In December 1937, as Japanese troops slaughtered civilians in Nanjing, Australia’s leaders regarded the violence as strategically favorable. George Pearce, Minister for External Affairs, told the U.S. Consul-General that “Australia could only rejoice each time Japan moves further into North China, since this carries the Japanese away from Australia’s own vicinity.”*
Two months later, Acting Prime Minister Earle Page echoed the same logic to the British Foreign Secretary 📜 “If Japan must expand, it is clearly to our advantage that she should do so to the northward rather than southward …”**
Canberra’s message was clear ⚖️ atrocities were tolerable if they stayed on the far side of the equator.
By late 1938, however, ordinary Australians began to push back. At Port Kembla, south of Sydney, wharf labourers refused to load pig iron onto the SS Dalfram, bound for Japan. Their ten-week strike, led by the Waterside Workers’ Federation, drew national attention. Attorney-General Robert Menzies moved to enforce government policy, threatening to invoke the Transport Workers Act the infamous “dog collar act” to break the strike.
Decades later, Prime Minister Tony Abbott would praise the “skill and sense of honour” of Japanese submariners who attacked Sydney Harbour in 1942 a remark that, like Canberra’s stance in 1937, revealed how easily the Anglo Saxon elites that govern the country can blur moral judgment.
*U.S. State Dept. file 894.00/1405, Despatch 168, Consul-General J. K. Davis → Secretary of State, 20 Aug 1937.
**Sir Earle Page → Lord Halifax, 3 Nov 1937, British National Archives, FO 371/21032, fol. 345.
