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suppression of perceptions of the Asian is in fact the suppression of that of the Australian
himself, is the reason for the De-Orientalist barrage against them.
The P.C. voice nevertheless has its rightful place in the contemporary cultural dialogue,
including the debate of the place of d’Alpuget and Koch in the Australian canon. The sense of
history in fictional works about Australians in Asia, which necessarily bring with them heavy
loads of prejudices and preconceptions, certainly needs to be re-examined. ‘Nothing is ever as
it was or as good as it used to be’, and to look for ‘the authentic’ Asia, which would somehow
correspond to the images one has learned to expect there, would prove a futile exercise in
contemporary Asia. That ‘even the most dispassionate of literary travellers have their heads
turned by nostalgia’, Robin Gerster writes, is exemplified by C. J. Koch, whose Across the Sea
Wall and The Year of Living Dangerously present ‘Asia in essentially ambivalent ways’, but
with a vision ‘firmly set on possible future orientations for Australians as they reassess
redundantly colonialist, Anglocentric affiliations’. So much is confirmed by Koch himself in
his 1981 essay, Crossing the Gap, but Koch’s gaze, Gerster argues, turns radically back in his
latest novel, Highways to a War, with a narrator who ‘craves’ the old Singapore, and
‘abominates’ the modern, sanitised city it has become, and a protagonist whose nostalgia for
colonial Phnom Penh could be characterised as an obsession. Koch’s vision has become
‘suffused by a hankering for a picturesque colonial “East” that has passed into history’
(Gerster, Bali, 359). Gerster’s article focuses on travel literature and its obsessions, but while
Koch employs techniques of the travel writer, his Asian novels progressively strain against
such a De-Orientalist critique. Koch is rather delving into the nostalgia as a vehicle for the
development of his Austral-Asian motifs of time, place, meaning, and reality.
Koch admits to an ‘obsession’ with the past, which he says ‘has great meaning and
poignancy’, but is openly offended at what he calls the ‘totalitarian criticism’ which would
prescribe his works into a ‘fashionable’ postmodern or postcolonial niche. ‘The romantic,
“colonial” view of Asia is not the author’s, but that of the central character Mike Langford’
(Mitchell, 1996, Interview, 70). A writer is, like any parent, not the most objective critic of his
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