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themselves are the ‘dreaded’ others in the Asia-Pacific. If white Australians are to overcome
their stereotypes and see Asians for what they really are, and also see the Aborigines for what
they are, they must first of all see themselves properly (Milne, 286).
Milne’s view is itself a looking-glass image of the one made by Alison Broinowski, that
‘the way Australians see Asia determines the way we see ourselves’. As Milne puts it: ‘The
way Australians see themselves (in their own country) determines the way we see Asia’
(Milne, 287). Koch and d’Alpuget are working at the problem from both sides of the mirror by
removing the physical separation between the two and then hammering away at the
monumental stereotypes Australians have inherited about themselves and Asians. Given that
the Australian/Asian relationship so much resembles a house of mirrors, it does not seem
unreasonable that the two points of view share planes of intersection and that it is upon these
surfaces that Australians (and Asians) will come to know themselves more fully.
1.4. The Problem of Describing the Western/Eastern Liaison
D. M. Roskies writes of some of the main impediments to such a literary study as this
about Australia’s relationship with Southeast Asia. The first is that ‘in popular consciousness
“Indonesia,” like “Japan” or “India,” can seldom be seen except through the tinted or distorting
filter of ultramondane assumptions about “The East,” assumptions which are so ingrained in
one’s awareness of the human world as to be impossible fully to refine’. The second has to do
with ‘the grammar of “orientalism,” consisting of unintentionally supercilious associations
yoked to suppositions endorsed by the culture as a whole and supervening to reinforce attitudes
of judgement from on high’ (Roskies, 35).
Most writings about the Asia-Pacific, Roskies argues, have remained within the realm of
the ‘empirical-romance’ which is built upon such preconceptions, but Koch’s Year of Living
Dangerously, which ‘adventurously puts to rout some of the obstacles which are apt to
supervene between a creative intelligence and materials which customarily remain opaque to
western understanding’, shows that there can be exceptions (Roskies, 36). Rather than
exploiting Southeast Asia ‘for its exotic contents or treated as a location wherein various
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