Cirrus@Austlit

Melodrama.

Billed as a 'patriotic drama,' White Australia tells of an attempted invasion by Japan, with help from some Northern Territory Aborigines and a white traitor, which is thwarted by a Northern Territory squatter.

The first two acts deal with the descent of Japanese troops on Port Darwin, together with the spying and treachery of their leading officer, Yamamoto. The opening scene is set on the station owned by Geoffrey Pearse, the squatter who has invented and is currently building an airship capable of carrying enough explosives to destroy an invading navy. Although rumours about dissent among Japanese workers on the coast have begun to circulate, they are not taken seriously by those on the station or around the district. An enthusiastic toast to Australia is followed shortly afterwards, however, by new rumours of outright warfare and a spirited fight outside the station house as tension mounts. The drama then shifts to the centre of the continent and where two telegraph workers sit in their hut discussing the year Malua won the cup while their mate goes about his work outside unaware that death is creeping up behind him in the shape of a coloured man. The second act is set in Port Darwin, where the airship's project manager and chief engineer Jack Macquarie and his sweetheart, 'a more than usually reckless heroine' are involved in a situation inside an opium house. When Macquarie carelessly loses the cryptic key which allows the airship's delicate machinery to work, the Japanese spy leader gains possession of it. Meanwhile the land invasion continues, with this act culminating in the defence of Port Darwin. As the streets are swept by machine gun fire defenders and assailants fall in heaps. 'Among the slain being one of the cheerful young Australian girls... whom the author does not hesitate to sacrifice in his fine frenzy for the flag' (Age 28 June 1909, p9).

Although the Yamamoto now has the key he does not have the password that makes it effective. Knowing that if he fails to get the information the Japanese fleet will very likely be destroyed, he captures and tortures the young engineer inventor. Macquarie refuses to divulge the password, however, and Yamamoto subsequently orders his sweetheart to also be tortured. She is then given to Geoffrey Pearse's nephew, the traitorous and degenerate Cedric, to be 'outraged' (Table Talk 1 July 1909, p24).

In the remaining two acts Bedford threads together his incidents in a manner which the Age describes has little regard for ordered sequence. In the critic's opinion it is not Bedford's invention, but rather 'his arrangement that is at fault.'

One of the feature incidents reported by the paper's theatre critic was the sensation scene in which Macquarie's airship travels at an indefinite height through clouds above Sydney while 'hurling missiles of destruction upon the enemy's fleet' (Age 28 June 1909, p9).

The Age's review of the King's Theatre production suggests that Bedford had bestowed much thought in developing the important character of Yamamoto. 'This man,' writes the critic, 'is really the crown and centrepiece of the elaborate scheme that has evolved for the capture of Australia. The character is in no sense burlesqued; in fact he possess all the brains and resources that Mr Bedford would presumably bestow upon a clever white man, while the Japanese possess a devotion to national duty that the white man in these latitudes does not often recognise' (Age 28 June 1909, p9).

The comedic elements in the play were largely provided in the King's Theatre season by Bert Bailey in the role of Aboriginal tracker, Terrabit, and Temple Harrison, as a comic swagman with a memory of Sir 'Enery Parkes. Other leading characters were Bill Pearse '(Walter Dalgleish), as the one-time drunken young Australian who rises finely to a crisis;' his cousin Cedric Pearse (Lawrence Dunbar) the villain who sides with the enemy; and Jim Tennant (Max Clifton) as 'a stockman who becomes warlike when the enemy's guns are heard' (Age 28 June 1909, p9).