Although the proposal for a Japanese invasion of Australia remained just that, the Australia government of the day feared that it was on the Japanese agenda and took steps to deal with it. They knew we could never hold onto all of Australia so one proposal for dealing with an invasion was to abandon everything north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Essentially, all Australians and removable assets would be brought south of the Tropic and everything else would be destroyed - as in "scorched earth". Although there's no official records of it (as it was never officially adopted), there was lots of talk. Later day historians appear to have downplayed it as a misunderstanding or something that was never proposed but they're wrong in one respect, it was definitely talked about at the time - my grandparents lived through WW2 and my maternal grandfather told me in the 1980s (long before the current trend for "revising" history became popular), about scorched earth and the plans to deny northern Australia if the "Japs" invaded.
So yeah, some of us do actually understand the idea of having our homeland devastated and it's just as distressing for us because it would have been by our own hand. While we wouldn't necessarily have had the USA as portrayed in T2k, we would have had something sort of like Red Dawn with a partitioned nation and the enemy right on the doorstep.
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