Dictation-ship: Morals, Marriage & Italian

Just one year after trying to keep activist Egon Kisch out, the Australian government set their sights on excluding Mabel Freer, a British Indian woman who was coming to Australia to get married. She was white, she was a minor aristocrat, she was the very person Australia was trying to encourage to immigrate under the white Australia policy. So why were they excluding her?

As it turned out, it had nothing to do with Mabel's ethnicity and was a stinking cauldron of sexism, classism and nasty-old colonial racism. The Australian Government, the Australian Army, and two private families all worked together to pressure the government to keep Freer out. Unfortunately for the government, they severely underestimated just how much the voting public hated the idea that their elected representatives were acting in a private matter. The result? ...