Empire, orphans, and honourable Aussies

In truth these expeditions to rid the diggings of the Chinese, with banners, bands, and guns held aloft on horseback, marked a historic milestone on our path to White Australia in 1901. So how can we tell the story of gold or the white settlement of terra nullius without any reference to the calamitous role cast upon the hapless Chinese? Fomenting for and clinging to White Australia occupied our national psyche for a good hundred years!

When it comes to building trust with China nothing will speak more loudly to official Chinese visitors than the way we present Chinese Australian history. Last October I heard a Chinese guide (university trained) in Nanjing telling our Australian group that the locals still hated the Japanese for the atrocities they committed in 1937. We found out later that he never allowed the presence of Japanese tourists to stop him from telling that part of Nanking’s past.

Surely the Chinese emissaries would not be focused on the past treatment of the Chinese in Australia. Yet if we follow the Japanese and keep dragging our feet on telling the unexpurgated version of our history with China and its subjects sojourned in our land, we only invite questions about the sincerity of our overtures to win an equable place in the Chinese Century. Bradley’s account about the Vice-President of China taking his 200-strong delegation to Kakadu to see Aboriginal art, at the end of top level business roundtables and official engagements in Canberra, should beckon us to think deeply about how the Chinese might be seeing us through our cultural practices and productions, no matter how we otherwise present ourselves as honourable Aussies at official levels.

The British Empire is long gone. But we, the orphan of that Empire, will do well to search our soul to establish an outlook towards Asia that is neither nostalgic nor too optimistic or overconfident. If we want to be accepted as an honourable member in the Sinosphere of the 21^st century, it might be a good start to have more Chinese Australians tell the unexpurgated story of the Chinese in Australia, away from the froth and bubble of multiculturalism and purged of the remains of the White Australia dream.