The real face of White Australia
Thursday 22 September 2011
I’m a fan and follower of Tim Sherrat through his discontents blog. Today I read about his Invisible Australians project. The website explains:
The White Australia Policy was about people - people whose lives were monitored and restricted because of the colour of their skin. This experimental browser enables you to explore the records of the White Australia Policy through the faces of those people.
These portraits were extracted from a range of government documents using a face detection script. We’ve tried to weed out the mistakes, but you may still notice a few oddities. Many portraits are duplicated, as multiple copies of the forms were often kept.
Part of a certificate exempting from dictation test recording that on 4 March 1907 Willie Sum was exempted from the provisions of paragraph (a) of Section 3 of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901-1905, and that he returned to Australia on 15 May 1908. [National Archives of Australia: ST84/1, 1907/141-150, page 39]