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old and remarkable culture, like the water wheel which was used to irrigate the Chinaman’s
garden, ‘of a fashion some ten-thousand years old’ (Picador Henry Lawson, 440). Lawson
praises Ah Soon, who never whipped his horse and who offered his dried up pumpkins free of
charge to help sustain the hungry cattle of the narrator’s family, as well as his son, Ah See,
who extended in complete trust credit to his customers, and never forgot the help given to his
father by the narrator’s parents.
In a side comment which is completely germane to this study, Lawson points out how
the harsh Australian climate helps overcome racist tendencies. In times of drought, certainly
rather common in the bush, everyone, ‘saints and sinners, Christian and heathen, European and
Asiatic’, would work together to survive (Picador Henry Lawson, 440). This is an interesting
observation of a public man who ‘feared the possibility of Asian domination in Australia’
(Bennett, 1991, 188), who has been called ‘a nationalist who believed that Jews wanted to take
over Australia, using Japanese as a front’ (Broinowski, 1992, 10), and who was one of the
Bulletin’s most influential proponents of anti-Asian sentiment (Ouyang Yu, 1995, Bulletin,
136). Lawson’s story did, however, soundly condemn racism, even if only because it was the
sort of luxury which could not be tolerated in a hard country like Australia.
Children’s literature took advantage of the marketing and propaganda value of cultural
stereotypes of the period. Sharyn Pearce describes one example, Smiley by Raymond Moore
(1945). Smiley, the young Anglo-Saxon protagonist, conforms to the lineage of Australian
heroic types, expressing the ‘virtues of independence, self-confidence, courage, dislike of
mental activity and distrust and disrespect for authority that were created and embellished by
the radical-nationalist Bulletin’s team of city bushmen in the 1880s and 1890s’. He is ‘an
obvious construction of a mini-Digger, a little larrikin with a heart of gold’ who has a ‘genius
for getting into trouble’ and ‘the Australian male’s supposedly legendary passion for
gambling’. The representative of the race Smiley calls ‘yeller devils’ is the market gardener
Charlie Coy. Charlie hates Smiley for a past wrong, but Smiley’s ‘innate distrust for Orientals
is confirmed when it is later discovered that Charlie has been working as an opium dealer’.
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