The warning of a threat to European exceptionalism advanced by the Camden News was not new. Put bluntly, the traditional ascendancy of the white race might well be at stake if Japan were enabled to gather strength from this war in anything like the same proportion as she took it from the last.’ ( Camden News, 11 December 1941 ) For years the ‘Yellow Peril’ has provided an incalculable element in all Australian political thinking. ‘ The feeling has been that war with the crafty and ambitious Japanese, rapidly rising to power, was bound to come sooner or later. The Camden News ran an editorial with the headline ‘Japan – According to Plan’. Things were heating up and the Japanese Imperial Army landed forces on the Malayan peninsula on 8 December and started their land-based push towards Singapore. Historian Michael McKernan in his book All in! Australia during the second world war has called December 1941 a ‘black month for Australians’ and Prime Minister Curtin told the nation ‘We are at war’. British naval facilities were strengthened at Singapore and a string of conservative Australian governments reduced spending on defence across the Interwar years. The Australian Government felt that the country’s greatest military threat came from Japan, and Australia joined forces with Britain in what became known as the Singapore Strategy. Singapore had been on the minds of Australia’s strategic thinkers since the end of the First World War. On their return to Camden the town centre would have appeared very much like this 1938 image. This view of Argyle Street would have been a familiar memory for any local soldiers who went away for the war. The town centre changed very little over the next decade.
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