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

London, Bentley 1895. Octavo contemporary half roan (a repair to the back hinge); folding map and six plates by Frank P. Mahony (two form one view in two panels). A few minor signs of use but a pretty 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 poetry reviewed in newspaper sporting pages? - quoted at the end of this book). Here he happily mixes in society life, horse racing and a tragic love affair.

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