MACKAY, Kenneth. - The Yellow Wave. A romance of the Asiatic invasion of Australia.

London, Bentley 1895. Octavo publisher's cloth; folding map and six plates by Frank P. Mahony (two form a double page spread in two panels). Edges rubbed but a rather good copy. ¶ First edition, the same sheets were re-issued a couple of years later as an 'Australian Edition', either form is hard to find. This is by no means the first invasion of Australia novel - an earlier generation's fear of the Russians had produced at least two, and Robert Potter had, in The Germ Growers (1892), written what was possibly the first ever alien invasion novel - but it is early for the Yellow Peril. The Japanese defeat of Russia a decade later sparked a number of invasion novels but the rabidity of the White Australia movement had produced little more than inflamatory articles and cartoons until this. The Russians are not forgotten - they figure at the centre - but it is the Mongol horde that will (the book is set sixty years into the future) sweep down through Queensland using the land grant railways. This is a long and complicated novel, as much a romance as political hobbyhorse. Mackay was a politician who had published some outback fiction and horsey verse to a good reception - when was the last time you saw verse reviewed in newspapers' sporting pages as quoted at the end of the book? Here he happily mixes in society life, horse racing and a tragic love affair.

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