ABSTRACT
In recent years historians have begun interrogating connections between anticolonial movements and the economic dislocations of the Great Depression. While a link between Chinese anticolonialism and the Great Depression in Australia has not yet been made explicit, there is a changing historiography which positions interwar Australian history in a transnational frame. The circulation of poorer Australians around Asian port cities in the 1930s had clear effects on native populations. Depression-like conditions were felt in Australia from 1927 onwards. Thousands of unemployed left their communities to find work elsewhere as economic strains worsened and Australia experienced the worst effects of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Special branch officers from the Shanghai Municipal Police began surveillance on some Australian suspects from the 1920s, resulting in a rare glimpse of the day-to-day life of these men and women through urban streetscapes, into cabaret bars and up staircases to boarding houses.
