Between history and geography: Debates on Australia and Asia

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, White Australia has agonizingly attempted to reconcile its regional geostrategic and economic interests with its European history, language, and society. Today, political and academic discourses on Australia's assumed regional future contrast the nation's overwhelming European past with its close proximity to Asia. The rapid transformation of much of Asia has resuscitated White Australia's traditional feelings of cultural vulnerability while simultaneously intensifying its need to engage and integrate with the dynamic economies of the region. Some anxious Australians—usually those less educated, older, and living in rural areas—recoil from the need for closer economic and social interaction with Asia. In general they assert that the nation's colonial and post-colonial history as a European settler society, not its geographical location in or near Asia, must continue to shape its international links and its social mix. At its most extreme this view rejects liberal immigration policies and multiculturalism, while claiming the need for national cohesion as a barrier to the alleged “Asianization” of Australian life. Such arguments are forceful echoes of Australia's racist history, symbolized until the late 1960s by the White Australia Policy and institutional discrimination against Aboriginal people. This disturbing populist nostalgia for “old Australia” remains an embarrassing international irritant, most notably in the forms of Pauline Hanson's xenophobic “One Nation Party,” the efforts of the Liberal National government to reduce Aboriginal land rights, and less directly in opposition to the end of monarchical links with Great Britain.