Page 142 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

RACIAL/SPATIAL ANXIETY

Furthermore, the abolition of the White Australia policy, which began in the 1960s
and was finally formalized by the Whitlam government in 1973, has made it possible
for many people from Asian countries to migrate into Australia and thus to become
co-inhabitants of Australian territorial space. While these changes are significant,
however, I would argue that to an important extent the shift has not been
a qualitative, paradigmatic one but merely one of valence: Australia no longer turns
it back against ‘Asia’ (because it can no longer afford to), but is now for ‘Asia’
(because it thinks it has to be). Much of the engagement with ‘Asia’ today remains
caught within a paradigm of mutual exteriority: ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ continue
to be imagined as absolutely separate, mutually exclusive entities, even if their
relationship may be conceived differently, though still one entered into with less
than full conviction.
The establishment of White Australia was, as I have indicated above, a statement
about Australia’s place in the world: it stated that Australia felt entitled to quarantine
itself from its immediate surroundings in the interest of a much desired internal
homogeneity and white racial purity. Strict control over who could or could not
come into the country was therefore deemed necessary to protect the kind of civil-
ization that the new settler society imagined itself to develop and maintain. Its
territorial insularity and the seeming naturalness of its borders promoted the idea that
in Australia ‘it was possible to control contact with the rest of the world in a manner
not possible for most other nations’ (Evans et al. 1997: 205). Thus, a self-righteous,
self-protective parochialism, a determined commitment to provincialism and anti-
cosmopolitalism, has played a founding role in the formation of white Australian
culture. It should be stressed that this was a positive commitment: it was born of the
idea that the new society had a paradisiac, ‘lucky country’ potential if it remained set
apart from the world. But the other side of this fierce, self-chosen isolationism is a
deep discomfort about the outside world, an outside world which is the source of
danger, threat, insecurity, and which had to be kept at bay as much as possible.
In this sense, Australia is and has remained an ‘anxious nation’ (Walker 1999).
Pauline Hanson’s rhetoric clearly draws upon this contradictory, anxious strand
of white Australian settler identity. Hanson’s is a paranoid discourse that is pre-
disposed to be deeply suspicious of everything that is marked as foreign, imported,
international. Indeed, some of Hanson’s political demands were that Australia
repudiate all its international obligations (such as those related to United Nations
treaties) and cease all foreign aid. The idea of multiculturalism, a policy which
Hanson wanted to see abolished, is denounced in Pauline Hanson – The Truth, the
book published under her name, as a ‘foreign import’ (from Canada and later
the United States), as are ideas of a liberal multiracial society, free trade and
economic rationalism (Hanson 1997a: 73ff.). In short, what Hansonism stands
for is an extreme protectionism in defence of an embattled, fortress identity, not
only economic but also cultural and racial, a tenacious desire to hold on to the
dream of an insular, closed, wholesome ‘white Australia’.
That this dream turned out to be an illusion, however, had become clear many
decades ago, especially after World War Two, when Australia found itself caught

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