Australasian interactions : contested geographies of 'White Australia'

Review of Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan by Daniel Oakman and Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait, edited by Anna Shnukal, Guy Ramsay and Yuriko Nagata. The journey from September 11th 2001 to the Asian tsunami of last December revealed something about the contested nature of boundaries in the Australian imagination. On the one hand, the call for tighter security and tougher immigration laws re-racialized the historical moment and ignited old fears. The post-09/11 archive will reveal a story of safeguarding national space from potential threats, whether real or imagined, but it will also demonstrate deep-seated anxieties about the place of Asia in the shaping of official memory, anxieties that future historians will not find surprising or novel. Of course, maintaining an outpost of European civilization like a fortress, perched on the tip of south-east Asia, remains both intellectually and philosophically untenable, yet it is an ideal that seems to haunt the collective Australian conscience, drawing its legitimacy from the very manner in which our national history has been forged. Haunted by the ghost of White Australia, containment is articulated in a political language with a sinister and almost inevitable racial syntax. On the other hand, the tragedy of the Asian tsunami illuminated the fact that borders can be washed away and that misplaced imperial attachments are powerless to prevent the tidal wave of a broader global interconnectedness. The outpouring of compassion and generosity from Australians spoke of another kind of collective memory: one that was intimately enmeshed with the region, which reached out to Asia, and one that has subsequently led to more intimate relations with neighbours such as Indonesia and India, with whom we are closely linked. Perhaps, in essence, these mixed messages speak of a deeper cultural dialectic between the ideology of national containment and the reality of an everyday global consciousness. Two recent books on the nature of Australia's vexed and problematic interactions with Asia seem well-placed to reflect this paradox and offer divergent historical contexts that trace quite different spatial imaginings of cultural location.