Secondary Source Report No. 2:

Anxious Nation: Australia and the rise of Asia 1850-1939

By Mark Richardson

Complete citation:

Walker, David, Anxious Nation: Australia and the rise of Asia 1850-1939. UWA Publishing, Crawley WA, 2012.

If web access: url; date accessed: Available as an E-Book from JCU Library:

https://search-informit-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/fullText;dn=295491474818401;res=IELHSS

Image Credit: 'The Babylonian Marriage Market’, Long, E. 1875, (referenced in Walker (2012).

Key Words:

Invasion, Asian, women, cultural beliefs, fear, anxiety

Brief Overview:

This book explores anxieties held by Australians regarding the threat of an Asian take-over, which pervaded the Australian psyche from around 1850 until the Second World War. During the latter half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, fear of  incursion by Asian races, either by force or by stealth, was strongly regarded as almost inevitable, especially in Australia’s vast, empty North. Australians were acutely aware of their miniscule population and the fact that it was mainly concentrated in the south east corner of the continent, leaving Australia’s North virtually empty and an inviting prospect for the teeming ‘lower races’, who would occupy these territories and gradually usurp the white, or ‘higher’ races. 

Walker explores manifestations of these fears in intellectual tomes, such as Charles H. Pearson’s 1893 book ‘National Life and Character: A Forecast”; popular fiction such as the anonymous 1888 narrative ‘The Battle of Mordialloc, or How We Lost Australia’; Kenneth Mackay's 1895 ‘The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia’ and Sax Rohmer'sFu Manchu tales, which appeared as a series of novels between 1913 to 1932. Fu Manchu is depicted as an ‘evil doctor’ plotting to overthrow mankind and possessing all the insidious traits of the Asian race: deception, treachery, guile and cunning. Walker also depicts Australian antipathies toward Asians in popular magazines of the period, in particular ‘the Bulletin’, which espoused strident anti-Asian rhetoric.

This book is also valuable as a research source for its depiction of contemporaneous views pervading Australian Society regarding women. In general, women were regarded with suspicion; believed to be weak-willed and submissive creatures who would demonstrate meek compliance with any Asian aggressors, even to the point of miscegenation.

Summary of key points:

Australians held grave fears during this period, about the inevitability of an invasion by the teeming hordes of Asia. Australians held similar fears about the empty North of the continent presenting an irresistible opportunity for forced colonisation by Asians, who were rapidly overpopulating their homelands.

Australians widely feared they would become slaves to Asians in their own homeland.

Australian society viewed women with suspicion, believing that they would ‘betray the national interest by being meekly compliant, or even willing participants, in an Asian takeover of Australia.

Important Quotations:

‘Praed's witty novel was a lively satire of Australian manhood: its material obsessions, its patronising attitudes to Eastern cultures, its superior attitudes to women, its intellectual limitations and self-important warnings of the threat from the North’ (109).

In this era of rapid social change, it seemed to men that women were capable of any perversity and might even be attracted to Asian men’ (128).

‘The misogynist idea that women would readily betray the Australian national interest informed the Bulletin's attempt to explain the reception accorded to the Japanese Training Squadron in 1906’ (130).

‘Women were viewed with great suspicion. They were given many of the elusive properties of water. They were gushing, tidal, uncontrolled, all-engulfing. They were reputed to be prey to moral instability and at the mercy of powerful and dangerous biological drives. They bled’ (131).

‘Fu Manchu was no grovelling Oriental, but a profound thinker, deeply learned in Western science. He was a man who never slept, a man who seemed to have cheated death itself. He was a man on a quest: the overthrow of the white world. The Doctor infiltrated Chapter 13 of this book one dark, mist-shrouded morning, enjoying, no doubt, the superstitious dread his presence there would cause’ (7).

‘There are three Chinese to every white; Chinese freely marry white women and white men have been reduced to 'Asiatic slavery’ (100)

‘The Chinese, 'stirred some of the volcanic sub-texts' of everyday life. Most of the known vices were attributed to them: they were represented as gamblers, drug addicts and sexual deviants. They lusted after white women. They were diseased. They carried leprosy and all the poxes: small, chicken and other’ (36).

‘The Babylonian Marriage Market', completed in 1882. Paintings … depicted the way the Orient regarded women … encouraging the male gaze to travel appraisingly over the naked bodies of women about to be sold into slavery, (134).

Randolph Bedford found similar value in this approach. In a short story published in 1923 he allows his character, the Chinese sage Quong Sue Duk, to express a few truths about women who were 'creatures moulded out of faults'. They may bring life, but 'they bring death also’ (135)

‘The populous Australia of 1960, with its efficient trains, busy shipping lines and remarkable prosperity, is Asian. Australia would become Asian’ (14).

 Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:

Depicts Australian attitudes toward Asia, and toward women, through the period 1850-1939.

Depicts how these views were expressed in Intellectual texts, fiction, magazines and newspapers.

 References

Long, E. L. (1875) "The Babylonian Marriage Market". Fine Art America. 

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-babylonian-marriage-market-1875-edwin-longsden-long.html. Accessed 05 October 2020.

Walker, David, Anxious Nation: Australia and the rise of Asia 1850-1939. UWA Publishing, Crawley WA, 2012.