Asian Studies

Jamie Mackie’s recent death was a sad reminder of a time when enthusiasm for Asian studies mirrored the Australian government’s developing perception that the future lay in ‘our’ part of the world. The small cohort of academics who initiated these studies were genuine pioneers. For instance, Mackie, in the decades after 1958, became founding Head of Indonesian Studies at Melbourne University, founding Research Director of South-East Asian Studies at Monash University, and founding Professor of Political and Social Change in the Pacific and Asia at the Australian National University. Prior to World War II, there had been virtually no Asian studies in Australia. Now the field was wide open for those who were skilled and interested, and Herb Feith was among the earliest.

From childhood on a dairy farm in the flats beneath Mount Egmont, in New Zealand, John McBeth rose to become a senior foreign correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review, one of Asia’s most influential English-language news magazines. Like other old-school journalists, he asserts at the beginning of his highly entertaining memoir that no one can be ‘taught’ journalism; you are either born one, or not. So it proved in his case. A liberal arts education might have made the younger John a more reflective autodidact, but possibly not a more successful journalist.

To go on thinking of the Korean War as a ‘forgotten’ war in a ‘hermit’ country, as we too often do, ignores the many authoritative accounts of it. Cameron Forbes’s new book is the latest.

If you were to tell me that a book had been written that covered a century of art in Asia, from 1900 to 2000, and that its geographic range moved from Japan to Pakistan and Indonesia, to Nepal, the Australian outback, and Cambodia, I would initially ask how many volumes it contained. That such a book exists, in a fairly slim volume, is tribute to the skills of its author, Alison Carroll. How has she done it?

Imagine living in a world also inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, whose goodwill is essential to the ongoing fertility and prosperity of the community. Life, Death and Magic: 2000 Years of Southeast Asian Ancestral Art reveals this view of the cosmos, and explores the relationship between art and the world of the ancestors in South-East Asia. It is published in association with the ground-breaking exhibition of the same name curated by Robyn Maxwell, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, where it was recently on display.

The world bank’s 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle, conveyed the quasi-religious awe prompted by the economic progress of many East Asian societies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While somewhat self-serving (it was funded by Japanese money), it set the tone for much of the political and economic analysis of East Asia in the 1990s and its prospects. With few exceptions, we were told that the future belonged to Asia, that export-oriented industrialisation and selective liberalisation were the keys to growth, and that Asian societies had certain cultural features which furthered their comparative advantage and questioned the universality of Western notions such as democracy and human rights. This suddenly ended in July 1997 when the collapse of the Thai baht prompted a series of currency crises that produced political and social turmoil across the region. The Asian financial crisis, borne of bad investments, dodgy government–business relations and that favourite of the press, ‘crony capitalism’, raised questions about the foundations of Asia’s strength and the ‘Asian century’.

Notwithstanding the old adage, you can tell a certain amount about a book by its cover, especially if it has two covers, each displaying a different subtitle. The British edition of Forgotten Wars, on sale in Australian bookshops, has the subtitle ‘The End of Britain’s Asian Empire’. The cover photograph shows Lord Louis Mountbatten, in spotless white naval uniform, inspecting a guard of honour of Burmese soldiers in 1948. The soldiers appear smart and loyal, while the Burmese civilian accompanying Mountbatten is deferential. The American edition of the book, published under the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, has the less precise but more evocative subtitle ‘Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia’, and a cover with a blurred photograph of a truckload of Asians celebrating ‘Independence Day’. The caption identifies neither the country nor the date, but a likely candidate would be India in 1947.

Canberra’s week of the two presidents – October 2003 – brought the unprecedented spectacle of George W. Bush and China’s President Hu Jintau speaking just a day apart to joint sittings of the Australian parliament. The coincidence elegantly dramatised the central questions for Australian foreign policy: how we manage our relationships with our superpower ally, how we live with our neighbours in Asia, and how we get the balance right between them. This has been the essential challenge for every Australian government since World War II. In his important new book, The Howard Paradox, Michael Wesley focuses on one side of that balance – relations with Asia – and on the Howard government.

The third volume to be produced by the Asian Association for the Study of Australasia, Diaspora: The Australasian Experience, is a large publication with more than forty chapters. It makes an important contribution to the often willing debate about preserving Austral(as)ia’s perceived homogeneity in the face of the challenges carried in the cultural baggage of postwar arrivals from beyond the shores of the United Kingdom. Most, if not all, of the writers prefer to celebrate what Jane Mummery calls, in the opening essay, ‘the affirmation of the hyphen and hybridity’. Many other essays in the collection also demonstrate the extent to which Australian academics in the humanities and social sciences are contributing to the development and analysis of cultural connections between South Asia and Australasia.

This book, The Battle for Asia, is the most recent and ambitious contribution from the group of Australian political economists, formerly based at Murdoch University, working on East Asian political economy. This book upholds the group’s Marxian structuralist orientation and advances its critique of ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. The book’s ambition to integrate post-World War II international political economy, Asia’s development trajectories and US hegemony widens this group’s analytical lens and deepens its links with the anti-globalisation movement. For Mark T. Berger, ‘many of the organizations and individuals involved [in the movement] are asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction’.

Berger shares with this movement the belief that the US is the single hegemonic power driving the global economy. He presents capitalism as an inherently unequal system prone to crisis and monopolisation. Global corporations, leading states, mainstream intellectuals and international bureaucrats are its shapers and main beneficiaries. All others are its excluded subjects.