Between history and geography: Debates on Australia and Asia (original) (raw)
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Australia's unique future: Reconciling place, history and culture
Futures, 2007
During the recent years, Australia has once again opted for a conception of the world that centres on its European and especially American connections. The harsh treatment of asylum seekers, 'border protection', threatened pre-emptive action against terrorists in the region and intervention in Iraq have been proposed by the government-and to a considerable extent accepted by the electorate-as an investment in safety. For the best part of a decade, Australia's profound ambivalence towards Asia has resurfaced with a vengeance. This essay examines the psychological and political underpinnings of this 'leap into the past', and makes the case for a more promising policy direction for the future. It brings to both policy analysis and prescription an approach that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and the imaginary dividing line between the domestic and the international.
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003
This long book has at its heart Blanche D'Alpuget's Turtle Beach (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), a novel encapsulating Australia's attitude towards Asia today and in the past. Australia's ambivalence towards Asia spends several chapters preparing the reader for its critique of the novel and the film adaptation of the same name. It begins and ends by hammering home the belief that Australia is a racist nation and that white Australians from the very beginning of their stay in that country mistreated Aborigines and subsequently other people of colour who came to it. To prove that Australians are bigoted and racist, the book uses complex and sometimes opaque terminology. It establishes the concepts of 'concrete' and 'abstract' societies, for example, to analyse the major differences between Asian and Western societies (although it bends over backwards to stress that this in no way essentialises or 'fixes' these societies in broad stereotypes). The authors also utilise the tools of psychoanalysis to describe the 'early whites deposited' on Australian shores as 'children of the empire, socialised into it, and brutalised and petted by it, who could not imagine themselves or others in any but a hegemonic/abject binary' (p. 25). As that last quotation indicates, the book is a minefield of jargon. Its message would be lost in technical terms and convoluted post-modern syntax, except that it repeats its main points over and over again: white Australians from the very beginning of their stay in this country mistreated Aborigines and subsequently other people of colour who came here. Their racism was 'concealed within the Trojan horse of liberalism' (p. 26) and Australian racism persisted, despite the dismantling of the White Australia Policy in the mid-1960s, the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 (outlawing racist acts) and the official policy of multiculturalism introduced about the same time (pp. 27-8). The touchstone, the benchmark for all of this, is Turtle Beach (or TB as the authors call it). The long introduction and first few chapters prepare us, the readers, for their analysis of TB. They use a close reading of the text to make their point that 'The TB texts can (and do) overtly and more literally present a message of cultural evenhandedness while persistently and covertly undermining such a message' (p. 31). They do this by counting the number of times Malaysians are compared to animals or other non-human things such as plants. However, in doing this the authors omit quotes from TB in which Australians, for example, are likened to 'over-flowing garbage bins in a florist shop' (TB, p. 212). This last metaphor by Blanche D'Alpuget should indicate one of the problems with this work: its authors see many things as sinister that may simply be a product of her writing style. The persistent use of convoluted metaphors and similes in D'Alpuget's original
The Awkwardness of Australian Engagement with Asia: The Dilemmas of Australian Idea of Regionalism
Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2011
Australia has experienced difficulties engaging with Asia-Pacific regional integration. Despite Australian attempts to punch above its weight in regional forums and to be a regional leader, it is still not regarded as a full member or as quite fitting into the region. It is an ‘awkward partner’ in the Asian context, and has experienced the ‘liminality’ of being neither here nor there. The former Rudd government's proposal for an ‘Asia Pacific Community’ (APC) by the year 2020 was a substantive initiative in Australia's ongoing engagement with Asia. It has, however, attracted a high level of criticism both at home and abroad. The main critical analysis of the proposal has focused on institutional building or architecture, or its relationship with existing regional institutions, but overlooks a host of often fraught questions about culture, norms, identities, and international power relations. The APC concept needs to be scrutinized in terms of these questions with a critical ...
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Thesis Eleven, 2016
Western Australia (WA) has recently assumed an unaccustomed centrality in the minds of Australian policymakers. The recent resource boom briefly propelled WA to the forefront of national economic affairs. While this proved a relatively short-lived prominence , the emergence of WA at the centre of a putative 'Indo-Pacific' region promises to give it a more enduring strategic significance. This paper details how geopolitical and geoeconomic forces have shaped WA's developmental history, and why they are likely to do so in the future as well.
The Asia-Pacific Scramble and a 'Larger Australia'
There will be new and different role in the Asia-Pacific (A-P) for Australia as China 'rises;' and the United States declines. Australia has numerous similarities with Japan as an island-nation and especially with Japan as a country with regional hegemonic ambitions during and pre-World War Two. This article examines Australia in the new age of the A-P and proffers that a 'larger Australia' based on current immigration and foreign policies is a myth, one that is being held on to by its political elite in the hope that when the critical time arrives--that of militarily defending Australia--the resources will be in place for this to happen. As with Japan in World War Two there was hope, however based on its pre-WWII policies it was only that, a 'hope,' that never materialized into a reality.
In and Out of Place: Civilization Interaction and the Making of Australia in Oceania and Asia
Comparative Civilizations Review, 2019
The making of Euro-Australia occurred against the backdrop of two dimensions of its historical constitution. First, it occurred on the back of Britain’s entry into the Oceanian world and its intercivilizational encounters with Pacific cultures. The second dimension was the appropriation of the land of a complex and internally diverse Aboriginal civilization and suppression of its social world view. This was vital to a lasting sense of ambivalence in Australian identity and in the relations of the Commonwealth of Australia with island states in the Pacific. After Federation (1901), Australia became more independent in the context of devolution of the Commonwealth. Engagement in the Pacific War heralded a turn from allegiance to Britain to alliance with the United States. A new orientation to the Asia-Pacific was not a chosen course, but one compelled by geo-political conditions and a growing dynamism in this multicivilizational world region. From the 1970s to the end of the twentieth...