Sariago, Willcock and Bin Sallik
In 2015 Emeritus Professor MaryAnn Bin Sallik AO, after a lifetime of achievement in health, academia and indigenous affairs, was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor at Western Sydney University. This was an event that might not have happened had the mechanisms of the White Australia project always worked as intended. For, in December 1940, some 75 years previous to MaryAnn Bin Sallik’s appointment, the Labor Premer of Western Australia, John Willcock, had written to then Prime Minister Robert Menzies to request the Commonwealth government intervene to prevent the proposed marriage of MaryAnn Bin Sallik’s parents.1
Willcock’s motivation in making the request, which if it had succeeded in its intent would have seen MaryAnn Bin Sallik’s prospective father Sallum Bin Sallik deported from Australia, was based on his ingrained belief in a White Australia. A consequence of this belief was that John Willcock had no hesitation in attempting to control the lives of people such as MaryAnn Bin Sallik’s parents. Her mother, Biddy Sariago, was a non-white Australian and her father, Sallum Bin Sallik, was both non-white and a non-Australian.2 Willcock’s letter, written at the height of the White Australia project epitomises everything that nation-shaping scheme was about, while in many respects the lives of Sallum Bin Sallik, Mary Bridget (Biddy) Sairiago and of their daughter MaryAnn Bin Sallik, is everything the defeat and death of that project exemplifies.
John Willcock was motivated by his dismay that if two such people married they would inevitably be adding further to the non-white population of Australia. As the Premier put it: ‘A marriage between an indentured man and a woman of any colour is wrong in principle’. The West Australian Premier’s need to appeal to the Prime Minister in order to uphold this principle was an ironic one. His state’s laws would at that time have given him ample power to control who Bibby Sariago, a women of the Dajar people of the Kimberly region, married. That is, an indigenous Australian with limited rights within her own land. The irony is that although Bibby Sariago regarded herself as an indigenous person, her father Dorotheo Sariago, was from the Philippines and her mother was half-Aboriginal, making Mary Bridget Sariago in the terminology of the times, a ‘quadroon’. As a result she was not liable to the control imposed on
Sallum Bin Sallik therefore became the target of this effort to preserve a White Australia. A Pearl diver based in Broome, Sallum had been in Australia since his arrival aged 18 in 1935. As a non-white person, Sallum, even though born perhaps in Singapore and thus a British subject, was only able to remain in Australia on ‘exemption’. This meant he was exempt from the Dictation Test – a test of dictation in a language selected to ensure failure – which would have allowed Sallum Bin Sallik to be declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’ liable to the deportation Premier Willcock desired, and incidentally ending the life of MaryAnn Bin Sallik before it began.
This study is a history of how a ‘Dictation Test’ came to be the weapon of choice for the Commonwealth of Australia in the first half of its existence for the purpose of shaping itself as a White Australia. A history of the Dictation Test necessarily touches upon why both Labor man John Willcock and conservative Robert Menzies agreed on the need to maintain a White Australia. It also helps us understand why Sallum Bin Sallik was allowed to stay and work as a Pearl diver in Australia ‘under exemption’, as well as why the requested deportation did not happen. Sallum in fact remained to aid in Australia’s war against Japan, and to father, educate and support his daughter long enough to see the defeat and gradual death of the White Australia project that had nearly affected his life so significantly.
Most of the life of the Bin Sallik family, the birth of their daughter, the informal adoption of a cousin, their move to Darwin, his war service with “Z” Force, the parent’s businesses and taxi service, and MaryAnn’s education and subsequent career, has nothing to do with the Dictation Test.3 But this is true of most lives affected even by such controlling instruments of policy. Lives intersect with the Dictation Test at crucial moments for good or ill and then continue on, allowed or not allowed to enter Australia, reunited or separated from family, all based upon ill-defined but nevertheless powerful ideas of race and whiteness.
Notes
NAA: A461, D349/3/4, Premier to Prime Minister, 20 December 1940.
Originally Salleh, his name and hence his daughter’s name was eventually spelt Sallik.
Bin-Sallik, Mary Ann, ‘Common Threads’ in Bin-Sallik, Mary Ann, Aboriginal women by degrees: their stories of the journey towards academic achievement, St Lucia, Qld. : University of Queensland Press, 2000, pp.177–193; NAA: A446, 1957/60982, SALLUM Bin Sallik born 29 November 1918 & News, 28 Aug 1950, p.10.