Page 146 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

RACIAL/SPATIAL ANXIETY

staunchest proponents of a profound and committed Asianization of Australia. His
political position can therefore not be further removed from that voiced by Pauline
Hanson: he berates Australians for ‘laziness in coming to terms with the fact of Asia’
(FitzGerald 1997: 57) and welcomes the stream of Asian immigrants into the
country, which he sees as essential to ‘bringing Asia into our social and cultural
landscape’ (ibid.: 67). In his view, ‘the Asian challenge for Australia is not economic
or commercial. It is intellectual, and the issues are political and cultural’ (ibid.: 4).
And he adds a sense of urgent necessity to this: ‘the question of how we make our
future with Asia, or whether we have a future, depends on how well we can apply
our minds’ (ibid.: 5, my italics). He warns that if Australia doesn’t massively increase
its ability to function in the new dynamic East Asian world it will be left outside –
as the back cover of Is Australia an Asian Country? puts it, ‘an unregarded nation
in a region dominated by a powerful and confident Asian confederation’.
In such warnings we can begin to trace an unmistakable undercurrent of fear and
anxiety in FitzGerald’s ostensibly Asia-embracing discourse. The sub-title of his
book makes this painfully clear. It asks ominously, ‘Can Australia survive in an East
Asian future?’ And here we come to the crux of the matter. The message that
Australia should become a ‘part of Asia’, of which FitzGerald’s own book is a prime
example, has been sold to the people with the prospect of a threat to Australia’s
very survival as a country. In this era of rapid globalization, the emergence of
regional trade blocs and the troubled rise of Asian, especially East Asian economic
prominence, so the message goes, Australia must embrace its geographical
neighbours. To put it dramatically: ‘Asianize or perish’. Alarmist pronouncements
have abounded, especially before the financial crisis hit the region in 1997. Author
Ross Terrill, for example, admonished that ‘Australia would be doomed if it turned
the clock back against Asian influence’ (1996: 17). And Stephen FitzGerald himself
packaged his message with the insistent reiteration that Australia had to step up its
engagement with Asia if it is not to be left behind. He invoked the dramatic image
of a lonely island-continent cut adrift, deserted by its parent-protectors:

the great global shift in the balance of power is in their favour. The world
has changed forever. It no longer belongs to the European or the North
American. And we are alone, exposed. Nowhere to go but Asia.
(1997: 14)

The undertow of anxiety is all too palpable in this geopolitical vision of Australia
in the twenty-first century: Australia’s future is tied to Asia, whether it likes it
or not. The Asian financial crisis has not changed this sense of inescapability;
if anything, it has only increased it. Thus, in the wake of the crisis, journalists asked
questions such as, ‘have we made a big mistake pursuing an economic strategy
hinging on Asian prosperity?’ (Wood 1997: 28). Whatever the answer to this
question, commentators agreed that Australia could not evade its interdependence
and interconnection with Asia: geography is destiny. Not surprisingly therefore,
when the economic indicators turned bullish hardly two years later, those same

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