1 - Eureka Street

all the more remarkable. Walker showshow opinion was constructed with an eyeto geopolitical consequences. Thus, forexample, if the Australian land mass waspotentially rich all over-one of the fondestfantasies in our history-then it had to bequickly claimed by vigorous white settlement.If, on the other hand, it was largelydesert, then this fact had to be proclaimedloud and clear, to dissuade invaders fromthe north. Every argun"lent, it seems, had its'anxious' corollary.An awakening East powerfully affectedthe way British-Australians saw themselvesand their country. They knew they were asmall, mostly coastal and urban populationand that translated into an anxiety aboutthe future and a fear that, as lazy and languidcity folk, they might be surpassed by moredispossession/ Answer, yes and no.The idea that Australia might be anAsian land accidentally settled by Britonsunsuited to both climate and regionalculture was a disturbing undercurrent.Asia's carefully noted energies w erematched by new concerns about malignintelligence and 'inscrutability', bestembodied in the fictional Dr Fu Manchu.'The Doctor', writes Walker, 'infiltratedChapter 13 of this book one dark, mistshroudedmorning, enjoying, no doubt, thesuperstitious dread his presence there wouldcause.' Anxious Nation entertains.Some of the anxiety traced here isexplicitly gendered. Would the male or thefemale principle win out in Australian life?How to understand these principles at workto the north, not five days' steam away? InIn 1933, the Dean of Canterbury suggested thatAustralia should share the Northern Territory withJapan to help reduce international tensions.The local press had a field day.vigorous races to the north and become the'white Aborigines of the Empire' . Thedeclining birthrate became a focus of heavilygendered fears: city life was seen as drainingthe virile, masculine qualities of the race (atheme Walker has followed since his fineand funny essay, 'Seminal Loss and NationalVigour', appeared in Labour History in May1985). Enter 'Asia' as a kind of rhetoricaldevice to compel whites to do their dutyand fill the country. Enter the' sturdy buslunanas race hero', though here a key text in thediscussion of blood and the bush-C.E.W.Bean's Flagships Three ( 1913)-"'{ X T is missing.V VALKER ARGUES THAT the 'awakeningEast' accentuates the 'powerful masculinisingand racialising impulse in Australiannationalism'. This is not new. What is newand important is the way he ties this understandinginto a review of contemporarydebates about life and land in Australia.This is done with economy, style and wit.The best sentence in the book-'Narrativeloves danger'-has all three. By examininga range of literature, from scholarly papersto newspaper controversies to invasionnarratives, Wa lker documents thes urvivalist anxieties at the heart ofAustralian nationalism. Could Anglo­Saxons take the heat of the North? Couldthey contemplate the meaning of Aboriginal1900 the Town and Country Journal ran anarticle on 'The Contempt of Asiatics forEuropeans', in which gendered m eaningwas foremost: the encounter between the'Asiatic' and the European was likened tothat between 'a clever woman' and an'average and slightly stupid man', the latterno match for this female 'other'.Walker links the self-doubt at the heartof Australia's survivalism with a m isogynyevident in the fear both of Asia and of therise of the 'new woman' in Australia. Thatfeminist female was identified as selfseekingand sexual, a kind of racial betrayal.Some saw that betrayal confirmed in thedeclining birth rate. Says Walker: 'Womenwere viewed with great suspicion. Theywere given many of the elusive propertiesof water. They were gushing, tidal,uncontrolled, all-engulfing', like thefeminised 'bush spirits' of a Sydney Longpainting. An Asia enhanced by a femininecunning and cruelty, and the new womanin Australia, constitute one of the keyinterplays in the anxiety Walker documents.Amidst the many propaganda fictions aboutthe Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, one titlestands out: The Woman Who Commanded500,000,000 Men (1929).When the Japanese squadron came toAustralia in 1903, the Argus noted culture,order, efficiency and competence in thesevisitors. There were vast crowds andelaborate welcomes during the 1906 visittoo. In the wake of Japanese victory over theRussians, perceptions were shifting from'enchanting' and 'aesthetic' to 'disciplined'and 'soldierly', but the reception was stillrapturous, in one port after another. Thedissenting press blamed female weakness,among other failings, for this 'misguided'enthusiasm. Hospitable females weredubbed 'George Street Geishas' by Truth,which claimed their behaviour madecriticism of the debasement of wom en inJapan that much harder to sustain.Worse still, Japan was celebrated bysome as the embodiment of a newElizabethanism. For Australians who hadformed the idea that they would be the newElizabethans-creative, adventurous andh eroic, a racial inheritance-this wasparticularly galling. 'Here were the"imitative" Japanese, sh owered withadulation, at just the moment when theeyes of the world should have been occupiedupon the newly created Commonwealth ofAustralia', writes Walker. The dissentingpress, notably the Worl