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of the language and imagery of contemporary texts in order to make them conform to the De-
Orientalist project, a history of goodies and baddies’ (Lewis, 63). For this reason, De-
Orientalist criticism tends to fail to see past the stereotypical racism and sexism, to return to
the example detailed in chapter 4, which d’Alpuget uses to force the reader, rather than the
author, to ‘take responsibility for what he/she sees or fails to see’ (McKeogh, 35).
Susan McKernan chimes in that Koch is indeed furthering Orientalist imagery in his
‘fascination for the different’ (McKernan, 433), which she attributes to a ‘tourist mentality—
that the unknown, the alien, must necessarily be both glamorous and threatening’ (McKernan,
434). In deliberately distorting his pictures of Indonesians and, especially, of women, Koch
‘promotes Australian racism’ (McKernan, 434). Her examples include the interpretation, in
Across the Sea Wall, that it ‘is only by losing all his money and succumbing to an Indian
disease that O’Brien can restore himself to health and the sanity of life in Australia’
(McKernan, 435); and ‘Koch’s portrayal of women demonstrates his method of taking a reality
and loading it with moral and spiritual overtones’, as in the recurrent female face pictured as
‘the child face which may hide cruelty or vulnerability’ (McKernan, 436). Koch is neither
interested in ordinary Indonesians, but only those who are diseased and deformed, nor in
ordinary women, but only those who ‘bear the burden of Otherness’. Since he offers no
ordinary Indonesians or women in his novels, ‘and because this kind of writing depends on the
association of character and moral quality, it is difficult not to hold Koch responsible’ for the
idea that Indonesians and women ‘are evil’ (McKernan, 437). McKernan concludes,
The difficulty with Koch’s view of good and evil as states of psychic health is
that it seems to propose normality as a good. To be physically deformed, to
have a ‘foreign’ face, to be homosexual—to be Other in any way—is to be
associated in Koch’s novels with evil and corruption. (McKernan, 438)
This example illustrates how pretending to take the high road of political correctness can
subvert the objectivity of literary criticism. Since we are talking about De-Orientalism here, it
is essential to refer back to Edward Said’s description of what Orientalism is in the first place,
which is ‘a whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always
involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question’. Orientalism is
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