‘Can I Tell You What We Have to Put Up With?’: Stinky Fish and Offensive Durian

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Notes

 [1] The word ‘Aboriginal’ in this article indicates where Pauline Hanson and Tim Flannery have used the word in their own works. This article attempts to remain respectful to the Indigenous custodians of this land by recognizing the continuing use of the word Aboriginal as a legacy of racist categorizations and distinctions. The use of the word Indigenous intends to show my respect for Indigenous people.

 [2] There is a persistent theme of an ‘anxious nation’ in Australian identity that is firstly the European Australian in an alien Aboriginal landscape, then European Australia in Asia and now multicultural Australia (but really still white Australia) trying to assert its identity through difference. Gullen argues that Australians have a habit of self-analysis (Gullen, 2002, p. 57). He asserts that there is no anxious questioning of Australian identity as being, but instead he sees an anxiety around issues of change and becoming (Gullen, 2002, p. 173). This is evident in the significance of the narrative of the ‘lost child’ in the Australian press—see Pierce (1999). White Australians appear as inevitably constrained by this anxiety, which simultaneously reminds them of their past and their uncertain, provisional future (Gullen, 2002, p. 173).

 [3] Scholars have written extensively about Australia's harsh continent and the challenges it has presented to settler Australians in forging a home. Richard White has documented the descriptions of explorer William Dampier who made two voyages to the Australian continent in 1688 and 1699 (White, 1981, p. 2). Dampier described the land as barren, fly-pestered, and dry with non-fruit-bearing trees (White, 1981, p. 2). The scientific specimens that were gathered from the continent, which was then known as New Holland, were considered odd and unique objects of study. The kangaroo was considered by European scientists as ‘impossible to compare to any European animal’ (White, 1981, p. 8). New Holland was a land that was ‘upside down, topsy turvy, where it was day when it should have been night, summer when it should have been winter’ (White, 1981, p. 8). Through the eyes of these explorers, the Australian landscape seemed inhospitable and unsuitable for the genteel lives of the Europeans.

 [4] Uma Narayan uses a ‘domestication’ metaphor in her analysis of curry in nineteenth-century Britain (Narayan, 1997, p. 164). She argues that curry was found in domestic cookbooks in Britain during the colonial expansion of the British Empire in India. Consuming curry was a necessary political tool in the incorporation and domestication of India into the minds of middle-class British families (Narayan, 1997, p. 164).

 [5] Richard White has also explored how icons of the bushman, shearers, diggers, the surf-lifesaver, and the suburban ideal of ‘everyman and his Holden’ have persisted throughout Australian history (White, 1981, p. 158). These icons allowed white Australia to effectively demonstrate certain traits that it promoted as quintessentially Australian. For instance, the digger is understood as embodying values of mateship, and egalitarian principles of democracy and it is these values that are readily reproducible in other ‘typical Australians’ like Don Bradman, the condemned soldier in the film Breaker Morant, Henry Lawson and Paul Hogan (Schaffer, 1988, p. 20). Kay Schaffer argues that these accepted characteristics of quintessential Australianism achieved their dominant status as the primary representation of Australia through the whole concept of myth, which became ‘the accepted modes of representation for the meaning of the nation’ (Schaffer, 1988, p. 20). The white Australian male therefore functions as the taken-for-granted archetype of ‘real’ Australia.

 [6] Tim Flannery also writes that: ‘Australasians,—have learned about their Australasian homelands and of how the land has, often in ways not perceived, shaped its people’ (Flannery, 1994, p. 17).

 [7] She also acknowledges the presence of Chinese in the bush. Edwards and Yuanfang argue that encounters between Indigenous people and Asians throughout Australian history have been ‘whitewashed’ in a history that focuses upon encounters between Indigenous people and white people (see Edwards and Yuanfang, 2003).

 [8] Beazley has a PhD.

 [9] This is a reference to the support for Hanson's One Nation Party in Queensland (see Edwards et al., 2000).

[10] Julia Kristeva sees vomiting as an encounter with the abject:

[l]oathing an item of food … The spasms and vomiting that protect me … The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them … Milk—that substance that is life-giving and nurturing, the harmless thin sheet that encapsulates it—‘I’ experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly … nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire … ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3)

[11] Ghassan Hage argues that Australia's multicultural discourse is supposed to make the nation a culinary-nurturing home, ‘where many sons and daughters of the nation feel at home eating “ethnic” and where many ethnic mothers enjoy feeding and being appreciated’, all under ‘the watchful eye of the well-fed paternal government’ that ‘communicates the imperative of multicultural law’ (Hage, 1997, p. 117).

[12] Flannery claims that Australia has always been multicultural and that a history of homogeneous white Australia has always been a lie. He claims that ‘Muslims and Chinese have been part of the Australian cultural mix almost from the beginning’ (Flannery, 2003, p. 24). He also reminisces his childhood enjoyment of eating Chinese food where he writes: ‘[c]ulinary exoticism was provided in my childhood by a Chinese restaurant run by a diminutive woman from Clapham, England, who if we wanted take-away, ladled chow mein, and rice into the pots and pans we brought in’ (Flannery, 2003, p. 22).

[13] The scholarly omission of the ‘truth’ of ‘Aboriginal cannibalism’ that Flannery identifies could be read as a culinary absence of the abject. Douglas quotes a ritual uncleanness absence recognized by V. S. Naipaul:

Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches … they never look for cover … These squatting figures … are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories … This might be regarded as part of a permissible, prettifying intention. But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even with complete sincerity deny they exist. (Douglas, 1966, p. 124)

Julia Kristeva writes that this absence of the uncovered defecating Indian is a ‘blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 74).

[14] The white Australian in this example also reserves the right to worry about the consumption of food by non-white Others (see Hage, 2003, p. 10, for a discussion of white Australian ‘worrying’).

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Alan Han

Alan Han is a PhD student with the Department of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. His thesis is titled Finding Roots, Tracing Genealogies: Unearthing Mining Masculinities in Postcolonizing Australia. His research interests include the racialised politics of food and eating, gender studies, Asian Australian studies and critical race and whiteness studies.