Page 133 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

Hanson can be so self-righteous here because she feels she can rightfully speak
from a position of entitlement, itself an enduring product of white settler colonial
history. Ideologically, the White Australia policy was not just a declaration of racial
exclusivism, it was also a claim of symbolic ownership. The very act of establishing
procedures to ensure the maintenance of a ‘white Australia’ – through explicitly
discriminatory immigration criteria designed to keep non-Europeans out – was
a form of power to control who was or was not entitled to live on this island-
continent. Implicit in this statement of power, then, was a sense of territorial
entitlement, a self-declared authority to appropriate and own the land, a claim to
what Ghassan Hage calls a ‘governmental belonging’ to the nation: ‘the belief
in one’s possession of the right to contribute (even if only by having a legitimate
opinion with regard to the internal and external politics of the nation) to its
management such that it remains “one’s home”’ (Hage 1998: 46). Hanson herself
put it more straightforwardly: ‘Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite
whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes
into my country’ (Hanson 1997a: 7). The important point here, however, is not
so much Hanson herself, whose One Nation Party has lost clout in the official
political world remarkably quickly, precisely because it has always operated in the
liminal space of (il)legitimacy. What is at issue here is the more deep-seated and
long-term structure of feeling which determines who has symbolic ownership of
‘Australia’ – a structure of feeling spectacularly embodied by Hanson but arguably
a much more pervasive, if implicit motivator of the national consciousness.
Of course, the moral quandary of white appropriation of the land is most drama-
tized in relation to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the indigenous people
of the country, whose increasing assertiveness in claiming their rights as the original
inhabitants of the country has destabilized white Australians’ sense of entitlement.
In this regard, the sense of uncertainty – so prominently featured during the native
title debate which raged around the same time as Hanson’s rise to prominence 5
– must be related not just to the uncertainty with regard to the materiality of land
claims, but more symbolically, the uncertainty of one’s own legitimacy as occupiers
of the land. Historian Ann Curthoys (1999: 2) has argued that ‘beneath the angry
rejection of the “black armband” view of history, lurks a fear of being cast out, made
homeless again, after two centuries of securing a new home far away from home’.
This clarifies Hanson’s repeatedly made, emphatic statement that ‘I am indigenous,
and “indigenous” means “native of the land”. I am Australian as much as any
Aboriginal’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1998). It is the white claim on Australia as
home which needs to be upheld and defended in the face of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander resistance.
As to ‘Asians’, however, the relationship is different. As the exclusion and
expulsion of Asians were central to the very formation of the modern Australian
nation, their increasingly visible presence today, especially in the large cities, is still
deeply associated with the foreign, the strange, with alien otherness, and with
invasion. While Aboriginal people are now more or less universally, if sometimes
reluctantly, recognized as belonging to Australia, Asians would never seem to be

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