REGULAMENTO DE USOS DO TEATRO COLÓN INTRODUCIÓN

The sort of interaction most ANZACs had with the Egyptian public differed significantly from those of prior British travellers. Most Britons travelled to Egypt as either short-term pleasure tourists, or as long-term professional migrants. In the tourists’ case, interaction with the public was severely limited, mediated by a layer of protective guides.193

As for the numerous Anglo-Egyptian officers, bureaucrats, and businessmen that oversaw the administration of Egypt after the 1882 occupation, their community life was largely defined by a series of insular enclaves and social institutions that demarcated them from the Egyptian public, particularly the lower classes.194

For most ANZACs this was not the case. At the time of the ANZACs’ arrival in Egypt, the British population in Egypt hovered between 4-5000, a number that was nowhere near large enough to socially absorb the ANZACs, whose numbers amounted to twenty times that.195 _{In turn, this meant that, other than the officers, the ANZACs had to}

turn elsewhere for diversions, which meant engaging in far more frequent patronage of lower-class Egyptian businesses, especially in the vibrant urban hub of Cairo.196

Despite the ANZACs’ robust engagement with lower-class Cairenes, slums marked acute anxieties in Australasian imagination. In The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914, Alan Mayne notes by the 1910s slum-clearing reforms had largely improved the living standards of Sydney’s working class, although the methods used to establish improved hygiene came at the expense of many working class livelihoods whose homes and businesses were obliterated to make room for this new reality by imperious upper class municipal officers.197 _{Turn-of-the-century Australia was}

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193 _{John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South, (Oxford:}

Clarendon Press, 1987), 264.

194 _{See Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime, and Crises 1882-1922, (New York:}

I.B. Tauris, 2012).

195 _{Ibid, 191, 179; Suzanne Brugger, Australians and Egypt, 1914-1919, (Melbourne: Melbourne}

University Press, 1980), 52-53.

196 _{Brugger, Australians, 52-53.}

197 _{Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representations in Three Cities 1870-1914,}

wound up in these debates, with a print media that deliberately sensationalized the supposed danger and grossness of slums in order to improve their papers’ sales.198 _Thus,

anxieties about the dangers of the urban slum would be quite prominent in the minds of many departing ANZACs.

Cairo would be an apposite arena to experience these fears. While hygiene is to a certain extent a social construction that varies across societies, on several measures colonial Cairo’s poorly funded yet rapid urban sprawl had engendered problematic sanitary conditions. In Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious Janet Abu-Lughod describes how “regular trash collection was attempted from 1895 onward, but the system was primarily confined to newer sections of the city,” and how the city’s sewage system was first inaugurated only during the middle of the First World War.199 _{In comparison to}

Australasian cities like Sydney had already been subject to a great deal of slum clearing and sanitation infrastructure improvement by the 1910s, even in working class neighbourhoods.200 _{Or as, the Australian ambulanceman Langford Colley-Priest opines,}

“Sydney slums are palaces when compared with Old Cairo.”201

These Australasian apprehensions about urban slums were augmented by fears about hygiene more generally. Australians, especially in the early twentieth-century, were known for being particularly attentive to the state of their hygiene, both on a personal and societal level. In her monograph Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History, Alison Bashford examines how concerns about hygiene became interwoven with anxieties about race and preserving Australia’s whiteness. She argues “the pursuit (at many levels) of health, hygiene and cleanliness was one significant way in which the ‘whiteness’ of white Australia was imagined, as well as technically, legally and scientifically implemented: purity was the project of public health, as well as the project of nation.”202 _{Thus Australasian prejudices}

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198 _{Ibid, 108}

199 _{Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious, (Princeton: Princeton University}

Press, 1971), 125.

200 _{Mayne, Imagined, 100.}

201 _{Langford Colley-Priest, diary entry March 16, 1916,}

http://transcripts.sl.nsw.gov.au/page/353322/view, accessed June 7, 2016.

202 _{Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, (London: Palgrave}

had the ANZACs well-prepared to imagine a dichotomy between the ‘clean white’ and ‘dirty nigger,’ a lens which would shape many of their interactions with Egyptians.

Nor was the supposed unhygienic nature of non-whites the only racial prejudice held by the ANZACs. While Brugger surmises it is unlikely that the ANZACs initially had any prejudices against Egyptians specifically, Australasian culture was deeply prejudicial against non-whites more generally.203 _{As the previous chapter has noted, the arriving}

ANZACs widely felt Egyptians should fall on the black pole of their imagined racial binary. Accordingly, the Egyptians inherited many of the prejudices that Australasians held toward non-whites.204

In Australia the most common recipients of blackening monikers tended to be Aborigines. While few ANZACs likely had much actual contact with Aborigines, who were severely depopulated and strictly segregated by the early twentieth-century, they were educated with a deep reservoir of racial biases against Aborigines.205 _{Australians imagined}

Aborigines to be lazy, unhygienic, sexually perverse, and inclined towards theft and other forms of crime.206

Even more central to Australasian Orientalism was the Asian ‘Other’, particularly the Japanese and Chinese. Unlike Aborigines, who were imagined to be a ‘dying race’ who would never pose a long-term threat to white civilization, Asians were imagined as being vibrant and numerous enough to pose a threat to the futures of Australia and New Zealand.207 Asian-Australians were generally othered as “unmanly, inherently servile

coolies.”208 _{They were imagined as a people that had no civilizational or trade unionist}

aspirations and who would drag down white attempts in Australia and New Zealand to ________________________

203 _{Brugger, Australians, 29-30.} 204 _Ibid.

205 _Ibid.

206 _{Anna Doukakis, The Aboriginal People, Parliament, and “Protection” in New South Wales,}

1856-1916, (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2006), 30, 89.

207 _{Charles Ferrell, Paul Millar, and Keren Smith, eds, East by South: China in the Australasian}

Imagination, (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005), 97.

208 _{Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries}

and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 154.

build a society that allowed a fair deal for the working man.209 _{They were also looked upon}

with suspicion, imagined to be carriers of diseases and having depraved sexual appetites that threatened white Australasian women.210 _{These are all tropes that ANZACs ascribe}

onto Egyptians during their wartime sojourn, suggesting many of these anti-Asian prejudices were indeed transferred.211

While geography led the bulk of racial othering and prejudice in Australasia to be directed against Aborigines and East Asians, there is also evidence that many Australasians, were acquainted with European prejudices against the Middle East as well. The accounts of many ANZACs and their associates, particularly among the more educated, are peppered with Middle Eastern-centric Orientalist tropes like the “wily Arab,”212 the unknowable “Oriental mind,”213 the “fatalism of orientals,”214 and the East’s

milieu of “seductive and sensual voluptuousness.”215 These imagined self-evident ‘truths’

about the nature of the Islamic Orient represented a congruency with a deeply ingrained discourse in Western literature.216 _{They helped pre-condition many ANZACs with a ready}

language of othering the Egyptians they encountered.

Altogether, these traditions of racism against non-whites left the Australasians departing for war well-prepared to think the worst of the non-whites they would meet. But the intensity of this antipathy would be unevenly distributed amongst the different segments of the non-white population in Egypt that they encountered. Lower-class urban

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209 _{Ibid; Ferrell, Millar, and Smith, East, 32, 98.} 210 _{Ferrell, Millar, and Smith, East, 9.}

211 _{Mabel Brookes, Old Desires, (Melbourne: Australian Authors’ Agency, 1922), 155.; William}

Cull, correspondence December 18, http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/_transcript/2013/

D04282/a2910.htm, accessed April 20, 2016; Wal McMullen, “Letter From Egypt,” The Scone Advocate, June 15, 1915, 1.

212 _{Mabel Brookes, Old Desires, (Melbourne: Australian Authors’ Agency, 1922), 191.}

213 _{A.D. Ellis, The Story of the Fifth Australian Division, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920),}

36.

214 _{Irene Read, war narrative, 1915-1916, http://transcripts.sl.nsw.gov.au/page/363699/view,}

accessed May 30, 2016.

215 _{Anzac, On the Anzac Trail: Being Extracts from the Diary of a New Zealand Sapper,}

(Wellington: W. Heinemann, 1916), 78.

Egyptians would bear the brunt, while antipathy towards affluent Egyptians, fellaheen, and Indian soldiers would be comparatively muted.