Secondary Source Report 3

Australia's Asia - from Yellow Peril to Asian Century

David Walker and Agneiszka Sobocinska 

By Mark Richardson

Complete citation:

Walker, David, and Agneiszka Sobocinska. Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century. UWA Publishing, Crawley, W.A, 2012

If web access: url; date accessed:

Date of Access: 5 October 2020

https://search-informit-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/browsePublication;res=IELHSS;isbn=9781742583495

 

Image Credit:

‘There’s one section in Australia that can’t quite understand “Society’s” Jap-worship’, cartoon in The Bulletin, 20 June 1903, p. 18, in Walker, 2012, p 81.

 Key Words: Australia, Race Relations, Migration, Asia

Brief Overview:

Walker and Sobocinska explore Australian attitudes to Asian peoples from Federation to the present day. The Authors provide a comprehensive and detailed analysis, balancing the views of those who wished to keep Australia white, with those who favoured a more enlightened and progressive view of Asian peoples and the contribution they could make to Australian society.

Summary of key points:

Australia’s past cannot be separated from the Asian region or the world; acknowledgement of their roles will promote a more comprehensive and inclusive history.

Australia’s adherence to the White Australia policy represented maintenance of outdated dogma that failed to recognise Asia’s place in the world or the potential contribution Asian peoples could make to Australian society and the Australian race.

These attitudes matured over time. Asian peoples are now welcomed in Australia. People of Chinese heritage currently constitute the largest diaspora residing in Australia.

Important Quotations:

One of the arguments of this book is that ‘unprecedented Asia’ has emerged over time as an appealing, though largely inaccurate, fiction (p. 2)

  Australia’s Asia provides the basis for a reading of our past that recognises Asia as an ongoing formative presence near the centre of our national history rather than as a minor and readily ignored influence on the fringes (p. 9)

 This volume argues the case for acknowledging the breadth of the Asian dimension of Australian history. (18)

 Windschuttle has claimed that the White Australia Policy did not have a racial basis at all, but was primarily an economic measure designed to maintain a relatively high standard of living (p 41)

 Australia’s early contacts with Asia were underpinned by an anxiety that white society risked contamination from Asia (p. 46).

 They could very well kidnap the prize continent of Australia from the nonchalant whites; Japan now took over as the fresh mirror of Australian awe, adoration and anxiety (p. 69).

 More controversial in Australia was the proposal that Britain would reduce its naval presence in the Pacific, leaving the Japanese to fill the gap (77)

 The Home, a publication of the Sydney Morning Herald. In a two-page, four- picture spread, this society women’s monthly magazine portrayed Wong as an American of Chinese ancestry (p.155).

 

 

Image Credit:

The Gun that could shell the City of Sydney from the Sea’ Australian Town and Country Journal, 17 June 1903, p. 32, in Walker, 2012, p 86.

Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

This Book is not very useful for our purposes. It has some value as background information, however there is only one brief reference to a magazine we are analysing, The Home, as reflected in the above quote. Otherwise, Magazine Culture is confined to a paucity of referrals to magazines in general, or to some magazines that are outside our scope and time period, such as Tatler, and Sketcher.