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lame. The American heroic, paternalistic experience proves that Australia’s was not simply a
colonial experience. The inhospitable Antipodean landscape, Tacey writes, ‘is explicitly
linked with the death of the hero and the degeneration of culture’, and becomes a ‘mythic
image for metaphysical wilderness’ (Tacey, 205). White Australians were becoming a people
in exile in their own land, and even in their own homes.
2.4. The Beginnings of Trade Relations with Asia
The progressive withdrawal of the Australian from outside affairs was paralleled within
the British empire by growing outside domination of the colony. In terms of Asian contacts,
this meant that direct Australian trade with Asia was legally limited to India. These two were
conducting trade from the 1880s, but most other efforts at developing trade were crippled by
the European domination of Asia. Australian ships carrying tea and silk in from China were
technically smuggling since the East Asia Company held a monopoly on imperial trade with
China. The result was that, into the beginnings of the 20 th century, Australian commerce, even
for products of Asian origin, was routed through the West (Levy, 16).
Trade with China, limited as it was, still represented the promising beginnings of
commerce with Asia, but came to an abrupt halt with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.
China’s defeat closed it off to further Western contact and elevated newly industrialised Japan
to major-power status. The Anglo-Japanese trade treaty of 1894 complicated for Australians
the new questions about just what Japan was. Trade with Japan was desirable, but not the
immigrants which the treaty permitted. Some saw Japan as a counterbalance against the
perceived threat of Russia in the region while others feared the evils of ‘ungovernable
multitudes of Japanese subjects’ flooding in. Japan replaced China in the Australian
demonology, and whether the Japanese were wily and dishonest or spirited, enterprising, and
hard-working, they would still not fit into the Australian social scheme (Levy, 18). Indeed,
Australians hardly made any distinction between Japanese and Chinese, tending to lump all
Asians together as a collective yellow threat to white civilisation (Ouyang Yu, 1995, Invasion,
77). Hostility to the Chinese developed especially through the union movement, but took on
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