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Wales and the rise of the English East India Company’s power in Bengal have been seen as
two aspects of the British ‘swing to the East’ which followed the loss of the American
colonies. Britain’s two new colonies were brought together by complementary economic
needs, with Australia exchanging wool, wheat, sugar and horses for Indian tea and jute. Even
more importantly, retired Indian army officers and civil servants often migrated to Australia,
followed by thousands of immigrants who came as labourers, camel drivers and prospectors
(Copland, 127).
Others, however, did not see Australia in Asian terms at all. For many Australia offered
Britain another chance to learn from the failures of the former North American colonies, and
create a society based on British principles and institutions of freedom, democracy and
capitalism. In an argument which ironically demanded strict British domination over
Australian society, the new colony would avoid the corruptions to those principles and
institutions which, once embedded, had proved impossible to eliminate in British society.
It is even more ironic how the Europeans shut Asia progressively out of their minds as
their investment in the Eastern hemisphere increased. Yasmine Gooneratne notes that for the
first three centuries of European experience in Asia ‘East-West relations were ordinarily
conducted with a framework and on terms established by the Asian nations’. The Europeans
were in no ‘position to force their will upon the imperial rulers of India or China’ (Gooneratne,
1992, Asia, 338). Only in the 19 th century, when the technical achievements of the Industrial
Age impressed Europeans with their own stature, did they begin ‘to look on the countries of
the East as centres of retardation, as a potential menace to the world which Westerners seemed
divinely destined to make over in their own image’ (Gooneratne, 1992, Asia, 339). Just when
Australia might have taken advantage of its geographic position to maximise exchange with
the East—which many Europeans, disenchanted with the West’s materialism and impressed
with the East’s spiritualism and artistic achievement, hoped for—a reactionary attitude
‘emerged in the West which emphasized the backwardness of Asia and its stubborn resistance
to the spread of the Christian and Western way of life’ (Gooneratne, 1992, Asia, 339).
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