AustLit

David Crouch argues that White or Yellow? : A Story of the Race War of A.D.1908 'is an early manifestation of a long lineage of national paranoia, part of a history of primal anxiety which colours the contemporary rhetoric of border protection, illegal immigrants and the increasingly phobic suspicion that a multicultural Australia might include hidden cells - or "communities of interest" - within.' He suggests that William Lane's novel 'is particularly interesting because of the way in which he presents ideas about the relations between the individual and the mass that are inflected by both sexual and racial politics.'