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White Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in Interwar Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2023

Aden Knaap
Aden Knaap*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
Email: adknaap@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Popular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.

Keywords

popular internationalismLeague of Nationswhite supremacyracismBritish EmpireAustralia

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Journal of Global History , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 77 - 97
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© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Robert Menzies, ‘Australia’s Place in the Empire’, International Affairs 14 no. 4 (1935), 481-2; Aden Knaap, ‘“Apart Altogether from Idealistic Sentiments”: Domesticating the League of Nations in Australia’ (Honours Thesis, Sydney, University of Sydney, 2014); Nicholas Brown, ‘Enacting the International: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union’, in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Angela Woollacott, Penny Russell, and Desley Deacon (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008), 75–94; Hilary Summy, ‘From Hope … to Hope : Story of the Australian League of Nations Union, Featuring the Victorian Branch, 1921-1945’ (PhD Thesis, Brisbane, University of Queensland, 2007); Kate Darian-Smith, Catriona Elder, and Fiona Paisley, ‘“Are We Internationally Minded?” Everyday Cultures of Australian Internationalism in the Mid-20th Century’, Journal of Australian Studies 43, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 405–11; P. Harrison-Mattley, ‘The League of Nations Movement and Australian Schools’, Journal of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society 1, no. 2 (1972): 8–20; Joy Damousi, ‘Australian League of Nations Union and War Refugees, 1930-39’, in League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact, ed. Joy Damousi and Patricia O’Brien (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2018); W. J. Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980).

2 Hsu-Ming Teo, Richard White, and Marilyn Lake, ‘On Being a White Man, Circa 1900’, in Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), 108; Jane Carey and Claire McLisky, eds., Creating White Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Pluto Press, 2000).

3 Mae M. Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Vol. 1: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

4 Of course, who was considered ‘white’ shifted over this period and did not necessarily include all Europeans: see Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788-1993, Australian Experience (St. Leonard’s: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 152.

5 See, for example, Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, rev. ed. (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006); Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

6 John Mulvaney, ‘Difficult to Found an Opinion: 1788 Aboriginal Population Estimates’, in The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70,000 Years to the Present, ed. Gordon Briscoe and L. R. Smith, Aboriginal History Monograph Series 10 (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 2002), 1–8.

7 For the term ‘white internationalism’, see Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 355.

8 On ‘national internationalism’ and ‘imperial internationalism’, see, for example, Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley, The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (London: Routledge, 2018); Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

9 On this, see this recent exchange: Susan Pedersen, ‘An International Regime in an Age of Empire’, The American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 1, 2019): 1676–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1028; Sean Andrew Wempe, ‘A League to Preserve Empires: Understanding the Mandates System and Avenues for Further Scholarly Inquiry’, The American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 1, 2019): 1723–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1027.

10 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), chap. 2; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, chap. 12.

11 Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States, and the League of Nations’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 113–38.

12 Bill Gammage, Peter Spearritt, and Louise Douglas, eds., Australians 1938 (Broadway: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987), 50.

13 Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Utopia, Empire and the Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

14 On the British League of Nations Union, see Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism c. 1918-45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Donald S. Birn, The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). On the French Fédération Française pour la Société des Nations, see Jean-Michel Guieu, Le rameau et le glaive: les militants français pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008). On the German Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund, see Christoph M. Kimmich, Germany and the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

15 On the American League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, see Warren F. Kuehl and Lynne Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920-1939 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997). On the Canadian League of Nations Society, see Richard Veatch, Canada and the League of Nations (Toronto: Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 42–5. On the South African League of Nations Union, see Sara Pienaar, South Africa and International Relations between the Two World Wars: The League of Nations Dimension (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1987), 11, 48–9. On the New Zealand League of Nations Union, see Gerald Chaudron, New Zealand in the League of Nations: The Beginnings of an Independent Foreign Policy, 1919-1939 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), 48–52. On Argentina, Chile, and Palestine, see W. H. Kelchner, Latin American Relations with the League of Nations, 1930, 148; Thomas R. Davies, ‘Internationalism in a Divided World: The Experience of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, 1919–1939’, Peace & Change 37, no. 2 (2012): 237. Racial categories of whiteness were contested, especially in relation to Jews in this period. On whiteness and Zionism in particular, see Tara Zahra, ‘Zionism, Emigration, and East European Colonialism’, in Colonialism and the Jews, ed. Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 166–92.

16 Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914-1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 92, 139–41. The only others were part (formally or informally) of the American and British Empires: Cuba, Haiti, and Persia: Davies, ‘Internationalism in a Divided World’, 237.

17 For a recent overview, see Monique Bedasse et al., ‘AHR Conversation: Black Internationalism’, The American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (December 29, 2020): 1699–739. For examples, see Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021); Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

18 See, for example, Andrew Arsan, ‘“This Age Is the Age of Associations”: Committees, Petitions, and the Roots of Interwar Middle Eastern Internationalism’, Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012): 166–88; Katharina Rietzler, ‘Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-War Years: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-War Years’, Historical Research 84, no. 223 (2011): 148–64.

19 See, for example, Emily Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Matthew Hilton, ‘Charity and the End of Empire: British Non-Governmental Organizations, Africa, and International Development in the 1960s’, The American Historical Review 123, no. 2 (2018): 493–517; Tom Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945-1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Tehila Sasson, ‘Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott’, The American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1196–224; McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations; Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

20 Susan Pedersen, ‘Triumph of the Poshocracy’, London Review of Books, August 8, 2013, 18-20.

21 Knaap, ‘“Apart Altogether from Idealistic Sentiments”: Domesticating the League of Nations in Australia’, 91–5.

22 On this point, see Priya Satia, ‘Guarding the Guardians: Payoffs and Perils’, Humanity 7, no. 3 (2016): 481–98.

23 See, for example, Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

24 On Australian feminist internationalism in the early twentieth century, see Angela Woollacott, ‘Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s-30s’, Gender & History 10, no. 3 (1998): 425–48; Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection?: Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919-1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000); Ian R. Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). On Australian socialist and communist internationalism in the early twentieth century, see Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998). On Indigenous Australians and internationalism in the early twentieth century, see John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003); Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: A. M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012).

25 Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013), 4–5.

26 Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations, 3.

27 Hudson, 4–5.

28 Eleanor May Moore, The Quest for Peace, as I Have Known it in Australia (Melbourne: Wilke, 1949), 81.

29 It is difficult to determine exact membership figures because they were only collected by separate state branches and even then intermittently. This estimate is based on the archives of various state branches, the personal papers of Union leaders, and newspaper records: Knaap, ‘“Apart Altogether from Idealistic Sentiments”: Domesticating the League of Nations in Australia’, 91–5.

30 Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117.

31 Andrew Moore, ‘Discredited Fascism: The New Guard after 1932’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 57, no. 2 (2011): 189.

32 Gwenda Lloyd and John Merlo, International Affairs in Schools (Melbourne: Australian League of Nations Union, 1934), 15-17; Harrison-Mattley, ‘The League of Nations Movement and Australian Schools’, 9.

33 Ibid.

34 Julie McLeod, ‘Everyday Internationalism as an Educational Project: School Curriculum and Pedagogies for World-Mindedness’, Journal of Australian Studies: Everyday Cultures of Australian Internationalism in the Mid-20th Century 43, no. 4 (2019): 447–63.

35 Harrison-Mattley, ‘The League of Nations Movement and Australian Schools’, 15.

36 Alison MacKinnon and Helen Proctor, ‘Education’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: University Press, 2013), 432.

37 Australian League of Nations Union (New South Wales Branch), ‘Annual Report for 1938’, Bulletin, no. 10 (May 1939), 2-7; S. R. Carver, The Official Year Book of New South Wales, 1937-38 (Sydney: New South Wales Government, 1939), 250.

38 Kate Darian-Smith and James Waghorne, ‘Australian Universities, Expertise and Internationalism After World War I’, Journal of Australian Studies: Everyday Cultures of Australian Internationalism in the Mid-20th Century 43, no. 4 (2019): 412–28.

39 Ibid.

40 Fred Alexander, On Campus and Off: Reminiscences and Reflections of the First Professor of Modern History in the University of Western Australia, 1916–1986 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1987), 21.

41 Phyllis Duguid, interview by Mary Hutchison, 13 August 1982, transcript and recording, State Library of South Australia, J. D. Somerville Oral History Collection, OH 891/14.

42 Susan Keen, ‘Associations in Australian History: Their Contribution to Social Capital’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (1999): 642.

43 Knaap, ‘“Apart Altogether from Idealistic Sentiments”: Domesticating the League of Nations in Australia’, 12. For one example, see Australian League of Nations Union (New South Wales Branch), ‘Annual Report for 1935’, Bulletin, no. 7 (February 1936), 3.

44 Graeme Davison, ‘Religion’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Bashford and Macintyre, 218.

45 ‘A Rabbi at the League of Nations’, The Jewish Weekly News, January 25, 1935, 2.

46 Australian League of Nations Union, New South Wales Branch, Christianity and the League of Nations: A Crusade for The Common Cause—‘On Earth, Peace’ (Sydney: Australian League of Nations Union, 1923); John E. Guy, ‘League of Nations Sunday’, Advocate (Burnie, Tas.), September 5, 1923, 6. See also McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, 80–95.

47 Australian League of Nations Union, New South Wales Branch, Christianity and the League of Nations, 17.

48 See, for example, the excerpts from Brisbane’s Courier Mail in J. B. Brigden, An Australian Looks at the League of Nations (Sydney: Australian League of Nations Union, New South Wales Branch, 1935). See also Margaret Steadman, ‘The League of Nations Union in Perth: Internationalism in Isolation’, Studies in Western Australian History 9 (1988): 27.

49 John Arnold, ‘Newspapers and Daily Reading’, in A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, ed. Martyn Lyons and John Arnold (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 258.

50 Keith Hancock, Australia (London: Ernest Benn, 1930).

51 Catherine Fisher, Sound Citizens: Australian Women Broadcasters Claim Their Voice, 1923–1956 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2021), 52–4.

52 Arnold, ‘Newspapers and Daily Reading’, 267.

53 NLA MS 1924/35/237, Papers of Herbert and Ivy Brookes, Box 109, League of Nations Union (Victorian Branch) Publicity Week, Pacific Broadcast, Address by Mrs. Herbert Brookes, President of the International Club, 27 August 1932.

54 ‘League of Nations Pageant. Opening Night of “The Warrior” Tomorrow’, News (Adelaide, SA), December 6, 1929, 17.

55 Australian League of Nations Union (New South Wales branch), ‘Pen vs Sword: The Story of the League of Nations’, National Library of Australia, Raymond G. Watt Papers, MS 1923/1/12. For the number of cinemas, see Ina Bertrand, Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1989), 69.

56 ‘League of Nations Day: Plays, Poems, Songs and Story for Infant and Junior Classes (Sydney: New South Wales Department of Education, 1938); ‘World Peace. League of Nations Day. Celebrated at the Schools’, Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser, August 28, 1931, 4.

57 ‘Junior Branches in Schools’, League of Nations Union (New South Wales Branch) Bulletin, no. 9 (February 1938), 6.

58 Walter Murdoch, ‘Credo’, The School Magazine of Literature for Our Boys and Girls 23, no. 7 (1938): 1; ‘League of Nations Day, 7 August 1936, Schools Broadcast’, The Education Circular (1936), National Library of Australia, Raymond G. Watt Papers, MS 1924/1/9.

59 James Cotton, ‘Australia in the League of Nations’, in Australia and the United Nations, ed. James Cotton and David Lee (Barton, A.C.T: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2012), 22.

60 Helen McCarthy, ‘Democratizing British Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934-1935’, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 2 (2010): 358–87.

61 See, for example, ‘World Peace. League of Nations Day. Celebrated at the Schools’, Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser, August 28, 1931, 4.

62 New South Wales Department of Education, ‘League of Nations Day. Plays, Songs, Poems and Pageant for Primary and Senior Pupils’, National Library of Australia, Raymond G. Watt Papers, MS 1923/2/25B.

63 Cf. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

64 Helen McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c. 1919-56’, History Workshop Journal 70 (2010): 108–32.

65 ‘League of Nations Ball at Manjimup’, Manjimup and Warren Times, June 9, 1932, 2.

66 Cf. Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

67 ‘League of Nations Ball: International Peace Pageant’, Sydney Mail, July 13, 1927, 26

68 ‘Pageantry. Commerce of Many Nations. International Ball’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 29, 1935, 7.

69 ‘Annual Feature. Nations’ Ball’, The Sun, August 25, 1929, 37.

70 ‘League of Nations Ball at Manjimup’, Manjimup and Warren Times, June 9, 1932, 2.

71 ‘Annual Feature. Nations’ Ball’, The Sun, August 25, 1929, 37.

72 On the limits of the White Australia policy, see David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2012); Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

73 Ngai, The Chinese Question; Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

74 Hancock, Australia, 66.

75 Janet Mitchell, Spoils of Opportunity: An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939), 63, 288. On Mitchell, see Fiona Paisley, ‘The Spoils of Opportunity: Janet Mitchell and Australian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific’, History Australia 13, no. 4 (2016): 575–91.

76 Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 284–309; Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998).

77 Quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 308.

78 Odette Kelada and Maddee Clark, ‘Beyond the Wonderland of Whiteness’, in A Companion to Australian Cinema, ed. Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2019), 114.

79 See, for example, ‘The Peace Protocol. No Danger to Australia’, Advertiser, December 12, 1924, 13; ‘The White Australia Policy. A Reply to the Governor’s Warning’, Chronicle, January 5, 1924, 41; ‘The Protocol. Its Effect on World Peace. League of Nations’ Union Lecture’, Mercury, February 25, 1925, 6.

80 See, for example, John Latham, The Significance of the Peace Conference from an Australian Point of View (Melbourne: Melville & Mullen, 1920), 17.

81 ‘Women in Public Life. The League of Nations’, The Age, February 9, 1923, 10.

82 Oona Anne Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 117–19.

83 H. Duncan Hall, ‘The Legal Position of the White Australia Policy under the Covenant, as Affected by the Protocol’, NLA MS 5547/7/4, Box 43. Emphasis added.

84 ‘British Legal Opinion Says White Australia Policy Safe’, The Sun, October 5, 1924, 1.

85 Hathaway and Shapiro, The Internationalists, 119; Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations, 55.

86 ‘School of Arts Debates. Flanagan Shield’, St George Call, September 18, 1920, 5.

87 Arnold, ‘Newspapers and Daily Reading’, 257.

88 ‘White Australia Challenged’, The Weekly Times (Melbourne), October 4, 1924, 5.

89 Latham, Significance, 17.

90 John Latham, ‘League of Nations and Protocol—to the Editor of the Argus’, The Argus, December 30, 1924, 8.

91 John Latham, Australia and the British Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1929), 49-50.

92 Technically Nauru was assigned to the British Empire as a whole, but it was Australia that administered it: F. W. Eggleston, ed., The Australian Mandate for New Guinea: Record of Round Table Discussion (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1928), 85; Pedersen, The Guardians, xviii, 75.

93 James Jupp, The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92; Reynolds, Other Side of the Frontier, 127.

94 Pedersen, The Guardians, 4–5.

95 Heather Radi, ‘New Guinea under Mandate, 1921-41’, in Australia and Papua New Guinea, ed. W. J. Hudson (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1971), 75; Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations, 144–9.

96 Pedersen, The Guardians, 299–317; Patricia O’Brien, ‘Reactions to Australian Colonial Violence in New Guinea: The 1926 Nakanai Massacre in a Global Context’, Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 191–209; Roger C. Thompson, ‘Making a Mandate: The Formation of Australia’s New Guinea Policies 1919-1925’, The Journal of Pacific History 25, no. 1 (1990): 68–84.

97 Pedersen, The Guardians, 299; William Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914-1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 12; Radi, ‘New Guinea under Mandate, 1921-41’, acts 81–3.

98 Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 148–60; Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 46–58.

99 Pedersen, The Guardians, 29.

100 Christine Weir, ‘“White Man’s Burden”, “White Man’s Privilege”: Christian Humanism and Racial Determinism in Oceania, 1890-1930’, in Foreign Bodies, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008), 293–4, 303.

101 ‘The British Empire and Mandates’, undated, NLA MS 1924/35/248, Papers of Herbert and Ivy Brookes, Box 109.

102 E.W., ‘The British Empire and Mandates’, The School Magazine of Literature For Our Boys & Girls 16, no. 4 (May 2, 1932): 50-52.

103 Ibid.

104 Eggleston, ed., The Australian Mandate for New Guinea, 140.

105 Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations, 147.

106 Radi, ‘New Guinea under Mandate, 1921-41’, 74.

107 Eggleston, ed., The Australian Mandate for New Guinea, 128-41.

108 Pedersen, The Guardians, xviii; Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire, 172.

109 ‘The League of Nations. Lecture by Professor Darnley Naylor’, Southern Cross, November 3, 1922, 3.

110 ‘Australia and Nauru. What of the White Policy?’, Westralian Worker, July 25, 1919, 5.

111 Julia Martínez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 4.

112 Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

113 ‘The Choice. Mr. Hughes’s War. White Australia Question’, The Daily Telegraph, November 22, 1922, 10.

114 Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 109; Paisley, Loving Protection?, 87; Paisley, The Lone Protestor; Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 87; Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2015), 84, 128.

115 Quoted in Holland, Just Relations, 5.

116 Daniel Gorman, International Cooperation in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

117 Banivanua-Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 95.

118 Quoted in Holland, Just Relations, 144.

119 See, for example, ‘Australia’s Trust. The Mandated Territories. Address by Professor Naylor’, Mercury, February 8, 1923, 8.

120 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

121 ‘Women Arrange Display for Peace Week’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), October 4, 1938, 6.

122 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, 219–25.

123 Steadman, ‘The League of Nations Union in Perth: Internationalism in Isolation’, 32.

124 Brown, ‘Enacting the International: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union’, 83, 89.

125 Harold Woodruff, ‘Fellow Members of the League of Nations Union’, Australian League of Nations Union (Victorian Branch) Newsletter 1 (September 1942), 1-2.

126 Brown, ‘Enacting the International: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union’, 95.

127 ‘United Nations Day in Schools’, The Argus, October 18, 1948, 7.

128 ‘United Nations Ball’, Western Mail, November 14, 1946, 33.

129 ‘World Flag to be Flown in City’, West Australian, October 22, 1949, 8.

130 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, 251; Brown, ‘Enacting the International: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union’, 88–9.

131 James Wurst, The UN Association of the USA: A Little-Known History of Advocacy and Action (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016), 228.

132 Jon Piccini, Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 42–3.

133 Banivanua-Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 122–4.

134 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 225, 262, 340; Ravindra Noel John De Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 86–8; Piccini, Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia, 128–30.

135 Paisley, The Lone Protestor, xviii, 100, 173.