Migrant Acculturation via Naturalisation: Comparing Syrian and Greek Applications for Naturalisation in White Australia

In 1903, the Commonwealth Australian government passed the Naturalisation Act (1903). Acquiring naturalisation, however, was not straightforward in a country that was concerned about its ‘foreign element’. A key legal requirement of the Act stipulated that ‘a person resident in the Commonwealth, not being a British subject, and not being an aboriginal native of Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific’, who intends to settle in Australia could apply for a naturalisation. Because the naturalisation law explicitly excluded people who were from certain regions of the world, applying for naturalisation was, at its root, racialised. For Syrians and Greeks, acquiring naturalisation came to hinge on the question of whether they were to be accepted as white subjects. This article compares naturalisation application files of Syrians and Greeks to explore the ambiguous inclusivity of Australia’s naturalisation law. In comparing how two groups subjected to similar external representations applied for naturalisation, it is argued that applying for naturalisation was a mode by which migrants outwardly performed their acculturation by identifying with a dominant whiteness-property nexus. In doing so, the article opens terrain in migration history to consider how applying for naturalisation was contingent on migrants’ capacity to present themselves as loyal settlers.