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D’Alpuget writes that this prejudice comes out of ‘the days of the Raj’, a time ‘so different that
it seemed unreal now’ (TB, 3), though several of her characters would certainly share it. The
cliché serves to introduce the novel’s central motifs of the predators, trespassers, and
indiscriminate violence which are so commonplace that they are almost invisible.
4.3. The Real Asia
Asia itself is the principle object of the stereotyping. Modern Singapore—the very
image of the well-ordered industrial society—is treated, as a general rule, unmercifully. The
airport is ‘huge, bright and very clean’, and is inhabited by ‘small, bright and very clean
Singaporeans’ who ‘hand out passes and snap out directions.’ D’Alpuget repeats the words
bright and clean as if to insist that, yes, these really are the right adjectives to use with ‘the
new Asians, the economic miracle-workers’. ‘Huge’ meanwhile goes only with the facilities.
The workers are just ‘small’, and are less the producers of the economic miracle than its
product, churned out by engineers and archetects as ‘perfectly painted dolls’ for the airport. If
becoming ‘new Asians’ is what Australians are interested in, d’Alpuget is implying, this is
what they’ll get. Judith retreats in panic from such a salesgirl who, like a robot, gets short-
circuited over doubts of the authenticity of luxury items. The cliché exposes its true self—the
cleanliness turns into the ‘aggression’ of the ‘bright lights of the terminal, the sharp, assertive
colours of the tarmac buses, the monosyllabic jabbering of the shopgirls’ (TB, 53).
Christopher J. Koch in The Year of Living Dangerously focuses on the image of
Singapore as the last protective buffer between the Australian bastion of Western civilisation
and the Asian threat. Yet, if there is truth in stereotypes, then Singapore seems too flawed to
be up to the task. Wally O’Sullivan refers to it as ‘Singers’ and longs to return, but only
because that clean efficiency meant he could indulge his immoral passions (YLD, 61). Still,
Guy Hamilton recognises its place in the civilising efforts of the British presence:
‘Wait till they quit Singapore, Cookie. It’ll all fall down. The Yanks won’t
save it. The British Empire was better—we’re not supposed to say it, but it
was. There’ll be more tyranny without it, not less.’ (YLD, 64)
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