ABSTRACT
Australia has always been multilingual, with over 250 indigenous languages spoken at the time of White Settlement in 1788 (Clyne, 1991, p. 6). But multilingualism has sat uneasily alongside the “monolingual mindset” (Clyne, 2005) that the British colonists brought with them and it has been a point of policy dispute, linked to fears of social fragmentation, throughout the history of modern Australia. We see this uneasiness most clearly in the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (Commonwealth of Australia, 1902), more commonly known as the White Australia Policy, 1 which included a language proficiency instrument aimed at excluding people whose linguistic, cultural, political, and racial identities were considered undesirable.
