Orienting Australia: David Walker’s Anxious Nation in the historiographies of Australia and Asia

Abstract

David Walker’s ‘Anxious Nation’ had had its greatest influence on scholars working on Australian encounters with Asia. But the book’s most significant achievement was to identify the central importance occupied by Asia – or, more precisely, the spectre of Asia – in Australian history. It diagnosed Australia’s desperate search for security, its defensive posturing as a ‘White Man’s Country’, and the longstanding search for ‘engagement’ as part of the same malady: a hyperawareness of Asia’s proximity and power, and the sense that it would determine Australia’s future. This was less a book about Asia than it was about Australia. Until it is recognised as such, and fully drawn into mainstream Australian histories and survey courses, the task of understanding Australia’s national character in light of its neuroses remains incomplete. A quarter century after its publication, historians of Australia still have a lot to learn about their anxious nation.

Keywords:

• Historiography
• Australian history
• Australia-Asia
• David Walker
• Anxious Nation

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Orienting Australia: response by David Walker

David Walker’s Anxious Nation gets better with every reading. I first picked it up as a PhD student working on twentieth-century Australian travel to Asia. I must have found it very early in my candidature; it appears as #29 in my Endnote library (a file that has been corrupted so many times this, admittedly, no longer means much). It is likely I read it immediately after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the behemoth that set the intellectual stage for Walker’s analysis, as for so many others. I have visceral memories of reading Orientalism; I remember my then-boyfriend’s dining table, his dog, and the peculiar blinding light of the Sydney sun (to be fair, this has probably been heightened by nostalgia as I write this in gloomy London). Most of all, I remember frustration at my slow progress. At that point, my ‘method’ (if I had one) was to manually type out key quotes from books and articles as I read them. Reading Orientalism was taking too long because I was essentially typing the entire book out again. Reading Anxious Nation, on the other hand, was sheer pleasure: not because there were few key quotes – on the contrary – but rather because they were so well written, so pithy and so funny that reading them for work seemed like cheating. Retyping whole paragraphs simply allowed me to savour the writing and better appreciate the witticisms. In the 20 or so years that have passed, I have only come across a handful of texts that are as gratifying to read – and a couple of those are David Walker articles.

When I returned to Anxious Nation this year, in preparation for this review essay, I still found it an enjoyable read. But now, the best part (for me) is the elegance with which Walker weaves together culture and politics; race and gender; discourse and experience, and the subtlety and modesty with which he set about revolutionising Australian history. Don’t get me wrong: I still chuckled (how could you not) but now I am more genuinely struck by the book’s contributions and influence. Before Anxious Nation, it was common to think of Australia’s identity through the prism of its European relations. One common metaphor portrayed Australia as an adolescent, slowly and reluctantly relinquishing its claims on Britain’s apron strings. In this story, Australia was so dependent, it only stopped pining for ‘home’ once the United States came a-wooing. The opposing ‘radical nationalist’ school portrayed Australia as plucky and independent, and determined to prove it to British audiences. Anxious Nation portrayed Australia’s past through an entirely different lens, arguing that awareness of Asia had been a powerful force shaping Australian identity and history. For Walker, the aggressive posturing of Australia as a ‘White Man’s Country’ made most sense when viewed as a defensive reaction to Asia’s proximity, coupled with a lack of any genuine understanding of Asian cultures or languages. For me, as for many others, this argument proved wildly influential. The only way I can account for historians who continued to explain Australian history without reference to Asia is that they were so charmed by Anxious Nation’s prose that they simply did not notice the argument. This is their loss.

With notable exceptions (Rupert Lockwood’s Black Armada being one), histories of Australia and Asia written before the 1990s were mostly old-school diplomatic histories of bilateral relations.¹ Over the previous decades, Neville Meaney had become the dominant historian of Australia and Asia, and his authoritative books on Australian perceptions of Asia were firmly focused on Australia’s political, diplomatic and military elite and took particular account of Japan.² David Sissons was also influential, and covered similar territory.³ There is no denying that foreign policy is important to international history, but it is not constitutive of it. This is particularly true in the case of Australia, which did not have an independent foreign policy until the 1942 adoption of the Statute of Westminster (according to some analysts, it has yet to craft an independent foreign policy). When it came to Australia and Asia, therefore, a great deal of the important stuff took place beneath the diplomatic level. This was certainly the case before the Pacific War, and I and others have argued that it is also true far beyond. But the field’s top-down traditions made it difficult for even the most gifted diplomatic historians, in which category I include Neville Meaney, to fully grasp the dynamics of international affairs beyond parliament house and Australia’s embassies, high commissions and consulates (although in the mid-1990s, Meaney became more attentive to literary and artistic depictions).⁴

These dynamics were becoming increasingly visible outside the academy. The 1990s were a period of transformation in Australian attitudes to Asia. Politically, Paul Keating had made Asia a centrepiece of his prime ministership. He had pushed the progressive narrative of ‘engagement’ further than others had dared, declaring that Australia was not just close to Asia but actually part of it. For Keating, Asia represented the future: not only did it have massive markets, but integration in a dynamic world region lent genuine importance to an otherwise peripheral country (in Keating’s own words, Australia was ‘the arse-end of the Earth’).⁵ Every step towards integration with Asia was also a step away from the British sphere of influence, which was important for Keating, not least because it annoyed John Howard and the other ‘old fogies who doffed their lids and tugged the forelock to the British establishment’.⁶ But just as significant were changes outside politics: on the one hand, a talismanic belief that markets in Japan or China would determine Australia’s economic future, and on the other, a fear that Asians would wipe Australians off the map. This would happen either militarily, as depicted in John Marsden’s phenomenally popular Tomorrow, When the War Began book series (which I read at school, along with the rest of the Elder Millennial cohort) or by immigration. The early 1990s saw a potent national anxiety around Asian migrant gangs that only accelerated after the murder of prominent heart surgeon Victor Chang in 1991 and the assassination of NSW member of parliament John Newman in 1994 (the former by criminal opportunists, but with media coverage initially blaming ‘Asian Triads’; the latter a murky political murder immediately linked to Vietnamese heroin dealers in Cabramatta). This was the context that gave rise to Pauline Hanson and her infamous 1996 speech warning Australians they were in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’.⁷ By the 1990s, if not before, it was eminently clear that Australian perceptions of Asia were far more than the sum of diplomatic relations.

Poststructuralism and cultural history were on the rise, and David Walker rode the first wave in Australia. The first decades of Walker’s career coincided with major historiographical transformations, with the gradual translation of Michel Foucault’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, and the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978. Walker’s sophisticated reading of literary sources and his skill in interpreting cultural sources through a political lens were honed by these developments. Like his contemporary, Richard White (whose Inventing Australia has also been examined in this ‘Landmark Histories’ series), Walker had begun his career by unpicking Australian national identity. Walker’s particular interest was in literary nationalism: his first book, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity, examined Vance Palmer, Frank Wilmot, Louis Esson and Frederick Sinclaire as case studies of the interplay between personal and national identity.⁸ Notably, Walker was an astute observer of gender identities, and Dream and Disillusion offered a perceptive analysis of masculinity both as a construct and as a defining element of Australian nationhood. This sensitivity to the political valence of gender identities would be central to Anxious Nation. So too would discourse analysis of cultural materials, and especially middlebrow books and novels. One of the best-known, and most enjoyable, of Anxious Nation’s chapters examined ‘The Invasion Narrative’ genre. Walker revealed that Asian invasion thrillers such as Tomorrow, When the War Began had a long ancestry that stretched back to the nineteenth century. These novels illustrated the paranoid scope of Australian anxieties: ‘Asian’ threats in these novels were variously rendered as Chinese or Japanese; alluring or ugly; genius or dolt; vast invading armies of inhuman masses or a sole genius plotting to take over the world. But the real object of anxiety was not Asia, but Australia itself: as Walker notes, in these novels, ‘fears of weakness, decline and moral pollution along with anxieties over the decay of patriotism and the untrustworthy nature of women, often figured as betrayers of national promise, recur’.⁹

Walker’s interest in Asia was overdetermined. Later in life, he published Not Dark Yet, a ‘personal history’ that prominently wove Asian ‘engagement’ into the Walker family narrative.¹⁰ From the mid-nineteenth century, the Walker clan were based in Burra, some 150 km north of Adelaide, and their story intersected with Chinese Australians, including Walker’s distant relative, market gardener Luke Day. During the Pacific War, Walker’s uncle Laurie was posted to Ambon, where he was captured and eventually executed by Japanese forces. Another uncle was posted to New Guinea and Borneo. The mystery surrounding his relatives’ Asian experiences stoked the young David’s curiosity. Walker’s institutional habitat at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s was also significant. At UNSW, Walker collaborated with historian of Indonesia John Ingleson on an innovative undergraduate course, ‘Australian Perceptions of Asia’, which provided the opportunity to gather materials and refine arguments. By the 1990s, the history of Australian perceptions of Asia was becoming a matter of wider academic interest. In 1991, Walker co-edited a special issue of Australian Cultural History, titled ‘Australian Perceptions of Asia’, with Julia Horne and Adrian Vickers. This edited collection was a fork in the road of Australian–Asian history; it was so important that I have since accrued two copies (I also somehow have four copies of Anxious Nation, including its Chinese translation and Indian edition). Among other essays, Beverley Kingston assessed Indian influences on Australian culinary tastes, Adrian Vickers examined Australian literary depictions of Southeast Asia, Richard White followed AIF soldiers to wartime Egypt, and Nicholas Brown uncovered Asian impacts on Australian intellectuals. This edited collection pioneered the intersection of cultural history techniques and Australian–Asian history. In many ways, it set the terms of reference for Anxious Nation.¹¹

Two other major publications also set the scene. In 1992, former diplomat Alison Broinowski read the history of Australian perceptions of Asia through the visual arts in The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia.¹² Four years later, Lachlan Strahan (later High Commissioner to the Solomon Islands) published Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions From the 1930s to the 1990s, which, like Anxious Nation, charted multiple paths from Sinophilia to Sinophobia, and everything in between.¹³ Both these texts were innovative in using cultural sources to understand international relations. But they worked within the established narrative that portrayed ‘engagement’ as a mark of progressive Australianness. In a foreword to Broinowski’s book, prominent Indonesianist Jamie Mackie asked, ‘Why have Australians remained so tenaciously Eurocentric and oblivious to the challenges and opportunities presented to us by our proximity to so many Asian countries?’¹⁴ Perhaps because Walker limited his analysis to the prewar period, Anxious Nation avoids this Whiggish position. Rather, Walker took a step back and historicised this very discourse as a recurrent theme in Australian history. Later, when David Walker and I worked together on Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, we would write that the trope of ‘Rising Asia’ has ‘long been presented as a test for Australians: a test of their geographical and cultural knowledge’.¹⁵ Eager swots that we are, most historians had been so keen to pass that they failed to ask why ‘engagement’ was set as a test in the first place, and by whom, or to probe the broader effects of this narrative. Identifying this discourse was one of Anxious Nation’s key contributions. In the 25 years since Anxious Nation was published, progressive politicians and self-appointed ‘thought leaders’ have regularly returned to the theme that Australia faces an Asian future – an ‘Asian Century’, even – and that we need to pull our socks up in preparation. The regularity with which this theme is revived reveals a good deal about its discursive power, and also about the very real benefits that can accrue to its proponents. Australian ‘engagement’ is perpetually a work in progress, a destination that is both imperative and impossible to reach. Walker once said to me that academics working on Australia and Asia were unusually blessed: we would always be able to make claims for the timeliness and ‘national benefit’ of our work. He said this in jest, but as the Australian government makes a new tilt at an ‘Indo–Pacific Future’ (having already discarded the Asian Century trope), I am again reminded that Walker’s witticisms often bear a kernel of essential truth.

The importance of being white

Anxious Nation was well received upon its publication in 1999. It won the Ernest Scott Prize, meaning that it was judged as ‘the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand’ published in that year (a bumper year for Australian history, at that). Australian–Asian history is more established than it was 25 years ago, and Anxious Nation is much admired in this field. However, I still do not think the Australian historical discipline has adequately integrated the book’s key argument: that Australian history cannot be understood without reference to Asia or, more precisely, the idea of Asia. Anxious Nation argued Australia’s national character, particularly in relation to race, gender and land, was profoundly shaped by the spectre of Asia. Studying Australian perceptions of Asia, then, is not optional to understanding Australian history. It is right at the centre: part of the core curriculum rather than an elective.

From at least the 1850s, if not before, Australian ambitions for independent nationhood focused on the dream of a ‘White Man’s Country’. Anxious Nation shows that the spectre of Asia was essential to every one of these three keywords. The importance of race – of being white – can hardly be overstated in Australian history until at least the mid-twentieth century. Fin de siècle Australians were preoccupied with race; so much so that race-based immigration restriction was among the very first pieces of government business taken up at Federation. Social Darwinism was at the peak of its influence, and many Australians believed that the world was a competitive place where ‘higher’ races would naturally supplant ‘lower’ ones. Whiteness was thought to be at the very top of the racial hierarchy, and so Australia owed it to the rest of the world to achieve and maintain racial purity. This rhetoric became amplified after Chinese migrants, escaping political instability and natural disasters, found their way to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. Anxious Nation reveals that Australia’s pursuit of a white nation was propelled by two contradictory tropes: that Asian migrants were both racially inferior and incredibly powerful. As ‘lower’ races, they could survive on lower-quality food, and less of it: where white men needed meat, ‘Asiatics’ seemingly thrived on rice alone. They possessed a capacity for cooperation that seemed to be more ant-like than human. They could also flourish in difficult climates, such as Australia’s tropical north. Some commentators thought this was a good thing. But there was a dark undercurrent. Just as British colonisation had been justified by the claim that Indigenous peoples had failed to develop the land productively, so could a new civilisation leverage the claim against Australia, pointing to its sparsely populated interior and in the so-called ‘Empty North’ as evidence. In the stark racial language of the times, yellow threatened to displace white just as white had supplanted black. Much of Australia’s racial identity, therefore, developed as a discursive counterpoint to the threat of Asia.

The rugged masculinity of Australian national identity – the fact this was a Man’s Country – was just as important as its whiteness, and Walker argues that the gendered construction of Australian nationhood was also projected against the foil of an Asian ‘other’. Although Australia was overwhelmingly urban, the ‘true’ national character was located first in the hardy bushmen of the interior, and later in the bronzed ANZAC. Women and urban intellectuals were considered suspect in the national project of self-defence: not only were they too weak to physically counter the Asian foe when he arrived, but they could not be trusted not to invite him in the first place. Effete urbanites, who in the nineteenth century were taken with japonaiserie and interested in the ‘The Antique Orient’, represented a dangerous weak spot in the national armour.¹⁶ This is why, Walker suggests, artistic and intellectual tastes were rendered feminine and questionable (ironically, often by nationalist writers who themselves were thoroughly urban, and very far from brawny). This fierce anti-intellectualism, infused into the Australian psyche to inoculate it against Asian influence, had a lasting effect for subsequent ‘inner-city elites’, including many academics, in Australia.

Finally, Anxious Nation helps us better understand Australian ideas about Country. I have already discussed the insecurity surrounding Australian colonisation, especially in the Empty North. Many Australians regarded their small population with some trepidation well into the twentieth century, and this anxiety underpinned government schemes to attract migrants from Britain and Northern Europe (gradually, the definition of ‘whiteness’ was relaxed to allow southern and eastern Europeans too). But from the late nineteenth century, immigration boosterism was joined by contrasting claims that the Australian environment was not capable of sustaining a large population. The continent’s environmental limits came to be better understood following the Federation drought, which banished all delusions that ‘rain follows the plough’ and that Australia could support a population of 100 million or more. For some, this came as a relief. The aridity and inhospitable nature of the Australian continent became a cultural touchstone at least partly because it helped project a warning to the ‘surplus’ populations of Asia: the continent might look big on the map, but in reality, the inhabitable portions were far smaller. The message was clear: Australia was not worth the trouble of invading. This elegant fusion of cultural history, environmental history and the history of science was a hallmark of Anxious Nation.

Building on the ‘Anxious Nation’

Although Anxious Nation was influential for historians of Australia and Asia, it has not had the revolutionary impact on mainstream Australian history that it deserves. The self-sufficiency of Walker’s argument is at once a strength and a weakness: the Asian lens seems to explain so much about Australian national identity and history that it can be incompatible with other lenses, including British imperial connections and histories of settler–Indigenous contact. Anxious Nation certainly did not attempt to argue with other interpretations: Walker did not attempt to situate the Asian roots of Australian identity within the older story of radical nationalism, in which the brawny, tanned Australian was seen as a counterpoint to British claims of moral and racial degeneration in the colonies and a retort to English snobbishness. He also did not position Australian obsession with whiteness within the long history of Indigenous violence, in which the importance of being white was wielded as a violent tool of settler colonialism.¹⁷ While he was probably wise not to try to quantify what proportion of influence came from anxieties about Asia, and what proportion came from other sources, the stand-alone nature of Anxious Nation did make it difficult for many historians to integrate its arguments into their existing narratives. Many preferred to simply set it to one side. Survey histories of Australia still typically relegate ‘Asia’ to a single stand-alone chapter that often centres on foreign relations rather than national identity; others mention Asia only in relation to the White Australia Policy.¹⁸ From what I have seen over the past two decades, most survey Australian history units (where they still exist) also tend to sequester ‘Asian engagement’ to one or two weeks in a semester-length unit.

This echoes the historiography of Australian racism, which is divided between studies of settler attitudes towards Indigenous Australians (an internal other) and those focused on migrants and other external others. Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus’ 1978 influential edited collection, Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Working Class in Australia, examined discrimination against Indigenous people and discrimination against migrants in separate chapters, and subsequent accounts have tended to retain this division. Anxious Nation extends the range of Australian perceptions of Asia beyond racism, but otherwise remains within this framework.

Although Anxious Nation was not a transnational history, it set the stage for historians to zoom out and analyse the transnational circuits of people and ideas nurturing Australia’s preoccupation with white manhood. Writing at the end of the twentieth century, Walker’s account of Australian discourses about Asia was firmly national: his is a story of an anxious nation. But in fact, many of the ideas about Asia – its intoxicating and contradictory blend of exoticism, allure, vice and danger – circulated beyond Australia, in transnational circuits encompassing the United States, South Africa, Northern Europe, New Zealand and the colonial entrepots of Bombay, Shanghai and Batavia. Walker was well aware of this. At multiple points, he drew our attention to foreign opinion in support of Australian anxieties about Asia: Anxious Nation’s cast of characters extends across the globe to include Kaiser Wilhelm (credited with coining the phrase ‘Yellow Peril’), Theodore Roosevelt, Lord Curzon and Sax Rohmer, British author of the Fu Manchu novels. But the task of joining these dots to mount a transnational analysis of Asia-anxiety was only picked up a decade later by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, who turned to many of the same characters, and indeed many of the same sources, in their influential Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality.¹⁹ By this time, transnational history had developed into a vigorous field, and Lake and Reynolds carefully traced the circulation of ideas about race and immigration between Australia, South Africa and the United States. Australia is central to this story, and Lake and Reynolds were clearly indebted to Anxious Nation. This transnational lens has since been ably applied by Benjamin Mountford, who has traced intersections between Australia, Britain and China at the time of the gold rushes.²⁰ The transnational lens expanded beyond Australia to trace the interplay of influences between the Anglophone settler colonies and beyond.

Other historians have zoomed in, focusing on particular national or racial groupings within ‘Asia’ to build a more nuanced understanding of their relationships with Australia. When it comes to the historiography of Australia and Asia, Anxious Nation is truly a landmark – a point of reference around which subsequent historians have located their work. Although Walker wrote of the rise of ‘Asia’ as a totality, his key arguments were about Australian perceptions of the ‘Big Three’ of India, China and Japan. In the 25 years since Anxious Nation, historians of Australia and India, Australia and China, and Australia and Japan have expanded on Walker’s work in two ways: by going beyond ‘perceptions’ and reintegrating materialist analyses; and by contextualising the Australian gaze by drawing out Asian perspectives and agency.

It is notable that the first two chapters of Anxious Nation looked closely at India, considering that, in the context of the 1990s, it was rarely considered beyond the cricket. But back in the mid-nineteenth century, it was India that represented the ‘East’: exotic, ancient, spiritual, but also a bustling marketplace of exciting and affordable commodities. That’s not to mention its famously ‘teeming’ population. Anxious Nation sketched out the colonial frames through which nineteenth-century Australians perceived India. These interactions have subsequently been explored in greater detail, and extended beyond Federation. Samia Khatun’s Australianama reassessed Australian–Indian contacts from the ground up, and complicated the narrative by triangulating white Australian, Indian and Indigenous Australian perspectives. Her narrative flipped Walker’s on its head: rather than a story of discourse and perception, Khatun examined interactions, exchanges and experiences, both real and speculative.²¹ Kama Maclean’s British India, White Australia expanded on Walker’s account by accessing the Indian side of the story, which unsurprisingly was very different from the Orientalism of Australian perceptions.²² This brought in politics. By the turn of the century, Indians living under British rule pursued politically sophisticated strategies towards self-rule and, ultimately, independence. Anticolonial resistance was also transnational, and Heather Goodall has recently traced interactions between Indian and Indonesian activists.²³ This granular empirical work has complicated the narrative and revealed a significant gap between discourse and on-the-ground experience.

The bulk of Anxious Nation focuses on Australian perceptions of China and Japan, and it is in subsequent work on Australia’s relations with these two nations that its impact has been most fully realised. The mid-nineteenth century saw a massive wave of emigration from China amidst decades of political instability and natural disasters. Chinese migrants mostly settled in Southeast Asia, but a relatively small number headed further afield, including to the goldfields of Australia and California. Chinese migrants were essential to the hardening of Australian opinion against ‘Asiatics’. The Chinese migrant population plateaued as immigration restriction acts became increasingly strict, and in the Australian imagination, the protean Asian other morphed into a Japanese form. Japan became an object of wonder following its opening to the world, at the point of a gun, by American Commodore Perry in 1853. But the very speed of its modernisation, and the rapid advancements in military technology, came to be seen as a threat by the turn of the century. Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia – previously considered a potential Pacific threat – came as a shock and focused many of Australia’s anxious minds on the rising threat of Japan.

The subfield of Australia–China relations has boomed in the past 25 years. John Fitzgerald’s Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia reversed Walker’s gaze, drawing out Chinese perspectives and in so doing complicating our ideas about the Australian–Chinese encounter. As Fitzgerald noted, ‘Chinese voices are barely audible among all the comments about people of Chinese descent that resonate through Australian art and letters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.²⁴ Once historians began to listen, they encountered new, important narratives of Chinese Australians in white Australia. Fitzgerald uncovered vast ethnic and kinship networks forged by newly arrived Chinese migrants that spanned the continent. These networks allowed for mutual assistance and proved a store of resilience that helped migrants weather the insults and confront the prejudices of white Australia. These networks extended out to China, Southeast Asia, the United States and Canada, and the transnational character of the Chinese diaspora underpins recent scholarship on the Cantonese Pacific.²⁵ Historians have since examined multiple aspects of Chinese–Australian history, from politics and the economy through to personal and intimate lives.²⁶ Mei-fen Kuo has uncovered rich political and media networks.²⁷ Sophie Loy-Wilson has examined Chinese Australians’ economic activities and labour networks (she has also explored Australians in Shanghai, providing a fascinating contrapuntal history of Australian–Chinese relationships).²⁸ Sophie Couchman and Paul Macgregor have focused on the material culture of Chinese Australians.²⁹ Kate Bagnall and Julia Martinez charted the intimate histories of migration through careful work on Chinese–Australian women and families.³⁰ David Walker has also recently turned to personal and family history, most recently with an experimental book weaving together his own life with that of translator Li Yao.³¹ All this work (and much more not examined here) further exemplifies the shift from discourse analysis to material experiences and encounters in the 25 years since Anxious Nation was published. It also points to the ongoing importance of China to contemporary Australia: these scholars, presumably, have never struggled to pass the Australian Research Council’s National Interest Test.

Histories of Australia and Japan have been less forthcoming, and surely this is the flipside of funding historical research on the basis of current events. Japan was certainly front-of-mind for many Australians from the late nineteenth century. At that point, Australian attitudes to Japan vacillated between fear and yearning; desire for paper fans and geishas competed with rising anxiety about Japan’s military and economic power. Japan’s dramatic entry into the Second World War in 1942, and the gruesome Southeast Asian and Pacific campaigns that followed, seared a hatred of everything Japanese onto many Australian hearts. I remember watching an interview with a Pacific War digger at some point in the early 2000s, likely on ANZAC Day, and being shocked at his visceral hatred of the Japanese, undiminished even sixty-odd years later. At one point in the interview, he spat out that, if it were not for the sacrifices of his fellow soldiers, we would all be eating rice. (Like many others, I already nurtured an expensive sushi habit by this time.) Many of his generation have now died, and judging by the popularity of Japanese food and pop culture, so has the Australian aversion to Japan. But the slow re-education of Australian tastes and perceptions still awaits its historian. Instead, Australian historians interested in Japan have largely focused on the Pacific War and its immediate aftermath. Christina Twomey, Christine de Matos, Robin Gerster and Dean Aszkielowicz have examined Australian–Japan interactions in the military settings of prisoner of war camps, war crimes tribunals, and the BCOF occupation of Japan.³² Their work has pushed the boundaries of military history and revealed the imbrication between military and civilian life. But there is plenty of scope for granular analyses of Australian experiences of Japan, and the Japanese, outside the military context.

Anxious Nation made little mention of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. This is a little surprising, as David Walker helped set up an Australian Studies program at the University of Indonesia in the late 1980s. But looking at discourse elided Australian relations with Indonesia and Indonesians, who rarely figured in the feverish desires or anxieties of white Australian writers. Subsequent histories have helped fill in the gaps by taking encounters and experiences, rather than discourse, as their subject. Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers took a significant step in revealing the extent of Indonesian–Australian contacts in The Pearl Frontier.³³ The frequency and significance of encounters between Indonesians and Indigenous Australians opened up a new avenue for historical exploration, and there is much to be done in this field.³⁴ Vannessa Hearman’s work, and my own, uncovered subsequent ties structured by humanitarianism.³⁵ But closely examining the wide range of encounters between Indonesians and Australians remains an urgent project.

The wide lens of Anxious Nation has largely been supplemented by more detailed and geographically bound studies of bilateral relationships. But some brave generalists, including Prue Torney and Daniel Oakman, kept the flame of generic ‘Asia’ alive.³⁶ I continued the tradition when writing Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia, the book that came out of the PhD that brought me to Anxious Nation in the first place. Like David Walker, I took generic ‘Asia’ as my subject. I still think this was a meaningful category for Australians in the twentieth century, a view heavily shaped by my experience of the 1990s, when both ‘engagement’ and ‘being swamped’ referred to generic Asia rather than any place in particular. But analysing travel and mobility also demanded geographical specificity. Because my focus was on postwar and contemporary Australia, and because I was interested in non-elite travel, Walker’s ‘Big Three’ proved too restrictive: for postwar Australians, ‘Asia’ also signified Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and especially Indonesia. Visiting the Neighbours was informed by Anxious Nation, but I was less interested in the discourses themselves than in how they changed over time, and particularly in how ideas about Asian others were increasingly rewritten by compounding first-person experiences facilitated by travel and mass tourism. I spent a lot of time following Australians who changed their mind about Asia – including Japan – once they experienced it. I, too, was part of the wider historiographical shift that triangulated discourse with experiences and encounters; that gradually brought materialism and social history back (of course, for many it had never left). For me, Australian discourses about Asia were not only ambivalent but malleable, and change happened through experience.³⁷

Anxious Nation has also been influential beyond history departments. Sociologists including Suvendrini Perera, Ien Ang, Nikos Papastergiadis and Catriona Elder turned to Australia’s historical invasion anxiety to explain contemporary events including the 2001 Tampa crisis and 2005 Cronulla riots.³⁸ Chengxin Pan’s international relations scholarship is imbued with a deep historical understanding and an unusual sensitivity to the significance of cultural discourse in the conduct of diplomacy.³⁹ Scrolling through Anxious Nation’s citations on Google Scholar brought up publications in literary studies, political science, international relations, media studies, sociology and many other disciplines. As I write this in November 2023, Anxious Nation has been cited 622 times. Research metrics are a poor proxy for influence, but on this measure, Anxious Nation certainly makes the grade.

As an author, David Walker has many acolytes. As a human, David Walker has even more. In China, Indonesia, India and more recently the UK, even very prickly professors have warmed up at the mention of David’s name. Often, they chuckle and recall some devastating quip that David had once made. David has encouraged, if not tangibly assisted, many of the authors I have listed above. Even as his eyesight failed, and when he would be forgiven for being a bit self-absorbed, David went out of his way to help scholars in the field. I have been luckier than most. David Walker examined my PhD, and even before I received the examiners’ reports, he had written to ask if I would be interested in working together on an edited collection (which became Australia’s Asia). Of course, that is not the best part – that was his hilarious first email, which involved a lot of mock-serious subterfuge in recognition of the fact that correspondence between examiners and candidates was technically off limits. It was a fitting introduction both to David’s generosity and to his sense of humour.

By this time, my struggles with Orientalism were long past (with 6000 words’ worth of retyped quotes to prove it). Like Orientalism, Anxious Nation examined discourses about Oriental others, but its true subject was the western nation that created them. Anxious Nation’s greatest influence has been on scholars working on Australian encounters with Asia. But the book’s most significant achievement was to identify the central importance occupied by Asia – or, more precisely, the spectre of Asia – in Australian history. It diagnosed Australia’s desperate search for security, its defensive posturing as a ‘White Man’s Country’ and the longstanding search for ‘engagement’ as part of the same malady: a hyperawareness of Asia’s proximity and power, and the sense that it would determine Australia’s future. This was less a book about Asia than it was about Australia. Until it is recognised as such, and fully drawn into mainstream Australian histories and survey courses, the task of understanding Australia’s national character in light of its neuroses remains incomplete. A quarter century after its publication, historians of Australia still have a lot to learn about their anxious nation.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Agnieszka Sobocinska

Dr. Agnieszka Sobocinska is Reader in International History and Historical Geography and Director of the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London. She is a historian of international development, North-South contacts and Australia-Asia relations. Her books include Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (UNSW Press, 2014). Her current research explores historical challenges to foreign aid intervention across the Global South.

Notes

1 Rupert Lockwood, Black Armada: Australia and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1942–49 (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1975).

2 Neville Meaney, Australia’s Changing Perception of Asia (Sydney: Japan Cultural Centre, 1997); Neville Meaney, Towards a New Vision: Australia and Japan through 100 Years (Roseville, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1999).

3 See Arthur Stockwin and Keiko Tamura, eds., Bridging Australia and Japan: The Writings of David Sissons, Historian and Political Scientist, 2 vols. (Acton: ANU Press, 2016 and 2020).

4 See, for example, Neville Meaney, ‘The Yellow Peril: Invasion Scare Novels and Australian Political Culture’, in The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, ed. Ken Stewart (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), 228–63.

5 Keith Scott, ‘Keating Strikes back at Hawke’, Canberra Times, 24 June 1994.

6 Paul Keating, House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 27 February 1992.

7 Pauline Hanson, House of Representatives Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 10 September 1996.

8 David Walker, Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian National Identity (Canberra: ANU Press, 1976).

9 David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 101.

10 David Walker, Not Dark Yet: A Personal History (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2011).

11 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).

12 Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992).

13 Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions From the 1930s to the 1990s (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

14 J.A.C. Mackie in Broinowski, The Yellow Lady, v.

15 David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Introduction: Australia’s Asia’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Crawley: UWA Press, 2012).

16 Walker, Anxious Nation, 13–25.

17 See, for example, Russell McGregor, ‘“Breed Out the Colour” or The Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (2002): 286–302.

18 See for example: Marilyn Lake, ‘Colonial Australia and the Asia–Pacific Region’ and Tomoko Akami and Anthony Milner, ‘Australia in the Asia–Pacific Region’, in Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Mark Peel and Christina Twomey, A History of Australia (London: Macmillan, 2018).

19 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008).

20 Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

21 Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (London: Hurst & Co., 2018).

22 Kama Maclean, British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2020).

23 Heather Goodall, Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939 to 1950 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019).

24 John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), viii.

25 Henry Yu, The Rise and Fall of the Cantonese Pacific (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019); John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip, Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020).

26 For a good overview, see Kate Bagnall and Sophie Couchman, eds., Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

27 Mei-fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang, 1911–2013 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013); Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese–Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2013).

28 Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘“Liberating” Asia: Strikes and Protest in Sydney and Shanghai, 1920–1939’, History Workshop 72, no. 1 (2011): 74–102; Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (New York: Routledge, 2017).

29 Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor, eds., After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860–1940 (Kingsbury, VIC: Otherland, 2004); Sophie Couchman, ‘Telling Chinese–Australian Stories’, Historic Environment 4, no 1 (2012): 8–16.

30 Kate Bagnall and Julia Martinez, Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019).

31 David Walker and Li Yao, with Karen Walker, Happy Together: Bridging the Australia–China Divide (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2022).

32 Christina Twomey, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Christine de Matos, Imposing Peace & Prosperity: Australia, Social Justice and Labour Reform in Occupied Japan (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008); Robin Gerster, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan (Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2008); Dean Aszkielowicz, The Australian Pursuit of Japanese War Criminals, 1943–1957: From Foe to Friend (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017).

33 Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

34 Lynette Russell’s ‘Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples’ Laureate project promises to expand this historiography, https://www.monash.edu/arts/monash-indigenous-studies/global-encounters-and-first-nations-peoples.

35 Vannessa Hearman, ‘Australian News Photography and Contested Images of Famine in Indonesian-Occupied East Timor’, Australian Historical Studies 54, no. 3 (2023): 530–53. See also Agnieszka Sobocinska, Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian–Development Complex (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

36 Prue Torney-Parlicki, Somewhere in Asia: War, Journalism and Australia’s Neighbours, 1941–75 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000); David Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: ANU Press, 2004).

37 Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014).

38 Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Nikos Papastergiadis, The Invasion Complex: Deep Historical Fears and Wide Open Anxieties (Malmö: Malmö University Press, 2005); Catriona Elder, Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2000.

39 Chengxin Pan, Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2015).