The construction of Australia as a white nation was exemplified in the ratification of the Immigration Restriction Act or White Australia policy (1901). The White Australia policy was the Australian nation's attempt to prove its whiteness by closing its borders to those people considered its binary opposite. The white authorities policed the entry of 'black' bodies into the nation state by determining their degree of blackness (de Boissière, 2010) and concurrently attempted to 'breed out' Indigenous people through, among other strategies, forced removal from their families (McGregor, 2002). Aboriginal people in Australia were categorized from 'black' to 'white' through the use of colonial racial categorizations similar to those employed in other colonies: 'full blood', 'half-caste' and 'quarter-caste' (Briscoe, 2010). Similar categorizations were used to determine who could migrate to Australia from overseas based on the notion of 'best fit'; in other words, the potential for full racial assimilation into the white nation.  
In the Australian literary magazine Overland there was a discussion in 2015 about blackness in Australia, led by Natasha Guantai, an Australian-born woman of Kenyan descent. In the online discussion, Guantai begins by stating that there are 'two narratives of Blackness' which are in 'collision' in the Australian context: the narrative of Aboriginal Australians and the narrative of Australians of African descent. People from the Indian diaspora appear to be left out of this discussion, despite sometimes having the label 'black' applied to them and also using the term 'black' to describe themselves in white majority contexts. Guantai argues that she is a black Australian because she is racialized within Australia