https://orcid.org/0009-0004-0182-9213
It is very pleasing to have Anxious Nation recognised on its twenty-fifth anniversary in History Australia, especially by a scholar as accomplished as Agnieszka Sobocinska. Anxious Nation had its beginnings after the fall of Saigon when Vietnamese ‘boat people’ began arriving. In 1984 the prominent historian Geoffrey Blainey warned that Asian immigration was running ahead of public opinion. His comments drew national headlines and his book All for Australia generated heated debate.Footnote1 While this was going on, my colleague at the University of NSW, the Indonesian historian John Ingelson, and I grew concerned that his students knew very little about Australian history whereas mine knew little about Australia’s Asian context. We sought to bridge the divide by introducing an undergraduate course ‘Australian Perceptions of Asia’. One early research outcome was ‘The impact of Asia’, another was a special issue of Australian Cultural History on Asia.Footnote2
There were other early influences. Lurking through my childhood was the heavy presence of the largely undiscussed family story of my uncle Laurie’s death in Ambon in 1942. In Not Dark Yet I recount the gristly tale of his beheading by Japanese soldiers. Being conscripted for service in Vietnam in 1965 also sharpened my interest in the Asian region. I knew as little about Vietnam then as did most of our political leaders.Footnote3 Later, while working on my PhD at the ANU, I became aware that many of the Australian literary nationalists I was studying, including the dramatist Louis Esson and the novelist Vance Palmer, had a wary interest in Asia although I did not pursue this further at the time.Footnote4
In the early stages of writing Anxious Nation in the mid-1990s, I mentioned my project to an academic colleague. He was extremely doubtful that there would be enough material for a book. By then I thought otherwise. I remain surprised by how much more there is to know. Take invasion literature. Agnieszka comments very generously on my analysis in Anxious Nation of invasion writing and its links to the emerging interest in cultural history, discourse analysis and gender identities. While I focused on Australian contributions to this genre, I also drew attention to British precedents and parallel American texts. The core argument is that Australia’s geographical position created a fertile environment for a survivalist anxiety. The continent was often depicted at the forefront of great geopolitical and racial challenges.
In Anxious Nation I note how ‘narrative loves danger’. By this I sought to indicate that the repositioning of Australia within the Asia–Pacific did not necessarily mean that all Australians feared Asia. Rather, I wanted to convey that many writers were eager to embrace the exciting villainy of the geopolitical thriller.Footnote5 They continue to do so. My most recent survey turned up 52 invasion novels, 10 written before 1900.Footnote6 I have also found a lot of invasion writing serialised in Australian magazines and newspapers. This material was very difficult to research in the bad old days before Trove when you needed to track down obscure texts or spend considerable amounts of time trawling through old newspapers or peering at microfilm. For example, when I first read The Coloured Conquest in the Mitchell Library, I was quite unaware that it had been widely reviewed and also serialised in The Albury Banner, the Cootamundra Herald and the Clarence and Richmond Examiner.Footnote7 Trove enables a richer and more nuanced reading of our cultural history.
From the 1880s, invasion writing exposed the social psychology of Asia-related anxieties, the qualities Australians were thought to need for a race war and other repeated tropes. Doubts were expressed about the patriotism of women and the stamina of the urban male. At a time when ‘empty Australia’ seemed particularly vulnerable, the country found its ‘real men’ with fighting spirit in the bush. The bushman emerged as the ideal race patriot.Footnote8
Anxious Nation has a counterbalancing theme of engagement, curiosity and connection to Asia. In this context I was very pleased to discover the writings of J. Currie Elles, stockbroker, linguist and student of the Orient. In 1908, during his Fisher lecture at the University of Adelaide, Elles advised his audience that to promote trade and cultural understanding, Australia’s rising generation needed to learn an Asian language. Many years later, in 1974, William L. Thomas, Fullbright scholar, was to write a damning account of Australia’s failure to address this need. Too little has been done since.Footnote9
Anxious Nation also examines trade with Asia, taking the story offshore to imperial trade routes and entrepôt cities. There is much more still to learn about Australian Trade Commissioners, journalists and business figures who worked in Asia. Consider William Farmer Whyte, prominent newspaper editor and political commentator whose unpublished manuscript recently came to light. It describes his travels through Japan, China, Korea and the British and Dutch colonies of Southeast Asia in 1923. Farmer Whyte already knew the region well through his extensive reading and correspondence. His impressive networks enabled him to meet Stamford Raffles in Singapore; Prince Tokagawa lesato and Viscount Shinpei Gotō in Japan; and George Ernest Morrison, W.H. Donald and the warlord Zhang Zuolin in China. Yet the Asian dimension of Farmer Whyte’s career is not noted in his ADB entry.Footnote10 Such omissions are rather too common.
In 2019, UWA Publishing brought out my book, Stranded Nation, which carried my exploration of Australian engagement with Asia further into the twentieth century and enabled me to build on some of the themes raised earlier. Agnieszka notes that Anxious Nation has little to say about the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This is broadly true, although I do discuss the intriguing letters of Dorothy Fry, a young typist who worked in Batavia and wrote home from 1919 to 23.Footnote11 Indonesia has a much more prominent place in Stranded Nation which includes a chapter on the 1955 Bandung Conference and explores the implications of there being no official Australian representation at this gathering.Footnote12
In Anxious Nation, the relationship between Australia and India was largely presented in its imperial nineteenth-century context with particular emphasis on the witty travel writer James Hingston; on Alfred Deakin and his two books, Temple and Tomb in India and Irrigated India and on Australian responses during the 1890s and early 1900s to the history of the Indian Mutiny and the character of the British Raj.Footnote13 India has a more prominent place in Stranded Nation, as after independence, India became a leading critic of the White Australia Policy.
In Anxious Nation I examined Australian involvement in the Institute of Pacific Relations from the 1920s. In Stranded Nation, the first section, ‘Pacific Imaginaries’ further develops this theme by looking at Pacific diplomacy, cultural engagement, popular literature and persistent calls to promote trade in the Asian region. America is included as an important Pacific nation, but I note the ongoing mutual distrust between the US and Australia, which lasted into the 1940s. The second section of Stranded Nation, ‘Volatile Minds’, examines how from the late 1940s, the Anglosphere re-invented an entity they called the ‘Asian mind’. I examine how they thought this mind worked and how they tried to influence it.Footnote14
Agnieszka raises the important question of Asian responses to Australia. While this was not a prominent theme in Anxious Nation, ‘Asian Voices’, the third and final section of Stranded Nation considers interactions between Australians and Colombo Plan students, along with visits of Asian journalists and political leaders who came to Australia under the aegis of the ‘Asian Visitors Program’ run by the Department of External Affairs. Collectively, these visitors presented Australians with a range of new and often disconcertingly direct responses to Australian insularity and racism. Responses by Asian students to surveys run by the magazine, Hemisphere were well informed but often quite uncomplimentary.Footnote15
Of all the diplomats posted to Australia in the 1950s, none was more prominent or more outspoken than India’s High Commissioner, General Cariappa. His voice rang loud and clear across the continent. Other Indian visitors whose response to Australia I examine in detail include the farmer and Colombo Plan sponsored visitor, Deoram Narkhede and the dancer, Ananda Shivaram. I also examine official visits made by Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Dr Subandrio, President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and Prime Minister Kishi of Japan. In the case of Subandrio, I consider wartime memory, the impacts of Asian decolonisation and the ongoing dispute over the fate of West New Guinea. During his visit Dr Subandrio was particularly forthright in his commentary on how Australia had overlooked Indonesia. One of the key conclusions of Stranded Nation is that Asian opinion has had a much greater and largely unexamined role in undermining the wobbly and often dishonest rationale that supported the White Australia Policy.Footnote16
While there is no room to expand on the theme here, Stranded Nation details attempts by the Department of External Affairs in the 1950s and 60s to persuade ‘our Asian Neighbours’ that Australia was not a racist country. The Department insisted that the miserable living conditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were explained by their status as ‘Stone Age’ people unsuited to the modern world. They refused to acknowledge any discriminatory government policies or the existence of widespread racism. Unhappily for the Department, decolonising Asia found these convenient fabrications hard to swallow.Footnote17
Agnieszka notes that, particularly in general histories and survey courses, the multiple ways in which Asia has shaped Australia have largely been sidelined. Why this is so requires a more detailed analysis than is available to me here, but I agree that Asia is too often seen by Australian historians as optional, not core business. With colleagues, a recent attempt has been made to weave Asia into a general Australian history, though this endeavour has largely been ignored, except by Giselle Byrnes from New Zealand.Footnote18 If mainstream histories have largely told ‘Asia’ to keep out, there has been, nonetheless, a good deal of specialised research examining some of the themes raised in Anxious Nation and beyond. Agnieszka’s literature review and my own in Stranded Nation map this territory. Worth emphasising here is the emergence of new scholarship from Australian Studies practitioners in Asia, particularly in India, Japan and China.Footnote19 With anniversaries on our mind, it is appropriate to also note that the very creative and dynamic Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN) will, in 2024, celebrate their own twenty-fifth anniversary.Footnote20
During COVID-19, I completed Happy Together, a dual memoir with Li Yao, close friend and foremost translator of Australian writing into Chinese. This was our attempt to show Australian and Chinese histories running in parallel and to highlight differences, some surprising commonalities and constant interplay between the two nations. At the Melbourne launch of this book, the historian Graeme Davison noted that threaded through my earlier work was a ‘note of disappointment’ in Australia’s failure to bridge the cultural gap with Asia. He added: ‘If a once-anxious nation is still stranded, it is because it has yet to make the imaginative leap, not merely to know the Asian Other, but even … to know itself profoundly’. I fully agree. Anxious Nation and Stranded Nation together make the case that from at least the 1880s Asia has had a significant impact on the kind of nation Australia has become and how it sees its place in the world. It is an argument I have brought up to the present in more recent articles and one that speaks to the ongoing importance of fostering new research into the history of Australian engagement with Asia.Footnote21
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David Walker
David Walker is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was the inaugural BHP Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University, Beijing from 2013–16. He is Emeritus Professor at Deakin University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.
Notes
1 David Walker, Anxious Nation; Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999); Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia (Sydney: Methuen Haynes, 1984).
2 David Walker and Li Yao, with Karen Walker, Happy Together: Bridging the Australia–China Divide (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2022), 230; John Ingelson and David Walker, ‘The Impact of Asia’, in Under New Heavens, Cultural Transmission and the Making of Australia, ed. Neville Meaney (Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Group, 1989), 287–324; David Walker, Julia Horne, and Adrian Vickers, eds., Australian Perceptions of Asia, Australian Cultural History no. 9 (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales, 1990).
3 David Walker, Not Dark Yet: a Personal History (Sydney: Giramondo, 2011), 123–56; Walker et al., Happy Together, 138.
4 Louis Esson wrote five articles for The Lone Hand on India, Japan and China between July and December 1908; Vance Palmer had a long-standing interest in foreign affairs including in Asia, as apparent in his weekly column in the Advocate from November 1919 to October 1920 and later in regular columns in the ABC Weekly.
5 Frank Billé, ‘Introduction’, in Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World, ed. Frank Billé and Sören Urbansky (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), 1–34. See also David Walker, ‘Day of Judgement: Australia and the Rise of Asia’, in Yellow Perils, 60–83.
6 David Walker, ‘Facing East: Asia in Australian Literature’, in The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Jessica Gildersleeve (New York: Routledge, 2021), 215–24; see also David Walker, ‘When the Twain Meet: The Australian Novelist in Asia’, in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, ed. David Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 288–302.
7 T.R.J. Roydhouse [‘Rata’], The Coloured Conquest (Sydney: New South Wales Bookstall Company, 1904). For serialisations, see for example ‘The Coloured Conquest’ in Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, from 19 August 1904, 7, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/100590783; Cootamundra Herald, from 13 August 1904, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/143897709; Clarence and Richmond Examiner, from 13 August 1904, 6, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/61408621.
8 Walker, Anxious Nation, 106–8, 82.
9 David Walker, ‘The Time has Come; Histories of Asia Literacy’ in Asia Literate Schooling in the Asian Century, ed. Christine Halse (New York: Routledge, 2015), 29–43. For trade commissioners see: James Cotton, ‘E.T. Sheaf, Australian Trade Commissioner in the East, 1922–25’, History Australia 15, no 2 (2018): 271–88, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14490854.2018.1439250; and James Cotton, ‘We are Nearer the East than the Other States’: Frederic Jones of Queensland, the First Official from Australia in Shanghai’, Queensland Review 27, no. 1 (2020): 7–8, DOI:10.1017/qre.2020.3.
10 Walker, Anxious Nation, 195–209; William Farmer Whyte, The Awakening Giant: Travels and Reflections in the East in 1923 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022); Gavan Souter, ‘Whyte, William Farmer (1877–1958)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, ed. John Ritchie (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 480–81.
11 David Walker, Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2019).
12 Walker, Anxious Nation, 185–87; Walker, Stranded Nation, 191–214.
13 Walker, Anxious Nation, 13–35.
14 Walker, Anxious Nation, 210–26; Walker, Stranded Nation, 163–194.
15 Walker, Stranded Nation, 297–325.
16 Ibid., 326–79, 380–434.
17 Ibid., 229–30, 250–55 and 444–45.
18 Louise C. Johnson, Tanja Luckins, and David Walker, The Story of Australia: A New History of People and Place (London: Routledge, 2022); Giselle Byrnes, ‘Review of The Story of Australia: A New History of People and Place’, Australian Historical Studies 53, no. 2 (2022): 351–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2022.2048437.
19 Walker, Stranded Nation, 16–30.
20 Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN), https://aasrn.wordpress.com/, accessed 2 December 2023.
21 David Walker, ‘Know Thy Neighbour: Save the Date, 7 July 1937’, Griffith Review 48 (2015): 194–201, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.198408008373045; David Walker, ‘Significant Other: Anxieties about Australia’s Asian future’, Australian Foreign Affairs 5 (2019): 5–27, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.216092272497932.