Author: Greg Ray

For Australia, “the yellow peril” has always been a defining factor in nationhood. It didn’t take long, after white colonisers arrived on the great southern continent, for fears of the “Asiatic hordes” to take root and grow. Being an English colony on Asia’s doorstep explains it, of course. And hence the anti-Chinese sentiment in the Gold Rush days, the anti-Asian-labour sentiments that ebbed and flowed over decades, the White Australia Policy and Britain’s calculated use of colonial fears of Japanese invasion to induce Australia to raise an army just in time for the slaughter of The…