Anxious Neighbour: Australian Opposition to Japanese Labour in New Caledonia, 1945 to 1960.

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, in the context of the White Australia policy and strong anti-Japanese sentiment, Australia mounted a successful diplomatic campaign against the use of Japanese contract labour in New Caledonia. Australia also campaigned, but with only partial success, against the use of Japanese labour in the nearby New Hebrides. These initiatives further illustrate Australia's traditional assertiveness, when it saw its interests threatened, in the South Pacific. Blocking the use of Japanese labour probably contributed, as Alan Ward has argued, to increased permanent migration to New Caledonia from the other French South Pacific territories and France, shifting the population and voting balance against the indigenous Melanesian nationalist movement which later emerged. But Ward overstates his case: immigration of this kind would have happened anyway, especially from resource-poor and over-populated Wallis and Futuna. In its campaign on the Japanese labour issue Australia profited from its strong relationship with France, which resulted from comradeship in the two world wars, and from the lack of contentious bilateral issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]