Page 147 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

commentators could barely suppress their journalistic enthusiasm – an enthusiasm
tinged with a sense of relief and, to be sure, a sense of anxious urgency. In the
words of one Sydney Morning Herald observer: ‘Something big is happening in Asia
in the wake of its financial crisis – and its creating a great investment opportunity
for Australian business if it is smart enough, and quick enough, to take advantage
of it’ (Burrell 1999: 22). FitzGerald, on his part, would probably protest that
Australians would only be able to be smart and quick enough if their engagement
with Asia was more than merely opportunistically economic.
A very disturbing double bind begins to emerge here. Stephen FitzGerald and
Pauline Hanson may be diametrically opposed in terms of philosophy, values
and politics, but they are both passionately driven by a sense of emergency about
Australia’s future. With equal insistence they both claim that ‘time is running
out’. But while the informed, elite view (as exemplified by FitzGerald and many
others) pronounces that Australia will be doomed if it doesn’t ‘Asianize’, the
popular/populist Hansonite view is that Australia will be doomed if it does. As
antagonistic as they are, both positions remain strong currents in contemporary
Australian imagination, an indication of the fact that the key contradiction in
Australian national identity – history versus geography – is still an agonizing force
in the national culture. How to overcome it, or at least come to terms with it?
A minimum requirement, I would argue, would be the overcoming of the register
of fear and anxiety itself. As Meaghan Morris has observed,

If panics over immigration from Asia seem (as they do in 1996) to be
recurrent in Australian public life, how surprised can we really be – when
so much official rhetoric of ‘Asianization’ addressed to us in recent years
has been marked by the very same panic, prompted now by economic
rather than racial anxiety about the future?
(1998a: 255)
Australians routinely overestimate the number of ‘boat people’, always marked in
the imagination as ‘Asian’, even though many in recent years come from equally
alien Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, signalling ‘their
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persistent fear and suspicion of Asian invaders’ (Phelan 1997). Against this kind
of psycho-geographic anxiety, expressed and amplified by the neoracism of Hanson,
former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, said of his own country, with a tone of
resignation bordering on self-hatred, that ‘the idea of a European enclave at the
edge of Asia is unrealistic and offensive’ (quoted in Editorial Sydney Morning
Herald, 6 May 1997). But it is clear that a nation cannot live with such a verdict
of illegitimacy on itself. Obviously, what is needed are positive visions of a new
future in which Australia resolves its unease with its geographical location. A
different kind of reconciliation is called for here. If reconciliation with Aboriginal
people requires white Australia to come to terms with its past, the challenge of
Asia, both inside and surrounding the territory claimed by and for whites only
somewhat more than two hundred years ago, requires white Australia to come to

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