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I tried to explain to the students the history of the ‘White Australia’ policy and the union movement’s anxiety about protecting wages of Australian workers from competition from Asians—but this sounded a note of defensive apology. The evidence was there in front of us. And this was only the literary, ‘quality’ end of the market; there were undoubtedly many forgotten works of Australian Sinophobia.
With his usual courage, Ouyang Yu has sought out extensive material written against the Chinese by Australians over one hundred years—and forced himself to read it and come to terms with it. The Chinese immigration to the goldfields in the mid-nineteenth century meant their derision in songs and stories, including those of Charles Thatcher and Rolf Boldrewood. By the 1890s, William Lane was writing diatribes against the Chinese in the name of the labour movement. Ever since, stereotypes of untrustworthy Chinese villains and exotic Chinese beauties have riddled Australian popular culture. Ouyang explores the shifts in these attitudes and the range of novelists who expressed them. At various times in the twentieth century, paranoia about Chinese invasion has been widespread in Australia—particularly after each of the world wars. The exploitation and promotion of such paranoia in popular culture extends from Hollywood films, to paperback thrillers and soft pornography, to children’s rhymes. It has been so endemic that most Australians hardly notice it or take it seriously. Of course, the Australian version of a more general Western paranoia is exacerbated by its sense of isolation from the U.S. and Europe and proximity to what was once called the ‘sleeping giant’. The development and maintenance of these attitudes need to be examined thoroughly and discussed. Ouyang Yu’s book provides the material to begin such a discussion.
If Ouyang’s research reveals some facts that are difficult to reconcile with ideas of a tolerant, egalitarian Australia, he also finds a range of writers who were interested in China and the Chinese. Hume Nisbet and Mary Gaunt had first-hand experience of China, though they could not escape habitual Western attitudes to it. In the years since the Second World War, communist sympathies of writers like George Johnston and David Martin allowed them a more benign perspective on the new communist nation in the north. More recently, Nicholas Jose, Alex Miller, and Brian Castro have written more complex engagements with China.