Dictation Test

A fake test within Australia’s immigration laws from 1901 to 1958 and designed to exclude people on the basis of race without specifically mentioning race.

"The Commonwealth of Australia for the first two generations of its existence maintained at the heart of its immigration administration another unique absurdity. Known at first as the Education Test and for most of the period as the Dictation Test, this was a bogus quiz for which a prospective entrant into Australia was set up to fail.

The purpose of this pretence was to achieve what became known as the ‘White Australia policy’ by barring entry into Australia of ‘undesirables’ without revealing too crudely the overwhelmingly racial reasons why some received this assessment. Although aimed at limiting the entry of all non-white people and reducing the number of Chinese people in Australia, the Immi- gration Restriction Act (IRA) of 1901 did not mention any race or nationality by name. Instead, the Immigration Restriction Act relied on its Dictation Test to provide the means to prohibit any person without being so impolite as to name names." p.1

"At the root of the Dictation Test as an instrument of immigration policy was a compromise between the new Commonwealth of Australia’s determina- tion to be ‘white’ and a British Imperial government determined to maintain cordial relations with ‘non-whites’, both in and outside the empire. The result was – as one newspaper report put it – a ‘heads-I-win-tails-you-lose’ test in which a passage could be dictated in any European language selected by an official. The language chosen was one it was known an individual would fail to write; such failure being a criminal offense resulting in a person being declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’ and liable to a gaol sentence before deportation." pp.2-3

Michael Williams, Australia’s Dictation Test - The test it was a crime to fail (Brill, 2021)