The Australian city of Darwin was home to a Chinatown when "... 186 Chinese workers arrived in 1874 by ship from Singapore, until World War II.
Darwin's Chinatown was described as "... an unsightly slum, where cramped unhygenic living conditions endangered public health."
"[2] Darwin's Chinatown was razed to the ground during World War II, through a combination of Japanese aerial bombing, and local looting and bulldozing.
The territory's civilian population had mostly been evacuated during the war and returned to find their homes and businesses reduced to rubble.
[3]: 35 In 1943, the territory's administrator Aubrey Abbott wrote to Joseph Carrodus, secretary of the Department of the Interior, proposing that the federal government use the absence of the Chinese population to compulsorily acquire Darwin's Chinatown and thereby effect "the elimination of undesirable elements which Darwin has suffered from far too much in the past".