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Killing two racial birds with one stereotypical stone, the decadent opium customers are
Aborigines living in a camp outside of town. The moral, Pearce notes, is that there is a close
link between national identity and racial identity, and that non-conformity inevitably threatens
the Australian way of life (Pearce, 35-36).
Thomas Keneally cannot be grouped with such racist literature, but employs many forms
of latent racism in his novels, invoking Orientalist stereotypes in expressions like ‘beyond
China’, which he says means, ‘beyond anything’, evidently somewhere further out than that
region described by the archetypal ‘beyond the Pale’ (Bring Larks and Heroes, 36). When the
soldiers attack the rebellious but unarmed convicts with bayonets, there is a great roar of
shouting and killing. Corporal Halloran is appalled by ‘the death roar of some man, bull,
singer, saint’ amongst the cacophony of rout which Keneally calls ‘Chinese music’ (Bring
Larks and Heroes, 142).
In The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith Keneally offers a digressive and wonderfully
illustrative tale about Australian identity in which two clerks of the Department of Agriculture
argue about the proposed federation of Australia. One speaks ‘upper-class English’, and
criticises the idea as unworkable, saying ‘there is no such thing as an Australian’ except for an
Aborigine, and makes an appeal to British heritage. The other, of more common stock, is
angered by this talk, and argues that Australians must come together to unite against their
common enemy, who he identifies as ‘the Asiatics’ (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, 15).
3.5. The ‘Asian Invasion’ Genre
This is a humorous version of a whole genre of Australian pulp fiction which exists
since the beginnings of Australian literature and is based on unabashed anti-Asian racism.
‘From the 1880s to the first World War, the fear of an Asian invasion, whether migratory or
military, was a major theme in Australian literature, as it was in Australian politics’ (Meaney,
228). The ‘Yellow Peril’ or ‘Invasion Scare’ genre of novel ‘amounted almost to an
obsession’, and was exploited in the nation’s cartoons, short stories, plays, films and, most
substantially, novels (Meaney, 229). These participated in the national preoccupation of
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