Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

India—an Ozzy encountering for the first time the Emerald City in the wonderful land
‘somewhere over the rainbow’ of the Hollywood film classic, the Wizard of Oz:
O’Brien stared out the window at the new Indian Republic sliding by, flat and
brown as a table-top, enormous, with empty stretches of burnt grass reaching
to the horizon. But the few scattered trees were a surprising emerald green
(ASW, 105).
Juxtaposed with the gleam of a marvellous new land, however, are the inescapable images of
‘thin dogs and naked children’, of poverty and struggle. O’Brien senses that he is ‘on the edge
of emptiness’ and that there ‘was a struggle out there from which he had somehow been
spared’ (ASW, 105), but the fractured world confronting him would not fail to jolt his
Australian psyche into looking for meaning in its own hard, dry life.
3.8. The Australian Vision into the Future
The Asia of today remains a puzzling partner for Australia. Australians are told that
they must ‘participate more fully in the global and Asia-Pacific region’, and judge themselves
not by their own but by multinational standards (Tacey, 117). And so they look out at Asia’s
apparently steady and impressive advances in democracy, socio-economic opportunity and
human rights, but the vision often turns back to its old, ugly and familiar face. Still, there is
promise even in the disturbing view of the Near North. After the Communist crackdown on
the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example, Australia allowed
thousands of Chinese dissidents to immigrate. The influx of artists, writers and others of
cultural talent brought new vigour into the country, but, more importantly, some believe that
Australia also gained ‘an opportunity to begin to recover what has been lost from historical
memory, hidden in suspect nationalism’. The Asians not only brought tools with which
Australians could ‘negotiate the dangerous future’ of East-West relations, but also gave
Australians ‘a chance to see ourselves in a new light. The mirror of East and West works
many ways’ (Kingsmill, 220-21).
It is paradoxical, writes Fay Zwicky, that Australians persistently see Australia itself as
‘someone else’s country, a homeland so fundamentally altered as a concept as to be no longer
comfortably recognisable as “Home”’, and yet Australian writers are still so drawn to ‘the
- 61 -