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Judith’s condescension of Minou, in true Orientalist form, stems from seeing Minou as ‘all the
past representations of women that Judith, as an emancipated, progressive, secular, pro-
feminist, Western woman, has renounced’. These representations sometimes tend to justify
Judith’s sense of her role, but usually only illustrate the professional and private satisfactions
which Judith has sacrificed to her feminism. Judith necessarily avoids self-recrimination for
these losses, and it is the Third World woman who must ‘bear the burden of Western feminist
guilt’ (Khoo, 41). Minou sacrifices her self for her family; Judith her family for her self. This
leaves the implication of ‘the hypocrisy of Western liberalism and, consequently, the
limitations on its feminism’ (Khoo, 41).
D’Alpuget is also presenting images of the New Age philosophy, ‘the beacon of moral
hope for the West’, and exposing it for its dubious effects and neo-Orientalist foundation.
‘New Age’ appropriates Eastern and American Indian concepts of nature, spirituality, holism
and metaphysics into its philosophy of personal growth and transformation (Khoo, 41-42). In
Turtle Beach it is represented in the characters of Ambassador Hobday and Kanan.
Hobday is the proponent of holism, exemplified in his hermaphrodite theory where a
whole personality is realised through the union of male and female halves, and sees his own
completion in the person of Minou. At the same time, Hobday is the image of Australia’s
involvement in the Vietnam war, making a strong association between colonialism and
hermaphroditism. Both concepts, argues Khoo,
are based on desire and power. After all, it was the colonies that gave England
her economic might and defined her ‘whole’ as an Empire at the height of
British aggrandisement. Hermaphroditism works in a similar self-serving
manner, undermining the concept of selfless love to reveal, instead, that it is
the desire to be whole and the power derived from that wholeness which is
often mistaken for love (Khoo, 44).
The search for Self in another is ultimately selfish, and when it ‘ends in envy for the Other and
self-loathing, one must reject the Other in the interest of self-preservation’ (Khoo, 44). This
principle reiterates Orientalist notions of the one-sided power relationship between East and
West, and also explains many of the wavering relationships between the novel’s main
characters.
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