ABSTRACT
Unionists resented Australia's role as a 'vassal state' in the imperial economy as well as the number of migrants arriving from Britain each year as part of imperial migration programmes, who were 'taking jobs from unemployed Australians'. Prior to 17 June the Labor Party had been in the process of objecting to a bill legalising the deportation of unionists. In early May 1925, Queensland unionists had abolished 'free standing', but shipping companies had responded by refusing to use their ports and the Bruce government had ruled in favour of the companies. Labor and union leaders produced a way of thinking about Australia's historical situation in 1925 from within an anticolonial frame that they pieced together from observing, and linking Australian strike action to, events in China. Billy Hughes, a passionate devotee of the White Australia Policy and of white race patriotism, was an unlikely conduit for Chinese nationalism in Australia.
