A youngster in breeches and an elderly man with a scythe, both white and together looking rather vulnerable, are playing dice against a team of unreliable-looking Asians. The object of their Great Game is on the board — Australia.

“Can the English-speaking peoples protect Australia as a white man’s country? They can to-day. But at a time when the energetic and capable Americans are very dubious whether they could even to-day protect the Philippines against a Japanese attack, it is not without pertinence to point out that any defense of Australia must be accomplished very far from the home bases of both Great Britain and the United States – and that an armed China would have enormous man-power at its disposal.”

(…)

“Equally obviously Premier Hughes fears, and fears rightly, that Japanese eyes are turned towards Australia. His speech breathes that fear throughout. But he pins his faith to the British Navy, to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and to an understanding with America. He appeals to America. ‘If she can not agree with Japan, how is she to help Australia?’ But does America really want to help Australia in the event of Japan’s insistence on freedom of entry? It has long been obvious to the thinkers of the great Republic that Japan must soon ‘find room somewhere for her rapidly expanding population’. And she is taking the necessary steps to preserve the purity of her own white race. But it does not follow that she is equally anxious about the purity of the Australian section of the European race. It is actually in the mind of many Americans that Australia, being the only empty area of any magnitude in the world, and more closely connected with Asia than any other land, is the natural sphere of Japan’s extension (…)”

This map was sent in by K. McIver who found it in a 1929 issue of the Literary Digest, an American weekly magazine best remembered for the rather ignominious circumstances of its demise. In 1936, based on its own polling of 10 million Americans, the magazine predicted a landslide victory in the presidential elections for Alf Landon against F.D. Roosevelt. FDR went on to win 46 out of 48 states, the polling became a textbook example of how not to poll, and the loss of credibility cause the magazine to first merge with another and even then still fail shortly afterwards. Literary Digest’s polling was skewed because it relied on databases of telephone subscribers and car owners – in those days, a demographic much better-off (and much less Democratic) than the American average.