Struggling to Satisfy the Board: Historical Difficulties Faced by Japanese Doctors in Australia.

The aim of this paper is to review the difficulties faced by overseas-born applicants, particularly Japanese, in seeking to practise medicine in Queensland and Western Australia before and during the period of the Immigration Restriction Act. It limits itself to those two colonies/states as they were the only ones to have a sufficient number and concentration of resident Japanese to attract a Japanese doctor. After tracing the history of the development of relevant medical legislation and examples of its early application in respect of various foreigners, the paper reviews the experiences of a number of Japanese who managed to practise, both with and without registration. Its principal focus is on the behaviour of medical boards and their sometimes dubious use of the subjective powers given to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]