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4.2. The Queen of Cliché
Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach is so chock-full with national stereotypes that the
novel comes dangerously close to being overwhelmed by triteness. Yet she turns it into a tour
de force, using the abundance of clichés she can expect her readership to share as her principle
vehicle to explore the theme of Australia’s contradictory and ambivalent images of the ‘Other’.
Bruce Bennett attests that d’Alpuget’s ‘satiric portraits of members of the diplomatic
community, particularly the wives, brilliantly ridicule their ignorance, arrogance, gracelessness
and insensitivity’ (Bennett, 1982, 13). She can make the cliché into a useful literary tool here
since it is so prevalent in the Australian image of Asia, though this perhaps also explains the
difficulty in marketing her novels outside of Australia, where the stereotypes of Asia, while
similar, are yet far less ingrained in the public’s mind. Still, d’Alpuget, like C. J. Koch, who
both ‘invoke deliberately the stereotypes of Asian menace and mystery’, use the stereotypes as
a basis from which they ‘interrogate the patterns of Orientalist devised binary oppositions—
oppressed/free, civilised/savage’ (Driesen, 19). Driesen notes how Billy Kwan forces Guy
Hamilton ‘out of his stereotypical Western attitude to the Orient as simply a site for individual
self-aggrandisement’, but her conclusion that d’Alpuget’s Judith Wilkes ‘is able to view
Minou’s suicide as possibly a redemptive act, through the eyes of her Indian lover, Kanan’
(Driesen, 19-20) is highly questionable. What is more possible—and more important to
d’Alpuget’s efforts—is that d’Alpuget’s readership might manage to recognise the
psychological barriers thrown up by Orientalist stereotypes. They at least might then
participate in the ‘new Australian consciousness’ which Driesen, Tacey and others write about.
Much of d’Alpuget’s subject matter revolves around the very privileged and isolated
expatriate community which is bound together by strict social convention and therefore
doomed to stereotypical patterns of behaviour—which can safely be described as caricatures of
the people buying her books. The journalists spend most of their time getting drunk in dark,
cold bars, ruminating over the corruption of local authorities and the availability of sex, only
exiting the bars enough to get an adequate number of the pictures and quotes required by their
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