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In 2004 the distinguished Australian cultural historian David Walker suffered a sudden and severe loss of sight due to macular degeneration. This limited his ability to continue archival research and forced him to "find another, more personal voice and another way of writing". The result was Not Dark Yet a personal history in which the author reflects on his own relationship to the past.

Summary
Not Dark Yet traces the story of Walker's family over five generations from the settlement of his great-great grandparents in South Australia in the 1850s until the death of his mother in the 1990s. Much of the book is set in Burra, a copper mining town 156 Km (97 miles)north of Adelaide, where his family were prominent merchants. Walker captures the essence of life in a small Australian town at the beginning of the twentieth century with all its strengths, limitations and petty jealousies. The author is a pre-eminent authority on Australia's engagement with Asia and it was with some surprise that he found that a member of his family had married Luke Day, a Chinese merchant living in Burra. The story of Day allows Walker to re-examine the position held by the Chinese in Australian society during a period when Australian racial nationalism and the resultant White Australia Policy were most strident.

Awards and prizes
Anxious Nation was awarded the 2001 Ernest Scott Prize for History for the best history of Australia or New Zealand published in the preceding two years.

Critical response
Anxious Nation received an extensive and positive  critical response. Al Grassby, a 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.” John Shaumer of The Age called it a "a sweeping but considered overview of the cultural influences that continue to dictate many aspects of the Asian-Australian discourse", while Tom Griffith of the Australian National University found it to be "a searching history of ideas and intrigue that probes the political and literary dimensions of blood, heat, sun, nerves, sex and dreams. Feverish fears and imaginings are reviewed with sensitivity and cool eloquence". David Carter in The Journal of Australian Studies believed that Anxious Nation had an important place in Australian historiography. He argued that it "shifts Australian perceptions of Asia from the margins to the centre of any concerns with the history -- the intellectual, cultural, political or diplomatic histories -- of the nation. In something of the same way that the complex of issues around `Aboriginal Australia' has moved over the last decade to the very centre of the field of Australian studies, Anxious Nation demonstrates why, over the next decade, Australia's relations with Asia, both the Asia within and the Asia without, will also be core business....It makes the biggest single contribution to date to this shift."

By October 2011 Anxious Nation had been cited in 131 scholarly articles.