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

Georgie maybe doesn’t need to be a Bahasa speaker to make a living in the future, but he should know that Bali is Hindu and that it is not part of Australia. In the last week, I’ve been wryly amused that Australian talkback jocks speak knowledgably about India’s Deccan Chargers, because good blokes like Andrew Symonds and Adam Gilchrist play in the Hyderabad-based IPL team, while casually talking about Chennai as if it’s Collingwood. But the same shock jocks showed little interest last November as to why the Pakistani terrorists who laid siege to Bombay called themselves the Deccan Mujahideen, evoking the sub-continent’s once-great Muslim empire based in, well, Hyderabad and stretching toward Chennai, and what the implications of that might be.

Events like the Corby circus — let’s not forget the Channel Nine ‘worm’ that showed 92 per cent of Australians regarded her as innocent — Hanson, the Tampa and now another asylum-seeker tragedy periodically surface, sometimes as moments of national madness, to remind us that Australia is a long way from becoming a part of the regional community that’s more meaningful than just trade.

If Rudd’s ‘AU’, per the EU, grows legs, the people who will ultimately sign off on any nation-changing initiative as he imagines it will have to be somehow persuaded that Asia isn’t an amorphous mass where Dodgy Things Happen, of religious zealots and corruptors desperate to come to Australia and steal our jobs, especially in this recession. Many of Asia’s prominent thinkers dismiss Rudd’s Grand Asian Plan as dead in the water among Asian leaders before it gets any traction, and they are probably right. But that won’t be because Asians don’t accept this vision from Canberra, but more because it won’t get to first base among Australians themselves. Ah, you say, we’ve embraced pad thai as the new meat-and-three-veg, and we know our nasi goreng from our nasi lemak, our paratha from our naan. And the suburbs are full of Lao and Khmers and Hmong, and our colleges of Malaysians and Taiwanese. True, but I wonder how many Australians understand Asia’s myriad differences, or care to. If Rudd wants to pull this off, he needs, gently but convincingly, to titillate more than our tastebuds. He needs to bring round sceptics to the inevitability of our geography, convince them that not all of Asia is in turmoil and threatening, even though the media’s superficial reporting of the region often makes it seem that way. And, of course, places like Thailand need to quickly sort themselves out too.

Maybe my Bali interlocutor Georgie’s granddaughters will one day become wealthy polyglot Asiaphiles, and the heirs of Alan Jones will culturally reference Lombok and Nagoya — the one in Indonesia as much as Japan — as instinctively as they now do London and New York. And when they do, we might know a little more about why desperate people are dying to come here. And discuss it — and maybe even solve it — without the unhinged clamour, fear and racism of recent weeks.