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Foreword
In the early 1980s, I taught some of the first groups of Chinese students to come to Australian universities after the end of China’s Cultural Revolution. At the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra), the students studied Australian literature, reading the canonical writings of Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, and others. They enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere at the college (one student took particular pleasure at the sight of a mustachioed picture of Princess Di in the residences), but in class they puzzled at Henry Lawson’s declaration that he saw no future for the Chinese in Australia. Then came the comic Chinese boundary riders in Furphy’s Such Is Life—the ones the narrator could only tell apart by the horses they rode. Worse, our anthology of Australian stories also included Edward Dyson’s ‘The Golden Shanty’ with its crude racial humour. And this was only material from the texts set on a conventional literature course—I had not been looking for anti-Chinese writing when I prepared it.