Alison Broinowski

Thanks to Alison Broinowski and Scribe, we now have an Australian booklet that seeks to make sense of the recent war in Iraq and of Australia’s participation in the war. Whatever shortcomings the book has – and shortcomings are inevitable when the slow art of book publishing seeks to keep up with contemporary events – its presence in the public arena is important, and both author and publisher have been brave in producing it so quickly.

Alison Broinowski reviews the accounts of Australia offered over the last hundred-odd years  by Asian ‘opinion leaders’ – generally  Asian politicians and journalists – but also those within Australia, including the Chinese headmen or community leaders, Colombo Plan students, and Asian-Australian fiction writers. It is perhaps surprising that such a diverse group of commentators from ten Asian countries – divided into the more powerful and more distant East Asian countries of China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea and India, and the less powerful but more proximate South-East Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines – has a constant refrain, albeit with contradictory undercurrents. The persistent themes are: Australia is ‘a physical space with a geography, but not … a mental space with a history or culture’, sometimes explained in terms of the convict heritage, and variously expressed in anti-intellectualism, simple-mindedness and stupidity; Australia is an economic failure, rich in natural resources but lacking the technology to develop these resources;(settler) Australia has always been White Australia, racist both in relation to indigenous Australians and Asians; Australia is a second-rate Western country, a ‘deputy sheriff’ or ‘dancing monkey’ to the United States, wanting to belong in Asia but not qualifying, although Australia’s aspirations are usually economically motivated; and Australia is marginal and irrelevant to Asia. ‘Australians seem more interested in “Asia” than “Asians” are in them’, even though Australians are accused of being largely ignorant about Asia.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.