Page 141 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

the fear of invasion. This fear was intensely heightened when the invader was
imagined as ‘Asian’: so geographically proximate, so threateningly multitudinous,
and not least, so alienly non-white. It is important to dissect the cultural logic of
this fear, as it still informs contemporary sentiments and attitudes towards ‘Asia’.
In a paper on settler colonialism and national security ideologies in Australian
history, Fitzpatrick (1997) speaks about the ‘threat ethos’ which has traditionally
informed Australia’s security obsession. This experience of threat is profoundly
bound up, according to Fitzpatrick, with Australia’s development as a European
settler society on the southeastern fringe of Asia. This situation produced a mindset
which sought to guarantee Australia’s security ‘through the support of culturally
similar but geographically distant powerful friends’, first Britain, later the United
States (ibid.: 116). Implicit in this scenario is the construction of Australia’s
geographical neighbours – ‘Asia’ – as an utterly distrusted Other. In other words,
at the heart of modern Australia’s sense of itself lies a fundamental tension between
its white, European identity and its Asian, non-European location. As historian
Andrew Markus has remarked:
The non-Europeans of the ‘near north’ were seen as posing a threat to
the social and political life of the community, to its higher aspirations.
The perception of this threat was heightened by a consciousness of race,
a consciousness that innate and immutable physical characteristics of
certain human groups were associated with non-physical attributes which
precluded their assimilation into the Australian nation.
(1979: 256)
What becomes clear here is that racial anxiety is articulated with a distinctively
Australian, equally formative spatial anxiety. David Walker (1997: 133) puts it this
way: ‘the need to live in relatively close proximity to awakening Asia lent a certain
drama and intensity to the Australian situation, it conferred a special status on
Australia as a continent set aside for the development of the white race’.
Thus, white Australia’s anxiety about ‘Asia’ was not accidental to its history,
nor merely based on racialist prejudices which have now become outdated (and
therefore easily discardable). On the contrary, in a fundamental, one could say,
ontological sense, anxiety about ‘Asia’ structurally informed the antagonistic
relationship of its history and its geography. In Walker’s (1997: 141) words, ‘what
was meant by “Australia” and what was meant by “Asia” were not unrelated
questions’. The establishment of the settler colony, dependent as it was on the
appropriation of the vast territory of the island-continent and on the legitimization
of its claim to exclusive possession, was conceived as the creation of a white
European enclave in an alien, non-European part of the world. In other words,
‘Australia’ was defined, foundationally, against ‘Asia’, what Meaghan Morris
(1998a: 245) describes as ‘a deliriously totalized “Asia”’.
Almost a century later, the official rhetoric has made a complete turnaround, at
least on the surface. Australia now proclaims itself a part of the Asia-Pacific region.

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