Assessing Australian Attitudes to Japan in the Early Twentieth Century: A New Approach

Abstract

After living in Japan for almost seventeen years, and being constantly intrigued by the attitudes of the Japanese to Australia, upon my return I was naturally interested to learnabout Australian attitudes to Japan. The paucity of news concerning Japan in the press suggested that it was not of major interest to the Australian public, and one tends to presume that, wartime apart, this had always been the case. An interest in Australian history fostered by prolonged absence was partly satisfied by undertaking volunteer work for the National Trust of Australia, at their property ‘Saumarez Homestead’, located in the rural city of Armidale, New South Wales, where I had taken up residence. ‘Saumarez’ is a large Victorian–Edwardian pastoral property, purchased by Francis John White in 1874.White and his wife Margaret raised their five daughters and two sons on the property, and became wealthy and socially important people in the township. While this may seem irrelevant to my experience in Japan, I was amazed to discover that Mary White, the eldest daughter of the ‘Saumarez’ family, had indeed travelled to Japan in 1903, andI soon learned that quite a number of other local people had done the same in the period between Federation and World War I.