page_title: William Lane
section_title: White or Yellow?
hierarchical_section_title: William Lane / Radical journalism in Australia / White or Yellow?
caption_attribution_description: English: 1910 White Australia badge
context_page_description: William Lane was an Australian journalist, author, advocate of Australian labour politics and a utopian socialist ideologue.
  Lane was born in Bristol, England into an impoverished family. After showing great skill in his education, he worked his way into Canada as first a linotype operator, then as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press where he would later meet his future wife Ann Lane, née Macquire. After settling in Australia with his wife and child, as well as his brother John, he became active in the Australian labour movement, founding the Australian Labour Federation and becoming a prolific journalist for the movement. He authored works covering topics such as labour rights and white nationalism.
  After becoming disillusioned with the state of Australian politics following an ideological split in the labour movement, he and a group of utopian acolytes moved to Paraguay in 1892 to found New Australia, with the intention of building a new society on the foundations of his utopian ideals.
context_section_description: Although his efforts were primarily directed towards the non-fictional, Lane was an avid author whose works deeply reflected his political philosophy, as short as his bibliography is. The Workingman's Paradise, an allegorical novel written in sympathy with those involved in the 1891 shearers' strike, was published under his pseudonym John Miller in early 1892. In the novel Lane articulated the belief that anarchism is the noblest social philosophy of all. Through the novel's philosopher and main protagonist he relates his belief that society may have to experience a period of state socialism to achieve the ideal of anarcho-communism. Mary Gilmore, later a celebrated Australian writer, said in one of her letters that "the whole book is true and of historical value as Lane transcribed our conversations as well as those of others".
  Most prominent in his bibliography is his novella White or Yellow?: A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1887). In this work, Lane proposed a horde of Chinese people would legally arrive to Australia, who would then overrun White society and monopolise the industries important to exploiting the natural resources of the "empty north" of the continent. As Australian invasion literature, White or Yellow? reflects Lane's nationalist racialism and left-wing politics within a future history of Australia under attack by the Yellow Peril.
  Lane wrote that in the near future, British capitalists would manipulate the legal system and successfully arrange the mass immigration of Chinese workers to Australia, regardless of its socioeconomic consequences to Australian common folk and their society. The economic, cultural, and sexual conflicts that resulted from the capitalists' manipulation of the Australian economy would then provoke a race war throughout the continent, fought between the White settlers and Chinese workers.
  The racialist representations of Yellow Peril ideology in the narrative of White or Yellow? work to justify forcible expulsion and murder of Chinese workers as an acceptable response to the loss of physical and economic control of Australia. Historically the leaders of the Australian labour and trade unions greatly opposed the importation of Chinese workers, whom they portrayed as an economic threat to Australia due to their eagerness to work for low wages, as well as them presenting a libertine and race-diluting threat to Christian civilisation. Lane's work was intended to act as an apolitical call to racial unity among white Australians.
caption: In 1910, fear of the Yellow Peril prompted the nativist Australian Natives' Association to create the White Australia badge, with which the wearer could identify his or her racial loyalty[2]
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