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Part II, covering the period 1888–1901, begins with a section on the representation of the Chinese by the Bulletin writers, and is followed by three other sections on the topic of ‘invasion literature’, ‘China writing’ by Anglo-Australian writers, and ‘positive Orientalism’ as present in Hume Nisbet’s writing.
Part III, dealing with the period 1902–1949, has two chapters that centre on two clusters of ideas. In the first chapter, I deal with sustained Chinese stereotypes made possible by the basic racist and Orientalist representational mode that remained unchanged from the federation of Australia in 1901 until 1949, and note the positive Orientalism and ethnocentrism evident in some of Henry Lawson’s writing and Charles Cooper’s fiction. I devote one section to the treatment of Chinese women in Australian fiction, a much-neglected subject in critical study.
Part IV comprises two chapters. One chapter deals with the polarised representation of the Chinese in fiction written during the period 1950–1972 as a result of political bias, and the other discusses the representational problems in ‘Asian writing’ and ‘China writing’, and the challenges and subversive attempts made in multicultural writing during the period 1973–1988.
As this study terminates in 1988, I do not discuss works representing the Chinese published after that period—works by such writers as Alex Miller, Brian Castro, and Nicholas Jose, who portray the Chinese in remarkably different ways from those discussed in this study.32 It is my sincere wish that the present research will provide a context in which to better understand the representations of the Chinese in recent works of fiction and to shed light on new interpretations of such representations.