Late in 1908, the day after Christmas, the African American boxer Jack Johnson finally got his opportunity to fight for the heavyweight title of the world. Until then, this title had been an exclusively white affair. The fight would take place in Sydney, Australia, home to the White Australia policy since 1901.

The world champion was the Canadian fighter Tommy Burns. He had evaded Johnson at every turn, choosing to fight one white contender three times rather than face the formidable black man, repeatedly telling the press, “all coons are yellow”. But Johnson refused to be ignored. He followed Burns all over the world – from San Francisco to New York, from Paris to London and finally to Sydney. The press called him a “buck nigger” and chided him for “gross and overbearing insolence”. But Johnson would not be denied, or cowed. As film-maker Ken Burns put it, in his documentary Unforgivable Blackness (2004), “when whites ran everything, Jack Johnson took orders from no one”.

The reigning champion did not draw the colour line categorically. Burns simply refused to fight Johnson for less than US$30,000, a sum so vast he was sure no one would ever meet his price. But in 1908, when Burns was touring Australia, with Johnson on his heels, a Sydney-based entrepreneur, sensing a fortune to be made from a “race war”, put up the money. He was Hugh D (“Huge Deal”) McIntosh.

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The fight was set for 26 December. The setting, a vast outdoor stadium at Rushcutters Bay. Norman Lindsay drew advertising posters for the event showing a towering black figure shaping up against a much smaller white man. Sydney’s Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News anticipated the racial temper of Australian boxing fans with an emphatic editorial: “Citizens who have never prayed before are supplicating Providence to give the white man a strong right arm with which to belt the coon into oblivion.”

The symbolic significance of the fight transcended boxing and touched on white anxieties that were shared across the globe. The editors at Sydney’s Australian Star were alert to the global significance of the contest. They published a cartoon showing the fighters in the ring, surrounded by an audience of the white and black races. Under the cartoon was a comment rich with prophesy: “This battle may in future be looked back upon as the first great battle of an inevitable race war … There is more in this fight to be considered than the mere title of pugilistic champion of the world.”

A crowd of some 20,000 packed the stadium, among them the Labor attorney general Billy Hughes and other dignitaries. Women were prohibited but “half a dozen” in disguise managed to elude the gatekeepers. Organisers made an exception for Charmian Kittredge, the wife of the American novelist Jack London. London wrote in a front-page report for the Australian Star: “Personally, I was with Burns all the way. He is a white man and so am I. Naturally I wanted to see the white man win.” But what he saw, he said, was a “hopeless slaughter”.

The fight! The word is a misnomer. There was no fight. No Armenian massacre would compare with the hopeless slaughter which took place in the Stadium. It was not a case of too much Johnson, but of all Johnson. A golden smile tells the story and the golden smile was Johnson’s … The fight had all the seeming of a playful Ethiopian at loggerheads with a small and futile white man; of a grown man cuffing a naughty child.

Throughout the fight, Johnson battered Burns with a measured restraint, wanting the contest to go the better part of the allotted 20 rounds, wanting to give out as much punishment over the journey as he possibly could, so he said after the fight. But in the 14th round it looked so grim for the white man that a knockout seemed certain and the police had to act. Following a preconceived plan, they stopped the movie cameras and stopped the fight. And so, the world was spared the spectacle of a black man knocking out a white man. The race war in proxy form had been fought and the white race had lost, but the world was denied the finale.

The Sydney Morning Herald described “the quietest crowd that ever left a heavyweight fight”; a crowd that was “heart-broken” with nothing to cheer them but the memory of “that brave little man suffering untold pain and battling against what he must have known from the first round were impossible odds”. The summaries of the fight seemed uniformly to emphasise Burns’ physical disadvantage and his “great pluck”. Mrs London thought him “the grittiest man I’ve ever seen”.

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Randolph Bedford, one of the Bulletin school, wrote an account of the fight for the Melbourne Herald. He saw the contest as “white beauty” fighting “black unloveliness” and going down heroically. He likened Johnson to “a caged brute”. He saw in the crowd “all the hatred of 20,000 whites for all the negroes in the world”. And, like most reporters after the fight, he was compelled to stress Burns’ courage, his wonderful endurance under punishment. Bedford eulogised Burns: “His courage still shone in his eyes; his face was disfigured and swollen and bloodied. Yet he was still beauty by contrast … clean sunlight fighting darkness and losing.” Bedford saw the fight as did many others, as both a tragedy and a warning. His bitterness was unbounded. But for the English slave trade, he wrote, “Johnson might still be up a tree in Africa”.

Several newspapers likened the fight, as did Bedford, to a struggle between man and beast. Fairplay, the liquor trades weekly, called Johnson “a huge, primordial ape”. The Bulletin’s cartoons likened the shaven-headed Johnson to a reptile.

The poet Henry Lawson believed the heavyweight contest had stirred fools to mass hysteria. In the fight he saw dark visions of racial humiliation, and in the barracking mob he saw the country’s doom:

You paid and cheered and you hooted, and this is your need of disgrace; It was not Burns that was beaten – for the nigger had smacked your face. Take heed – I am tired of writing – but O my people, take heed, For the time may be near for the mating of the Black and the White to breed.

The Sydney Morning Herald editorial condemned Johnson for his “bombast” and called the fight a “nakedly brutal scuffle” that lowered the general tone of the community and did nothing to enhance “the manly qualities of the race”. The paper also reported a sermon by a Methodist minister who denounced the fight as a “carnival of savagery” and condemned the crowd too – “twenty thousand raving white Australians”, he called them. He said “race hatred had been set on fire” and he prayed that worse was not to come: “God grant that the defeat of Saturday may not be the sullen and solemn prophecy that Australia is to be outclassed and finally vanquished by these dark-skinned people who everywhere are beginning to realise their immense possibilities.”

The fight had stirred the racial convictions of the nation; it transcended itself, rattling unstable certainties and dramatising the global racial divide. “Blessings on the Immigration Restriction Act!” declared Randolph Bedford.

• Peter Cochrane is a historian and the author of Best We Forget: the War for White Australia, 1914-18 (Text)