dataset consists of a portion of the 700K+ digitized files from the National Archives of Australia (NAA) relating to the White Australia Policy (which effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated white society). Through deeper link explorations, it appears that only 3% of the 700k+ NAA entries have been transcribed as of February 2023, implying vast opportunities to uncover expanded representation these archival materials represent. An invitation for volunteers to help transcribe the records, has, thus far, only yielded 19 volunteers who have completed 12,209 classifications for 12,339 subjects.
Overall, I find the user experience of the website engaging and effective. I’ve really appreciated the simple storytelling and visual representation of the subject and have learned a lot about this other side of Australia. I have also explored the project’s github repository where digitized files and scraping python codes are hosted and shared. The repository is well organized and easy to explore.