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R EVIEW ESSAYPETER CocHRANEThe many anxieties ofI N I s A usTRA LIA A N A siAN C ouNTRY!Australia and AsiaAnxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939, Dav1d Walker, Umvers1ty of Queensland Press, 1999.lSBN 0 7022 3 132 2, RRP $29.95manners, cohesion, artistry and(1997), Stephen FitzGerald argued 'cultivated women'. Walker tracesthat the Australian commitment totheir impact on European taste andAsia is still not a commitment of thecultural sensibility throu gh tomind. N ot bein g an intellectual Australia. Monet's Ja pan eseengagem ent, it is 'therefore almostfootbridge is matched by theincapable of sensitivity to subtlety or'A u s tral-japonaiserie' that wassub-text or silence ... ' FitzGeraldevident in the '9x5 Impression s'emphasised the necessity of becom- Exhibition of 1889.ing Asia-literate as an exercise ofIn the same year, the remarkablegreat urgency. The alternative is toJam es Murdoch, novelist, scholarrisk being left behind by an Asiaand Japanophile, reported thatwhich is simultaneou sly a 'Australian popular opinion is'cosmopolitan jostling of countrieswonderfully, favourably inclinedand cultures and peoples m oretowards Japan and the Japanese'.distinct from one another than anything we India, allegedly the testing ground of British This was overstatem ent, but Japan washave in Europe', and also an emerging character.' Antique' India had other claims doubtless perceived as an 'enchanted land'community of states with potential to too: the belief that Aryan civilisation had before it was seen as a threat. Walkerexclude a failure to the south. begun there encouraged the view- Deakin documents how both the cultural andDavid Walker's Anxious Nation: was an expopent- that to know about commercial appeal of Japan presented aAustralia and the Rise of A sia is a 'commit- civilisation one had to know about India. worrying challenge to the advocates of racem ent ofthe mind'.Walkerexploresourreal For a time, the conception of an purity.Onesidethoughtagrowingexchangeand imagined encounters with Asia over aggressive Asia bent on conquest was of goods and culture would enrichthe period 1850- 1939. A further volume rivalled by 'a golden, aestheticised Orient', Australian civilisation; the other said itwill bring the story up to the present. At the manifested principally in a fascination with would bring destruction.heart of Walker's project is a demonstration Japanese aesthetics, though the appeal of Threat was embodied in the ' awakeningof the role history can play in correcting the other qualities might equally have changed East ', a phrase that signalled an Eastfailure identified by FitzGerald. our history. In the year 1877, the missionary transformed from a languid, unchangingIn the mid 19th century, travel writing and theosophist, Wilton Hack, was st a t e into som ething active, mobile,on the subject of the East began to generate sufficiently impressed by the industry and mili tarised and threatening. Anxiousa keen readership. Journalists, traders, frugality of the Japanese to invite them to Nation traces this shift in language. Theintellectuals, missionaries and tourists colonise the Northern Territory, with the book's originality and importance hingesfound a responsive audience in the backing of the South Australian govern- on the interaction it documents betweenAustralian colonies. The curiosity of the m ent. The Japanese government, not overly Australian contemporary perceptions ofaudience was probably as diverse as the keen on the N orthern Territory and beset Asia and Australian self-understanding.opinion s of the travel writers. Both by its own problems, declined. This sort of Asian 'others' were always defin edconstructed many Asias: the most powerful reticence did no harm to Japan's popularity. against notions of the racial self.fears and phobias, the scariest caricatures The rage for Japan ese culture, andand motifs are matched by a string of more particularly for Japanese fabrics and art N ENTERTAINING short chapters, Walkersympathetic perspectives. objects, had already engulfed the elites of covers some of the hottest topics of theHeightened Australian interest in Asia Europe and Australia. By the 1890s there period- the nature of the Australian landwassparked by the sudden arrival of were two books published on the subject of mass, the moral and practical imperativesChinese goldseek ers, by Commodore Japan for every three books published on of settling the 'Empty N orth', the m eaningPerry's action in forcing Japan open to the Fran ce, according to the US Library of of the word 'desert', race degeneration,West in 1853-54, by the Indian Mutiny of Congress catalogu e. The Japanese were blood, sex and m ixed marriage. The1857- 58, and by a sustained fascination constructed as the 'ideal foreigners', not sustained interplay of these themes makeswith the glories and trials of British rule in unlike the British in their enterprise, good the book's readability, lightness and humour1V O LUME 9 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 37