Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

13.1. Introduction
Crossing to the Other Bank
Entangled in the problems of Australia’s identity and world view are the conflicting
senses of the role which place and time, or ‘history’, play. Recent theory, Jeff Lewis notes,
would have us understand history as ‘a quantum series’ of ‘random and self-reflexive events
that defy structural, categorical or teleological definition’ (Lewis, 54). Chaos theories are
perhaps the best Western thought presently capable of offering in reformulating the ancient
wisdom of Buddha that ‘everything is the result of a vast concurrence of causes and conditions,
and everything disappears as these causes and conditions change and pass away’ (Bukkyo
Dendo Kyokai, 80). The Western theoretical approach proves unsatisfactory when removed
from the laboratory environment and used to address the issues of the identity and role of
humanity, however, leaving us ‘perhaps duty bound to unlock broader referential and heuristic
patterns in order to account more fully for the multiple contingencies directing our personal
and social destinies’ (Lewis, 54). The Eastern approach to history, once its ‘Otherness’ is
embraced, meanwhile proves especially useful in this discussion over defining and identifying
Australia’s relationship with the Southeast Asian community.
C. J. Koch, this study has argued, is exploring just such patterns according to the
principle of his central metaphor of hybridisation. Earlier chapters have looked at how the
fusion of antagonistic forces create such hybridisations as of character, of perspectives of
reality, of the divine, and of worlds. This final chapter will concentrate on conflicting
perspectives of ‘history’, a topic which is generally current today, but is especially so in
Australia, where the re-emergent Aboriginal perspective is so strongly at odds with the
Western one, and would put to question the white Australian view of the existence of
Australia. It will argue that Koch has brought linear Western and cyclical Eastern
constructions of ‘history’ together to re-examine contemporary attitudes about the ‘Self’ and
the ‘Other’ insofar as they concern the sense of time and place, and also to reinvigorate what
he considers the West’s deflated human and spiritual values. It will use Highways to a War as
- 330 -