2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(2) citizen.1 However, birth in the Territory of New Guinea conferred only the status of Australian Protected Person (‘APP’). APPs were stateless but entitled to Australia’s diplomatic protection. This distinction between Australian citizens born in Papua and New Guinean APPs was, however, of no practical significance as long as Australia governed both territories. Indeed, despite their different statuses under international law, the Papua and New Guinea Act 1949 (Cth) provided for the Territory of Papua and the Territory of New Guinea to be administered together as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (‘TPNG’) and created a local legislature for the administrative union.2 Moreover, of particular relevance in the present context, prior to 1973, Australian immigration policy centred on keeping non-whites out of metropolitan Australia. Indeed, for many years the Department of Immigration ruled that ‘a prospective migrant [to Australia] had to be of 75 per cent “European blood”’. 3 Therefore, not only was it the case that APPs could not enter metropolitan Australia without prior permission but neither could those who were Australian citizens by virtue of birth in the Territory of Papua. The election of the Labor Whitlam Government in December 1972 was a watershed event. As well as precipitating PNG’s hurried path to independence, it also saw the formal demise of the ‘White Australia’ policy.4 The effect of these events on the ‘regimes of race’ that, as Patrick Wolfe argues, reflected and reproduced particular forms of colonialism and colonial relationships, would be almost immediate.5 Indeed, the distinction between Australian citizens born in Papua and APPs suddenly had the potential to become very consequential indeed, depending on the policy choices that were made by the political actors on each side of the Torres Strait. In this context, the notion of citizenship became an intense site of official focus as each nation sought to formulate, or reformulate, ideas of who did and who did not belong. Rachel Sharples and Linda Briskman have argued that ‘citizenship is a powerful construct that is legally framed as denoting inclusion within a nationstate by birth or conferral, or as a force for exclusion that denies both granting of citizenship and the provision of rights afforded to others’.6 The bases of inclusion and exclusion and the new and emerging legal parameters of racialised identity in the two countries would, in the years leading to independence, significantly shape the debate around nationhood and citizenship. 1 2 3 4 5 6 The High Court referred to this citizenship status as a ‘veneer’: Re Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs; Ex parte Ame (2005) 222 CLR 439, [88] cited in Kim Rubenstein and Jacqueline Field, ‘What Is a “Real” Australian Citizen: Insights from Papua New Guinea and Mr Amos Ame’ in Benjamin N Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (eds), Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press 2017) 100, 101. The Papua and New Guinea Act 1949 (Cth) replaced the Papua Act 1905 (Cth) and the New Guinea Act 1920 (Cth). Article IV of the Trust Agreement permitted the Commonwealth of Australia (‘Australia’) to govern New Guinea as an integral part of Australia. Rachel Sharples and Linda Briskman, ‘Racialized Citizenship: Challenging the Australian Imaginary’ in Leanne Weber and Claudia Tazreiter (eds), Handbook of Migration and Global Justice (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021) 202, 204. This was the colloquial name for the policy of preventing non-white immigration to Australia, which was in place from federation (1901) to 1973 when it was formally abolished by the Whitlam Government. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso 2016) 8. Sharples and Briskman (n 3) 202. 214