Fear and incomprehension still dominate our perception of Asia

Wednesday, 29th April 2009

Eric Ellis questions whether Kevin Rudd’s plan to make Australia the West’s most ‘Asia-literate’ country has anything going for it except geography

An old friend of mine, a self-made corporate tyro embedded at the Big End of Sydney, asked me recently why I bother writing from miserable, crisis-racked places like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Thailand.

Moreover, he asked, why do I return to Jakarta, a city ranked by any measure you like as a corrupt urban hellhole of ocean-going proportions. ‘Mate,’ he emailed after scanning perfunctorily through a Speccie despatch I’d penned from Afghanistan before he rushed to his bucolic hobby farm in the Hunter Valley, ‘no one here gives a flying f**k about these places.’ Then, almost on cue, Operation Slipper — as Australia’s military contribution to Afghanistan’s ‘just war’ is formally known — claimed two diggers in two days after my mate’s message. He looked like a twit; no comfort, of course, to the grieving families of those who’d made the ultimate sacrifice for their country’s security, the official reason why Australian troops are there.

My friend is wrong. Many Australians do give an, er, airborne copulation about what is going on in Asia. That’s because their Phuket package holiday got delayed for weeks at Suvarnabhumi airport last November when Thai royalists marauded yellowly through it to topple an elected government. They know someone who lost someone in Bali, or Mumbai, or got shot at in Lahore. They switch on the evening news and see Orientals in uproar again and something burning — Asia, unless it’s rich China or Japan or Korea where you can sell lots of iron ore while staying home in cool places where the front gates are secure. Or Singapore’s Asia-lite, a kind of Noosa-sur-Death-Row.

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