The Chinese presence in the colonies stirred many Australian anxieties. Australian colonists liked to think of themselves as British, but they began to see they were British in strange geo-political surroundings. They suspected Australia might be on a great Chinese flood plain. It was clearly well within reach of Chinese influence. California, another gold rush society, had also experienced a substantial influx of Chinese. The realization grew that Australia should not look just to Britain. It shared strategic interests with other white communities in the Pacific, especially with America. But the pacific was a contested ocean. From the 1880s, it was increasingly apparent that China and Japan were also nearby Pacific nations.
(1) The presence of so many Chinese intensified debate on the potential character of Australian society. Potent concerns had developed about civic values in gold rush communities, concerns aggravated by Australia's convict origins. Gold was a seductive, richly mythologized substance. Its discovery in the Australian colonies publicized their potential more than anything else had yet done. Gold attracted a young, cosmopolitan, ambitious, predominantly white male population, often imbued with advanced democratic views. Yet as David Goodman has shown, this influx stirred anxieties about the moral stability of these gold-seeking communities. A gold-obsessed society appeared a poor foundation for a stable cultured society. Many social commentators found the prospect that working men could gain sudden wealth in this way very disturbing. Would people still value achievements wrought by steady labour and industrious habits?What would happen to moral values? (2) There was another more disturbing thought. If Australia could produce only these rough, uncivilized communities, might it not lose the moral authority by which Australians, claiming the rights of a superior culture, sought exclusive access to the continent? Were Australians still worthy of their immense opportunities?
Questions of tenure and entitlement were intensified by the dispossession of the Australian Aborigines. One of the main justifications used at that time for taking over Aboriginal land came from the belief that they were a primitive, nomadic people with no fixed settlements or habits of agriculture. It was thought that they did not value their land and had no capacity to develop it (3) One of the troubling paradoxes of gold seeking populations was that they also were a highly mobile wandering tribe, in some ways similar to the Aborigines they sought to displace. Anxieties about the continuity of white settlement in Australia intensified impulses to vilify Aborigines and to keep Asians out. The major question revolved around entitlement to the land. (4) In the blunt language of the late nineteenth century, if white had replaced black because black was not developing the continent, why should yellow not replace white on precisely the same grounds? If European communities in Australia were not seen to be civilized and productive, the case for sole tenure of Australia by whites might be seriously weakened.
Directions:Read the following passage, and then translate the underlined parts numbered from (1) to(4) , from English into Chinese. Please write your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.
