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The ambiguous, hybrid identities which Guy Hamilton and Billy Kwan share give
meaning to their relationship. It is the meaning which they also share with all of the hybrid,
white Australian society whose history and geography have made paradoxically both subject
and object of colonialism and imperialist aggression. The ambiguity causes some distress, but,
as Kelly notes, quite a lot of freedom as well in the perception Australians have of themselves
and their world.
Evidently, and this would appear to be a dominant reading, colonial
Australians could identify with what they construct—or totalise—as the
approved metropolitan version, gratifyingly affording to the colonial what Said
calls a ‘flexible positional superiority’ over an Other constructed as the
Oriental. Yet, since colonials were themselves constructed as, and resentfully
mis-recognised themselves as being, an Other within imperial hierarchies,
there exists an available reading position of identification with Orientalist
spectacles as in some sense legitimating, even providing, imagery of their own
alterised reality. (Kelly, 33)
In this sense, the image of the ‘hybrid’ could lead, as Kelly explains with a quote from
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), to a ‘less monolithic and more ludic and de-
essentialised sense of identity’ (Kelly, 34; Nietzsche, 150), where Orientalism becomes ‘an
empowering repertoire of identities and self-transformations’ (Kelly, 34). This is indeed the
interpretation which Kwan gives to being a hybrid, though, while he believes that it is
Hamilton whose restricted sense of identity needs this empowerment, Kwan himself proves to
be at least an equal beneficiary of alternating images and perceptions, and of the subsequent
transformation they exert on the sense of self.
Blanche D’Alpuget has not come under comparable scrutiny concerning her place in
Eastern and Western traditions, and this is another critical failure as she is similarly describing
efforts and hindrances in harmonising the two. Her most significant hybrid is Minou, who
shares Kwan’s resistance for seeing things in ‘black and white’ and proves herself the mistress
of self-empowerment through the determined, yet playful, fluidity of her identities. Yet, the
character who has the chance to learn the most from Minou, Judith Wilkes, is also the least
successful in these terms. She is so afraid of allowing herself to relate with Asian culture that
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