Introduction: ruptured histories – Australia, China, Japan

In 1957, Hungarian refugee John Weiszmann travelled through Asia on his way to Australia, a path well worn by others before him, fleeing a European past in search of an Australian future. He boarded a small aeroplane with other Hungarian refugees carrying a United Nations issued refugee document – part of the wave of displaced people after the Second World War. The plane journey would take days, stopping regularly to refuel. But it was the plane’s stop in Saigon, capital of the Republic of Vietnam, that would stay with the passengers the longest. At an official ceremony welcoming the refugees, South Vietnamese performers staged an elaborate series of anti-Communist cultural theatre pieces that sought to present Saigon as a city on the frontlines of the global Cold War. To commemorate the plane’s arrival, each passenger was gifted an album of photographs documenting the anti-Communist festival.¹

This album, what Carol Gluck has called an ‘artefact of elsewhere’, troubles our historical geography and imagination because it does not fit easily into our usual conceptions of Australia’s Asian past.² Weiszmann kept the album until he passed away.³ It gathered dust in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but was deemed important enough to preserve and was eventually passed on to Sophie Loy-Wilson by his wife Dorothy in 2018. Did the album influence the family’s politics during the Cold War? Or their view of the Vietnam War when it crashed and burned into Australian consciousness in the 1970s? Did it tie them emotionally to Asia, an anchor linking them forever with an internationalism of the right fermenting in Cold War Saigon? We know the album mattered to the family; they have told us so.⁴ It was an artefact of emotional import, an artefact they imbued with historical meaning and value. As Australians with our own Asian ties, we know the album is one of many such artefacts sitting mutely in Australian homes, a confounding, de-moored archive yet to be incorporated into any national collection. If the communal memory of a nation resides in its monuments, institutions, and archives, where do we place the Weiszmann family album in the grand narratives of Australian history?

We feel the album hints at a methodological conundrum at the heart of Australia–Asia historiography. The album shows that Australian nationalism, deployed in our history writing and in our political discourse, continues to diminish Australia’s historical ties to Asia, mystifying the simultaneous and contending temporalities of Australia’s Asian past.⁵ Despite decades of rich and critical transnational history documenting these overlapping temporalities, media coverage of Australia’s multiplicity of relationships with Asia sustains some old tropes: Asia as economic opportunity, as geopolitical threat, or as both. As historians, we are yet to dislodge these tropes from the larger explanatory frameworks which we use to untangle Asian–Australian lives, ideas, investments, futures.⁶ These tropes are recalcitrant; they persist and they distort.

Finding the way

The Weiszmann album speaks to none of the usual tropes. If we seek to apply them to the album, its import is blurred, even awkward. The album, rather, tells us little about the classic touchstones typically denoting Australia’s Asian past: fears over Asian migration, about White Australia, about ANZAC, the Second World War in Asia, the Vietnam War, the Cold War. It belongs, seemingly, to ‘Asian’ history, a history of elsewhere, to what Raymond Williams calls history’s ‘noise and dust and unwanted stone’.⁷ But if we look more closely, we see that this album testifies to a far wider range of temporal possibilities, to a more expansive definition of Australian community. Here we see the potential to rethink the ways in which political ideologies are (and have been) constituted between Asia and Australia; to reconceptualise shared histories of ideas and movements of people and to map historical lives which confuse the neat distinctions of borders and state. Together, these perspectives might lead us towards a more capacious and interdependent set of histories, in which local and regional, national and international, imperial and anti-imperial geographies overlap each other.

In this special issue of History Australia, five emerging scholars bring new pressures to bear on Australian national history. Working at multiple scales combining micro- and macro-historical practices, these articles provide a snapshot of young scholars working at the intersection – and pushing at the boundaries – of Australia and Asia. From famine, to war and revolution, even love, these authors find new threads tying Japanese, Chinese and Australian lives together, exposing the limits of what Alecia Simmonds, Yves Rees and Anna Clark have called ‘national time’ in the process.⁸ Chinese New Year has shifted how political time and strategy is calculated in Australian domestic politics, while also allowing families to stretch their minds and hearts back across the centuries to their Chinese ancestors and their Chinese homelands. Australian farmers walked through wheat destined for Revolutionary China at the height of Cold War anti-Communist fervour, troubling Australia’s trade with Japan and alliance with the US during the Vietnam War; the Americans were concerned that Australian wheat would end up in North Vietnamese hands. Almost exactly 100 years earlier, Chinese merchants in Melbourne quoted Han-dynasty poetry to compel their European and Chinese compatriots to raise money in response to another famine in China, for only by averting the ‘unspeakable horrors’ could Victoria’s Chinese elites demonstrate moral leadership, ‘attach[ing] oneself to the tail of a great horse’. Japanese War brides after the Second World War arrived in the long shadow of embedded anti-Asian racism, leaving one war zone to arrive in another. ‘I love Australia’, one declared, her fear – the fragility of her position – the palpable undertow of such an affirmative declaration. Australian journalists dined at the table of Chinese warlords strategising their resistance to Japanese imperialism in Republican China and witnessed the results of aggressive Japanese colonial expansion, just as they failed to reflect on the violence of the British Empire, which made their own privileged position in China possible in the first place. We do ourselves a disservice if we do not capture the multiplicities of these voices.

How does Asia contribute to and reshape what it means to be a historian of Australia? Or an Australian historian of Asia? And what is the proper scaffolding to historicise and remap lives, archives, or material artefacts of Australian and Asian histories? As guest editors, we meet these new provocations from our particular academic experience. At a personal and professional level, we have both been beneficiaries of the multilingual and multinational archival focus of international history, and our intellectual lives entail an affective investment in Australia’s ruptured Asian pasts. While personal histories matter, the study of Asia and Australia is, methodologically speaking, the challenge of mastering two scholarly traditions rather than distinct methods. As we worked through the entwinned histories, our thoughts were drawn to the epistemological consequences of how the parting of ways structured older historical writing and how archives are constituted. We see Australian, Japanese and Chinese histories not as a series of discrete national or regional histories but as co-constituted, as key components of a larger body of historical scholarship.⁹ The Weiszmann family personalised a piece of propaganda as part of a shift from one life to another and in the process hinted at myriad arteries of Australia–Asia interconnection yet to be absorbed into the Australian historical imagination. The album directly challenges the economic determinism and securitisation which limit Australian engagement with Asia.

By undoing these reductive narratives, in the hope that more possibilities for the Australian self might flourish, we hope to reposition Australia’s future in Asia on two fronts: in the ways Australia chooses to interact with and represent itself in the world, and in the ways Australians make sense of the past. Our sources might speak different languages, yet the stories they tell point at a world of intense interconnections beyond national exchange and commerce; to something more intimate and familiar. To put it another way, two scholars, defined by differences in training, research and writing, arrived at ways of seeing Australia and Asia that were complementary and defined by inner solidarities, narratives, and perspectives. We both came of age in the Keating-era – a time now mythologised as auguring Australia’s much belated ‘turn to Asia’ – but feel much of the promise of that era fell afoul of a national politics intent on supressing rather than disinterring difficult histories and memories of Australia’s Asian past.¹⁰ We are interested in what was discarded at that particular moment, what was activated years later and how this process has shaped views of Australia and Asia. ‘We lost the way’, in the words of Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald:

What did we lose? Not everything of course. We have the trade and the tourism and the students and the other things for which we campaigned. But we lost the debate about the way, about the way Australia – the level of policy and foreign relations between states and business and university relations – discovered, engaged, enmeshed became part, with, of, in or about Asia. It was about not replacing the Western, never replacing the Western, but about making a place alongside it for Asia, about broadening the cultural horizons, about changing the intellectual universe of Australians.¹¹

Here in this special issue, we restore a historical lens to the question of Australia’s Asian future via a focus on Chinese, Japanese and Australian interconnections across the long twentieth century. Drawing together specialists in East Asian and Australian history, we present a series of articles that set out to map the political, economic and intellectual architecture that gradually bound Australia closer to Asia. Such a framing draws back the Eurocentric veil that continues to distort Australian views of Asian history, uncovering obscured connections between Asian empires, wars, revolutions and Australian politics, across a broad political spectrum, connections only properly understood if Australian archival collections are read alongside available East Asian archives and in East Asian languages. This is also a collection reflecting the breadth of Australian political engagement with Asia. While moments of Austral–Asian solidarity have often been the domain of transnational labour history, new research has shown how Australian conservativism and anti-Communism also owes a substantial debt to East Asian conservative politics.¹² There is little in Australian political history that remains unshaped by the Australian experience of Asia or at least unconnected to it. Asia has been a fact of life for Australians since the earliest days of colonisation and empire; it was not something that needed to be discovered or rediscovered. It was there in the colonial British race ideology, in the statutes, monuments and memories. Anxiety has been an overriding leitmotif, but also unexpectedly, Asia has been a place of memory, of loves, friendships, opportunities – what we might say are the makings of a life. Innumerable lives.

Our collection of new research articles begins in the 1870s when Chinese merchants in Melbourne raised money for famine relief in Qing dynasty China; analyses the role of Australian journalist-advisors to Republican era China and Taishō era Japan; examines contrasting Japanese and Chinese responses to White Australia; follows the Australian wheat trade into Revolutionary China; and ends in the 1990s when Chinese Lunar New Year became a staple on the Australian political calendar. Our Japan–China–Australia nexus is intentional. Japan has been excised out of much new work on Sino-Australian relations, and yet, we suggest, it is impossible to have clarity over Australia’s relationship with China if Japan is excluded from the discussion. In Asia, these histories have long been entwined at all levels.¹³

As a companion to this new research, we offer the latest in History Australia’s Landmark History series, featuring two leading scholars of Australia’s relationship with Asia: Agnieszka Sobocinska and David Walker. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Walker’s Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (1999), Sobocinska provides an illuminating re-examination of Walker’s seminal work in the field and its continuing importance for scholars today. Walker then offers some reflections and insights on Anxious Nation a quarter century after its first publication.

Ruptured histories

As Walker and others have noted, one of the most influential ways of seeing Australian and East Asian histories has been through the idea of a ‘rediscovery’ of Asia by Australian scholars at moments of national crisis or in response to changed political, intellectual, economic and diplomatic circumstances.¹⁴ As a mode of argumentation, the loss and perpetual rediscovery of Asia has exercised a powerful influence on how historians write Australia’s Asian pasts within a national narrative.¹⁵

Yet the pattern of rediscovery and loss points to more serious problems in the development of Australian writing about Asia that for our purposes is best understood as a series of ruptured histories. The move to reconceptualise loss and rediscovery as rupture is twofold: it allows us as historians to shift away from the idea of precipitous breaks or definitive leaps (however arresting these might be) and also edge instead towards a contextual approach to history that enables us to better understand the deeper significance of our Asian pasts. Through the lens of rupture, we are able to incorporate the lived historical realities of the violent colonial and Cold War conflicts that punctuated Australia’s engagement with Asia in the twentieth century. Put another way, this move allows for thicker histories to be written that centre the maelstrom of Cold War decolonisation – which is too often elided from narratives of Asia–Africa internationalism – Australia’s founding role in the Colombo system and especially histories of transnational activism in the global sixties.

The old ‘rediscoveries’ that once structured historical writing and the historian’s craft were arrayed against the personal experiences of families, debates by politicians, bureaucrats and activists, and the stories of unrest and emergencies in Asia – all of which Australians were directly involved in. In Wrestling with Asia (2012), journalist Frank Mount, who covered the international war in Vietnam, showed in his memoirs how significant the imaginary of Asia was to the anti-Communist politics of Bob Santamaria and the Australian Democratic Labour Party.¹⁶ Australian thinking about Asia has often involved a kind of double act: of intimacy and distance, of ignoring and remembering. Likewise, the Weiszmann case speaks to a broader trend, where material objects seem to trouble the longstanding assumptions of the postimperial decades.

What interests us here is a question of historical method: to discover the roots of our current predicament, recover older, more capacious ways of seeing, and with them reveal latent possibilities for how to reconstruct Australian and Asian pasts. This special issue explores – both methodologically and conceptually – the underlying causes of Australia’s ruptured history and offers new historical ways of seeing Australian and Asian pasts. It began with a common commitment to understanding how national historical narratives in Australia have come to ignore aspects of the Asian past. We start from the proposition that historians of Australia and Asia have every reason to engage with one another, for the issues they both focus on – politics, war, trade, gender, race, migrations, citizenship, empire, environment and revolution – are substantively the same. As we interrogate our sources, methods and conceptual approaches, this special issue sets its eyes on the possibilities and challenges of researching and writing that builds on the transnational and international turns in the discipline while working across multiple scales, disciplines, languages and sources.

A new habit of historiographical seeing

This collection was not assembled in a vacuum separate from its own time. We are undertaking this rethinking of Australia and East Asian histories at a moment of international and institutional upheaval. Internationally the world order that was created in 1945 is giving way to a new period of disorder as rising powers seek to revise regional borders and post-Cold War and postimperial settlements, while looming above it all is the spectre of Great-Power violence and war. Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the worsening of Sino-Australian ties and the coming of a ‘new Cold War’ between China and the US and its allies. The turning away from history and historical thinking in this discourse by international relations scholars comes at a real cost; we lose sight of moments of shared internationalism and intellectual fellowship across Australia–East Asia divides, moments preserved in our archival collections, and the collections of our Asian neighbours, but rarely considered by Australian historians themselves

These very archival collections are eroding as well. The key cultural institutions that guard Australia’s memory of Asia have all had their budgets cut in recent times. The National Library of Australia – one of the great historical repositories on Asia in the Anglophone world – has stopped collecting books on Japan, Korea and much of Asia. The Asia Reading Room within the NLA – whose walls were once filled with the latest publications and papers from across Asia – has been shuttered.

We see this special issue not as an answer to the gordian knot of Australian and Asian ties, but as an invitation to ask different questions of our protagonists, the contexts in which they are embedded and the events in which they are involved. For Asia, to borrow a phrase from Tessa Morris Suzuki, ‘is thus forever being reconstructed and reinvented’.¹⁷

So, one might add, is Australian history. Australia’s ruptured history has its own intellectual genealogy intimately tied to empire and war and anticolonial revolutions. What is this ruptured history? We suggest here three arguments that seek to understand the histories of rupture in Australian historical writing and Asia.

First, as Australia deimperialised, Asia was a major global site of decolonisation, central to the birth of the Asia–Africa movement, and a zone of some of the Cold War’s most violent and bloody struggles.¹⁸ It is the tension of the simultaneity of the two historical processes – deimperialisation and decolonisation – that significantly restructured Australian histories and knowledge production of Asia and set in motion new interpretations of national histories.¹⁹ Second, the post-Cold War period from the 1990s to the 2000s – and especially a new period of Chinese migration after Tiananmen – set the stage for a recovery of the country’s engagement with Asia and shaped the context of historical writing about formal and informal transnational connections. Third, the changing pattern of Australian strategic and economic views of Asia since the 2010s naturally had a significant impact. One of the most important structural factors affecting Australian writing on Asia has been the attempt to come to terms with the perceived failure of Australian efforts to forge a post-Cold War order. This impact on Australian public discourse and historical writing has been marked. A question now haunts the Australian imagination. Was the era of Australian engagement with Asia from the 1970s to 2000s an aberration from a longer historical experience of insecurity, state violence and regional wars?

Let us focus on the simultaneity of the experience of deimperialisation and decolonisation in shaping historical writing. After 1945, several factors commingled to produce the rupture in Australian views of Asia. To borrow a phrase from James C. Scott, the ‘hidden transcript’ of deimperialisation in Australia was not just the shedding of the imperial past, but the effacing of Asia in Australian historical writing.²⁰

For the most part, historian Neville Meaney’s work on Britishness and Australian national identity has been seen as separate from his attempt to write a series of comparative histories of Australia and Japan.²¹ Yet putting these two intellectual endeavours in conversation is generative for thinking through Asia in modern historiography. Meaney viewed the clashes between Australia and Japan not through a racial lens of White Australia – even though that was important – but as coterminous with the problems of modernisation and nationalism. While Meaney is most known for his work on Britishness and Australian nationalism – that is the different stages of imperial nationhood – his work on Australia and Japan restores a capacious and plural approach to the Australian past and the ambivalence of empire. Such an approach opens new pathways to think about Australian history and its relations to Asia as one constructed through multiple imperial centres: Great Britain, the United States and increasingly China and Japan.

Meaney divided Australian deimperialisation into three eras: the period of colonial self-government; the British national or race patriot era, which extended from the 1870s to 1950s; and the multicultural era from the 1960s onwards.²² Meaney’s Australia troubled the national narrative and the view of Australian relations with Asia as either tabula rasa or coloured by the racialist White Australia Policy. Australians stood out even among the dominions, proclaiming themselves not just equal partners in the glory of empire but the true inheritors of an imperial race and culture that once encompassed the whole world. Yet as Australians came to realise, ‘race culture, and state interests were not easily reconciled’, and imperial consolidation of the British world system proved difficult to attain.²³

After World War II, as Australians faced up to the growing awkwardness of their position in the Commonwealth of Nations, the question of Asia was front and centre. Yet the transition to the American Cold War system was never geopolitically preordained. Meaney recognised the transformation of the British Commonwealth into a ‘multicultural, multiracial Commonwealth could no longer serve, even nominally, Australia’s national purposes’.²⁴ As historical geographers marked an ever-receding realm of Britishness, Australians were forced to come to terms with an Asian state system ruled by anticolonial nationalist leaders whose careers entwinned uneasily with the wartime Japanese empire. Yet at precisely the moment that Australian politicians, intellectuals and historians confronted the tumult of postcolonial Asia, the writing of history turned inwards towards the creation of a nationalist teleology that led historians away from Asia.²⁵ And so Asia was always the ghost at the banquet. Meaney writes perceptively that the fear of Asian wars and racial migration became a ‘central, if misunderstood motif’ in the attempt by national historians to define a ‘National Culture’.²⁶ Yet the hegemony that these works gained in the writing of Australian history – and the denial of Asia that they represented – is an important part of the ruptured history we seek to tell.

By the 1990s, Australia’s economic realignment to a fast-growing region set the stage for a more intensive focus on the country’s engagement with Asia.²⁷ The resultant writings tended to narrate the history of Australian ties to Asia through a post-1989 account centred on a materialist nexus of natural resources or markets, or as part of the new post-Tiananmen wave of Chinese migration. Beginning in the 2000s, a new generation of historians began carefully to recover histories of border crossing solidarities – immigrants, diaspora communities, travellers, activists, commodities, ideas, religion and so on. Through meticulous archival examination, these histories traced the ‘circulation of their chosen subjects, scholars narrated histories beyond the nation state’.²⁸ Yet moving beyond the nation is easier said than done, and even here in works marked by a commitment to transnational approaches, the nation proves a hegemonic (if spectral) presence.

An emotional terrain

The articles assembled here aspire to be imaginative about the past in ways attentive to temporality, causality and juxtaposition. They do not represent a collective research agenda but rather represent a ‘habit of historiographical seeing’, which emphasises sensitivity to new lines of reconnection as well as to the fine grain of archival recovery of prematurely foreclosed ways of thinking about the past with empathy.²⁹ Taken as a whole, they map out multiplicities of past and present, and gesture towards what we see as an emotional terrain of historical geographies, clamorous temporalities, material encounters born of the particularities of Australian and Asian connections. In terms of sources, methods and conceptual approaches, the emotional terrain entails writing histories in a way that invokes ‘new kinds of archival questions, new regionalisms, alternate geographies and original periodization’.³⁰ Memory has a hard edge because the emotional terrain can be deployed to many different ends in domestic politics.

Each essay also in its own way opens new avenues to rethink Australian history. Through an empathetic reading attuned to the complicated and contradictory lives of our historical actors and the multifaceted identities they assumed, as much as to the extreme choices forced upon people, we seek to broaden our understanding of the personal, political and familial that troubles fixed ideas of Australia and East Asia. To paraphrase historian Martin Dusinberre, history emerges not just in the multilingual archives of international history but in the ‘brackish spaces between archival sites, or between physical and digitized archives’ as much as in the ‘historians’ imagination’.³¹ Such works of history are already underway. At the University of Sydney, Adrian Vickers has been spearheading a project on the multilingual Asian archives of Australian history that destabilises static narrative and extends ‘our points of reference and our frames of comparison’.³² These are exciting developments, and it will be interesting to see what resonance they have on Australian history in the years to come.

In resituating the Australian past as a site of overlapping and multiple imperial presences – Great Britain, United States, China, Japan – the kind of stories we tell are transformed. For example, as Tianna Killoran has shown, Japanese migration to Northern Queensland was not only a local history of migration and integration but also a co-production of British and Japanese imperialism.³³ Viewed this way, the topic raises new questions. How did the farming and mining knowledge gained in Northern Queensland help shape Japanese settler colonial practices? How did this migration deepen Australian understandings of Japanese imperial migration policies and goals? What does the oceanic journey of entire Japanese towns and villages to Australia tell us about the imperial world of Asia in the late nineteenth century?

Further south, in Bendigo, in regional Victoria, where ‘the story of Chinse migration is more important than the gold rushes themselves’, residents grow up listening to drums, made in south China in the nineteenth century, before the fall of the Qing dynasty, and before nationhood – Australian or Chinese.³⁴ These are drums that made their way to Australia as two empires, the Qing and the British, sent their emissaries to the settler colonial goldfields, and were shocked by the violence, disorder and racism that sprung forth, alongside the gold.³⁵ They are drums that trigger emotions in the listener; that mark time, that break the silence, that signal the Asia within. Leigh McKinnon, curator of the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo and a fifth-generation Bendigo local, grew up hearing these Chinese drums every Chinese New Year, and he is not alone in measuring his connection to place via their beat. ‘Bendigo people’, McKinnon told us, ‘all hear the drums’.³⁶

Above all, this special issue seeks to enable productive dialogue among scholars. The examples provided by our contributors, we hope, might inspire us to read and re-read some of our sources in new ways, and to recover the global context and comparisons of the Australian and Asian past.

Our collection begins, appropriately, with a new history of resistance to the White Australia Policy by Nathan Gardner. Gardner asks what ordinary lives and subaltern voices can tell us about the demise of White Australia. Drawing on a range of sources, he reads these subaltern voices against the elite, state-based discourses that predominate in our scholarship on this topic. Gardner asks us to ponder the relationship between the ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ in Australia’s history. Reading the resistance of multiple migrant cohorts in the same frame, he posits that elite resistance to White Australia has at times overshadowed the more difficult-to-reach influence of other community voices. For Gardner, this puts the role of historians under the spotlight and allows us to consider how the focus on elites has overshadowed the position of other Chinese and Japanese cohorts worthy of historians’ attention.

Sarah May Comley then takes us back to the gold rushes and their aftermath, when newly minted Chinese Australian merchants, rich from the rushes, sought honour and prestige in China, committing themselves to a variety of charitable endeavours. Comley shows how these merchants drew on Confucian and Buddhist ideas to raise money for the North China Famine between 1876 and 1879. Philanthropy became ‘a vehicle [for] both social and moral mobility’, allowing Australian Chinese with humble origins to claim status in both late Qing China and regional Victoria. Comley has found a valuable trove of documents – including a detailed letter in Chinese – preserved in the records of the Towns Clerk files in Melbourne, detailing the establishment of the Melbourne fund for the charity and the role of prominent Melbourne Chinese merchants in its functioning. This is rich material, demonstrating an entwined Australian and Chinese emotional terrain even at a time of intense anti-Chinese antipathy in colonial Victoria. As Comley writes: ‘A single Chinese-language letter in the committee records reveals a complex interplay of Chinese merchants living in Melbourne, and the ways in which they may have conceptualised the famine and their relief’.

In our third article, Tess Gardner takes us into an imperial and revolutionary world, where identity and the emotional terrain of lived experience, like ideology and belief, coexisted uneasily. Through an innovative reading of Australian and international archives – public and private – biography serves as a lens to write a new chapter in the global history of media and propaganda. Gardner follows the lives of Australian journalists George Morrison and Harold Timperley through their sojourns in Asia and across two world conflagrations, tracing their intimate involvement with revolutionary Asian politics. As Australian journalists’ lives mixed propaganda against the Japanese empire with sensationalist reporting, the line between fact and fiction always blurry and uncertain, hints at the malleability of their roles as journalist and activist. Gardner’s work recovers the complex identities of Australians in Asia – first as British imperial subjects, next as mercenary journalists on the lookout for a story (even a made up one) and finally as expert advisers to Republican China. Through these multiple emotional loyalties, Morrison and Timperley’s lives gesture to the way borders dissolve in words and lives. Here, Gardner tethers together geopolitical and affective loyalties, showing us how the revolutionary politics of Asia through the Great War – in particular China – served as a mirror for recasting Asia in Australian minds. This is Australian history of Asia not as international or national, imperial or colonial, but through the lens of the experiential.

Frank Yuan delves into the political landscape and resource frontier of Australian–China relations before formal diplomatic relations were normalised in 1972. Focusing on the 1940s and 1960s, and the transition from a British imperial world to the Cold War in Asia, Yuan traces the archives of business interests and private individuals who, with the tacit support of the Liberal–Country Coalition, worked to galvanise new markets for Australian agricultural products with the People’s Republic of China. Writing along the grain of new international histories of the Cold War, Yuan’s work makes a number of important interventions into the global history of sanctions, economic coercion and the politics of global economic governance. By placing Australian efforts to bypass commercial and trade restrictions with the PRC without breaking from the country’s Cold War alignment, this history broadens our understanding comparatively of the role Australia and other Asian allies of the United States played in helping to shape the entry of the PRC into capitalist international markets.

The final article, by Cindy Zhu, traces the history of Chinese New Year celebrations in Australia and asks what these can tell us about political time in this country, and about questions of inclusion, diversity and the geopolitics of the heart: the emotional terrain of multicultural politics and its discontents. Drawing on little-used archives collected by Australian local councils, Zhu traces the evolution of Chinese New Year as a political event in Australia while also weaving Chinese–Australian emotional investments in the celebration into her analysis. The two are far from separate: Australian political attitudes towards Asia have always been deeply felt and have always trodden a fraught emotional terrain. Our ‘anxious nation’ remains, with all its imperial baggage. It is better to understand its antecedents than to pretend we have left the past behind. As Zhu writes: ‘Just as Christmas and Valentine’s Day encourage ritual behaviors to emphasise social identities and confirm kinship, so too do the traditions of Lunar New Year provide an opportunity to affirm individual and collective identity’. As Zhu demonstrates, the physicality of Chinese New Years – the drums, the dragon dance, the pride, the history – could have a profound effect. For Eugene Law from Bendigo’s Golden Dragon Museum, performing in the Chinese New Year parade in Bendigo with the famous Bendigo Dragon moved him to his core – and in the aftermath his ‘heart still hasn’t stopped beating’.

When the Weiszmann family came to Australia in 1957, they arrived in a post-war society with its eyes fixed intently on the future. Across the country, Australia’s old Chinatowns, Malay towns and Japan towns were imperilled. These places were bulldozed in Darwin and Brisbane, and threatened in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.³⁷ But amid this erasure, the Weizmann family brought with them an artefact that spoke to pervasive Australia–Asia solidarities. As this special issue demonstrates, such solidarities built on an older inter-Asian traffic in ideas, objects and people. The album was a reminder of the human capacity to imagine alternative futures after dystopian times; in Australia, such an imagining was always tied to Asia. It proposed an imagined Vietnamese society fashioned in Cold War terms, influenced by Asian and Western anti-communisms, and connected to new Australian lives, a narrative especially redolent for post-war European migrants – those ‘new Australians’. These ties testify to a ruptured series of connections foundational to Australia’s national story.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Levidis

Dr Andrew Levidis is a lecturer of modern Japanese history at the Australian National University and an international historian of modern Japan and its empire-state.

Sophie Loy-Wilson

Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson is a senior lecturer in Australian history at the University of Sydney and a historian of Chinese–Australian communities.

Notes

1 Private archives of Sophie Loy-Wilson.

2 Carol Gluck, ‘The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now’, American Historical Review 116, 3 (2011): 676–87.

3 Cathy Weiszmann, Correspondence with Sophie Loy-Wilson, 12 October 2023.

4 Ibid.

5 Here we are drawing on a large body of work critical of the ‘nation’ in settler colonial historiography, ranging from Ian Tyrell’s work which sought to dislodge American exceptionalism, to Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynold’s insistence on a transnational history of the White Australia Policy, to Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s mapping of Indigenous mobilities across Australasia and the Pacific, and to Neville Meaney’s field-defining intervention, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History of Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001): 76–90.

6 Wanning Sun, ‘What Does National Interest Mean When it Comes to Labor’s China Policy: The Language Around National Interest and National Security has the Albanese Government Walking a Tightrope’, Crikey, 15 November 2023; James Curran, ‘Excess Baggage: Is China a Genuine Threat to Australia?’, Australian Foreign Affairs 19 (2023): 6–28; Marilyn Lake, ‘The China Threat: Can We Escape the Historical Legacy of Anti-Chinese Racism?’, Arena, 29 June 2023; David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2021). See also: Alecia Simmonds, Anne (now Yves) Rees, and Anna Clark, ‘Testing the Boundaries: Reflections on Transnationalism in Australian History’, in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, ed. Simmonds, Rees and Clark (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–14.

7 Raymond Williams, quoted in Ewan Gibbs, ‘Blood all over the Grass’, review of Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984–85, ed. Robert Gildea, London Review of Books 45, no. 21 (2 November 2023).

8 Simmonds, Rees, and Clark, ‘Testing the Boundaries’, 3.

9 Christina Twomey, ‘Is Australian History over Determined by the Transnational Turn?’, in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, ed. Simmonds, Rees, and Clark (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 89–101.

10 Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Trouble in White Australia: Marilyn Lake, Australian History and Asian Exclusion’, in Contesting Australian History: Essays in Honour of Marilyn Lake, ed. Joy Damousi and Judith Smart (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2019), 175.

11 Stephen Fitzgerald, quoted in Geremie Barmé, ‘Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?’, China in the Word Annual Lecture, Australian National University, Canberra, 18 July 2011.

12 Jon Picinni, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2016); Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Liberating Asia: Strikes and Protest in Sydney and Shanghai, 1920–1939’, History Workshop Journal 71, no. 1 (2011): 74–102; Adrian Vickers, ‘From Oriental Studies to Inter-Asia Referencing: The 2019 A.R. Davis Memorial Lecture’, JOSAH: Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, 52 (2020–21): 12–35; Andrew Levidis, ‘Cold War Archives: Return to the Jakarta–Tokyo–Canberra Trilateral’, East Asia Forum, 19 February 2023.

13 David Walker, ‘Know Thy Neighbour: Save the Date, 7 July 1937’, Griffith Review 48 (2015): 194–201; Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s (Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kate Darian-Smith and David Lowe, The Australian Embassy in Tokyo and Japan–Australia Relations (Canberra: ANU Press, 2022).

14 David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, eds., Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Press, 2012), 2.

15 Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Overturning the Point: Exploring Change in Australia–Asia relations’, History Compass 12, no. 8 (2014): 642–50.

16 Frank Mount, Wrestling with Asia: A Memoir (Ballan: Connor Court Publishing, 2012).

17 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Liquid Area Studies’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 27, no. 1 (2019): 209–39.

18 Nicholas Ferns, Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–75: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

19 Miranda Johnson and Caitlin Storr, ‘Australia as Empire’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, ed. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 248–80.

20 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990).

21 James Curran and Stuart Ward, eds., Australia and the Wider World: Selected Essays of Neville Meaney (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013).

22 Ibid., 51.

23 Curran and Ward, eds., Selected Essays of Neville Meaney, 59.

24 Ibid., 67.

25 Mark Hearn, ‘Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation’, in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, ed. Stefan Berger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 103.

26 Curran and Ward, eds., Selected Essays of Neville Meaney, 73.

27 Allan Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World Since 1942 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017).

28 Paul Thomas Chamberlin, ‘Beyond Americentrism: Thoughts on Internationalizing America and the World’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 263.

29 The phrase ‘habit of historiographical seeing’ comes from Carol Gluck in Sabine Frühstück, Carol Gluck, Andrew Gordon, and Laura Hein, with Eiko Maruko Siniawer, ‘Modern Japan History Association Roundtable: “The State of Our Field”’, Modern Japan History Association, 17 October 2023.

30 Maria John, ‘Doing Comparative and Transnational Indigenous History’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 298.

31 Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023), 5.

32 Arunabh Ghosh, ‘Reflections on Global History’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 281.

33 Tianna Killoran, ‘Visible participation: Japanese migrants in north Queensland, 1880–1941’, History Australia, 18, no. 3 (2021): 508–525.

34 Dennis Lewis from Bendigo Historical Society, Conversation with Sophie Loy-Wison, 16 January 2023.

35 Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Keir Reeves and Benjamin Mountford, ‘Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese–Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies, 42, no. 1 (2011): 111–25.

36 Leigh McKinnon from Golden Dragon Museum Bendigo, Conversation with Sophie Loy-Wilson, 16 January 2023.

37 Elizabeth Kwan, ‘Matriarch of Darwin’s Chinese community’, Inside Story, 7 March 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/matriarch-of-darwins-chinese-community/.