Un-Australian? White Australia’s Visions of Identity and the Racialisation of the Pacific War

Abstract

This article investigates white Australia’s racialisation of the Pacific War. Specifically, it focuses on contemporary disputes over racialised depictions of the conflict, and how such contentions figured in understandings of Australian identity. By looking at wartime newspaper and magazine articles, wartime propaganda, and the public responses to them, this article demonstrates the diversity and complexity of white Australia’s racialisation of the Pacific War. Though the view of the Pacific War as a ‘race war’ was certainly common among white Australians, it was not universal. That said, most white Australians at the time, regardless of whether they supported the racialisation of the conflict, upheld a racialised worldview.