In 1955, Robert Menzies, the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Australia, sat for an interview with a radio station about the so-called “White Australia Policy.” This was a policy that, as the name implies, prohibited most people of non-European ancestry from entering Australia.
The “White Australia Policy” was not implemented with a law that explicitly banned any particular ethnicity. Australia’s parliament couldn’t have gotten away with that, because the British government — which still held authority over Australia, and which ruled over a vast empire of many different ethnicities — probably would have vetoed it. So instead, Australia’s parliament implemented the “White Australia Policy,” beginning in 1901, with a “dictation test” that was administered to new arrivals to the country. The test looked something like this:
.png)
.png)
