As war threatened in the late 1930s, the seamen's campaigns became even more urgent. While Indian merchant seamen needed no reminding of the deaths in the Atlantic during World War I, the British had eventually acknowledged these deaths in 1924 with a 100-foot-high ‘Lascar War Memorial’ in Calcutta dedicated to the memory of the ‘896 merchant seamen from Assam, Bengal and Upper India’ who had died in the war from that port alone. The collaboration between Indian and Chinese seamen's unions at the ILO meeting in 1936 had shown that there was support across racial lines for consolidated action to protect merchant seamen endangered by the Asian Articles in times of war. But what was urgently needed was practical support on the ground, in the port cities where seamen could take political action.

Four maritime disputes in Australia were about similar issues which all reflected the growing pressures of war. They involved first Chinese seamen, then Australian waterside workers in 1937 and 1938, then Indian seamen in 1939 and finally Indonesian seamen in 1942. Each one built on the links created by the earlier ones, and fostered support from Australian unions, even though networks across racial lines had been rare before the war. This chapter describes all four disputes, but the 1939 Indian seamen's strike in eastern Australia is considered in most detail. Security surveillance created an unusually large amount of documentation of this strike, analysis of which provides the best glimpse of the growing, complex networks of support, as well as some of the associated cultural confusion.

It was no accident that maritime disputes were highly visible, receiving much press coverage and government attention. Ports, ships, and merchant seamen played central roles in all trade and most communication in the interwar years. Economic interactions were conducted through the waterfront, where there were many workers because mechanisation was still low; if these workers unionised, they could take powerful collective action. Meanwhile, the ILO was attempting to have seamen's voices heard. In 1936, it had been hoped that the ‘hours of work’ Convention 57 would change the racial disadvantage created by the Asian Articles, but its ratification was slow in coming – and the looming dangers of war brought the racial injustice of fixed inferior wages and conditions more clearly into view.