The ‘Flow of Asia’ — Vocabularies of Engagement: A Cultural History

Abstract

The article reviews the history of Australian representations of Asia from the mid-19th century to the present. It argues that there are instructive continuities between recent references to ‘Asia literacy’ and to injunctions to know Asia that date from the late 19th century. It examines representations of Asia that stress fluidity and unpredictability, and argues that fluid Asia has been assigned characteristics not unlike those attributed to women and the crowd. The implications of this analysis for recent discussions of the threat posed by political Islam are also referred to. In such discussions ‘the proper treatment of women’ is commonly represented as both an established Australian value and one now under threat. The article ends by suggesting that the Howard government sought to marginalise ‘Asia literacy’, replacing it with ‘Australia literacy’.

Notes

¹The theme of watchfulness was not confined to Australia, as H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (first published in 1898) makes very clear. Drawing on an uneasy fascination with surveillance and espionage, and the apprehension of being watched by unseen enemies, Wells imagined the world itself as a watched planet: ‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's …’ (Wells 1898] 1995, 1).

²For a discussion of more recent depictions of Rudd as a ‘Manchurian candidate’ and an examination of the sexualised undercurrents of the Asia literacy debate in Pauline Hanson's The Truth, see Johnson, Ahluwalia and McCarthy's ‘Australia's Ambivalent Re-imagining of Asia’ on pp. 59–74 in this special issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Walker

David Walker is Professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University and Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Studies, Renmin University, Beijing. He is the author of Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850 to 1939 (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1999) and editor with Laksiri Jayasuriya and Jan Gothard of Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2003).