About face : Asian representations of Australia

This thesis considers the ways in which Australia has been publicly represented in ten Asian societies in the twentieth century. It shows how these representations are at odds with Australian opinion leaders’ assertions about being a multicultural society, with their claims about engagement with Asia, and with their understanding of what is ‘typically’ Australian. It reviews the emergence and development of Asian regionalism in the twentieth century, and considers how Occidentalist strategies have come to be used to exclude and marginalise Australia. A historical survey outlines the origins of representations of Australia in each of the ten Asian countries, detecting the enduring influence both of past perceptions and of the interests of each country’s opinion leaders. Three test cases evaluate these findings in the light of events in the late twentieth century: the first considers the response in the region to the One Nation party, the second compares that with opinion leaders’ reaction to the crisis in East Timor; and the third presents a synthesis of recent Asian Australian fiction and what it reveals about Asian representations of Australia from inside Australian society. The thesis concludes that Australian policies and practices enable opinion leaders in the ten countries to construct representations of Australia in accordance with their own priorities and concerns, and in response to their agendas of Occidentalism, racism, and regionalism

We are relocating

Editorial: For many years, the politics and promises of globalization, and its threats, have been bandied about. For so long, indeed, that forests must have fallen to create all the books devoted to nuanced discussions of what globalization is. A decade and more ago, when American commentators wrote of globalization, they mainly meant transnational competition, dominated by the United States. Globalization, Thomas Friedman asserted, is us (Friedman 1997). But a lot can change in ten years, including who dominates, who can read what about us, and the means by which they read it

The honbako is bare: what\u27s become of Japan/Australia fiction?

Complementary opportunities seemed to favour Australia and Japan at the outset. A shared modern history of 150 years might be expected to be long enough for the two antipodal countries to have seeded and cultivated their relationship, and watched it flourish, bear fruit, and multiply. Opposites could be expected to attract, empathy would be stimulated by difference, and cultural interchange should thrive spontaneously without the need for frequent applications of official fertiliser. The harvest should be plentiful, not only for government, business, education, and tourism, but for the two cultures

Contesting civilizations: Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore

Australia and Japa n emerged simultaneously as modernizing states in a shared region, and Singapore joined them in the 1960s. Interaction between Australia and Japan is more than 150 years old, while its Australia/Singapore counterpart is much more recent. But mutual perceptions appear in both cases to be characterized by concerns about cultural superiority or inferiority, and by complex contests over the deference due to civilizations. Here, I will trace the workings of civilizational contestation in Australian, Japanese and Singaporean fiction

An interview with Dr. Hsu-Ming Teo

Alison Broinowski (AB): A connecting thread of fear has been detected in your fi ction. The June 2009 special issue of Antipodes featured several essays that discussed your work. Would you agree with that? Teo Hsu-Ming (THM): It’s hard to reduce any novel down to one thing, but fear is defi nitely a signifi cant part of Love and Vertigo, and especially in Behind the Moon. The section of the Antipodes article that quoted views about [fear in] Australian society, much of that is generated by the tabloids, by current affairs television. All of that comes through in the novel but ultimately it goes beyond Australian society. It’s about the human condition, the fear of being alone, the fear of loneliness, and not being able to connect. Now this I think is the great modernist fear. We have for instance E. M. Forster’s great epigraph in Howard’s End—“only connect”—and the whole history of modernist literature has been about the fear that we are no longer able to connect

No Promised Land. "Shanghai Dancing" by Brian Castro. [review]

If we lived in the kind of country - and there are some - where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori