By James Goldrick*
In the first years of the 20th century, shared perceptions of the potential threat from Japan began to bring Australia and America together. President Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of 16 battleships of the US Navy on a round-the-world cruise in December 1907 resulted in one of the greatest events of Australia’s first decade as a federation. In part intended as a deterrent against a Japan aggrieved by the treatment of Japanese immigrants in the US’s west coast states, the Great White Fleet’s demonstration of the rise of American power was one that couldn’t be missed—and certainly wasn’t, by at least one Australian politician.
