Australia’s enmeshment with Asia: The unseen evolution
Warren Reed | January 18, 2010
The Australian, on January 15, ran a one-page feature article by Rowan Callick called “Dysfunctional diplomacy”. A balanced piece of journalism, it looked at where this country stands in the international community and at turbulence in its relations with major nations like China, India and Japan. Early on in his article, Callick highlighted the fact that,
“The government has focused its diplomacy on three multilateral goals: gaining election to the UN Security Council, an ambition that colours Australia’s approach to other foreign policy issues; nuclear disarmament; and creating a new Asia-Pacific community. All these aims remain distant.”
True enough, and the pity is that such quests understandably overshadow the slow, steady and silent achievements of individual Australians grappling creatively and productively with the realities of the region around us. This individual process has been going on for a long time, and any examination of just the last few decades reveals a wealth of useful engagement, whether in the economic sphere, in science, the arts or in personal relationships. So rich and diverse is the list that anyone qualified to compile it will inevitably produce a totally different selection to somebody else. Once, many of the Asia hands knew each other. Not any longer, and that’s a good thing. It comes with growth.
An Australian friend who’s fluent in Mandarin, and his Chinese wife, are currently spending a few years in China for professional reasons. It wasn’t long before he had formed a close relationship with his parents-in-law. The father, who recently passed away in his mid-80s, was a scholar and the pair would enjoy long conversations every day of the week.
When my friend emailed me to tell me that the old man had died, he wrote warmly of him and of the insights he had gained through him into China and its history. “I was so fortunate,” he said, “to know intimately and at first hand what the Confucian thing is all about. More than an intellectual exercise, it is simply about how to be a loving and devoted person. More than any books could have conveyed, I have had a glimpse of a China untainted by modernity, in its simplest, purest form. Rather than being stultifying and rigidly conformist, this phenomenon is more liberating than any strange political ideology because it enables one to know that to be human is to live in the dynamic and rich tapestry of human affection.”
I was lucky to have a similar friendship when I was a foreign student in the Law Faculty of Tokyo University in the early 1970s. I came to know very well a Japanese friend’s grandfather, who at the time was in his 90s. A true son of Meiji, he was the child of a samurai and had studied engineering in Europe at the turn of the 19th Century. Still fluent in German, though not in English, he went on to achieve much for his country and was still influential at the time I met him. He would often take me out for a meal and we’d talk for hours about how the modern Japan was created, the early Alliance with Britain, how the Pacific War came about, and much else. He went to his office in Tokyo’s CBD every day and refused to use the lift, instead climbing the stairs to the tenth floor. Before he died at 98, his condition deteriorated quickly. His family and his doctors arranged for me to see him at his rambling old Japanese-style home, undamaged by the 1923 Great Earthquake and the incendiary bombs of WWII.
I was ushered in to a huge tatami mat room, in the middle of which he lay on a futon with a drip alongside. His head rested on a small, hard, rice-packed pillow that he had always used. When the nurse left us, he turned towards me as I sat cross-legged on the floor. “Well, my number’s up, sonny,” he said, using the matey, informal Japanese I’d become accustomed to with him. “But we’ve covered a lot of ground together, haven’t we, and never wasted a moment?” I squeezed his hand and he smiled. “You know, it’s a bastard really,” he observed. “My damn body’s about to go, and I have to go with it!”
Whenever I recall this deeply moving experience, I sense him alongside me, smiling.
Australians, in increasing numbers, are privileged to touch the heart of Asia in these sorts of ways virtually every day of the week. For some, the encounters actually take place on our own soil, rather than out and around the region. For older Australians, the first point of contact was the Colombo Plan scheme, which brought students from British Commonwealth countries, and later from Asia, to study at our universities. In those days, many of these first foreign students lived with Australian families and the bonds that arose were close and lasting. Even now, you will occasionally meet a grandchild of someone from that generation coming here for their studies.
For older Australians who teach at university here, and who have themselves studied overseas, there is usually a good rapport with the foreign students one encounters. Recently, I witnessed a small mixed group in Sydney sharing a moment of mirth as a young Saudi man and a Chinese girl ribbed each other in a friendly manner by resorting to Australian colloquialisms. It said a lot about the varied ways in which enmeshment takes place.
It is sad, therefore, that too many of those in Canberra preoccupied with the mechanics of a grand international picture, as well as their counterparts in state capitals, lose sight of these meaningful approaches to regional engagement. Perhaps that’s why Australia was so slow to act when problems loomed large on the foreign education front here. College bankruptcies were an early warning. The understandable unease that Indian students feel in our midst today is only the latest manifestation of an inertia that unstitches so much of the human fabric that binds us to Asia. It would be a great pity if racism and xenophobia on the part of a small minority of Australians were to continue to impact on our destiny in this way.
Warren Reed studied in
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peter brady
February 13, 2011 at 2:21 pm
ESPIONAGE IN AUSTRALIA
WHEN THE COMMUNIST COUNTRIES BECAME CAPITALIST,SO WE WERE TOLD, WE WERE TOLD ITS NORMAL TO TRADE WITH THESE COUNTRIES.
THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES SWITCHED TO PROTECTING COMMERCIAL INTERESTS,PRESUMING THESE WERE IN THE INTERESTS OF THE TAXPAYERS OF EACH COUNTRY.
GIVEN MULTINATIONALS HAVE NO MONETARY,IN THEORY,ALLEGIANCE TO ANY COUNTRY IN A FREETRADE WORLD ONLY TO THEIR FUTURE PROFITS IT IS POSSIBLE THAT INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES COULD ACT AGAINST THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
SECONDLY AS THESE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES HAVE A NEW AGENDA THEY CAN MORE AGGRESSIVELY BE INVOLVED IN DESTROYING ANY COUNTRY’S ,EVEN ALLIES, OWNED COMPANIES.
DOMINANT COUNTRIES COULD TRADE OFF SMALLER COUNTRIES TO FOREIGN AGENCIES IN ORDER TO EXTRACT BETTER CONCESSIONS FOR THEMSELVES.
ASIAN COUNTRIES ARE DOMINATED BY POWERFUL MAFIA FAMILIES CONTROLLING EVERYDAY LIFE AND INTEGRATING WITH ASIA COULD BE A COVER WHEREBY POLITICIANS ARE ABLE TO INTRODUCE THESE FAMILIES ACROSS THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE TO THE DETRAMENT OF AUSTRALIAN SECURITY.
JUST ONE EXAMPLE HUTCHISON IS LINKED TO THE PEOPLES LIBERATION ARMY AND THEY HAVE ACCESS TO OUR INNER THOUGHTS VIA VODAPHONE. ALREADY THERE IS SECURITY BREACH.
WHAT INFLUENCE HAS A VERY CONTROVERSIAL USA WEAPONS COMPANY ,POLITICALLY CONNECTED, HAVE OVER OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OUR NEAR NEIGHBOURS..THINK BALI