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Concluding Remarks
This study has tried to introduce the Western and Eastern pretexts to the Asian novels of
Blanche d’Alpuget and Christopher J. Koch. In spite of the sheer number and inevitably
interrelated nature of the topics, the goal has been to make a coherent argument for their
importance to critical analysis of the novels and to the whole issue of whether traces of the
Australian identity can be found in Asia. A dissertation should not be so long, and yet it seems
obvious that this one has taken but the early steps in the criticism of the Australo-Asian
relationship as it is represented in these two writers’ novels.
Each chapter of this study could be further developed into a major study on its own.
More interdisciplinary work should be done on these novels’ focus on the principles of
stereotype activation and repression. The concepts of Australia’s Asian ‘looking-glass’, the
‘Otherworlds’, whether of faery or Dis or Wonderland, and the access they give to self-
revelation still need clarification, and especially need to be applied to the white experience
with Aboriginal and Asian Australians, as also to the Australian landscape. Specific pretexts
of both Western and Eastern origins need to be more extensively studied and related to the
novels. Koch especially leaves a trail of hints of where to look, from Rudyard Kipling,
Somerset Maugham and Ian Fleming, to Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imerialia, and the wayang
kulit play, ‘The Reincarnation of Rama’. The extensive tradition of Hindu literature seems
begging for much closer study and application to the novels of Koch and d’Alpuget. In
addition, there are other novels which ought to be included in these studies. Robert Drewe’s
Cry in the Jungle Bar would be a good candidate, but has proved hard to acquire, and there are
many other works of fiction, and even more in drama and poetry which are devoted to the same
themes.
Alas, the scholars do not seem so interested. Koch and d’Alpuget’s unorthodox
approaches to their writing do not win many prizes for making readers and critics feel good.
Shocking the readership into awareness of its own latent stereotypical prejudices, or dragging a
bag of old and discredited symbols and myths back onto the Australian scene in order to re-
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