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Alison Broinowski sees the promotion of the ‘tall, tanned, tough, laconic bushman’ in
the light of ‘a male subagenda’ born of the insecurities of the masculinist, patriarchal society.
Fearing to lose more than just of their jobs, gold, and life-styles to Asians, but, specifically,
their women as well, the new national ideal operated ‘to ensure that settler Australians were
preferable to Asians as lovers, husbands, and sons’. At the same time, Australian women were
chastised for the fears of Asian invasion, since, if it should ever come, it would be because they
had failed in their duty to fill Australia with sons. It would be they and their daughters,
furthermore, ‘who would be the first to suffer unspeakable fates’ at the hands of the modern
Mongols (Broinowski, 1992, 34).
For empire, for king and country, for racial purity and a ‘White Australia’, Australian
men and women were exhorted early in the 20 th century to prepare for inevitable battle against
the ‘alien host’ (White, 126). When the first World War did come, the Australasian White
Cross League addressed departing troops to ‘Come back clean, to be the fathers of a pure-
blooded and virile Australian race’. (White, 127; Quote from: Richard Arthur, Keep Yourself
Fit: The Dangers of Venereal Disease: An Address given at the Camps in Queensland and New
South Wales, Australasian White Cross League, Sydney, 1916, p. 11.)
While the world was preoccupied with events in Europe, Australians looked to the
Americans to stem Japanese expansion in the Pacific and maintain the status quo. Indeed,
Japan did aid the British in China and the Pacific during the war, but seeing them occupy
German islands north of the equator convinced the Australians, who had done the same in the
south of the equator, that they must become more politically independent (Levy, 41).
2.8. New Attitudes on the ‘Near North’
After the armistice many Australians felt, as a former colony, it was logical to take a
positive view of post-war nationalist movements in Asia, as exemplified in India (Levy, 42).
The first expression of the ‘Far East’ being Australia’s ‘Far North’ or ‘Near North’ came in the
1920s and 30s, but indicated more an appreciation of the increased threat than anything else.
Australia was still the healthy but lazy nation, betrayed by geography and Newtonian physics,
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