Page 140 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

RACIAL/SPATIAL ANXIETY

powers within its national framework, the whole territory previously known as terra
Australis incognita had come under the control of a singular world power. (Indeed,
had history run another course, what is now Western Australia could easily have
become either a Dutch or a French state.) As it happened, the totalizing nature
of the British annexation and control paved the way, several decades on with
Federation in 1901, for the creation of ‘one Australia’, encompassing the whole
territory of the island-continent and imagined in terms of a transplanted British
homogeneity. In other words, what was produced here was the collapsing into one
of physical geography and human geography, which had a powerful imaginative
effect on the white settlers. It provided the fledgling settler society with a singular
sense of spatial identity, the integrity of which coincided with that of the whole
island-continent.
It should be noted that the idea of Australia as an ‘island-continent’ is by no
means an innocent one. This idea absolutizes the disconnection of the territory from
the rest of the world and downplays the fluidity of the border zone between the
northwest coast and the southeastern islands of what is now Indonesia (including
Timor), for example, as testified by the centuries-old links between Aborigines and
Malays in that region. In their book The Myth of Continents, Martin Lewis and
Kären Wigen remark that for a long time there was no agreement among (Western)
geographers on how to represent the space of Australia: in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century world atlases, Australia ‘was sometimes colored as a portion of
Asia, sometimes as a separate landmass, and sometimes as a mere island’ (Lewis and
Wigen 1997: 30). The fact that the idea of Australia as a separate and distinct
‘island-continent’ is now completely naturalized, is the historical outcome of a
world-political process which has produced and legitimized the boundaries of
the nation–state of Australia as we know it today. More importantly, it has elicited
a national geopolitical vision shaping some peculiarities of Australia’s view of itself
and its relationship to the world (Dijkink 1996).
The absence of internal cultural/political fracture within the territory as a result
of its entire appropriation by the British, and the imaginary closure provided by the
sense of continental wholeness and insularity, must have intensified – together with
the distance from Europe – a feeling among the inhabitants of the new white nation
that they were dangerously exposed to external threats. Documenting the period
around Federation in 1901, Raymond Evans et al. remark: ‘Australia was an
isolated continent, far from Europe, in the midst of Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Settlers in Australia constantly felt vulnerable, fearing that some other world power
would come and ruin their Austral-British tranquility’ (1997: 180). Throughout
the nineteenth century that ‘other world power’ was by turns identified as France,
Germany or Russia, but Japan’s victory over Russia in their war of 1904–5, as one
author observes, ‘appeared to link the presumed threat from a foreign great power
– till then a European monopoly – with the non-European demographic’ (Fitzpatrick
1997: 98, italics in original).
What we have here is a crucial determinant of what I want to call, to borrow a
term from Morley and Robins (1995: 8), the ‘psycho-geography’ of white Australia:

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