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Australia's Ambivalence Towards Asia

Chapter 1

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The Superiority-of-Being-Us:
The Ideology in the Anglo-ethnic Gaze

The Western Gaze, Agency and
Post-colonialism

 

The present work stands on the shoulders of work by Edward Said, in particular Orientalism. We will be using the term ‘Orientalism’ in Said’s sense, with ‘Orientalist’ being that which is characteristic of, or one who practises in, the field of Orientalism. Said (1985:12) notes, ‘Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power... Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’ (Said 1985:12; all emphases in original). This notion is consistent with K.N. Chaudhuri’s (1990:22, 28) observation that the concept of Asia exists only as the reverse of Europe; our own observations throughout that the more abstract is portrayed as able and driven to grasp the more concrete but not vice versa; and the notion that linguistic (and other) representation builds a world rather than merely reflecting it.

Still very much part of ‘“our” world’ is G.W.F. Hegel’s early fantasising of the Oriental as essentially unreflective, lacking agency, and only responsive to direction by other people, always turned to higher authority, seeking guidance from outside themself and from above, hence incapable of subjectivity and desire. Having defined the fully realised subjectivity of which Western consciousness is capable, Hegel (1956 reprint:141) went on to argue that the conditions of such consciousness are simply absent in ‘the Oriental World’: so, for example, to Hegel, India is ‘an enchanted World … a region of phantasy’, where Spirit exists only in an amorphous form of a dream-state; and thus, the sensuous object in the Indian view ‘is not liberated by the free power of the Spirit into a beautiful form … but is expanded into the immeasurable and undefined, and the Divine is thereby made bizarre, confused and ridiculous … Things are as much stripped of rationality, of finite consistent stability of cause and effect, as man is of steadfastness of free individuality, of personality, and freedom’ (ibid); the Indian is lost in excessive and wild reveries, ‘as a man who quite reduced in body and spirit finds existence altogether stupid and intolerable, and is driven to the creation of a dreamworld and delirious bliss in opium’ (ibi:167, emphasis in original); on the other hand, the objectification of the dream-state by the self-conscious mind, its ability to rationally and to abstractly connect with other objects, is for Hegel (1956:162-3) precisely that which enables the West both to make history and to write it. Thus, observes David Spurr (1996:143), ‘the history of the West as the West arises out of an orientation that understands the Orient as a space of disorientation.’

The English philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) (extract in Eze 1997:33) proudly admitted: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white… .’ Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) (extract in Eze 1997:48), who had claimed to derive morality from none other than reason, had his own fantasy of people-of-colour,1 believing that he could detect a ‘Negro’s stupidity’ from the fact of his blackness: ‘This fellow’, wrote Kant, ‘was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid’ (ibid:57). Cumulatively, such thinking by some of Europe’s foremost thinkers seeped down through the ages in Western thought and, to this day, is imbibed unselfconsciously by generations of Western peoples when it is now part of many peoples’ natural thinking and behaviour. One recalls the persistent assumption that only the ‘West’ is capable of a globally inclusive moral framework, and the pervasive neo-Hegelian imperative which requires of necessity that the ‘East’, lacking desire, by nature invites, even solicits, outright subjugation or absorption into a ‘higher’ and indeed purportedly universal/Western synthesis in ideologies such as a particular form of ‘democracy’ or a particular perspective of ‘universal human rights’, or into value-laden, potentially or fully globalising, structures such as APEC, IMF or the WTO.

How did such Western ‘rationalist’ philosophers—the likes of Hume, Kant and others—get around their avowed commitment to moral notions of equality and evade charges of inconsistency on race-based subordination? Their strategy, says Goldberg (1993:32), ‘was to deny the rational capacity of blacks, to deny [them] the very condition of their humanity’. Relevant here is Professor Ashis Nandy’s comment (1998a:308) in another context that a problem might lie in the modern Western preoccupation with the problems of irrationality rather than with those of rationality: notable post-Enlightenment2 European thinkers from Giambattista Vico to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud have all been preoccupied with unravelling the pathology of irrationality. And all that notwithstanding the fact that a long time ago Saint Anslem (c1033-1109) (1973:149) had cried with anguish, ‘I knew through my rational nature,/but I did not understand.’ Nandy (1998a:308) maintains that only a few Western thinkers such as William Blake, John Ruskin, Joseph Conrad, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse paid attention to the pathology of rationality, though for many non-Western thinkers, Gandhi being the most conspicuous recent example, it has continued to be a major concern.  He says (1999) that the pathology of rationality has claimed many more victims in our century than that of irrationality, notwithstanding popular media attention given to the latter, eg, intercommunal violence in South Asia. It may well be that, when the final human/environmental toll is reckoned, the ‘rational’ NATO bombing of Yugoslavia will have claimed far more victims than the ‘irrational’ intercommunal problems preceding it. Of course, for the West to investigate the pathology of rationality would be not unakin to police investigating their own corruption.

Our use of the term ‘postcolonial’ needs some elaboration. When we cite the work of postcolonialists like Zawiah Yahya we refer to a particular school of literary/cultural criticism broadly known as postcolonialism. But when we use the term ‘the failure of Australian post-colonialism’, as titled in Chapter 6, we do not mean the failure of this school but of something broader. While post-colonialism with its hyphen merely asserts that the period of formal colonialism has passed, one might expect a more mature and balanced era to have ensued much as one might reasonably expect the post-pubertal individual to be more mature than the pubertal one. Maturation, however, does not always occur; and Gayatri Spivak (1996:42) is rightly concerned that the term post-colonial ‘has become not only useless but counter-productive’, if  by ‘post’ one means that colonisation is at an end. So, to use the term ‘post-colonial’, we need to keep reminding ourselves, and take into active account, that even in the era that is historically post-colonial, colonial attitudes and representations continue to circulate (Alatas 1977:9; Said 1993:45), albeit in somewhat different forms which make mostly token gestures towards anti-colonialism (as we demonstrate is the case with TB).
There is also danger in conflating the hyphenated and the un-hyphenated terms, as does Ankie Hoogvelt (1997:156, drawing on Arif Dirlik 1994) who concludes: ‘“postcolonial” implies a movement going beyond anti-colonial nationalist theory as well as a movement beyond a specific point in history, that of colonialism and Third World nationalist struggles. … the release of post coloniality from the fixity of Third World location, means that the identity of the postcolonial is no longer structural but discursive. That is to say, it is the participation with discourse that defines the postcolonial.’ That may well be so, provided it does not appropriate and negate Third World agendas by leeching them of their history and the inherently significant power differential between coloniser and colonised, thereby denying defining characteristics to postcoloniality, or by dissolving nebulously into the overbially-gazed-on-Western-navel.3 In decentred constructions, colonialism becomes an ahistorical/transhistorical thing.

As Australians work themselves from one century to another, and as they try to negotiate their explorations of self and other, they more than most can ill afford to skip their history. With good sense many are not. Reviewing a volume of ‘best Australian essays’ for 1998, Kerryn Goldsworthy (1999:9) remarks on an Australian phenomenon: ‘History, indeed, is what dominates the thinking of Australian essayists in 1998—and, one hopes, 1999, and beyond. Don Watson’s essay on writing, teaching and being taught Australian history is at the heart of this collection. But almost everyone here moves back to the topic at some point, even people who are ostensibly talking about something quite different and when they do the mood darkens, the light dips, there’s a change into a minor key. It’s as though anyone who is thinking at all in this country at the moment feels a need to look at the past again and again, trying to work out what was the matter with it, and whether any of it can be fixed.’ It would be a disaster for Australians, at this point in their self/other understanding and appraisal, to assume a predominantly a-historical position, a-decentredness in terms of time and locality.

The reflex to conflate gathers momentum. Padmini Mongia (1996:7) takes Pico Iyer to task for an ‘easy and dangerous conflation of postcoloniality, marginality, postmodernism and cosmopolitanism.’ Discussing ‘new world literatures’, Iyer (1993:52) refers to the geographical and cultural locations that postcolonial writers claim as their own; these writers, he claims, ‘are the creators, and creations, of a new postimperial order in which ... all countries are part of a unified CNN and MTV circuit, with a common frame of reference in McDonald’s, Madonna and Magic Johnson.’ Mongia (1996:7) argues that while the new technologies of communication and global movements of people ‘strain any simple understanding of location’, yet, ‘to suggest that postcolonial countries share a common frame of reference in some unified (and implicitly equal?) transnational circulation of ideas and cultural products, is to refuse to address the inequities that shape current global relations.’ Similarly, says Mongia (ibid), Homi Bhabha’s celebration of hybridity leads to ‘the privileging of migrancy and exile which ostensibly confer a greater critical edge to the migrant intellectual’, and which, says Ahmad (1996:287) abandons all specificity of ‘gender, class, identifiable political location’, which in turn offers us a figure of the postcolonial intellectual as ‘a taken-for-grantedness of the male, homogenous onlooker, not only the lord of all he surveys, but also enraptured by his own lordliness’ (ibid), with Homi Bhabha (1994:5) declaring that ‘the truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision.’ ‘I want to take my stand,’ he writes (ibid:21) in describing his free-floating position, ‘on the shifting margins of cultural displacement that confounds any profound or “authentic” sense of a “national” culture or “organic” intellectual.’ As we have noted, the pronouncements of APEC, WTO and like organisations have much more to do with the continuing imposition of a particular ostensibly a- historical, a-locational, a-specific and universal style of discourse from one side and resistance to this from the other, rather than with any liberated participation of supposedly former victors and victims in a discourse unfixed and unfettered.

Anglo-Ethnic Australian Politics, Liberal Democracy and Race Relations
Assimilationist Ideology in Anglo-ethnic-Australia’s Liberal Democracy

An Australian commentator Mary Delahunty (1997:239), reviewing three books on the plundering and dismantling of democracy and the democratic process, while sharply perceptive in her understanding of the Australian scene, does not  tell us that the democracy in question, for the future of which she is rightly concerned, is of a kind seen as the sole possible model only in certain Western countries where it originates and is practised. ‘Democracy’, Delahunty (ibid) notes, ‘is a lot like motherhood. We are all for it, but in Australia these days we do very little to buttress it. We’re under the doona in some sort of civic slumber, passive, as the maelstrom of change swirls around us, reducing our rights and cutting us out of the action. Few, particularly in the mainstream media, are sounding the alarm, so it has fallen to the publishing industry. Three books ... present a cri de coeur for a philosophy of government that we thought was sacred and inviolate.’ Just who are the ‘we’ being referred to here, for whom a number of political shibboleths are ‘sacred and inviolate’? The ‘we’ here performs an interesting feat, for even while it includes some, it is also exclusionary; thus ‘we’ meaning Anglo-ethnic Australians then excludes all those in Australia who do not subscribe to the Anglo-ethnic ethos.4  Of course, there are varieties of democracies.
In stunning unawareness, Western elites stalk the globe oblivious to the unexamined, and therefore fundamentalist, nature of the idiosyncratic and solipsistic construction of their particular ‘sacred and inviolate’ brands of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, or ‘human rights’. This allows them to believe their politically correct and largely Anglo-ethnic-based values to be ‘universal’ and superior, while really they bear the markings of a peculiarly Western secular/religious democratic fundamentalism, yet it is by that yardstick they judge every non-Western society as morally and politically deficient. Thus, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating (quoted in Steketee 1999:27) contrasts Australia in relation to its Asian and Pacific neighbours: ‘Of course Australia will always stand for its democracy, its liberty, its human rights, its heart, its compassion. But not all societies are like we are ...’ Keating exemplifies a pharisaic stance, typical of his way of thinking, a ‘Superiority-of-being-us’, us being unlike other (lesser?) beings. ‘Let this philosophy agree to being one approach among many, and the conflict evaporates,’ as Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, 1991:163) declared in another context. However, any such agreement is conspicuously absent from Western democratic fundamentalists and democratic assimilationists; but that is not really surprising in view of the long history of seeing ‘Asia’ as existing only in dependence upon and opposition to the West.

All this, despite the growing literature from even Western political scientists and philosophers showing that both at the empirical and conceptual levels emergent forms of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ are not all of a kind, that what is claimed to be embracingly ‘universal’ is actually local and historically particular (see the detailed work by Paul Rainbow (1996), also Joel Kahn (1995) and David Goldberg (1993) in allied subject areas which illustrate this point) and seeps out from under a particularly hard ideological rock. Furthermore, Harold Crouch (1996:5) shows that ‘democratic and authoritarian characteristics found in many Third World regimes do not necessarily contradict each other but can often be mutually supporting’, and that forms of Western democratic practices ruggedly based on individual rights are not always congruent with the politics of difference, being especially averse to traditional and other communitarian life-forms (Dallmayr 1996:201ff). It should come as comfort, but in the end it does not, that Hilary Putnam (1994:185) admits that ‘Perhaps we in the West have far too narrow a sense of human cultural diversity, and perhaps this makes it easier for some of us to contemplate the idea of a world with one language, one literature, one music, one art, one politics—in a word, one culture.’ As we shall note in the case of Putnam, he holds this view and still ultimately denies the worth of any political philosophy or institution that is not based on a rational/democratic grid.
Some one hundred years after officially launching the White Australia Policy at the Federation of Australia in 1901—a policy originally ‘concerned with bleaching the existing population, … preventing non-European arrivals from landing, [and] … building up the white population of Australia’ (Day 1997:219)—the doctrine is now being re-assessed with the old justifications rehearsed and newer ones advanced (Kane 1997:117-131). In the late nineteenth century, writes Greg Sheridan (1995:159), ‘when we were deciding we wanted to be “white”, or “European”, it was in part explicitly in a context in setting our faces against Asia or being Asian’; whereas today, a hundred years later, Australians want to be in Asia but not of it. Most architects of the Australian Constitution ‘regarded themselves as liberals’ (Macintyre 1998b:389). John Quick and R. R. Garran (1901; quoted in Macintyre, ibid) note that the doctrine ‘embodies the best achievements of political progress, and realizes the latest attainable ideals of liberty.’ Yet, they used the logic that the only way democracy could be ensured in Australia was through a policy which maintained racial homogeneity and purity of Anglo-Australian culture and a weird form of democracy by excluding peoples with ‘wrong’ skin colours and belief-systems and by building into the Constitution the values pre-eminent in the culture of Anglo-Australia, such as a circumscribed notion of equality and, through it, individual rights and a democratic framework of government. (It is like saying that Ancient Athens had the world’s first democracy; everybody had a vote—except women, slaves, beggars and people below 30.)

That was how pluralism was corralled within the Australian enclosure of a racism propelled out of strategic ‘democratic’/majority-ruled manoeuvres by an elite that represented powerful Anglo-ethnic individuals and groups in Australian society at the beginning of the 20th century. To further justify the isolation and exclusion of people-of-colour from the public culture of Australia, the most putrid of feelings and behaviour their imaginations could muster were attributed to Asians. A news-from-the-archival-front account of the continuous race hatred directed against coloured people in Australia, described by Richard Hall (1998), reveals the sexual and other preoccupations that occupied those white minds from which such fantasies emanate.
Not only did the Anglo-ethnic elites which led Australia in those early days of Federation not represent people of the ‘wrong’ colour (Aborigines, Asians or Pacific Islanders), but they also did not represent people of the right colour but wrong class (that is, poor whites), wrong ethnicity and/or hue (such as Southern Europeans), wrong gender (women), wrong sexuality (lesbians and gay men), or wrong religion (non-Christians, more specifically non-Protestants). Some of these tendencies of Anglo-Australian elites were not entirely held out of an innocent ignorance, because some of them were opposed by people at that time, as documented by researchers like Henry Reynolds (1998) in the case of Aborigines. It was only with a pragmatic twist, while elbowing aside all those atypical groups from the body-politic, that Anglo-Australian majoritarianism found itself able to proclaim at Federation that it was at the same time racially homogenous and democratic—demonstrating that notions of freedom, equality and democracy are not always compatible with one another; and having done just that, it proclaimed Australia free, equal and democratic, in a word liberal.
Federation marked a highpoint in a formal attempt to ethnically/politically cleanse Australian society. In effect, liberal democracy became the instrument for consolidating and privileging institutionalised racist, ethnocentric, misogynist, homophobic, class and religious bigotry in Australian politics. Federation also marked a high point in Anglo-ethnic politics in Australia. When at Federation Australia ruled to jettison peoples of  non-white ethnic origin from its midst, it was simultaneously instituting predominantly ethno politics of an Anglo type. That Australian politics, as it enters the new millennium, has become more generalised/abstracted should not blind us to the fact that its prime values in the year 2000 arise from and are still more homologous and resonant with the Anglo-ethnic culture of its origins than with other cultural presences in its midst. And having secured that pre-eminent position for itself, Anglo-Australia now denies any concessions on those very grounds to other ethnic/religious groups—not that many are clamouring for it at this stage—which partly explains the basis of the virulence once directed by some non-Catholic Anglos to a perception of the Democratic Labor Party in Australia as very Irish/Catholic and the Australian Communist Party as Soviet/Chinese.
Paul Keating (2000:50) argues that many things about the Australian way of life might change, but that some things are non-negotiable: ‘My starting point ... is that Australia’s democratic institutions and traditions are not negotiable. Many things have changed and will change in Australia, our ethnic composition and, with it, our culture, our economic and industrial practices, our world view ...’. But, he adds: ‘traditions of democracy, fairness and personal liberty, which we have fought wars to defend, will remain this country’s guiding principles.’ Here we have a clear articulation of what is meant by democratic fundamentalism, not that there is anything inherently wrong about holding a fundamentalist position, but merely that others in Australia who may have varying positions on these issues should also be extended the same right to hold theirs with equal conviction and firmness. The problem lies in Keating’s type of a fundamentalist universalism on civil society issues for foreign export which also wants to be fundamentalist sectarian with regards to domestic democratic processes and structures. But then comes the referendum on the Monarchy/Republic, and we find that the politicians of Australia did not finally trust ordinary Australian citizens to democratically choose their own head of state; instead they clutched that right for themselves as politicians because they claimed to know better than the citizens they represented.

There were weaknesses, to say the least, in the Australian government response to Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party. One lay in the long time Hanson was allowed the public run of her right to racial prejudice, without clear contradiction, presumably because it was a ‘personal’ cause, even if it was premodern/old-fashioned, emotional, irrational, which she was perhaps erroneously pursuing but which still was a right that could not be legitimately curtailed or denied in a liberal democracy; another is the fact that liberal democracies can provide no guarantees that racism will not be invoked directly or indirectly despite the rhetoric that in a Western liberal democracy matters of race ought to have no place; thirdly, that even strident opposition to Pauline Hanson’s outlook can be an alibi for avoiding rigorous examination of one’s own outlook. Meanwhile, what does one say to those who suffer the brunt of racial abuse from the Hansonites and others of this world, while the rest of us feel good about the free speech we allow the Hansonites so that our stance is, in that noted Enlightenment tradition, liberal and intact? Besides, the dominant polite liberal recognition that one really should not exercise one’s ‘right’ to say things like ‘Asians out’ because they are not nice can lead to a warm inner glow which is most likely quite unjustified and is another version of the Superiority-of-being-us. That it is better for some to suffer abuse so the rest of us can revel in our liberalism on behalf of all of us? And, whatever one thinks of the ‘right to speak’ (and there are arguments that curtailing it further in Australia, however pure the motives, would simply inflame hostility), nobody has particularly and explicitly emphasised this right of many other groups on the margins since Federation, from orthodox Christians and Muslims to gay Catholics.

That Australian experience at Federation continues to lace mainstream liberal thinking in Australia which exemplifies a more general and paradoxical liberal trend is noted by David Goldberg (1993:6-7): ‘As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain. Race is irrelevant, but all is race. The more abstract modernity’s universal identity, the more it has to be insisted upon, the more it needs to be imposed. The more ideologically hegemonic liberal values seem and the more open to difference liberal modernity declares itself, the more dismissive of difference it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of acceptability’ (emphasis in original). As the liberal democratic noose tightens, splintering occurs, which is something Lévi-Strauss (1979:20) also noted more generally: ‘The more a civilization becomes homogenised, the more internal lines of separation become apparent.’
The new assimilationist ideology being set for the 21st century targets multiculturalism and points to unwelcome divisiveness (Sheehan 1998:138) or ‘Balkanisation’, (which in fact is a form of resistance to stage-managed political and cultural homogenisation (Kalantzis and Cope 1997:83)), violence, even civil war, which ostensibly must result from too much group-pluralism in a society, as distinct from a pluralism only taking note of differences among individuals: it argues that all individuals-in-groups in Australia—whether based on age, class, ethnicity, family, gender, history, region, religion/belief, sexuality, or whatever—should adhere to an overarching framework of a democratic constitution which, while granting them rights and liberties, also imposes a duty of tolerance only of individual others and adherence to its own values and agendas.
 

Liberal Democracy: the Naked Citizen, and a Partisan Public Culture

The particular advancement of the ‘citizenship’ project, that Australian schools ‘inculcate’ the basic elements of citizenship in all school children and that they be made to learn all about the Australian Constitution, makes possible the emergence of the naked-citizen through a watering down or washing away of all other, especially organic/group, affiliations, and with their individualities-in-relation-to-the-state reinforced: ‘People are individual citizens and their relationships with other (collective) national/cultural identities are annulled by citizenship’ (James 1997:58).5 Roberta James (ibid:74-75) adds: ‘The concept “race” necessarily validates collective, aggregate, or corporate identity as a natural and absolutely fundamental category of social action and existence. Cultural logics maintaining social relations organised around the individual as the basic economic, political and social unit and identity can only encompass race relations in the most clumsy and unsatisfactory ways. In this context, the constraints and pains of normative racism also ironically include the impossibility of enculturations entangling individualism to apprehend the reality, authenticity and legitimacy of “organic” collectivities or aggregate identity, especially when there is little space in the organisation of daily life for it.’

   Modern Western societies have a further problem with more traditional-groups-with-tags, for the latter often also very jealously nurse group privacy for reasons of survival. Levine’s (1985) study of traditional societies suggest that privacy/secrecy serves several functions – among other things, to control information flow and preserve hierarchical authority and to maintain regulating access to esoteric knowledge. It also maintains advantage in a group’s negotiations with ‘outside’ groups. Such ‘closed’ tendencies are abhorrent to citizens of ‘open’ societies, wherein openness is supposedly highly prized. One of the more common group-tags is that of culture, which is seen by modern progressives as divisive. Thus, former Prime Minister Paul Keating contrasts his view of the Asia-Pacific region as best served by an antiseptic ‘institution-building’ in contrast to Malaysian Prime Dr Minister Mohamad Mahathir who describes his to be based on ‘culture’ or ‘Asianness’ (Keating 2000:166); while, of Mahathir’s vision, Australian journalist Paul Kelly (2000c:13) negatively declares: ‘It is racial.’ Somehow, a politics that is based on anything other than an Anglo-individualist citizenship is wrong to such Australians: they need to establish that there is only one way of looking at things, and their minority view must prevail in the region as elsewhere, and when they don’t get their way, they claim they are victimised. A good example of this behaviour is referred to in Chapter 5, where that Australian champion of civil rights abroad, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, cries foul when the UN condemns Australia for its ill-treatment of its Indigenous people.

     Eva Cox (1999:18) quotes the philosopher, Professor Claus Offe of Humboldt University in Berlin, who suggests that we need to balance tension between community, market and state, so that no one element dominates, to which Cox adds, ‘the community offers passion, the government fairness and the market choice’. In her terms, ‘lack of balance is toxic: the dangers are with too much market, [we get] Mafia; too much government, Stalinism; too much community, Kosovo.’ Meanwhile, the government of the state of New South Wales has decided to abandon the concept of ‘ethnic’ and to do away with the Ethnic Affairs Commission in favour of a minister for citizenship and a commission of community relations (ibid).  But need the proportions of the mix that make up Cox’s ‘balance’ be uniform for all peoples in all places and at all times? Perhaps instead of only speaking of ‘balance’ we also ought to invoke notions of ‘restoring’ and ‘redressing’, and that would involve (not a crude equality but) a needs-based principle.
Liberal democracy is attuned to individuals-in-their-‘nakedness’, to individual rights, and cannot cope with difference wherein individuals come clothed with group-tags asserting group rights, especially of race, religion and gender; and the challenge is likely to come precisely from wearers of such group-tags. Alain Touraine’s (1991:266) answer holds: If the only choice made available to a minority is between assimilation and marginalisation, it is not much of a choice and is in fact a violation of their human rights. As Spivak (1993:229) pointed out in another context, ‘Rational abstractions can be staunch allies, but they can also be used as alibis.’ (Emphasis in the original.) Democracy-as-a-rational-abstraction, with its logical twists and turns, has been and is still being used as such in the Australian public discourse. Sections of Australian society have yet to discover, in Isaiah Berlin’s (Berlin and Jahanbegloo 1991:143) words, that ‘Democracy can sometimes be offensive to minorities and individuals’, and that what is required is a specifically pluralistic democracy which calls for consultation and compromise, ‘which recognizes the claims – rights – of groups and individuals …’ (Berlin and Jahanbegloo 1991:144; emphasis added).

The situation reeks with hypocrisy. For instance, countries like Australia are happy to announce they derive their ethno-Anglo cultural and philosophic (previously, ‘religious’) orientation from the Anglo-West, but choose not to highlight the fact that their values in public life are also tagged, drawn from that Anglo-Western reservoir, but assert instead that theirs are universal values. Furthermore, when it suits them, so-called open societies like Australia have not objected to secretive Freemasonry societies operating within them, nor do they object to business secrecy practised by local businesses or multinationals even when the latter are competing even with the state. But, as noted earlier, the attack has been relentless against membership in (say) the Communist Party of Australia (CPA, with allusions to links with foreign/Soviet/Communist Chinese/etc interests) or against the National Civic Council (NCC, with allusions to the Catholic Church and the foreign influence of Rome, and the Irish-Italian Mafia). Freemasonry, however, has been acceptable because in some ways it was homologous with elements of Anglo/religious culture aligned with the state.

The democratic constitution of Australia is cast as a sort of dispassionate and disinterested arbiter which ensures that a fairly-arrived-at consensus of values/rules of the public arena is adhered to by potentially antagonistic groups, and with the capacity to apply force to carry out its mission. Read quickly, it sounds familiar and fine. In truth, of course, there is nothing impartial and disinterested about the Australian Constitution or the state, for what it charts as an overarching ideological framework of the public culture is harvested with grim deliberation from among the pre-eminent abstract values of the dominant Anglo group which, since invasion and colonisation in 1788, has successfully wrested control of the country at gun point from the original Indigenous inhabitants of the land that was to become Australia.
As the more abstract elements of Anglo culture swelled in their public role in Australian life, the more concrete elements are practised, ‘silently, angrily or with ribaldry’ (Murray 1999:84) across rural (and urban) tracts nation-wide, and are reflected in their corresponding ‘vernacular literatures’. The perspective of Australian poet Les Murray (ibid:5) is tightly drawn, locally centred, and well anchored: ‘The centre of my field,’ he says, ‘is of course my home district of Bunyah, which lies fifty-odd kilometres south of Taree and about twenty kilometres as the crow flies from the Pacific Ocean.’ From that local centre, his field of vision broadens out, slowly, increasingly and inclusively, but what is seen ahead and afar is always tested against his local and anchored centre. As he describes it, ‘vernacular Australia’ (ibid:71)—‘the subsoil of our common life’ (ibid:73)—is often where ‘people ... know they’re not in on the action’; that is also where ‘sprawl’ reigns, and sprawl is characterised as a way of looking at life; among other things,

Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility (ibid:2).

If the public high ground is held by the more abstract Anglo elites, and the more concretely oriented people of Celtic Australia are locked out, then infinitely more excluded are the non-Anglos, including the Aboriginal people and other people-of-colour, and all such minorities in Australia.
At century’s end, Anglicised Australian elites charting this ideological trail are anything but adequately representative of the peoples inhabiting Australia, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Asians, women, lesbians and gay men, and the poorer classes. While focusing on the problematic entanglement of liberal democracy and racism in the case of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Roberta James (1997:275, 22n) somewhat despairingly, though perhaps accurately for the time, suggests that unless those non-Aboriginal Australians who subscribe to forms of life which are more corporate in character come to dominate Australian life and cultural institutions, ‘common recognition of organic collectivities is extremely unlikely.’
For a minority in a democratically based multicultural society, notes Alastair Davidson (1998:92), ‘the old community will always be the majority, and so the democratic privilege to make the laws which is the basis of citizenship, will usually result in the minority point of view being rejected democratically (or, at least, by a majority).’ Twisted outcomes of some legal/democratic practices are not hard to find. For instance, one reason why the US has kept the death penalty ‘is an admirable one: because it is so democratic,’ writes the London Economist (editorial, 10 June:13). It adds: ‘In virtually every other country where the death penalty has been removed it has been done by the political establishment in the face of polls showing support for it. Most Americans believe, in the words of John Stuart Mill, one of Britain’s great philosophers of liberty, “that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is [not] to show want of regard for human life. On the contrary, [it shows] most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right, this shall.” ’ And should the multicultural citizen make his claim on an assertion of rights, that, observes Davidson (1998:92), then ‘privileges the legal system’ over all else.
Hence the failure, to date, of the existing democratic systems of Western countries like Australia and the US to effectively cater for important differences amongst its polity in their pursuit of the hope, advocated by some including Jayasuriya and Kee (1999:91), for ‘a unity and national identity that rests not on a common racial or ethnic origin or cultural diversity, but on a common citizenship, a common culture based on civic values such as mateship, the fair go and egalitarianism’, ‘the civic core of a multicultural Australian citizenship.’ A synthetic and abstract citizenship or an equally synthetically generated common culture militates against the very notion of concrete group difference. It has not worked because inter alia ‘No regime of toleration will work for long in an immigrant, pluralist, modern, and postmodern society,’ writes Michael Walzer (1997:111), ‘without some combination of these two: a defence of group differences and an attack upon class differences.’

Setting pretence aside, what is still being presented as the ‘overarching framework’ (Kane 1997:129) of the Australian public culture of the state is ideologically partisan; it is little more than the recycled values of a partisan Anglo-Australian culture being projected as the common culture of all the inhabitants of Australia. The state has become the alter ego of the Anglo-Australian ethnic group. The values now being foisted on all groups in the nation state are chosen values of an ethno-Anglo-Australia (cf. Dixson 1999) which now hands them down to ideologically unbelieving groups, made misfits in the contrived and partisan public culture of Australia. We are all now and have always been ‘ethnic’, even from the beginning of white invasion of the land called Australia. Those with a coloured identity knew their coloration was politically denigrated, recognizable as separate entities only on the margins; the centre was given a natural translucence/transparency radiating progress and modernity. The margins lay in the shadows inhabited by grey shapes, the unknown and unknowable, the non-modern, uncouth intruders. Alastair Bonnett (2000:142) persuasively shows how ‘white identity and modernity have been mutually constitutive, and that the former has acted to naturalise the latter.’

What Anglo Australia has to admit to itself and others is its ethnicity, and that ‘white’ has always been ethnic, political and privileged, though it was always buried in a contrived innocence of a  translucence/opaqeness that was made to look transparent. The transparency gave the appearance of a disinterested and inclusive administrative arrangement which, it was argued, was a viable disinterested way of dealing democratically with public matters as they arose, and anyone who doubted or objected to it was represented as a misfit or wilfully obstinate; the opaqueness quietly held together the firm guiding Anglo values which prevailed through all the permutations and combinations permitted or endured in public life of a factually multi-ethnic society, and non-Anglos who did not question those values were labelled ‘good citizens’ and rewarded. Thus, the category ‘non-ethnic Australians’ (as in Jane Hyde, 1995) is sheer subterfuge: such a people/entity never in fact existed; it was a contrivance utilised to gain and hold on to a privileged position by the Anglos, and when that privilege is eroded (ie, when a semblance of equality comes into play) those who once profited from it cry foul in resentment (see Dixson 1999). As resentment against the coloured other (especially against the  Aboriginal people in Australia) kicks in, there then emerges a curiously paradoxical phenomenon that Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs (1998:65) call ‘postcolonial racism’, which they describe as follows:  ‘The paradox of postcolonial racism (which is why it is such an unstable form of racism) is that in the midst of resentment it can also be sympathetic towards, and even enthralled by, Aboriginal people ... . It can acknowledge that Aboriginal people do not have enough, while at the same time it can become anxious that they have (or may end up having) too much. In other words, postcolonial racism sees modern Aboriginal people [and we can also say to some degree, all other peoples-of-colour] as lacking (which produces sympathy and “guilt”) and as gaining (which produces anxiety and resentment) simultaneously ...’
So, when, in 1995, as Prime Minister, Paul Keating (2000:262) laid down his iron law of multiculturalism in Australia, saying ‘the first loyalty of all who make Australia home must be to Australia’, immigrant Australians would have instinctively recognised the entrapment, the decoy-Australia that was being set up, namely, ethno-Anglo-Australia, a racially and culturally defined ethnic entity shrouded in a largely faked inclusive political category. In fact, we are all ethnics.

Furthermore, the compulsory and comprehensive – and thus very effective – nature of the Australian system of education serves to ensure that (God forbid) even if every Anglo-Australian were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, the more abstract and dominant values of Anglo-Australia would be churned out, educating and training and socialising every school-going child in Australia into the prescribed forms of Anglo ethnic-culture. The faces of the students and teachers might be coloured, but their hearts and souls would be as Anglo-white as blanco; their voices, too, would be Anglo-Aussie white, as our subsequent analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 will suggest.
In a hundred years of its history, ie, in the 20th century Australian state, the fundamentals of its public culture have remained the same, privileging the one Anglo-Australian cultural value orientation—in such forms as the privileging of core values of individualism, ‘egalitarianism’, and homologous patterns of authority and power distribution—while ensuring that more communitarian forms of cultural activity are kept at bay by some subtle and other not so subtle forms of negative representation. ‘Local values became fixed as universal,’ as David Goldberg (1993:33) remarked in a parallel context. The Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, Zita Antonios (The Age 29 June 1998:6), reminded Australians: ‘You cannot use the language of equality and say in one breath that we are all equal, and then devise policies that single out particular groups in a negative way.’

The air would be a great deal clearer and human relations smoother when Anglo-Australians finally come to understand and gracefully accept the fact that they are one of many ethnic groups cohabiting spaces called Australia, Asia, the Pacific, the world, and that they have no intrinsic right of any sort to assume they represent the normative core or a synthetically constituted common culture of peoples in whose midst they live within or outside Australia. What there is now is a state-driven Anglo monoculturalism being passed off quietly as multicultural. In 1788, by labelling the land now called Australia terra nullius, early Anglo governors and ‘settlers’ overtly and formally denied the existence of a multi-ethnic society (composed at least of Aborigines and white ‘settlers’). Nearly a century after the separate colonies federated forming the Commonwealth of Australia, despite Australian society being even more multi-ethnic today than it was in 1788, by some quite clever semantics and even cleverer operation of the education system, while Australian society is loudly described as multicultural, it covertly and effectively functions as an Anglo monoculture. Where monoculturalism was once plainly assumed and proclaimed in 1788, in 2000 the monocultural Anglo ideology is maintained by stealth and an element of subterfuge, and, like counterfeit coin, is passed off as multiculturalism. A century after Federation, the term ‘democratic’ is still loaded in the political discourse in Australia, still working to maintain the partisan Anglo hegemony in the land and in the region. Neither the Australian Constitution nor its assimilationist version of ‘democracy’ is, or has ever been, innocent.

To be genuinely democratic, a framework of principles and procedures would have to evolve into one that has been arrived at by at least stages of negotiation among the groups in Australia. None of them, cautions Iris Young (1990:164) more generally, should be excluded prior to the start of negotiations, for ‘assimilation always implies coming into the game after it has already begun, after the rules have already been set, and having to prove oneself according to those rules and standards’. However one dresses it, it is still assimilationist to argue (Dixson 1999:164) that ‘the old [Anglo-Celtic] culture will have to continue acting as the baseline carrier of an imaginary for the emerging Australia.’ True integration can only occur if genuinely multi-cultural groupings arrive at some commonly agreed to values or principles and common courses of action through open negotiation. No pre-emptive first claim strike to baseline carrier status by any one group can possibly be the starting point of reconciliation or integration for all: in a multicultural society that is democratic, reconciliation/integration needs to begin from a baseline that is pluralist and negotiable (not from any privileged baseline).

Nor should a truly democratic state in this day and age recognise and privilege only individuals in a society; the rights of groups as groups within which people reside should be equally privileged and not written off as ‘mere communalism’ or ‘tribalism’ in an attempt to denigrate more concrete tendencies in the polity. Describing the situation in India, cognitive psychologist and anthropologist, Professor Veena Das (1995:14) explains: ‘The emergence of communities as political actors in their own right is related in India to changes in the nature of political democracy. We know that the anti-colonial struggles, as embodied in several local, regional, and national-level movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were about the sharing of power. Yet by the end of the twentieth century the nature of representative democracy has itself been put into question, for it has become clear that even when power is exercised in the name of representation it tends to become absolute, and “to speak in the name of the society it devours” (Touraine 1992:131). … It is this political context of the state’s assertion and arrogation of authority which explains why so many social scientists have raised powerful voices in support of “tradition”, and why they have expressed the hope that alternative visions of life may be available in the form of traditional ways of life, of which diverse communities are the embodiment.’6

To draw attention to the need to recognise and accord appropriate respect for those in society who lean towards a more concrete way of life does not mean that that form alone is being privileged; rather, it is only to caution that the major leadership thrust in the West, which favours globalisation, makes the practice of more concrete forms of life very difficult to maintain. As elaborated in Chapter 3, the more concrete form of life and its more abstract counterpart need to be nourished wherever people opt for them. In some of the more cosmopolitan, more abstracted, circles in Asia, communalism is so denigrated among the Westernised and cosmopolitan urban elites that it now glides easily in the company of what are regarded as lower forms of public life, such as when in a single breath a writer refers to ‘communalism, communism and violent crimes’ (Seah Chiang Nee 1998:24; also Vanaik 1997). As we enter the 21st century, such a sentiment denigrates and dismisses the modes of life of the majority of humankind. The most destructive action in this regard for people of more concrete orientations is for the public culture to be atomised, which would be plainly unhealthy, for standing alone individuals are more easily intimidated, threatened, manipulated, and picked off.

As the 20th century was setting in, one increasingly found even Australian government-sponsored reports admitting to some abominably inhuman practices against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (eg, Wilson 1997), and the odd one which acknowledges the existence of Australian racism; but few if any from Anglo-Australian ranks will explicitly admit to Australia being a racist country. With notable exceptions, the move is to advertise the country as bathed in democratic sunshine and to deny the shadows. Of course both co-exist, and redeemably so through anti-racist legislation. The study Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia by Australian researchers Janeen Webb and Andrew Enstice (1998; see also, Cowlishaw 1988; Kamien 1978; Cowlishaw and Morris (Eds.) 1997) found that from the times of its earliest history the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Asian ‘other’ in Anglo-Australian fiction and political writing have been and are consistently characterised as alien/savage.

The virus of Australian racism arrived perhaps as an unwitting cultural inheritance of the British imperial and racist mantle in the 18th and 19th centuries, which not only shaped Australian attitudes to race but also accounts for the fledgling Antipodean colonies’ eagerness to embroil Britain, the ‘Mother Country’, through the British Colonial Office, in the colonisation of island peoples in the neighboring Pacific region and the use of those, ie, the Pacific Islanders, thus colonised as slave labour to develop Australia. The racist virus might well have arrived uninvited in the first instance, but the cultural bleaching process has been continuously and assiduously cultivated and enforced until recently by successive Australian Governments through legislation, and it still thrives in varying degrees in many parts of the country and arenas of its national life.

Australia’s Imperial and Colonial Amnesia, and Impending Legacies

Australian academic Roger Thompson’s study, Australian imperialism in the Pacific: the expansionist era 1820-1920 (1980), documents the story of an early expansive phase of Australian imperialism in a neighbouring region—during which its white settlers urged Britain (which became quite irritated by the Australian colonies’ eagerness and fantastically grandiose plans) to annex various Pacific islands, in particular Fiji, the New Hebrides, New Guinea, Samoa and the Cook Islands. Later, Australia was diplomatically quite active in the Southwest Pacific during World War II, on occasion resorting to a bit of gunboat diplomacy in attempting to influence what was to happen to French, German and Dutch colonial possessions. The Australian government of the day actively encouraged the continued presence of the Dutch in what was then called the East Indies by agreeing to and encouraging their neutrality (which it would never have countenanced in the case of Holland in Europe), and when the Gaullist leader from New Hebrides left Vila in a Norwegian freighter to successfully challenge the Vichyites at Noumea, an Australian warship stood by in support (Sheean 1943:280; Grattan 1963:519). At century’s end, with renewed attempts to exercise a leading regional role by Australia, the South Pacific is again on the main Australian foreign policy agenda (Fry 1997:307), but this time in company with Asia.

Because Australia’s diplomatic role in helping to shape the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I is seen as a turning point in its relationship with Britain and the wider world in its attempt to articulate a distinctively Australian foreign policy stance, and because it deals with a number of elements which still plague Australia’s relations abroad, we shall touch on some of the salient issues which came to the fore. The ‘birth of Australian diplomacy’, as W.J. Hudson (1978) described the sequence of events that concatenate significantly for Australia which came with post-World War I international politics at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, saw a nexus firmly forged between Australian domestic and foreign policies, in particular, a relationship between domestic development and defence, on the one hand, and external security and international trade, on the other. It soon became evident that, in this instance, the claims for an independent Australian voice (one not subsumed under a general British Dominion umbrella) rested on a principle no higher than the territorial spoils expected after a successful military engagement to further consolidate a racist philosophy. ‘What have we got out of the war?’ Prime Minister William Morris (Billy) Hughes asked, then went on to answer: ‘Australia became a nation’, ‘our soldiers won it for us’ and Germany was forced to make financial reparation (ibid:121). And despite calling the League of Nations, which had come into existence with the Treaty, ‘the new temple of civilization’ (ibid:124), the Australian Prime Minister declared ‘we will not allow anything relating to our sphere in the Pacific to be regarded as a proper subject of submission to that tribunal.’7

Australia went into the war in the first instance, the Australian Prime Minister claimed, ‘for our national safety, in order to insure our national integrity, which was in dire peril, to safeguard our liberties, and those free institutions of government, which ... are essential to our national life, and to maintain those ideals which we have nailed to the very topmast of our flagpole—White Australia, and those other aspirations of this young Democracy’ (ibid). The ‘national integrity’ was seen to be dependent on ‘the great rampart of islands stretching around the north-east of Australia’ (ibid:126), such as New Guinea, for ‘those who hold it hold us’; and though Australia sought ‘direct control’, it was satisfied in the end to receive only a ‘mandate’ over those they acquired. Yet, said the Australian Prime Minister, ‘the greatest thing we have achieved’ at the Conference was ‘the policy of White Australia’ (ibid:127). Thus, the birth of Australian diplomacy at Versailles reasserted the symbiosis of Australian nationhood, a mangled practice of democracy and the racist policy of White Australia, all of which had also been promulgated at Federation in 1901.

At Versailles, the Australian Prime Minister admitted, the Japanese ‘regarded it as intolerable that they should not be treated as the equals of us and other races’ (ibid:128)—understandably so, if not on a basis of equal human worth then at least for the fact that it was the Japanese navy which patrolled the seas between Japan and the Suez during the war, escorting Australian and British troop ships across to and around parts of Europe, thereby effectively safeguarding Australian and British interests across the Asian, Pacific and some European sea-lanes while risking and losing Japanese lives in the process (Fitzhardinge 1970:250ff; Wilson 1998:356; Day 1997:235; and Gilbert 1994:329;1971:255), all in accordance with the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 still in existence then. Australian historian Professor John Molony (1988:220) refers to ‘Japan, Australia’s ally’ in that period of Australian history, which ‘provided a powerful escort carrier, the Ibuki’ to protect eight transports carrying 20,000 Australian and New Zealand troops which sailed from Albany in West Australia for Europe. Australian historian Humphrey McQueen (1991:26) is explicit about Japan’s role in contributing to Australia’s security during World War I: he writes, ‘Japan acquired responsibility for Australia’s naval defence under the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, especially after 1905 with Japan’s defeat of the czarist navy. Between 1914 and 1918, Japan—the nation that Australians most feared—became the guarantor of the sealane security’, and adds (ibid:27) with understatement, ‘Japan’s neighbourly watchfulness excited Australian anxieties.’

While the substantive Australian ideals were claimed to be ‘our liberties’, such as free institutions and the White Australia Policy, the last was based on racial difference (glossing over the elements of inequality and subordination), as the Australian Prime Minister explained to the Japanese delegation at the Conference, ‘We do not say ours are greater or better than yours; we only say they are different’ (Hudson 1978:129). Australia would not accord any Asian nation, not even the Japan which had been its protector during World War I, a footing equal to that accorded to European nations, despite the rhetoric of different-but-not-unequal. Hughes also illustrated the difference in terms of spoken language (with English still a marker of similar significance today, as our analysis of TB will show): ‘Remember that this is the only community in the Empire, if not, indeed, in the world, where there is so little admixture of race. Do you realize that, if you go to England from one county to another, men can hardly understand one another? Yet you can go from Perth to Sydney and from Hobart to Cape York, and find men speaking the same tongue, with the same accent. Place on that bench men from Alice Springs, Cape York, Hobart, and Adelaide, and you cannot distinguish them in speech, form, or feature. We are all of the same race, and speak the same tongue in the same way.’ He then added, significantly, ‘That cannot be said of any other Dominion in the empire, except New Zealand, where, after all, it can be said only with reservations, because that country has a large population of Maoris.’ Significant, because not only were people of Asian origin excluded but the Indigenous people of Australia, the Aborigines, were rendered absent from the scene even in discussion in this instance. Australian Aborigines would have been bemused to hear Prime Minister Billy Hughes (ibid) declare: ‘We claim the right … to say in regard to Australia who shall enter and who shall not. This is our house.’

At the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes remembered the Maoris of New Zealand but not the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. At the birth of Australian diplomacy at Versailles, with its massive defence of the White Australia Policy, Australia was also re-asserting the racist legislation formulated at Federation in 1901, and by expunging Aborigines from the scene at that fateful moment Australia was re-asserting the doctrine of terra nullius formulated at the foundation of a white Australia in 1788, as well as providing to this day the rationale for speech as a marker of ‘successful’ assimilation into Australia. Henceforward, in its dealings with the country called Australia, the world would encounter a ‘white’ and therefore only a partially present country, one defined even more by the absent coloured other.

The people-of-colour in Egypt—in what was then called ‘the Near East’—where Australian troops were stationed in huge numbers during the war, fared little better than their counterparts in Australia and neighbouring islands. They experienced the presence of thousands of Australian soldiers in no uncertain terms (there were 85, 000 in 1915 alone). Australian historian Richard White (1990:52) writes that, for the Aussie digger, Cairo’s Biblical links with stories such as the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt held ‘much less interest than other tourist sights’, among which were the ‘Wazza’, Cairo’s brothel district, and the Mouski, the famous bazaar. Hypocritically, ‘the most virulent language was saved to damn Cairo as a reservoir of venereal disease unfit for any clean-living Australian’ (ibid:59), although in reality, as E.J. Rule recalled later, to the diggers ‘the famous Wozzer [sic] was the most notorious [tourist attraction] and generally came first.’ Warnings were given to the soldier-tourist: and, White (ibid) observes, in general the Aussie digger was ‘excessively cautious’ in the bazaar, but ‘fearless’ in the brothel.

The ‘Cairos’ of the colonial world were the kind of sites where Australian manhood could act out its fantasies, which had to be repressed in some measure at home and projected on to the other elsewhere, especially onto people-of-colour in Australia and abroad. The Cairo riots of 1915, known also as the ‘Battles of the Wozzer’ and their aftermath led one soldier to record in his diary, ‘these people fear the Aussies more than they fear their God’ (ibid 1990:61). Vera Brittain (quoted in Gilbert 1994:414), an English nurse who had seen the Allied troops in large numbers in Europe, described the Australian soldier as ‘aggressive’ and the New Zealand soldier as ‘turbulent’ in contrast to the American soldiers who carried themselves ‘with such rhythm, such dignity, such … self-respect.’ Commenting on the Australian soldiers, White (1990) comments ironically, ‘The wily oriental could no longer put anything over these men. … now the tourist was supreme. … This was not what the Orient had promised, but it was what the Orient was reduced to.’

If we have lingered a moment longer than expected on that ‘glorious’/inglorious World War I episode with events culminating in the 1919 peace settlement at Versailles, it is to make the point that the celebration of white Australia’s reach for an independent foreign policy stance at Versailles needs to be measured against its lengthening shadow which races back to the digger’s treatment of the coloured other in Cairo, for the presence and the shadow of the Aussie digger constitute a single entity which looms over both places, and over all such sites of Western appropriation and degradation of the other.

One now begins to understand a little more clearly the role the Asia-Pacific region assumes in the Australian consciousness—in the apparently unselfconscious Australian racist and defensive/expansionist pugilistic psyche, in the persistence of Australia rattling the gates for admission into the ASEAN region and into ASEM meetings, and in the consequent frustration that shows in Australian Prime Ministers accusing an Asian leader of being ‘recalcitrant’ or his country’s practices of being ‘barbaric’, and being read as vainly trying to play off one Asian leader (eg, former President Suharto of Indonesia) against another Asian leader (eg, Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia) as former Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia looked like doing when, on occasions, he seemed to be playing an Indonesian card, such as on matters relating to APEC. East Timorese leader Jose Ramos-Horta (New Straits Times 3 April 2000:20) accuses former PM Keating of appeasing Indonesia, claiming also that Keating maintained a father-son relationship with former Indonesian President Suharto, with Keating the junior. Indonesia, however, is of some lively value to Australia, given the former’s enormous population and its geo-political location vis-a-vis Australia. Imagine, writes a leading Australian commentator, Greg Sheridan (1995:144), if  Italy was to suddenly collapse after a total crisis, it would distress Australians, but not devastate them. However, in 1995, he wrote with a degree of prescience, that if Indonesia collapsed in a deep crisis, it ‘could be catastrophic for Australia’. Apart from former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating playing ‘funny buggers’ in the region, there have been attempts, though eventually unsuccessful, to cultivate Indonesian leadership.

The Australian cultivation of the Indonesians may have been designed to achieve a number of objectives, including a manoeuvre to eliminate or at least to weaken Indonesia’s close ties with the ASEAN bloc and to then use its newfound Indonesian toehold to haul itself as a member country into the region. In 1998, however, Indonesia went into deep economic and political crisis from which it struggles to escape, and whatever the political and economic outcome in Indonesia, writes researcher and former Australian consular officer Alison Broinowski (1998:445), ‘the gamble on Suharto as Australia’s sugar-daddy in the region had not paid off.’ Relations between Indonesia and Australia—which had come apart over East Timor—reached a low point in December 1999, when President Abdurrahman Wahid announced he did not care if relations between the two countries faltered (Greenlees 1999:1; Sheridan 1999g:4).

Australia had been shocked when, in 1998, despite a great deal of lobbying on its part, Indonesia voted to refuse Australia admission to ASEM meetings. There follows the slow, gnawing, sinking feeling among Australian opinion-makers, leaders and ordinary people that no one (not even the old British and American allies) really understands or cares for Australia. And Australia feels victimised and forlorn, and angry. It was a very angry parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor Party, Mr Kim Beazley (The Australian 19 November 1998:9), coming in on cue to provide a little unsolicited chorus to the US Vice-President Al Gore (ibid), who said: ‘We don’t owe Dr Mahathir anything. … Dr Mahathir has systematically undermined every effort by Australia to be in the regional organisations and in discussions between the region and Europe.’ Again the blame is neatly shifted to someone else, and that someone else is invariably in Asia. There always appears to be someone or something in Asia that is to blame, never an admission of error on Australia’s part: they are barbaric; they are recalcitrant; they are withholding markets from us; they are undermining us; and they betray us even after we help finance the odd and modest project or two of theirs.

Nor has Australia always understood the nature of an invitation from an Asian country to one or other Asian regional gatherings. For instance, while Thailand is commonly seen by Australians as initiating Australia’s entry into ASEM (and Malaysia is seen as usually vetoing it (Keating 2000:166; Kelly 2000c:13)), it is not always what the Thais intend and that Australians anticipate. A senior Thai diplomat explained the nature of the invitation to Bangkok correspondent of the International Herald Tribune, Thomas Crampton (quoted in Vinocur 2000b:6): ‘[Australia’s] role’, he says, is an odd one of an almost European nation on the fringes of Southeast Asia. Australia would like to become the white tribe of Asia, but that will never happen. Thailand may have invited Australia into the Asia-Europe grouping, but we would find it very strange if they came to sit on the Asia side of the table.’ The Thais had assumed Australia would choose to sit on the European side of the table, which may in turn disconcert the Europeans. The Thais, like other Asians, have heard clearly successive Australian Prime Ministers say that culturally Australia identifies with European civilisation; and they wonder how Australia’s peoples-of-colour cope, and start to understand why Australians so frequently stumble in Asia. Meanwhile, though Australians are very upset about being kept out of the ASEM meetings, they remain very quiet about the perception in India—since confirmed by the then Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating (2000:193)—that Australia kept India out of the APEC forum, and intrigued against it over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Sheridan 1999c:23).
It is difficult for Australians to appear convincing to peoples-of-colour in the Asia-Pacific region by the mere assertion that the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act is an expression of a genuine change of attitude towards people-of-colour by white Australians when the Government of Australia finds it impossible to apologise to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the terrible wrongs done to them by white Australians since the day they set foot on native soil. In 1995 the then Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans (The Weekend Australian 25-26 March 1995:24) came up with the idea that Australians could/should see themselves variously as a people belonging to a number of places in the region, eg, the Asia-Pacific, the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. That is geographic promiscuity. It could only have been viewed skeptically by neighbourly onlookers in Asia, as yet another ruse to gain a toehold in the region. A persona like that gets nowhere—like the chess piece ‘the Red Queen’ that Alice meets in Lewis Carroll’s Through the looking-glass, which is constantly running but gets nowhere because the landscape moves with her. A geographically promiscuous Australian is no more appealing than a racially discriminating one. Besides, foreign policy moves of that nature have domestic reprecusions. Hudson and Stokes (1997:155) note: ‘Projecting multiple identities may be productive for external affairs, but it also may be internally distabilising and confusing.’ They add: ‘In the wake of the economic dislocation brought on by [eg, Keating’s] Labor government programs to “rationalise” the Australian economy and integrate it further with the relevant Asian economies, the official calls to diversify Australian identities may not have offered much comfort to those who had to bear the personal and social costs of such “reforms”.’

Furthermore, Australia’s will to be the dominant voice in the Pacific had led it to push for the formation of APEC without first fully consulting its great and friendly ally, the US government (Bell 1977:214), and without the active support of important Southeast Asian countries (such as Malaysia); similarly, Australia kept its own citizens in the dark about the 1995 Australia-Indonesia Agreement on Maintaining Security; just as that ‘great and friendly ally’, the US, was not brought into ‘the secret negotiations’ (Goldsworthy 1997:25), until the deal was signed. In retrospect, the Treaty seemed doomed from the start. The 1995 agreement was not submitted to the Australian Parliament because its architects knew that it would anger the human rights and East Timor lobbies. Professor Robyn Lim (1999:8) remarks: ‘In a democracy, it is hard to sustain a security policy that lacks public support.’ On 16 September 1999, it became the first casualty in Australian-Indonesian relations as they deteriorated in the fallout over some unwelcome moves by the Australians in events leading up to the East Timor crisis. Apparently, APEC was to be the covertly constructed contraption with which Australia was going to pole vault into the Asian and Pacific orbits, with its ‘great and friendly’ Western allies as unwitting but willing supporters. This, together with what Australian researchers Ellie Vasta and Stephen Castles (1996) have characterised as ‘the persistence of racism in multicultural Australia’, reveals also a latent patrol-officer-in-support-of-US-interests streak which simmers close to the surface of Australian life both at home and in the geographical region. Racist and imperialist tendencies are intertwined in the Australian experience. As we will presently note, Australia’s participation in many wars in Asia was in the colonial context of the British Empire, and later with an even more imperious US super-power. It is in this light that the Pauline Hanson phenomenon and a number of less than successful Australian ‘initiatives’ in the Asia-Pacific region need to be understood.

Australians have tended to make much of their generally nonchalant stance towards authority, though often not successfully. The Australian quest for an independent stance in its international affairs has not prevented it from eagerly following nearly every British and (later) US military sortie into Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East and Africa to assert or reinforce the western presence (sometimes under the banner of a US-led United Nations) in colonial and post-colonial eras. Australia’s military ventures abroad (Odgers 1999) with its Western allies include the ventures into the Sudan, in the Boer War, the Boxer resistance in China, World Wars I and II (in Europe, Asia, and Africa), Malta, Korea, the Indonesian confrontation of Malaysia, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and in peace-keeping operations (from Korea to Rwanda). Australia’s response to the East Timor crisis in 1999 needs also to be understood in this militarist tradition, or, as Paul Kelly (1999:25) phrased it, in terms of ‘the Australian tradition of military commitment to a foreign war’, and of Prime Minister Howards’s own reference (quoted in Hyland 1999:15) to Australia’s ‘great military tradition’ when its troops were sent to East Timor in 1999.
In a parallel militarist tradition, not all Australian soldiers are engaged in peacekeeping activities or are fighting for and paid by Australia. Micool Brooke (2000:24) writes of ‘a different type of Australian soldier—the mercenary ex-service man—[who] has largely gone unnoticed’: these Australian mercenaries, ie, those Australian soldiers who are not paid by Australia have fought, and some, covertly, are still fighting for rebel armies in ‘Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bougainville, Irian Jaya, Africa, and possibly even Chechnya’ (ibid), though exact numbers involved are unavailable. The renewed emergence of the militarist streak in the Australian psyche, and as a factor in its foreign relations repertoire, calls for serious examination and explanation.
Australians’ minds had been conditioned into believing the worst of their potential foes prior to World War II (for an extended discussion, see Walker 1999), so that when war came and they did meet in battle, the Australian soldier generally accepted his European/German enemy as human, but generally treated his Japanese opponents as culturally incomprehensible and sub-human (for a detailed account of the views of returned Australian soldiers, see Johnston 2000). In fact, wars have been the occasions for generations of Australians to be exposed to Asia. Robin Gerster (2000:18), an Asianist, adds: ‘War has been the major historical agent in bringing Australians into contact with Asian peoples. A long historical sequence of military engagements in “Oriental” theatres against broadly constructed “Oriental” adversaries has done much to entrench the view of Asia as alien and as threatening, as “the enemy”. War and its aftermath makes Asia relevant to us, especially if Australians are actually involved—as most  recently illustrated by the insufferably smug, sanctimonious coverage of Our Boys rescuing the people of East Timor.’

In times to come, when ex-colonies demand, as they are apt to do, that former colonial powers apologise for the dispossession of dignity and material resources of the former colonised peoples, Australia too cannot but line up with head bowed alongside its erstwhile ‘great and friendly’ Western colonial allies. The din of voices demanding that Japan apologise for cruelties perpetrated on colonies it liberated from Western colonial powers in World War II has not distracted Asians from reminding the ex-colonial powers that a day will come when colonialism and racism are classified as crimes against humanity and when discussions will take place from a position of equality, ie, that a day of reckoning is at hand.

For example, as a counter to demands from the British public for the Emperor of Japan to apologise for Japan’s past colonial misdeeds, the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has called on Britain to acknowledge its own ‘dark history’ of colonial rule (New Straits Times 28 May 1998:20), claiming that being the largest colonial power before World War II, it ‘was responsible for many barbarous acts, such as the 1840 to 1842 opium wars’, and one notes the barbarism of Britain’s responses to calls for Indian independence in the 19th and 20th centuries. To charges of the Japanese government not admitting to atrocities in the ‘Nanking Massacre’ (Irwin 1999), Ko Unoki (1999:8), Senior Fellow at the 21st Century Public Policy Institute in Tokyo, replies: ‘I for one await with much anticipation the day when the US government admits that the fire-bombings of Tokyo and the nuclear attacks on civilians during WW II were clear violations of international law and atrocities. I lived in the US for a long time but I never encountered an educated American who would admit to the fact that what the US did in the name of justice was simply an atrocity that surpasses the scale and level of Nanking.’

So too, as John Pilger (Interview, BBC World Service News, 30 April 2000) remarked, the children in the US are not taught the unseemly story of how and why the US forces came to be involved in the Vietnam war of the 60s and 70s because it would disillusion them over their country’s role in that conflict. If the truth were told, Pilger argues, the US government and its education authorities would have to roll-back the propaganda that had been fed to successive generations of its people, young and old, primarily through movie versions coming out of Hollywood. At the 25th anniversary of the American defeat in Vietnam, the children in the US would still have heard a US presidential hopeful, Senator John McCain (International Herald Tribune 29-30 April 2000:5), tell the world that ‘the wrong side won’. A firm rebuttal came from Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman Pham Thuy Thanh (ibid), who said: ‘It runs counter to the norms of morality that those people who brought bombs and shells to sow death among our people and wreck havoc with a country now pass themselves off as having the right to criticize their victims-cum-saviors.’ One must again allude here to numerous occasions when Australia colluded with its Western allies to suppress nascent nationalist resistance in Asia.8 And, yes, Australians marched off to India too as far back as 1858, having dispatched the Sydney-based 77th Regiment and Artillery forces to help quell those unruly and mutinous natives who dared challenge the might of the British Empire.

The Australian Government which is reluctant to apologise and make restitution for the barbaric colonisation and dispossession of its indigenous people, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia (The Australian 2 June 1998), may well have a great deal more in store if/when the ex-colonised of the British and US empires, which Australia still identifies with, seek not only condemnation by some type of international judicial tribunal, but also apologies and financial restitution from Australia for its role as a banner-carrying member of those empires. The fate that awaits Australians in this regard has still to register with them.9
 

Race Relations and Restitution

The racism emerging in more recent times targets not so much those who do not belong to the Anglo-race (that remains an undertow recurring with metronomic regularity), as those who arrive encumbered with cultural, religious, linguistic, family, and other value-affinities/appendages which render them problematic as ideal citizens with attachment primarily, if not exclusively, to the values of the nation state and the national unity of Australia. In 1984, Geoffrey Blainey (1984) raised a stir by announcing that Australia was overly Asianised to a point that the old Anglo-British values were being threatened; besides, he added for good measure, the older ‘frontline suburbs’ in western Sydney and Melbourne were beginning to fill ‘with greasy smoke and smell of goat meat.’ His message was that the old British-based social cohesion was withering away. In 1988, the One Australia, advocated by John Howard (The Age 9 September 1988) as then leader of the Opposition in Australia, expressed deep concern over the family reunion scheme in the then Australian immigration policy because it was perceived to reinforce ethnic cohesion, which was thought to work against a pure affinity to national unity and the state. Howard was later to retreat from his discriminatory stance on immigration policy, but not from his vision of One Australia. Then in 1996, Pauline Hanson repeated history with her maiden speech to the Australian parliament, when she accused Asian immigrants of forming ghettos and of not assimilating into the Anglo-Australian model; and she was joined in her criticism ‘by lobby groups, certain academics and, most importantly, by some leading political figures’ (Jayasuriya and Kee 1999:16).

Henry Reynolds, throughout his work, has portrayed Aborigines as having physically resisted the aggressors, and having quite often engaged their oppressors in public debate. Perhaps subject to an attack by white racists of a less overt and not actually genocidal nature, Asian peoples have been seen to be mostly ‘compliant’; and there are documented instances of Aboriginal people pretending to be Asian to share a quieter oppression (see, for example, Sally Morgan’s autobiographical text My place (1987)). Jayasuriya and Kee (1999:85-86) say Asian-Australians have been more compliant if compared to similar groups in Canada and the US, even if their resistance has been ‘more visible’ after the Hanson attack than in 1984, when after attacked by historian Geoffrey Blainey, ‘opposition ... was orchestrated primarily by fair-minded liberal Australians.’ Jayasuriya and Kee (ibid) continue: ‘The Australian community more generally, as well as government agencies, including those responsible for equal opportunity programs and community relations, have not been sufficiently responsive to the disadvantage, inequalities, and marginalisation experienced by groups of Asian-Australians.’ They explain: ‘For example, there is no acknowledgement of the “glass ceiling” experienced by Asian-Australian professionals and technocrats, or of extremely poor rates of Asian-Australian representation in key sectors such as in the federal and state public service, university governance, government advisory bodies—including those dealing with Asia-Australia relations—corporate leadership and the media.’

With exceptions, for all their professional standing in the Australian community, Asians have been largely voiceless in public debates concerning their disadvantage and vilification. For long it has been left to others, to white liberal Australians mostly, to defend Asian-Australians, doubtless due not only (if, indeed, much at all) to consenting silence but also to the nature of the oppression itself, ie, the ‘glass ceiling’ in academic and academic publishing circles (cf Chan 1995). This makes noteworthy the contributions of authors like Laksiri Jayasuriya and Kee Pookong, and that of their publisher, Melbourne University Press, for enabling Asian-Australians to enter the public debate.
One notes the use of an otherwise acceptable social principle, such as ‘different but not unequal’ in human relations, as a means of excluding Asians from entry into Australia at the Versailles conference after World War 1, and one recalls that at Federation in 1901, the equally acceptable value of the preservation of democracy was used to exclude Asians from Australia. Now, once again as the new millennium commences, certain environmentally conscious groups seek to reduce immigration drastically, disproportionately affecting Asians (who now constitute a bigger proportion of would-be migrants compared with 25 years ago) even where it is explicitly stated that such a reduction should be racially non-discriminatory. This is despite the fact that environmentalists more than most others should think globally, as the natural world knows no national boundaries. Of course, many environmentalists do think globally, but in Australia there are also those who seek to exclude migrants in the apparent belief that it is both feasible and acceptable to maintain a green paradise in Australia by adopting a policy which (amongst other things) clearly increases ecological stresses elsewhere. They may also suddenly begin to think globally when commenting on environmental problems in other countries; they may be unhappy, too, with Aboriginal management of national parks, fearing that Aboriginal wilderness values may be less ‘pure’ than their own even though Aborigines have managed the land for millennia (HREOC 1994). Do such environmentalists cherish green values or white skins, one wonders? Ultimately, these lobbyists proceed on the argument that not to reduce migration and hence exclude Asians would lead to a fall in the existing standard of living in Australia, an argument that extended from ecology to economy would draw considerable anticipatory support across the Australian population. Hage (1998)) demonstrates in detail how this link is made rhetorically in his evocatively titled chapter, ‘Ecological Nationalism: Green Parks/White Nation’.

Meanwhile, the radio waves in Australia enthusiastically carry ethno-and-other-phobic messages. The comperes of Australian radio talkback programmes, who Phillip Adams (1999:32) calls ‘shock-jockers’, command vast followings of faithful listeners. Radio talkback in Australia is for many ordinary Australians what TV panel discussions are to intellectually trained talking heads. Adams, himself a long-time and respected electronic and print media personality, occasionally provides us with glimpses of the lower life of talkback shows. Once, he recalls, pluralists, the likes of the erudite Barry Jones, compered talkback, but stations discovered that ‘it was more profitable to replace discussions with diatribes.’ Adams describes listeners who had been trained by ‘shock-jocks’ like Alan Jones, John Laws and Stan Zemanek: ‘Having learned that outbursts of vilification could lead to rewards (cases of grog, free meals in restaurants, personalised watches), they’d come on air ranting against one or more of the following: poofters, Vietnamese, Asian migrants in general, trade unionists, dole bludgers, do-gooders, feminists (or as Laws prefers to call them feminazis) and, most emphatically of all, Aborigines. They trained people in the basic skills of vilification.’ The comperes, with cult-status, model an automatic response to bigotry for their audiences. But what of the broadcasting industry’s code of ethics? Adams’ answer is quite explicit: ‘They took the industry’s code of ethics and wiped their backsides with them.’ Adams notes that the bullying, bigotry and bombast that drive talkback are not entirely alien to print journalism, but ‘the tabloid terrorists are but pale echoes of the emperors of the air.’ The influence of radio talkback on the formation of public opinion in matters relating to people-of-colour in Australia seems depressingly powerful.

Explaining the emergence of the Hanson phenomenon, Dennis Altman (1998:12) writes: ‘Hanson unsettles us because she has challenged what seemed to have been the accepted policies of the past decade, both the social and the cultural changes towards a more multicultural and diverse society and the triumph of economic rationalism and a particular view of the imperatives and advantages of globalisation.’ This points among other things to the failure of the liberal elite to address genuine suffering in rural Australia not unconnected with those claimed imperatives and advantages, and its willingness to allow the racist parts of the Hanson message (Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians kind-of-style) to flourish, as the debate surrounding them may distract attention from difficult socio-economic questions.

Subsequently, government responses to Hanson, however wishy-washy and centered in crass economism, have apparently been sufficient to put her party in its place. At the October 1998 Federal election, ONP polled less than ten percent of the vote nationally, and other parties overwhelmingly (although not universally) agreed to place her last on the preferential ballot paper; this was sufficient to elect only one parliamentarian, a senator from Queensland (Heather Hill) who was subsequently found ineligible to sit under Section 44 of the Constitution, which relates to unrenounced allegiance to a foreign power (in this case, the United Kingdom). Of course there is a delicious irony that ONP’s elected representative should have been found to be herself of inadequate Aussieness. Pauline Hanson lost her own seat (AEC 1998, Vol.1:i, 32-34, 56-57; Vol.4:9-14). In the wake of all this, Hanson may be said to calm rather than unsettle ‘us’ as ‘we’, meaning the liberal elite, ostensibly hold racism beyond the palisade as the characteristic of a few country rednecks only. Eventually, there was general agreement that one just cannot say those kinds of things in polite global society. But covert racism of the ilk we will discover in TB continues largely unabated as we wallow in the warm righteous glow of Ms Hanson’s disappearance from the political scene. As Lisa Bellear (1999:73) reminds us, ‘By focusing only on ... Ms Hanson ... often people forget to look within their local environment. Perhaps it is easier to target Ms Hanson than to examine our views on racism and how we contribute to the maintenance of racism by not speaking out when it occurs at our door step.’ Mercifully, as we have said, that is not the whole story, but neither can it be expunged from the story.

The lava of racism is always there in Australia and for some periods it may be publicly inactive; mostly it splutters and simmers below the surface. Then from time to time the lava of Australian racism bursts forth, singeing mainstream Anglo relations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Asian others, before again receding to a quiet simmer. The occurrence and re-occurrence of this phenomenon, like periodic volcanic eruptions, comes with varying responses and is to be expected given the attitude of some groups, extremely regrettable to other groups, and unconscionable to a small group of very courageous Australians.

Attitudes towards racism, and racial attitudes, in Australia are by no means of a kind. Relatively recently, Australians have sought to keep in check these ‘white’ tendencies by legislation which makes race vilification illegal, and on the whole, at the (pre-Hanson) level of public discourse anyway, the negative tendencies have (quite properly) been kept in check. However, it is probable that in recent years Australian elites have pushed through proactive legislation with respect to anti-racism which has yet to gain the support of significant sections of Australian society—‘the deep-seated vein of Australian racism that has been muted by post-Whitlam identity politics’ (Langton 1997:92), ‘a new national narrative … that has few connections with shared popular experience’ (Brett 1996:200)—ensuring Australians remain divided among themselves over race: hence the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. Richard Hall (1998:3) traces Pauline Hanson’s code word scapegoating of Asian migrants as being ‘in a direct line of descent from the unrelenting racism and violence of many Australians towards Chinese in the nineteenth century.’ And when resentment over specific issues perceived in racial terms has simmered for some time and banked up, especially when a matter of some existential importance with financial ramifications comes to the boil (such as not so much Mabo as Wik, the provision of health and other social welfare benefits to recently arrived migrants-of-colour, and the arrival of boat-refugees from Asia), then the more recently grafted inclusivity gives way to more primevally xenophobic urges, and the venom flows.10

An inescapable point which emerges is that, among Australian government and non-government bodies, there is a clear line of argument, a tendency perhaps, continuing from early times to now, which has it that in the defence of certain generally preferred values, such as the preservation of liberal democracy or the preservation of a standard of living, it is sometimes necessary to set aside the liberal democratic ideal itself to which one normally adheres as the corner-stone of one’s social and political ideology so as to enforce racially discriminating practices. It also implies, yet again, that the indigenous inhabitants of the land, the Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, have to this day no rights which make it necessary for the descendants of the convict and free white immigrant settlers of pre-Federation and the immigrants of post-Federation Australia to consult them on such matters as who will be welcomed as immigrants into the land.
 

Marketing Australia in Asia:
Students from Abroad

There have been in Australia racist and/or imperialist/colonial tendencies towards the Pacific that stretch a long way back. This type of knowledge is not unknown to Asian leaders and opinion makers. But in general, Australians seem surprised that they are contextualised and portrayed in this shonky role hoping perhaps that no one would link Australian negative attitudes to people-of-colour in Australia with those abroad . However, a few perceptive Australians immediately foresaw disastrous implications in the rise of Hansonism. In an early analysis of the Hanson phenomenon, Professor Robert Manne (1996:13) noted: ‘It is simply not possible for Australia to quarantine a domestic political mood – based on nostalgia and irritation – from our international relations with the rather prickly governments and public opinions of the region in which we happen to live. In contemporary Europe, fringe, anti-immigrant parties are merely ugly. In contemporary Australia, the emergence of equivalent parties would be a disaster.’

Malaysian Professor Shamsul A. B. (1996:51-52), drawing on some of his own past experiences as a young overseas student in Australia, notes perceptively that the ‘single most powerful source of information’ about Australia in Malaysia, and vice versa, is formed by the oral tradition of ‘everyday talking’ (ibid 52), carried on outside of the politicians’ orbit and includes students, their parents and relatives, business people and the like. Their oral repertoire of nuanced and plain ‘everyday talking’ includes making jokes, telling stories about cross-cultural misunderstandings, exchanging stereotypes, narrating childhood experiences, love affairs and sexual encounters, complaining about the weather, advising friends about possible tertiary institutions or courses to enrol in, how to get a scholarship, where to work part-time, which Asian food shops and restaurants sell cheap groceries and takeaways, which travel agents offer cheap flights, where to get halal meat, and a host of other mundane matters (ibid:51-52). The venues for this ‘everyday talking’ include private homes, social gatherings, alumni meetings, coffee shops, business meetings, golfing, and the like (ibid:50). The importance of this oral and essentially social mode of communication cannot be sufficiently stressed. It is also the channel through which the many kindnesses that Asian people-of-colour, as students, parents, tourists or business people, experience when in contact with particular Australian individuals are narrated with lasting appreciation and ‘with (hopefully) deep and positive links to Australia’ (Sheridan 1995:16).

So too with the other side of the experience, where the memories of Asian students’ encounters with white Australian host families and individuals are as lasting but very hurtful. The thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of slights (offensive language, sniggering, wink-wink-nudge-nudge asides, mocking gestures and speech, and the like) directed at Asian students and Asian families in Australia in the last (say) quarter of a century would have been regularly relayed to families and close friends in Asia, and these would have multiplied the number of hearers many times over in the telling and the re-telling. More pointedly, Asian students returning home on holidays carry back bundles of stories (which may well be a mixture of fact laced with a fable, the experienced and the imagined), telling of insults and intimidation in sporting venues, shopping centres, schools, universities, and tourist spots, and the stories are heard in silence, apprehension and smoldering resentment, and are remembered – all of which would be preserved in the defensive armory in dealings with Australia and Australians. But Australian school principals and university administrators continue to purr unconvincingly that all is well, really well, in their institutions.

Even normally astute commentators are at times taken in by a Keatingesque hype that proclaims all is going well, fantastically well, when in fact race relations in Australia were always sour. Thus, Greg Sheridan (1995:14-15) wrote in 1995: ‘The [race debate] coverage in the Australian press of the spasmodic immigration debate throughout the 1980s was damaging to our national interests. But our Asian friends should now realize that while we had a frank and full debate, sometimes a rancorous, acrimonious and even malicious debate, we resolved it.’ He adds: ‘Yet it is forever surprising to me how widely held, especially in South-East Asia, is the view that the White Australia Policy lives on.’ It lives. For Pauline Hanson and the sizeable support One Nation Party attracted in Australia in 1998 have cemented the existence of the White Australia Policy in Southeast Asian psyches as never before! While Pauline Hanson herself or her party might fade from the political scene, even disappear, the effects of Hansonism lingers in Asian minds and accumulates in geometric proportions. ‘The Asian immigration debate of the 1980s told us something about the kind of nation we are becoming,’ writes Sheridan (ibid), who then adds: ‘We are truly a nation of the new world, whose citizens suffer under no hierarchy of descent.’ He explains: ‘In Australia you can write your own script – you can, if you want, reinvent yourself. It is in that sense (whatever the swings in the economic cycle) a land of opportunity, where it is what you do that counts, not where you come from or the colour of your skin.’ Not quite.

A recent research commissioned by IDP Education Australia and undertaken at the University of New South Wales (original source, Pittaway, Ferguson and Breen 1998:61-71; also reported in The Australian 7 October 1998 and New Straits Times 27 October 1998:15) notes that ‘The research assistant who conducted the interviews was shocked at the amount of unconscious racism which was expressed by the interviewees’ (ibid 69). One student commented bluntly that ‘If you really wanted to know what the majority of local students felt about international students, you just have to read the back of the toilet doors’, while another said: ‘There are too many Asians and they are too competitive, they annoy me by doing things like playing with their pens in exam reading time’. This makes it apparent that race and colour (as the overwhelming majority of overseas students are coloured) do matter a good deal in Australia, even though the researchers who conducted this particular study subsequently wrote to The Australian (14 October 1998) complaining that the paper’s original article ‘focused exclusively on minority racist comments contained in one paragraph of the report’. The question then is: If the amount of racism among the interviewees ‘shocked’ the interviewer, why did it merit only one paragraph in a ten-page paper? In fact, the negatives are reported in more than one paragraph and on more than one page. Over eighty per cent of the interviewees, they said, identified various benefits they derived from the presence of overseas students, while ‘more than half thought that, in fact, there should be more overseas students’. However, people tend to under report racist attitudes when surveyed, knowing that such attitudes are not likely to be approved of by researchers and perhaps at some level feeling ashamed of them too. Anyway, if one has ever suffered injustice on the basis of race, gender, sexuality or the like, one knows that official statistical measures of the prevalence of that injustice are not really relevant when it touches one personally. Nevertheless, if statistics are deemed to be telling, one set shows that race discrimination complaints in the State of Victoria rose by 37% in the 1997-8 financial year (The Age 18 November 1998:8).
So, plainly, there are Australians who are not re-inventing themselves into hospitable people. Anthony Milner (2000:17), an Australian Asianist, reminds fellow-Australians: ‘Although no longer in our domestic headlines, reports from virtually every part of the [Asia-Pacific] region suggests the Hanson phenomenon goes on undermining years and years of diplomatic and public relations work, reviving the image of Australia as a white enclave, at odds with the region in which we are located.’ Little wonder then the whisper on Asian streets, in cities, towns and villages, still is that Australia is a racist country.
 

Sporting Scandals: Cricket, Olympics

Unfortunately, the most enlightened and democratic women and men in authority in Australia comfortably denigrate the ONP and its followers in unawareness of their own shortcomings, which not uncommonly include covert racism. This racism shows itself not in the name-calling and overt illiberalism of Pauline Hanson’s relatively small band of avowed supporters. It shows rather, in an unshakeable, (apparently) unconscious, and rather unfounded attitude of superiority, in particular with regard to what might be termed administrative morality: democracy and human rights (as discussed), corruption, environmental propriety, fair play in everyday conduct and (not least!) racial tolerance. So entrenched is this attitude that breathtaking hypocrisy is a quite natural response when anything arises which might appear to challenge its foundation.

Two issues playing themselves out in 1999 in the world of sport may illustrate this pattern (for a fuller account, see Kell 2000): the cricket ‘bookie’ scandal and the bribery scandal surrounding various Olympic bids including Sydney 2000. In the case of the former, it turned out that the Australian Cricket Board suppressed from the public and the Pakistani courts the fact that two of its players had accepted money from a bookmaker in India, while at the same time encouraging those same players both in their public accusations against Pakistani cricketers who allegedly bribed them and in the court proceedings which followed (see, eg, several articles in The Age of 25 February 1999:Sport 1-3). As far as Olympic bids are concerned, matters are still coming to light. However, in December 1998, Phil Coles, then of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), reacted with outrage when Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler suggested, in the process of blowing the whistle on the bid of Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics, that he knew all about Sydney’s bid. “I know what happened but I don’t want to disclose it,” said Hodler, adding “Sydney pretends it is completely clean, clean, clean.” An apology was demanded, with Mr Coles describing the allegations as “a monumental slur on the name of Sydney” (Magnay 1998). Subsequently it became clear that illegal inducements had been offered to secure IOC delegates’ votes for Sydney, echoing an earlier pattern in Adelaide’s unsuccessful bid for the 1998 Commonwealth Games documented by Cordingley (1999) in Asiaweek (12 February 1999:40-41).
There was also an underhand public relations campaign mounted against Beijing’s record on human rights, via the USA, with the priority being that “what might be interpreted as dirty tricks must not be traced back to Sydney”, as Gerard Ryle and Gary Hughes put it in their coverage of the issue in the Sydney Morning Herald (6 March 1999). Finally, it became apparent that the very same Mr Phil Coles and his family had received illegal largesse in connection with the Salt Lake City bid, ultimately leading to Coles’ forced resignation from SOCOG on 14 June 1999 (extensively reported in all major Australian newspapers the next day).

Two patterns become apparent in this: the desire to maximise clean appearance while minimising clean practice, and the sheeting home of corruption which does become undeniable to the errors of judgement or peccadilloes of individuals. This compares unfavourably with, eg, the judicial process promptly set up and followed through in Pakistan to investigate alleged corruption in cricket in that country.
 

Australian Entrepreneurs Abroad

The spectacle of Australian sportspeople, politicians, businesspeople, and entrepreneurial educationists, flanked by local and expatriated subalterns (see Gramsci 1971, Guha 1982 and Spivak 1999 for explication of subaltern), floundering on Asian tarmacs as they reflect, uncomprehendingly, on the minor deals they may have clinched and bigger ones they nearly clinched which in the end went to water, is real, sad, far from a pretty sight, and is wholly understandable. It is also an account of a people who ventured forth into the wide world in a tradition of having no clear definition of themselves, giving the impression that all they needed was a banner to chase, a deal to cut, a baggage of trite jingoistic slogans to chant and less than worthy racist/imperialist tendencies couched in highfalutin terms of a mangled democratic liberalism on which to fall back to explain what went wrong. Professor Stephen FitzGerald, long associated with Australian initiatives in Asia over the last three decades, in areas such as business, education and diplomacy, has graphically described the inglorious motivation which drove Australian forays into Asia from the 1980s on. In business dealings, he writes (FitzGerald 1995:160), Australia was motivated by the ‘El Dorado mentality’—‘in for the short haul, the quick return, the profit jackpot; make a decision to go in but make another decision within less than a year to pull out because the spoils were said to be there for the picking in North America, or somewhere else.’

The idea of education as an export-commodity is not exactly new in Australia; it was anticipated in the 19th century. As noted earlier, following a visit to India, Alfred Deakin (1893, extract in Gerster (ed.) 1995:81) talked about it: ‘We are near enough to readily visit India and be visited. Its students might come to the universities of our milder climate instead of facing the winters of Oxford, Paris, or Heidelberg.’ More recently, Australian schools and universities entered the Asian market at the heels of the Australian business people, and were motivated by similar greed. ‘They went for the money,’ says FitzGerald (ibid:161). He adds: ‘The charge was led by people who had no knowledge of or intellectual interest in the societies they visited. And they established a fine reputation for Australian universities as the carpetbaggers, the gold diggers, the mercenaries of education, …’

If Australian initiatives are reported to have improved lately, the gaps in the improvement are showing as the following suggests11. The Minister of Education in the state of Queensland, Mr Dean Wells, typically sums up the economic and moralising arguments in a combined State and universities AUD$200,000 marketing campaign of ‘positive messages’: in a report titled ‘Goodwill towards Asia on the roll’ (The Australian 12 August 1998:33), he says that ‘the consequences of prejudicing Queensland’s $275 million-a-year turnover in international students were “too horrible to think about”.’ ‘But,’ he adds quickly, ‘it was not just a matter of money.’ The report continues, quoting the Minister as saying: ‘As an educator, Australia had a moral influence on the rest of the world. “Our capacity to go to the rest of the world and say, we insist that you observe human rights – how can we do that if that’s going to be undermined by a race debate back at home?” ’ Thus, it is recognised that there is some sort of issue, but essentially only a marketing one to be addressed with marketing tools. Similarly, research reported on in 1997 by IDP Education Australia, the company representing the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee responsible for marketing Australian education overseas, revealed in the words of its chief executive Dr Denis Blight that ‘incredible as it may seem to us, in at least one country [Malaysia] students perceive Australia as having higher levels of racial discrimination than the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom’ (Campus Review 1-7 October 1997). Since Dr Blight is responsible for making Australia look as attractive as possible to overseas students, his recognition that Australia has at least an image problem suggests something may be quite deeply amiss. However, this recognition is presented as most likely ‘incredible’ to Australian ears, and the need Dr Blight identified was for ‘a strategy in Malaysia to avoid the MISperception that we are “racist” ’ (emphasis ours). The ‘mis’ neatly shifts all blame on to the Malaysian perceiver, whatever ‘they’ might think; there is a conviction, which we will find is foreshadowed in the (ostensibly) fictional world of TB, that ‘our’problems have been critically, openly and satisfactorily resolved. More recent research though suggests at the very least that a priori assumptions about Australia not being racist are dangerous.

A Fractured View of the Region and Its Peoples, and an Ambivalence

How does one begin to meaningfully frame what might be actually happening in these and related circumstances? Judith Brett (1996:184) asks: ‘How do non-Aboriginal Australians explain to themselves why they are living thousands of miles from where their ancestors were born, and how do they understand what it is that links them to the other and its offshore islands in the middle of the southern ocean in the last decade of the twentieth century?’ Australia is a nation that itself was called a colony (hence it now claims to be post-colonial itself) at the same time as being a nation that itself still colonises its indigenous peoples. This becomes even more complicated in light of Australia’s record of now claiming to be a white member nation in a region to which for a long period it asserted its racial and cultural superiority.
As Suvendrini Perera (1997:338-339) describes it in ‘Representation Wars’, an essay dealing with the conflicts over representation between Australia and Malaysia: ‘The claim authoritatively to represent, and therefore to know Malaysia cannot be separated from the various kinds of authority that are combined in Orientalism, the cluster of knowledges about “oriental” cultures that has underwritten Western imperialism. In Australia recent recognitions of—and celebratory explorations into—a new-found “post-colonial” condition often pass over the problems posed by an older national self image of Australia as regional heir to the coloniser’s discarded mantle. This history positions Australia in an unequal and uneasy triangle with Europe (especially Britain) at one end, and “Asia” on the other—a relationship perceived as a set of continuing hierarchical rearrangements based on current conditions of military, economic and cultural (which also at times includes “racial”) superiority.’ A fourth member, the US, was enticed into the club by Australian Prime Minister John Curtin during World War II (Evans and Grant 1995:22), making a quadrangle of it, and later cemented in with the ANZUS Treaty. The marked Westernness of the bedfellows has added to the ease/unease of the Australian image in the Asia-Pacific region in which Australia wishes to enmesh itself, if not as an Asian power, then at least as a regional member state.
Australia occasionally wades into the arena of world politics as a nation with an independent line of thought and action, even claiming to be post-colonial, yet, as noted earlier, Australia has seldom been physically and in spirit absent from any serious Western-initiated militaristic action to subdue one or other seemingly querulous Asian, Pacific and African group of natives. Even to Australians, successive Australian governments are increasingly acknowledged ‘to make ad hoc [foreign policy] commitments resulting from [US] presidential phone calls’ (O’Connor 1998:22). So Asians too wonder: Where is the independence in Australia’s foreign policy? How do Australians separate their interests from the US or more generally Western interests? There is urgent need for some clarification on Australia’s part. Former Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral reminded Australian journalist Greg Sheridan (1999b:23) that, over the issue of India’s nuclear testing in 1998, he had advised Australians to ‘[first] get out from under the American umbrella, then talk to us.’

On the heels of US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in March 2000, visibly shadowing the US presidential presence, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer also arrived in India—Indian officials said moves for the Downer visit came from the Australian side (Mackinnon 2000:9), after which Downer claims Indian officials raised the matter of the lifting of defence sanctions (Kremmer 2000:13)—seeking to mend ties between the two countries. It is doubtful what significant moves Australia is likely to make in the wake of the US’s own confused position over India. Indian listeners were amused when, in his address to the Indian parliament during his visit in March 2000, US President Bill Clinton (New Straits Times 24 March 2000:21) urged the Indian government to accept two treaties which his own government had not signed—in fact, the nuclear test-ban treaty had been soundly rejected by the US Senate in 1999, and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change calling for sharp reductions in heat-trapping ‘greenhouse’ gases by polluting nations (the leading offender is the US, whereas India ranks only seventh) had not by then been even presented to Congress.

With India shaping up as a potentially major market, Australia’s ‘flawed policy’ was beginning to show (Kremmer 2000:13) of defence sanctions imposed on India in 1998 after its nuclear tests, together  with Australia’s penchant for selective human rights stances (yes abroad, but not at home—see Australia’s rejection of UN criticism of its bad human rights record in the treatment of Indigenous Australians (The Weekend Australian 1-2 April 2000:11)) . India’s nuclear position between 1998 and March 2000 remained the same; so Australia’s imposition of sanctions in 1998 and lifting of them in 2000 could be explained by the fact that Australia became suddenly aware that the US presidential visit to India in March 2000 indicated a flexibility in the US stance towards India; and there was no way Australia was going to allow an adherence to principles of nuclear non-proliferation to stand in the way of opportunities for trade with India. So much for a principled and independent Australian foreign policy, for the moment anyway. Tired of his country’s constant shadowing of US manoeuvres in the region, at the dawn of the new millennium, former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser (2000a:13; see also 2000b:13) called on his fellow Australians to effectively reverse their traditional mode of foreign policy thinking which assumes the necessity of a US presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Australian role in world affairs has been rather confusing to many observers. A less than focused, actually fractured, role which Australia is perceived to exercise in the Asia-Pacific region may well issue from a deep-seated ambivalence it feels towards peoples-of-colour in regions outside its national boundaries, which in turn reflects an unresolved relationship with peoples-of-colour within its national boundaries – all of which raises real doubts about Australia’s claims to post-coloniality.
Notes

1 Few are aware that, besides philosophy, Kant also taught Geography and was the first ever to introduce a course in anthropology in a German university in the winter of 1772-3; and his students would have learnt of his racial taxonomy of humans (Kantian extract in Eze 1997:48), as follows:
   Stem genus: white brunette
   First race, very blond (northern Europe), of damp cold.
   Second race, copper-red (America), of dry cold.
   Third race, black (Senegambia), of dry heat.
   Fourth race, olive-yellow (Indians), of dry heat.
2 For a positioning of the central values of the European Enlightenment, see Chapter 3.
3 For extended discussions of some of these issues, see that excellent collection of essays in Padmini Mongia (ed.) 1996.
4 The ‘we’ in this case is akin in Malay to the more exclusive kami meaning us-excluding-them, in contrast to the all inclusive kita meaning us-excluding-no-one.
5 As we will see, a type of cultural cleansing which accompanies a hard demand for an undefiled citizenship rears its head in Asia too (see below, comment by Professor Carolina Hernandez, Chapter 2, 29n).
6 The situation of those in post-colonial societies attempting to understand their positions in terms of the demands of more abstract entities such as the state and the globalised world is one of uneasy complexity, as Ashcroft et al (1998:155-156) demonstrate in the Jameson- Ahmad-Guha debate. The issue of post-colonial narratives is a case in point. Frederick Jameson (1986:85ff) has suggested that the telling of the individual story must eventually involve telling of the experience of the collective group itself; thus ‘a certain nationalism in the Third World’, an account of a national ‘generalised other’, is necessary for the narrative to be more completely and thus better understood. But Aijaz Ahmad (1987:20ff) is critical, accusing Jameson (a fellow Marxist) of defining societies by relations of international dominance instead of defining them by relations of production. Through the Subaltern Studies project, Ranajit Guha (1982) offers a way around the nationalist/class tussle by pointing out that the post-colonial nation-state can only be understood by examining in detail aspects such as class, region, gender and other social formations and tensions. So, to be cautious about the nation-state is not a bad thing especially in these post-colonial times and contexts, and it is important and necessary that it be studied closely. As individuals and groups position themselves with reference to the state, the region and globalisation, they will grapple with issues of concreteness and abstraction in various forms and at various levels (as discussed in Chapter 3).
7   Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ speech to the Australian Parliament giving an account of his ‘stewardship’ in carving out an independent Australian posture in the debates preceding the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in France, quoted as an extended document in Hudson (1978:125).
8 Some Australian commentators during the Cold War years (J.V. D’Cruz included) failed to fully grasp a genuineness in nationalist causes in Africa and Asia, as having integrity in their own right, not always a Trojan horse for communist designs. For a re-run of the old line that Vietnam was and is (and ever shall be?) Leninist/Stalinist—nothing nationalist about its primitive Communist urges—see Stephen J. Morris (2000:8). For an Australian defense of the Domino Theory by veteran journalist Denis Warner, twenty five years after the fall of Saigon, see Warner (2000:6).
9   We are not calling for any such international trials wherein Australia would be ridiculed and condemned and made to make restitution for its past (and continuing) racism. However, the prospect of such trials happening—though not imminent—does seem inevitable, not because they are likely to do much good especially for the injured, but because the horrors of such racial crimes are still not generally understood and acknowledged with genuine remorse in many Australian circles including the government.

   The horror (and the nearness) of genocide as an instrument of racial policy is explained by the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita (2000:8) in discussing why, for example, the crimes against the stolen generation of Australian Aboriginal people ‘sometimes constituted genocide’: ‘Think of the forcible sterilisation of a people committed with the intention that they be eliminated as a people. That would count as genocide on most people’s reckoning. At any rate, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be morally outraged at the suggestion that it does. But, in my judgment, there is no significant moral difference between it and the brutal removal of children from parents of a people held in racist disdain, with the intention that these removals (together with other things) would ensure their disappearance as a people. That happened, I believe, in parts of Australia during some of the time covered by Bringing them home [Wilson, Ronald 1997].’ Gaita (ibid) then quotes Hannah Arendt who suggests that we think of crimes against humanity as attacks ‘upon human diversity as such, upon a characteristic of the human status, without which the very words “mankind” or “humanity” would be devoid of meaning.’ And that is why failure to genuinely say sorry for what many experienced, and others view, as horrendous is very likely to invoke the kind of retribution which comes with enforced trials involving allegations of genocide.

  So, when the Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia (Peter Varghese) writes defensively to the New Straits Times (12 May 2000:13) suggesting that in response to the plight of the Stolen Generations the Australian government was spending $A63 million (RM 145 Million) over four years ‘towards assisting those affected by previous separation policies’, (as if money alone fixes the Stolen Generations problem), his Malaysian listeners would already know that (see Chapter 6) the first and most important thing the Indigenous people want is for the Australian Prime Minister to say the simple and healing word ‘Sorry’. The High Commissioner adds: ‘It would be a misreading of contemporary Australia to see the debate over the stolen children and reconciliation as a debate about race.’ The debate over the Stolen Generations, as we have seen in the discussion above, now concerns, at least in part, nothing less than genocide that was used on occasion to resolve an uncomfortable race issue in Australia!
10 A parallel pattern in personal relations is adumbrated in the Introduction and discussed further in Chapter 5, with particular reference to the role of language as a carrier of some of these less worthy tendencies.
11 Two former Australian academic colleagues travelling in Asia, one an Anglo-Australian and the other an Asian-Australian, met at the baggage collection point in an Asian airport. They had worked in the same Australian university for a number of years. The Anglo-Australian, who was a supervisor of its international education programme in his university, had in tow another gentleman of Asian extraction, and of subaltern status, who was his go-between in some Asian countries he visits to establish twining pragrammes. (Subalterns, commonly drawn from one or other ‘native’ people-of-colour also assumed to be conversant with other ‘native’ cultures encountered, are often engaged to obviate any necessity on the part of the white employer to actually learn anything beyond superficialities of another culture, and to be scapegoats for damage caused by the employer.) After the kind of checking-out which goes on between people who had not met for quite some time, (Paul Theroux (1999:77) calls it ‘ambassadorial bottom-sniffing’), the Anglo-Australian, experiencing some insecurity for no obvious reason, muttered in a lowered voice to his former colleague: ‘This is our territory. Keep out of it.’ (It could always be claimed that it was spoken in jest; but the intent was plain, and uttered and heard as a territorial claim.) The Anglo-Australian made that claim to his erstwhile colleague of Asian extraction, who was not marketing any Australian international programme abroad, and who in fact was standing in his country of birth. Meanwhile, the subaltern accompanying the Anglo-Australian squirmed, looking quite miserable, as subalterns are wont to feel they have failed in such circumstances.

  Nor was the incident without irony, and captures something of the ambivalent position and recuperative capacity of the subaltern class. As the moment of embarrassment stretched and awkwardness mounted, the disconcerted subaltern began to talk fast, loudly and a lot, explaining at some length how he was burdened with soo-o-much excess luggage which was about to land on them that his wife was sending to her relatives. When the baggages arrived, politely and with a by-your-leave, the subaltern plonked some of his excess baggage on the Anglo-Aussie’s trolley. The final scene was of the coloured subaltern comfortably leading the way towards customs with the Anglo-Aussie in tow, tugging at his own and the subaltern’s excess baggage. Unfortunately for some Australian entrepreneurial university administrators engaged in flogging off their international education, their imagined Asia is still configured with a colonial mentality and charted along territorial cantonment divisions. In such incidents, one is reminded that even among intellectually trained Australians, the colonial reflex is alive and amazingly well. Meanwhile, the subaltern had pulled off a take-and-double-take manoeuvre; and the white employer unaware that he was totally outclassed is fated to rely on the subaltern for as long as the latter wishes. (For an early discussion of the subaltern, see Antonio Gramsci 1971; for later discussions, see Guha 1982 and Spivak 1999.)

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