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employers. The embassy officials and their wives survive between rungs of their social
ladders, their racial and economic prerogatives counterbalancing the frustrations of their
hopelessly structured existence. Finally, Asia itself is reduced to an array of photos and sound-
bites, mixing the beauty and the squalor, the ridiculous and profound spirituality, the nostalgia
for an earlier, seemingly better world, the promise of a New Age, and the sheer, unrelenting
heat.
Bruce Bennett calls the ‘intelligent dramatisation of a deep cultural ambivalence about
Asia’, which is most directly addressed by d’Alpuget’s near caricatures of the expatriate/tourist
Australian in Asia, the ‘singular strength’ of the novels of d’Alpuget and Koch. ‘The
journalist-protagonists are forward scouts, adventurers, but they too are bound by conventions,
even when they break away from their fellow Westerners.’ Their perceptions ‘fall somewhere
between the tourist and the expatriate’, as they are drawn against their will ‘into an
involvement in political action’. The novelists ‘are inhibited by an Australian past and become
involved in testing the limits of Australian engagement in “other” modes of thought and
feeling’ (Bennett, 1991, 202-03).
Judith O’Donahue Wilkes, the protagonist, is an attractive Australian journalist with big
breasts and marital problems who encounters various, yet expected, forms of racism, classism,
xenophobia and infidelity in her dual search for a story about the Chinese boat people fleeing
Vietnam, and for an explanation for her own excessive carnal instincts. D’Alpuget moulds her
images to reveal the reality behind the cliché—how one can struggle to liberate oneself from
the stereotypes and still fit into a safe and well-formed niche. D’Alpuget gets away with her
heavy use of cliché by building a few good characters on them, and by putting the clichés in
the mouths of characters who are themselves stereotypes. Most of all, d’Alpuget manipulates
the stereotypes for the sarcastic, critical purposes of her narrative.
She blames an unidentified Englishman for having noted how ‘a Malay would kill a
Chinaman with as little conscience as he would kill a tiger that trespassed on his village. For
were not all Chinese cunning trespassers in this country, and predators on the Malays?’
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