Alison Broinowski
Alison Broinowski is a former Australian diplomat, academic and author of The Yellow Lady – Australian Impressions of Asia (1991).
Whether you agreed with it or not – and many didn’t – Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a coming Clash of Civilisations (1993) was one of the most engrossing arguments of the late twentieth century. He not only foresaw Western civilisation confronting a joint Confucian–Islamic challenge, in 1996 he also anticipated an attack on the US by young, middle-class Muslims.
In the ensuing fraca ... (read more)
The timing of Peter Manning’s book, in which he seeks more Australian empathy with Muslims, was exquisite. The mufti of Australia in September urged the opposite, telling his flock that Jews and Christians were ‘the most evil of God’s creation on the face of the earth’. He also had colourful things to say about women being responsible if men turn to crime, or commit rape or adultery. Of co ... (read more)
In the beginning, says a much-repeated joke, was The Plan. Deemed excellent, at first, it passed through many reinterpretations at successive levels of bureaucracy, and ended up being derided as a crock of shit. Britain’s plan for reconstructing Iraq in 2003 might have met the same fate, only there wasn’t one. Don’t laugh: Australia had no plan either, excellent or crock.
The United States ... (read more)
Roma Mitchell came first in nearly everything. Not only at school and university, but in becoming Australia’s first female OC, Supreme Court judge, Boyer Lecturer, university chancellor and state governor. But she had no inside track to success. Her father was killed in World War I, her mother survived on his pension and the generosity of friends, and Roma and her older sister were taught b ... (read more)
What we might call ‘ordinary Australians’ produced a stream of novels about Asian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, but this is now a mere trickle. Some of the flow may have been dammed by the effect of market forces on publishers; some of it may have been diverted to Middle Eastern channels; some may have drained into the pools of Asia-enthusiasm that stagnated during the Howard years; and so ... (read more)
Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ... (read more)
The migration process makes you adept, Kim Cheng Boey remarks, in coded language. The first poem he wrote after settling in Sydney recalls an exhibition in the Queen Victoria Building about the Chinese tea entrepreneur Mei Quong Tart, whose clan name is the same as the Boey family’s. His daughter, pointing with her small finger, decodes the character mei, meaning ‘nothing’, a negative prefix ... (read more)
How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive a ... (read more)
When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.
T ... (read more)