19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
Guy Newell Boothby (1867–1905), novelist and playwright, was son of a South Australian stock and station agent and politician and was educated in England. He became private secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, Sir Lewis Cohen, in 1890. Boothby's work had appeared in the South Australian Register, and his first novel In Strange Company was published in 1894. On the Wallaby is an autobiographical account of his travels with his friend Longley Taylor. Intending to travel to England, the pair ran out of funds: landing in Colombo they wandered for some months, travelled through Singapore, Borneo and Java, stayed on Thursday Island, and then in Australia travelled overland by buggy from Normanton to the Darling River. Boothby took the manuscript to London and published the travel narrative there. In the preface to this work Boothby notes that 'on the wallaby' is slang for 'on the march,' and is a term applied to people tramping the bush in search of employment. This travel narrative through Australia and the East is extensively illustrated and is, according to Boothby, a "simple record of a strange wandering." Boothby does not encourage those who read his narrative to follow in his footsteps, instead he wished for them to enjoy his travels. The work is written in a descriptive, yet conversational manner, encompassing both factual information and personal anecdotes.
'By the end of the nineteenth century the pernicious racial term “yellow peril” had entered the common parlance of Victorians across the British Empire. Ironically, this insidious imperial myth that China would overrun the West owed its genesis to the impact of European, and particularly British imperial activity, on China in the late-nineteenth century, rather than to any expansionary Chinese aims or activity. The western impact was bi-faceted, involving both the physical incursion of westerners into China, and the related movement of Chinese people overseas to work in western nations and colonies. Under the international coerced labour phenomenon known as the “coolie trade,” Chinese people were brought across the British Empire as far as the settler colonies of Australia and South Africa, and even to the plantations of the British West Indies. Despite the relative powerlessness of their position as indentured or indebted immigrants, they were inevitably perceived as hostile aliens who threatened "white" society. This essay examines the impact of Australian anti-Chinese sentiment on representations of Chinese people in the works of Guy Boothby, an Adelaide-born author who emigrated to London in 1893. It explores Boothby’s representations of Chinese people in the imperial spaces of Britain’s Australian and Southeast Asian colonies, and also in the informal imperial spaces of contact in “foreign” China, in the cities and coastal locations where the British Empire was making its presence and influence felt, in works including Boothby’s travelogue, On the Wallaby (1894), the Dr Nikola series of novels (1895-1901), “The Story of Lee Ping” (1895), The Beautiful White Devil (1896) and My Strangest Case (1901). It argues that these superficially disinterested but consistently derogatory representations of the far-flung Chinese contributed to the deplorable international myth of the yellow peril, but also could not help revealing the important and largely overlooked presence of the Chinese in the spaces of the British Empire, demonstrating the impact of the coolie trade on imperial society and signalling the multifaceted nature of the British Empire’s involvement with China.' (Publication summary)
'By the end of the nineteenth century the pernicious racial term “yellow peril” had entered the common parlance of Victorians across the British Empire. Ironically, this insidious imperial myth that China would overrun the West owed its genesis to the impact of European, and particularly British imperial activity, on China in the late-nineteenth century, rather than to any expansionary Chinese aims or activity. The western impact was bi-faceted, involving both the physical incursion of westerners into China, and the related movement of Chinese people overseas to work in western nations and colonies. Under the international coerced labour phenomenon known as the “coolie trade,” Chinese people were brought across the British Empire as far as the settler colonies of Australia and South Africa, and even to the plantations of the British West Indies. Despite the relative powerlessness of their position as indentured or indebted immigrants, they were inevitably perceived as hostile aliens who threatened "white" society. This essay examines the impact of Australian anti-Chinese sentiment on representations of Chinese people in the works of Guy Boothby, an Adelaide-born author who emigrated to London in 1893. It explores Boothby’s representations of Chinese people in the imperial spaces of Britain’s Australian and Southeast Asian colonies, and also in the informal imperial spaces of contact in “foreign” China, in the cities and coastal locations where the British Empire was making its presence and influence felt, in works including Boothby’s travelogue, On the Wallaby (1894), the Dr Nikola series of novels (1895-1901), “The Story of Lee Ping” (1895), The Beautiful White Devil (1896) and My Strangest Case (1901). It argues that these superficially disinterested but consistently derogatory representations of the far-flung Chinese contributed to the deplorable international myth of the yellow peril, but also could not help revealing the important and largely overlooked presence of the Chinese in the spaces of the British Empire, demonstrating the impact of the coolie trade on imperial society and signalling the multifaceted nature of the British Empire’s involvement with China.' (Publication summary)
