Writing as Han Suyin, Rosalie chronicled their love affair in her most famous novel, A Many-Splendored Thing.18 Ian’s character was called Mark Elliott and when Hollywood turned the book into the Oscar-winning film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, he was transformed into an American, played by William Holden. As Ian was still married to Maria at the time of his death, he would have appreciated that.
‘He was a cultivated and gentle man and no swashbuckler,’ his brother Alastair Morrison says, ‘but he had an insatiable curiosity about events in Asia.’19
[1] In the event, Ley’s death sentence was commuted and he was committed to Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane where he died in July 1947.
Britain finally recognised Mao’s People’s Republic as the legitimate government of China on 6 January 1950 but for the next 17 years abstained from votes that would permit its membership of the United Nations. Australia, whose ANZUS Alliance with America had become the cornerstone of her defence policy, was even more recalcitrant. It was not until 1972 that the newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, gave formal recognition and celebrated the event with a personal visit to Beijing.
Televised coverage of the visit reached the home of a 15-year-old schoolboy in the small Queensland town of Nambour and inspired the young Kevin Rudd to learn Mandarin and join the diplomatic service. Thirty-five years later Rudd himself would become Australia’s twenty-sixth prime minister and the only Western leader able to converse fluently with his Chinese counterparts in their own language.
Australia then played a key role in replacing the Eurocentric G8 with the G20 – including both China and Australia – to monitor and direct the global economy. China replaced Japan as Australia’s biggest trading partner. Australia’s mineral exports to China created boom conditions for the foreseeable future; its biggest company, BHP Billiton, donated the gold, silver and bronze medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And a total of 8,182,259 people visited the striking Australian pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. A relationship that began badly in the riotous days of the gold rush in the mid-19th century has been utterly transformed. China has become Australia’s third biggest source of immigrants after Britain and New Zealand.
Kevin Rudd’s domestic political expertise did not match his international diplomacy and he was replaced three years later by his deputy, Julia Gillard, though he retained the important Foreign Affairs portfolio. He is well placed. The inherent Occidental suspicion of Oriental motives – inflamed by the Communist takeover and fanned by conservative propaganda during the Vietnam War – still smoulders beneath the surface. American concerns over the woken giant, its growing strength and ambition – combined with the repressive nature of the Beijing government – still act as a brake on a broadly based and open-hearted relationship.
However, the international pace of change is itself increasing exponentially and as information technology batters down the walls of censorship and secrecy, new generations are bringing global perspectives to bear. Shanghai itself is the perfect exemplar of this new paradigm. Visitors travel from the international airport to the city on the Maglev train, flying above the rail on a cushion of pure energy at 480 kilometres an hour, faster than anywhere else in the world. Some 25 per cent of the world’s building cranes are transforming the city into a futuristic behemoth.
The chunky, colonial skyline of The Bund preserves a memory of the city’s old-world charm and in the opalescent morning light elderly Chinese couples dance in dignified measure to the steps of yesteryear. At night, ghostly multitudes pass along the waterfront and from the terrace of M on The Bund we suddenly hear again the crackle of machine-gun fire and the sound of screaming, only to realise they are firecrackers and squeals of delight from a brightly coloured riverboat gliding downstream to the Yangtze. Shanghai has lived down its frenetic, disreputable, violent past and now strives to live up to its Expo theme: ‘Better City, Better Life’.
Men and women of many nations have found a place in the city’s story. Most were bit players, anonymous extras in a pageant of millions. Some were touched by greatness and only now can their contribution be revealed and measured. Among them are the five Australians, George Ernest Morrison, William Henry Donald, Eleanor Mary Hinder, Harold John Timperley and Colin Malcolm McDonald. They devoted themselves to China, yet remain little known there and less again in their native land.
But history has a way of separating the dross from the hidden gems. Perhaps their time has come.
And no one would deserve recognition more than Tse Tsan Tai, a.k.a. James See of Sydney and Grafton. Thomas Reid, former editor of the China Mail, wrote to him in 1912 after the revolution had become a reality, ‘You have the great satisfaction of knowing that you assisted in placing 400 million of your fellow men on the road to a better and more humane life and in initiating a movement that will go down in history as one of the most momentous in the records of the world.’
Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China completes a trilogy on Australians at war. Anzac Fury: The Bloody Battle of Crete 1941 focused on the Second World War in the Mediterranean, while Pacific Fury: How Australia And Her Allies Defeated the Japanese covered the broad sweep of the Pacific War.
This has been made possible only by the generosity of the many people who shared their personal experiences or expert knowledge with me and by Random House Australia’s recognition that there was a place for such a trilogy in the military canon.
I am enormously grateful to Dorothy Lewis for permitting me to quote from documents in the archive compiled by her husband Winston G. Lewis at the Mitchell Library, Sydney. Professor Lewis, Professor of History at Macquarie University, dedicated 20 years of his life to ‘Project Donald’, contacting dozens of people who had known the Australian journalist in China and conducting a most informative correspondence with many of them. Winston Lewis died before he could complete his magnum opus. His painstaking work has proved invaluable in the writing of this book.
Wherever possible, I have combined the personal memories of Shanghai people with combat action. I have also returned to the original sources of many existing works on the revolutionary period and the memoirs and/or biographies of the main participants.
My sources include Alastair Morrison (1915–2009), second son of ‘Chinese’ Morrison, who shared his recollections of his father and his own experiences of wartime China with me at his Canberra home; Ivor Bowden, Shanghai-born son of the Australian trade commissioner V. G. Bowden who was murdered by the Japanese in 1942; Greg Leck, who published his comprehensive history of internment, Captives of Empire, in 2006, and internees William Macauley, Freda Howkins, Roy Fernandez Jr and his sister Stephanie Sherwood, all of whom lived in Shanghai during one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
I also consulted documents, private papers, diaries, as well as books and newspapers in the Shanghai Library, the Dazhong newspaper archives (Shanghai), the National Archives (Kew), the British Library (London), the New York Public Library, the Cosmos Club (Washington), the National Archives of Australia (Canberra), the National Library of Australia (Canberra), the Mitchell Library and State Library of New South Wales (Sydney), the State Library of Victoria (Melbourne), the Oxley Library and State Library of Queensland (Brisbane).
I am indebted to Dimity Torbett for her research at the Mitchell Library on the papers of George Ernest Morrison and Eleanor Mary Hinder; to Richard Rigby in Canberra for his guidance on the May Thirtieth movement; to Hugh Lunn for his memories of the Reuters correspondent Graham Jenkins; to Elizabeth Fay Woodfield for information about her great uncle William Charles Woodfield of the Shanghai River Police; and to Robert Macklin, my frequent co-author, for reading the work-in-progress and making many valuable suggestions.
Finally, I would like to express my special thanks to Nikki Christer, my publisher at Random House Australia, for her tremendous support during the writing and
publishing of the Fury Trilogy, and to Random House editors Kevin O’Brien and Patrick Mangan for their splendid work on these three titles. My agent Andrew Lownie of the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency, London, was closely involved in the development and writing of this body of work.
Shanghai Fury contains many exclusive photographs of Shanghai scenes donated to the author from the private collection of Thomas Jackson Macauley of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Ulsterman Macauley collected these photographs during the 1930s and took them into captivity when he was interned in 1941. Following his death, the photographs passed to his son William Macauley who has authorised me to use them for publication in this work.
Regarding style, I have used the spelling of names and places as they were rendered at the time in dialect pronunciations, for example Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, Peking, Tientsin and Canton. The modern pinyin equivalents are contained in the Appendices. Regarding currencies, the dollar sign ($) applies to the Chinese dollar at the time unless otherwise spe- cified, such as US$. There is no difference between British and Australian pounds. I have also taken the liberty at times of using the present tense – for example, ‘he says’ or ‘she recalls’ – when a specific recollection may in fact have taken place years earlier. The sources of all interviews are clearly flagged in the references and notes section. In several instances, I have retained offensive terms such as ‘Jap’ and ‘Chinaman’ when they are used in direct quotations from the period.
Peter Thompson
August 2011
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