Al Grassby, former Minister for Immigration who dismantled the White Australia Policy, described the book as "evocative and compelling prose …which shows how bigotry and myth making shaped the question of race which dominated the public and private discourse.

In late 2004, David Walker, suffered a sudden and severe loss of sight that rendered him legally blind and limited his ability to continue archival research.

He subsequently changed his research methods and drew on his family history as a tool to investigate the development of Australia’s national character and culture.

[2] This led to the publication of Not Dark Yet: A personal history which has been described by Phillip Adams as "an evocative portrait of 20th century Australia …the attitudes, idiosyncrasies and prejudices of the era.

Drawing on a wide variety of resources including archival records, literature and personal stories, this volume covers the evolution of Australia's engagement with Asia in the period of World War II and into the 1970s.

This new history integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines and uses a great variety of sources from government reports and newspaper accounts to diaries, novels and art.

In the late nineteenth century, the Li family left famine-stricken Shanxi province in northern China to begin a new life on the remote grasslands of Inner Mongolia.

The novelist Alexis Wright has said of this book: "This richly detailed memoir takes us on a remarkable journey through a tumultuous period of Chinese history.

It is also an unforgettable celebration of a friendship between renowned scholar and gifted translator Li Yao, and David Walker, a distinguished Australian historian which bridges cultures, history, and life experience.

Walker would also provide academic leadership to a network of more than 30 Australian Studies Centres in Chinese universities, which has been supported by the Australia-China Council for two decades.