Painstaking research has revealed that over two hundred Australians with Chinese ancestry enlisted during World War I. Much has been made of these men who defied racially-based military restrictions to successfully enlist. Two hundred men is a tiny proportion of the estimated 420,000 Australians who enlisted but in the excitement of uncovering more examples of Chinese Australian enlistees, scholars have overlooked that, as a proportion of the eligible Chinese Australian population, their enlistment over time is very close to Australian rates of enlistment. Rather than a wall, racially-based military bans on enlistment were more like a net. Rather than something exceptional, Chinese Australian enlistees were more typical than assumed. So in what circumstances was race used as a bar to enlistment? Were there other reasons why some Chinese Australians were rejected for being ‘not substantially of European origin or descent’? What exactly was the nature of racial bans and how did they operate? The answers to these questions lie in a better understanding of the minutia of military bureaucracy, asking different questions about the circumstances of individual Chinese Australian enlistment - including asking who might not have wanted to enlist in the first place.