Page 123 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

A contradiction in terms?

The late 1990s have seen the publication of not one, but two edited collections with
the generic title of Asians in Australia (Inglis et al. 1996; Coughlan and McNamara
1997). Both books single out a particular group of people – amassed as ‘Asians’ –
whose presence in Australia seems to merit special consideration. Otherwise, why
dedicate whole volumes to it?
The issue of ‘Asians in Australia’ is historically complex, and continues to be
an ideologically loaded and politically and culturally sensitive one. The sub-titles
of the two collections above – respectively emphasizing the ‘dynamics’ and the
‘patterns’ of migration and settlement – are remarkably similar and they give a fair
indication of the dominant intellectual framework in which public discourse on
‘Asians in Australia’ is cast. Thus, both books focus on themes which have pre-
occupied Australian governments and public commentators alike in the past few
decades: succinctly, the macro-sociological concern with the overall process of
integration of ‘Asian’ immigrants into Australian society.
‘Asians’, in this context, are defined first and foremost as those born in an Asian
country, concordant with the way the Australian Census categorizes the ‘ethnic’
diversity of the population, i.e. by country of birth. Using this definition, an
estimated 4.9 per cent of the total population could be categorized as having been
born in an ‘Asian’ country by 1991, more than eight times as many as in 1966. By
1996, the estimated proportion of the Australian population born in Asia is reported
to have increased to 6.2 per cent (see Mackie 1997: 13). What these figures clearly
reveal is a strong and steady rise in the number of Asians in Australia in the past
thirty years, and it is this very rise – so bluntly stated through these objectivist
statistics – that has intensified the politicization of ‘Asians in Australia’ as a theme
in public discourse and debate.
But these statistics are rubbery figures given the flexibility and ambiguity of the
meaning of the term ‘Asia’ and, as a consequence, who counts as ‘Asian’. As a
geographical entity, ‘Asia’ is an artificial construct with uncertain boundaries,
especially on its western front where its border with ‘Europe’ has never been firmly
established by European geographers from whose meta-geographical imagination
the very idea of ‘continents’ had sprung (Lewis and Wigen 1997). Significantly,
then, as Jon Stratton (1998: 59–61) has observed, people from what is commonly

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