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living in a land which lay somewhere ‘through the looking-glass’ (Alice thought she might
eventually arrive in Australia as she was falling endlessly through the rabbit hole) must also
have had its psychological attractions. They identified with being the ‘outpost of civilisation’,
made the hard-nosed bush worker their heroic national type, entitled him ‘The Coming Man’,
and sent him to rescue the frail and ageing mother empire in her faraway wars. They revelled
in living at the extreme end of the planet, and called their country ‘Oz’ and themselves
‘Ozzies’ as if Australia were the magical land of witches, wizards and yellow-brick roads. Yet,
with the end of empire, the point of view was deconstructed, and the Australian identity
suffered its loss. There could not be an outpost of an empire which did not exist, and white
Australians were left wondering if they belonged to the old order of white-skinned European
colonial rulers or to the new order of dark-skinned non-European indigenous peoples.
Rediscovering an identity became an Australian quest. Many writers tried to climb back
out of the rabbit hole and return to Europe; others opted for deeper journeys through the
looking-glass into Asia. The Australian ‘Others’ were going to meet the Asian ‘Others’, with
the hope that daring to examine each other more carefully might lead to a clearer perception of
the ‘Others’ suppressed within themselves.
This is a veritable house of mirrors; it is difficult to tell what is real from what is only a
reflection, but this is the first fact one must accept before he can begin to understand the truths
behind realities and reflections. Only then can he begin to see past the illusory reflections
which obscure his own true reality—past the dust obscuring the pristine mirror. This
metaphor, cited by Billy Kwan in Koch’s Year of Living Dangerously (YLD, 81), comes from
the sacred Hindu poem, the Bhagavad Gita. The epic hero, Arjuna, asks the Supreme God
Krishna what drives a man to sin and therefore be blinded to the wisdom of God’s justice and
salvation. Krishna answers:
It is greedy desire and wrath, born of passion, the great evil, the sum of
destruction: this is the enemy of the soul.
All is clouded by desire: as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust, as an unborn
babe by its covering (BG 3:36-38; translated by Mascaró).
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