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Australian writers had a considerable impact on the national perception of Asia, but
many were published in England and owed enormously to the influence of ‘the archetypal
colonial writer’, Rudyard Kipling. They therefore published ‘as international writers
contributing to an international genre’ which trumpeted ‘the triumph of British values and the
search for manly adventure’.
It was Kipling who, both in his writings and as a public figure, managed to
ground such narratives in a colonial view of the world, so that the Australian
writers who followed him incorporated colonialism within their assumptions
about the nature of the area they used as a setting, and about the workings of
the genre in which they wrote. (Vickers, 67)
The ‘great degree of subtlety’ in his work means that Kipling cannot, in Vickers
estimation, be ‘dismissed as pure imperialism’. His ‘depth of personal knowledge of India’
enabled him to present India and Indians more accurately than other writers. He also argued
‘for the preservation of “pure” native cultures, and sympathised with many aspects of Indian
life, philosophy and religion’. But while he ‘demonstrated the possibilities of moving between
cultures through the eponymous hero’s mastery of disguise’, Kipling’s work is founded on a
belief in ‘the irrevocable difference of races, just as the colonialists’ praise of native cultures is
combined with disdain for those colonial subjects who attempt to cross the racial barrier, either
by being “half-caste” or by acquiring Western education and Western styles’ (Vickers, 69).
Nevertheless, Kipling provided the antecedent for later Australian novels, including those of
d’Alpuget and Koch (who cites his debt to Kipling in ‘Crossing the Gap’, 8, 16), which explore
‘the emotional frontier of humanity, the place where exoticism tested human limits and made
the unbelievable possible’, and which seek out a means of reconciling ‘some lack or absence in
individual characters’ and the needs of society (Vickers, 73).
In comments concerning the Australian short story which are certainly pertinent to the
novel, Bruce Bennett notes how the principle difference from the 1890s to the present is ‘that
the depiction of Asians has extended beyond last century’s goldfields fears of Chinese
takeovers’. Fears, misunderstandings and distrust still predominate, though the images are
sometimes more romanticised and usually more complex due to the greater direct experience
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