Page 126 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

Just before the October 1998 elections I spoke with a middle-aged woman, wife
of a senior manager, at a university function. The deeply common-sensical nature
of Hanson’s world view was brought home to me when this woman said, with
some timidity, ‘But we do have to be one nation, don’t we?’ From her perspective,
this longing for ‘oneness’ seemed perfectly natural, and who could blame her, in a
country where the ideology of homogeneity and assimilation has been so actively
pursued as a national project until only thirty years ago? If Hanson and her
supporters feel anxious, then, I would argue, it is not so much about ‘race’ as such,
but with the uncertainty about the future that ‘race’ represents: both Aborigines
and Asians put the moral and economic future of the nation in doubt, and,
consequently, the white (Anglo-Australian) sense of entitlement and ‘home’
(Curthoys 1999).
The projection of a multiracial future for the nation is articulated with the
growing sense of insecurity among many ordinary Australians as the process of
globalization continues apace. The fact that this is a global development, not just
affecting Australia alone, is generally lost in popular discourse, resulting in a sense
of local/national victimization unchecked by a clear understanding of the larger
dimensions of change and transformation that are subsumed under the umbrella
term ‘globalization’. One important aspect of globalization is that it has exposed
and intensified ‘the deep tensions between global migrations and the sovereign
borders of the 190 members of the United Nations’ (Wang 1997: 16). As the
Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has observed: ‘The isomorphism
of people, territory, and legitimate sovereignty that constitutes the normative
character of the modern nation-state is under threat from the forms of circulation
of people characteristic of the contemporary world’ (1996a: 43).
The symbolic significance of ‘Asians in Australia’ should be read in light of the
disjuncture of people, territory and sovereignty that globalization has effected
on the nation–state of Australia. In this sense, Australia is going through a process
of partial unravelling – a painful process, to be sure – similar to many other
nation–states with a large influx of migrants. But the way in which this process is
experienced and worked through in Australia is particular to its history, especially
its history as a white settler nation in the far corner of ‘Asia’, a product of European,
or more specifically, British imperialism.

Asians out/Asians in
The rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party has demonstrated that the
old sentiments of ‘White Australia’ – the notion that Australia should be a pure
European nation, particularly of people of ‘British stock’ – still linger in the
contemporary Australian unconscious. It is important to remember that the idea
of a White Australia was foundational to the establishment of the new nation–state
of Australia in 1901. As Janeen Webb and Andrew Enstice (1998: 140) remark,
‘The twin concepts of Australian Federation and a White Australia of pure British
stock became inextricably linked in the popular imagination.’ Indeed, racial and

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