Harendra Alwis, whose preferred title in an article presented on 28 May 2026 runs thus: “Alek Garden Fraser’s tour of Australia in 1915” ….. with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
The week Alexander Garden Fraser stepped ashore in Fremantle, Australian transports were closing on the Dardanelles. Within days the cliffs of Gallipoli would be taking the bodies of farm boys from Ballarat and bank clerks from Bathurst, and the country he had come to address — its mood pledged to a distant war, its borders sealed by a colour line then less than fifteen years old — would find itself remade by grief. Into this charged atmosphere walked a Scottish clergyman from a hill town in central Ceylon, ostensibly to speak for the Church Missionary Society. What he in fact did, between Melbourne in mid-April and Perth in mid-May, was to challenge — quietly, then less quietly — the racial settlement on which the Australian Commonwealth had been founded.
