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ustling markets and streets, the inadequacies of its most basic forms of modern technology,
the quaint personalities of the people, the fascinating and shocking religious festivals, and the
extreme nature in the drive for survival. Then, with a change in the light, she shows the weak
or even downright ugly sides of the Western protagonists. Her main tool, the stereotype, is a
double-edged sword for the contemporary writer, but one which d’Alpuget wields with cold
precision. She succeeds as a master of intertextual manipulation, as the reader who one
moment is quietly enjoying her humour and ‘horror stories’ of expatriate life in Southeast Asia,
the next moment finds himself the real victim, as an accomplice to the stereotyping which he
knows he ought to have repressed.
The reader who fails to incorporate the Eastern forms into his repertoire will inevitably
find Koch and d’Alpuget’s protagonists to be frustrated and disillusioned figures in post-
modern, absurdist fabrications. They will judge Asia as lands of ignorant, malefic paganism,
of corruption and greed born of unbridled capitalism, and of tyranny which supports itself with
the horrors of poverty, hatred and revenge. Finally, their self-perception will suffer, for try as
they may, they will not be able to ignore the fact that Australia and Asia are bound not only
geographically and economically but also symbolically.
1.6. The Approach, and its Goal
Nesselroth writes that any text has, on one hand, its meaning, ‘the literal meaning which
a statement or textual fragment has in its initial generic and cultural context’, and, on the other
hand, significance, ‘what a text would mean in other historical periods, as a consequence of the
reader’s cultural evolution’ or even simply in ‘a different verbal or situational context’
(Nesselroth, 50). This semantic distinction would involve the problems of divining the unique,
probably unknowable ‘meaning’ and then applying it to any of an infinite selection of
‘significances’, and seems to oblige any intertextual analysis to divide the material into small,
consumable bites. In order to avoid the earlier mentioned limitations which Roskies has taken
upon himself, this study does not structure itself according to formal genre but rather along
thematic divisions of symbols, metaphors and myths which have come out of the Eastern and
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