Page 145 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

a coming future which Hanson and her many followers desperately want to keep
at bay: a future in which the island-continent can no longer be preserved as white
territory. With an alarmist tone she invokes a scenario in which a barely containable
fear of an ‘Asian invasion’, a fear of being obliterated by ‘Asia’, is all too palpable.
‘Time is running out,’ she said in her maiden speech:

We have only 10 to 15 years left to turn things around. Because of our
resources and our position in the world, we will not have a say because
neighbouring countries such as Japan, with 125 million people; China,
with 1.2 billion people; India, with 846 million people; Indonesia, with
178 million people; and Malaysia, with 20 million people are well aware
of our resources and potential. Wake up, Australia, before it is too late.
(Hanson 1997a: 10)

Racial/spatial anxiety is expressed here through the invocation of the teeming
Asian millions who threaten to engulf the antipodean land that was supposed
to be reserved for whites. In Pauline Hanson’s One Nation policy document on
immigration, which was issued in 1998, the apocalyptic image was sketched of
an island-continent where white Australians were marginalized into the dead centre
of the island-continent. The fact that Asian migrants congregate in the major cities,
so it conjectured, ‘will lead to the bizarre situation of largely Asian cities on our
coast which will be culturally and racially different from the traditional Australian
nature of the rest of the country.’ (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation 1998: 11).
In other words, the fear is not just that Australia will no longer be ‘one nation’;
more terrifyingly, white Australia will slowly but surely be swallowed up by the
Asian hordes! This scenario operates, as Morris has noted, in ‘a register of paranoid
anticipation’ whose psychological effect is all the more powerful because it evokes
‘a chain of displacement’: ‘something we did to others becomes something that
happened to us and could happen all over again’. Enunciating the dark conscience
of the white Australian settler subject, Morris notes wryly that ‘on the beach, we
replay our genocidal past as our apocalyptic future’ (Morris 1998a: 247). It is for
this reason that the simultaneous assault on white certainties by the new assertive-
ness of indigenous Australia, on the one hand, and by the spectre of Asianization,
on the other, creates such an intense anxiety, the anxiety expressed in Hanson’s
desperate ‘Where do I go?’ It is the anxiety of someone who feels trapped, with no
way out.
By expressing this anxiety – with its clear racial/spatial overtones – so explicitly,
Hanson has unearthed a suppressed but pervasive element in the psycho-geography
of Australian whiteness. Indeed, it is a powerful force in Australia’s political
unconscious, a force transcending differences in political positions which might
superficially, at the level of conscious opinion, appear poles apart. To illustrate this,
let us briefly look at Stephen FitzGerald’s book Is Australia an Asian Country?,
published in 1997, precisely at the moment when the Hanson controversy was
at its height. FitzGerald is a former ambassador to China and known as one of the

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