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increase its military presence, then Australia would just have to raise more taxes to build up its
own defence forces. Any remaining arguments against the White Australia policy were muted
in the face of this perceived threat—the first of any real substance, coming from an
industrialised and militarised country (Levy, 29).
The White Australia Policy, which sought to protect Australia from unfettered Asian
immigration, caused outrage among Asian nations. Its racist character was not the problem,
for many Asian nations shared its notions of racial purity (Brawley, 256), but it seemed
evidence that Australians, in denial of geographic reality, ‘did not consider themselves to be a
part of Asia’ (Brawley, 257). Observing how it received support across the divergent lines of
Australian politics, Asians came to the perception that ‘the policy was Australia’ (Brawley,
258), with the result that the very threat and distrust which the policy was meant to dampen
was heightened by it.
As Japan came to represent for Australia the ‘Yellow Peril’, the British were seen as
willing to sacrifice Australia if Japan seemed to be the more useful ally. With Japan’s sobering
victory against Russia in 1905, America’s Japanese policy, previously proud of its role in
opening Japan up to the world, turned sour. Australians looked on with some envy as the U.S.
erected severely restrictive policies on Asian immigration, but at the same time feared an
American-Japanese war in the Pacific in which they might be obliged by British diplomatic
agreements to aid Japan (Levy, 33).
It became clear that Britain intended not only to withdraw its forces from Asia but also
to rely on its Japanese allies to defend its Asian empire. Australia, dominated by its European-
based stereotypes, still could not understand these actions. Asia hardly represented for
Australians a model on which their society could or should depend. Despite thousands of years
of political, religious and cultural achievements, Asians were ‘coolies, eunuchs, gnomes,
dwarfs, or opium-crazed sex maniacs’ who, whether sinister or whimsical, were better
patronised than treated with equality (Broinowski, 1992, 29-30).
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