Standard histories of the dismantling of White Australia policies can imply New Guinea Chinese had, at best, a minor role in such processes. While this may be true, these histories tend to assume that policies flow from the centre to the colony and that nothing much came from the periphery with the result that what gets written is largely Eurocentric (Thomas, 1994, p. 106;Anderson, 1998). Such histories are sometimes confined to, and conflated with, the values of a single nation-state, as when Tavan noted, perhaps somewhat over-enthusiastically, that the dismantling of the White Australia policies was 'largely a pragmatic response by political leaders to the changing circumstances in which Australia found itself and to the changing values of Australian society ' (2005, p. 238, italics in original). 1 Responding to this kind of methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002), we argue New Guinea Chinese should be made more central to the history of the White Australia policy. We do so by examining the granting, in 1957, of conditional Australian citizenship to Chinese residents in both Australia and New Guinea. In this chapter we merely point toward 1Along with Tavan's work there is a vast range of scholarship on the history of the White Australia policy (