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evidenced by the invasion scare novels which appeared in the last decades of the 19 th century,
was not entirely trusted to protect Australia, and yet remained ‘an emotional necessity and a
source of national security and political stability’ for the new Commonwealth (Ken Stewart, 5).
2.6. The White Australia Policy
Old fears began to bear themselves out by the beginning of the 20 th century as
Australians witnessed a shift of the balance of power in the Pacific and increasing requirements
for the British to concentrate their naval forces in the North Sea. Developing their own sense
of ‘Manifest Destiny’, Australians were becoming more concerned with questions of federation
and the expansion of the ‘Anglo-Celtic’ nation. Beginning also to recognise their own
responsibilities for self-defence, some Australians looked longingly at the expansionist Pacific
policy of the Americans, newly installed in Hawaii and the Philippines, which they considered
more favourable to Australia than Britain’s policy which was marked by the onset of decline
(Levy, 26).
It was yet a dream for expansion without integration or co-operation, meaning that only
trade held any promise for development with Asia. Asians as workers or immigrants were
written off by the ‘White Australia’ policy which in 1901, the very year Australia became a
nation by Act of the British parliament, choked off non-white immigration. Chinese
immigrants were generally seen as law-abiding and peaceful, but their presence threatened
hopes of white democracy and culture (Ken Stewart, 12). Notions of ‘culture’ and ‘race’
became interchangeable, and a pseudo-scientific authority was lent by the language of Social-
Darwinism to the struggle for survival and supremacy against the ‘Yellow Peril’ (Meaney,
229). The vast, open lands of the continent were supposed to be tempting to the numberless
hordes of Asians and their rabid desires for Lebensraum (Levy, 28). Theories of imminent
invasion surfaced again, this time involving secret Japanese plans, and images of Japanese
battleships lying in Sydney harbour swept across the horrified continent. Australians couched
their fears with the slogan ‘Populate or Perish’. The political and economic issue of filling the
land with ‘desirable’ immigrants was raised to a moral issue as well. If Britain could not
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