Pandanus

These novels fulfil the brief of ANU’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, where Pandanus Press was founded in 2001, by viewing Australia and Australians from the perspectives of China and a distant island. In The Tao of Shepherding, set in the 1850s, two young Chinese men are kidnapped and sold as labourers to a Riverina sheep property, where they lose all hope of returning to civilisation. The Lost Tribe is mellower, in that the Pacific is crossed in both directions in its counter-pointed narratives, one set in the present and the other in the 1860s. These second novels, by promising Australian authors with direct knowledge of the countries depicted in them, offer insights into cross-cultural interactions, myths and religion.

Papua New Guinea is definitely not one of the grand colonial stories. There is no tradition of empire, no tales of the raj, to be glorified or excoriated by historians and other nostalgics. Mostly, the various German, Australian and Japanese colonial administrations were not infrequently racist and stupid, often brutal and overwhelmingly unimaginative. Australia’s colonising and neo-colonising of what has become PNG was always, and still is, principally focused on its security interests, not on bringing civilisation to noble savages or developing a thriving economy. The colonial Australians who ventured into the oppressive heat, spectacular mountains, awesome rainforests and malarial swamps mostly comprised parsimonious bureaucrats, rugged patrol officers, no-nonsense police, Christian evangelists, and fugitives of pretty well every kind – ‘missionaries, marxists, and misfits’, as the saying goes.

One sun-filled Saturday in spring 2000, I wandered through Salamanca market, in and around the historic sandstone buildings on Hobart’s waterfront. After a long absence, I expected the arts and crafts, antiques, and books amid tourists and the local caffe latte set. What surprised me were stalls of beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables, grown and sold by smiling ethnic Hmong. The bright front cover of The Hmong of Australia zooms into that image of my memory.

It is pleasing to learn from sociologist Roberta Julian that, for Tasmanians, the Hmong ‘symbolise a new openness to Asia’. Yet it is disconcerting to be told: ‘Insofar as the Hmong are accepted as Tasmanians, however, their identity has become commodified, trivialised and marginalised … a superficial Hmong identity.’ Any more so than that of the Han Chinese and Italian vendors, who draw camera-clicking busloads to Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market? Or that of the colourfully clad Hmong minority in China’s southern Yunnan province, ancestral homeland of the Hmong?

In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.

In 1927 the London firm Chatto & Windus published a book titled A Chinaman’s Opinion of Us and of His Own People. Supposedly the translated letters of a young Chinese man, Hwuy-Ung, sent home during his years spent in Melbourne, the writing suggested itself to its European and Australian readership as a delightful take on their society as witnessed by an innocent outsider; an enchanting, amusing and unwittingly insightful journal of a sensitive and bewildered Oriental gentleman. Written by an Australian called Theodore John Tourrier, the book was eventually exposed as a hoax, a cheeky, vaudeville-style tease hamming up the image of the courteous and comical Chinaman.

Geckos and Moths is a time capsule. A note by the author, Patricia Johnson, indicates that the first draft of the book was written thirty years ago, after her partner had drowned in the Trobriand Islands. In many cases, a book begun so long ago and in such circumstances might best have been left in the bottom drawer.

Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.