TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050492/05049926.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 15.0 KB | 299 lines

                                                                                THE PACIFIC RIM, Page 56

Australia: In Search of Itself


A once brash and prosperous country suddenly must cope not only
with reviving its spirits but reinventing its future

By JAMES BUTTON/MELBOURNE


    On a cattle ranch in Queensland's remote outback, Andrew
Phillips, 12, does his homework -- in Japanese. One of 25,000
Queensland students studying the language, he walks around the
homestead near Richmond, some 780 miles northwest of Brisbane,
the state capital, telling his family to close the door, open
the window, in words they cannot understand. Says his mother:
"Andrew's grandfather fought against the Japanese in New Guinea.
He lost a lot of friends there, and is a bit funny about Andrew
learning Japanese, but I just think we have to be realistic
about what might be useful for his future."

    A joke on Asia's cocktail circuit has it that Australia is
an NDC, or newly declining country. To Australians it is hardly
funny, but in telling it, Kernial Sandhu, director of
Singapore's Institute of South-East Asian Studies, is trying to
alarm rather than amuse. Australia, he suggests, is like "a man
in a cataleptic state. He cannot move; he suffers no pain and
yet is perfectly conscious of what is happening to him.'' Twenty
years ago, Sandhu concludes, Australia was "top gun in the
region, one of the most prosperous countries in the world. What
happened?"

    What indeed? Australia has woken up late in the 20th
century and found itself virtually alone. Never before has the
country been so aware of its problems -- and never before has
it been so aware of the fact that no one but Australians can or
will fix them. In 1983 the Australian playwright John Romeril
said of the country's good life that "we don't know how and why
we got all this stuff, so we don't know how and why we're going
to keep it." With an unemployment rate exceeding 10% -- nearly 1
million people are jobless -- Australia is in a profound slump;
the downturn, the worst since the Great Depression, has
deepened foreboding that after decades of easy living, the
reckoning has arrived and Australia is being left behind
economically. There is, says John Prescott, the chief executive
of the Broken Hill Proprietary Co., Australia's largest firm,
"a level of apprehension in the community we have not seen for
a long time."

    That apprehension is not ill-founded. Gone are the days
when Australia could simply pack its plentiful minerals and
wool into ships and wait for the money to roll in. The world's
successful economies -- Japan and Germany, and lately, South
Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong -- base their well-being on the
proposition that value lies less in possessing natural riches
than in making something with them. And if Australia can no
longer rely on its abundant raw materials for economic success,
what will Australia make? What changes will be required for it
to remain a well-off and stable liberal democracy in the 21st
century? The questions are more urgent than ever -- and the
answers harder than ever to come by.

    The questions are particularly pressing for Prime Minister
Paul Keating, who took office last December. Keating caused
controversy -- and some bad feeling -- in Australia and Britain
when he sketched a vision of a country freed from its remaining
ties of monarchy with Mother England, moving rapidly toward
republic status and rooting itself firmly in Asia rather than
looking to Europe for a sense of identity and economic future.
Australia's time as "a cultural derivative of Britain," said
Keating, was finished.

    Keating's concept of a new Australia made a virtue of
necessity. The historic protectors -- Britain and, in the
postwar period, the U.S. -- no longer automatically guarantee
its security, let alone its economic well-being. With the end
of the cold war, the U.S. sees Australia as less of a special
ally.

    Australia's need for a new vision goes beyond foreign
policy and trade. In 1972 Don Chipp, a minister in the ruling
Liberal government, suggested that Australia should become a
multiracial society that could take "ideas, cultures and even
people from overseas." Former Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell
stormed in reply that no red-blooded Australian wanted to see
a "chocolate-colored" country, while Liberal Cabinet ministers
insisted Australia would remain forever homogeneous. Today
Vietnamese immigrants gather around high-rise public-housing
buildings in Melbourne's inner-city neighborhood of Fitzroy,
playing cards or talking in the soft twilight. What they will
make of Australia, and Australia of them, is still to be
determined.

    Not far from the housing complex are other signs of
transformation. Melbourne's skyline is a jumble of gleaming
glass-and-steel boxes, tossed up almost overnight in the 1980s
property boom. But beneath the glitter there is gloom. Last year
the Melbourne city council announced that the number of beggars
in the streets had increased for the first time since the
Depression. The gap between rich and poor grew worse in the past
decade, typified by the activities of Australia's over-leveraged
business tycoons, whose rise and fall earned the country much
publicity overseas. A dec ade that academic Hugh Stretton
describes as "the revolt of the rich" culminated in five of
Australia's 12 top businessmen going broke.

    By the end of that decade, it seemed not only that
Australians had wasted time and money but also that events in
their region were leaving them behind. Says historian Henry
Reynolds: "When I first went to Singapore 25 years ago, it was
a Third World country. Now its per capita income is nearing
ours." In 1989 Will Bailey, chief executive of the ANZ bank,
warned that Australians would soon become "white servants to
Asian tourists."

    No wonder Australia staggered out of the '80s with its
self-confidence shaken. A furious debate is under way about the
role of government in the economy; another looms over
immigration. Multiculturalism is under attack, without a clear
sense of what might replace it. Australia is suffering from
"analysis paralysis," says Hirotaka Takeuchi, professor of
international business and marketing at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi
University -- and perhaps from a deeper doubt. Says Robert
Manne, editor of Australia's conservative political magazine
Quadrant: "Australians live on the periphery, of Asia and their
own country. They are a long way from home.''

    In fact, more than 4 million immigrants have made
Australia their home since World War II. Like Canada and the
U.S., Australia has been one of the great havens for immigrants
in this century. But while the U.S. has bound a vast array of
peoples to an insistent myth -- that being American is a state
of mind, not a matter of genealogy -- Australians seem less sure
about what holds them together.

    What are the country's myths or shared stories? The land
that rode to riches on the backs of sheep has been shorn of
many of its farmers and farm markets. The swagman, that
mythical figure who roamed the rural vastness at the turn of the
century carrying only a rolled-up blanket, a tin mug and a
packet of tea, is now but a name for a Melbourne night spot. A
society that once boasted aggressive classlessness had 31,000
millionaires by 1990. Some experts are worried that Australians
can no longer develop a common sense of pride. Ivan Deveson, the
former head of Nissan Australia, notes that Australians never
say "my country" but instead say "this country."

    Historian Geoffrey Blainey is among those who argue for
reducing immigration, but other analysts find the notion
unrealistic. "Human movement is the feature of our epoch.
Nations that put up barriers will no longer be part of any world
community," says Mary Kalantzis, a historian at Wollongong
University's Center for Multicultural Studies. Kalantzis thinks
old forms of national identity that seek to forge a nation
around a single ethnic group are no longer viable.

    The massive postwar immigration, says Kalantzis, is one of
two events of global importance to have taken place in modern
Australian history. The other, she maintains, is the near
destruction of Aboriginal society that followed the arrival of
Europeans in 1788. Yet Aborigines have not only survived --
precariously -- but have begun to exert an influence on the
public mind far beyond their numbers (250,000 out of a 17.5
million population). Examples of a burgeoning Aboriginal
presence in Australian literature and music include Sally
Morgan's 1987 autobiography, My Place, which chronicled a
woman's discovery of her black identity; the 1990 musical Bran
Nue Dae by Jimmy Chi, an Aborigine who also claims Japanese,
Chinese and Scottish strains of descent; and the rock band Yothu
Yindi. There may be a parallel between the Aboriginal
Renaissance and a recent surge in white Australian
self-discovery. For the first time, archives across the country
are besieged by people looking for their family history --
seeking, to borrow from Morgan's title, their place.

    Just as Australians are looking inward for new avenues of
self-expression, industrial life may be reinventing itself along
more local and congenial lines. Unprecedented cooperation
between business and unions, fostered by nine years of Labor
Party government, has led to a sharp drop in industrial unrest
and, more important, to dramatic changes in factory
organization. When Joe Cummaudo started work in Ford's plastics
plant in Melbourne in 1983, he recalls, workers and bosses ate
in different canteens and management policy was "like handing
out the strap back in school." Since the introduction in 1986
of an employee-involvement plan, Cummaudo says, he and fellow
workers have thrived on the chance to develop greater
independence and new skills.

    Much of the change in industrial culture -- a rejection of
inherited British class-based divisions between managers and
workers -- is driven by the great economic power shift of the
late 20th century: the rise of Asia. In the 1980s the bosses of
Ford in Detroit acknowledged that the Japanese were better at
making cars than they were -- and proceeded to remake their
company, in part by using Japanese methods. The new forms of
organization at Cummaudo's Ford Australia are the result.

    In imitating those approaches, Australians are only
acknowledging the powerful pull of economic gravity. Most CD
players, VCRS and electronic goods in use today are made in
Asia. According to Sandhu, by the year 2000, Asia's gross
national product is expected to match Europe's; this year Hong
Kong's gnp per capita will pass New Zealand's. Nine out of the
10 fastest-growing economies last year, including South Korea,
Malaysia and Thailand, were Asian. Taiwan now has foreign
currency reserves equal to more than two-thirds of Australia's
$145 billion foreign debt.

    For Australia, Asia has never been as important as it is
today. It takes almost half of Australia's exports, especially
the raw materials that stoke the region's seemingly insatiable
appetite for growth. Japan has assumed a huge profile in the
Australian economy, with 1 in 10 Australian jobs now in some way
generated by Japanese demand, according to Gavan McCormack, an
Australian visiting professor at the Kyoto Institute of Economic
Research. The transformation has taken place in an astonishingly
brief span of time.

    But even today the link between Australia and its Asian
neighbors is tenuous. Canberra discarded its whites-only
immigration policy in 1976, but decades of Australian xenophobia
linger in Asian memories. On Hong Kong and Malaysian television,
Australia is often portrayed as a racist country. Australians,
on the other hand, are still prey to what Governor-General Bill
Hayden, the Queen's representative in the federal government,
recently called "Orientalist fantasies," timeworn images of
exotic, erotic and despotic Asians. Even after the cultural and
economic transformations of the past decade, Australia differs
radically from its neighbors in language, law, religion,
concepts of democracy and every tradition.

    Difference is not always a problem. Hung Nguyen was a
16-year-old Vietnamese refugee who spoke no English when he
arrived in 1978 with his family in Armidale, a small town in New
South Wales. Now his English has only a slight trace of a
Vietnamese accent, and he is training to be a surgeon -- one of
Australia's first medical specialists of Vietnamese origin --
in Launceston, Tasmania. He has easily moved into the society
he has come to call his own. Nguyen's sister married an
Australian of Irish descent; one of his friends is a Greek who
taught Nguyen Greek folk dancing at his wedding.

    Personal contacts, and larger ones, are slowly beginning
to make a difference to the island continent's overall sense of
isolation. Despite Australians' fabled reluctance to learn a
foreign language, 65,000 are now studying Japanese, more
students than in any other country outside Japan, save South
Korea and China. In Sydney, government-funded laboratories are
working on giving Australian foods such as jams and processed
meats a more attractive taste for consumers in Japan. There are
no Asian characters so far in the hit Australian television
soap opera Neighbours -- ironic perhaps, given the title -- but
there is a fledgling Asian presence in the arts. About 50% of
the government-funded Australia Council's grants for overseas
projects goes to work involving Asia.

    Thirty years after the weekly newsmagazine the Bulletin
removed the words "Australia for the White Man" from its
masthead, Britain this year will cease to be the country's No.
1 source for immigrants, its place to be taken by Hong Kong.
Already more than 600,000 people of Asian background -- 3.5% of
the population -- have made Australia their home, and the number
is likely to double by the year 2010. This migration has not led
to the racist violence that has greeted non-European migrants
to France, Germany and other countries. It is a promising
measure of the society that it has remained mostly calm in the
face of such a transformation; that ability to absorb change
will seem increasingly valuable in the future.

    The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in the 1950s
that the Australians' laconic mode of living could "point the
way to a happier destiny for man throughout the centuries to
come." Australians may finally be developing the sort of culture
that could match Russell's utopian vision. They are waking up
to the fact that they are not so much isolated as irrevocably
enmeshed in a new society -- neither totally European nor Asian
nor Aboriginal but containing elements of all three -- that is
just being born. The promise is that unlike much of the rest of
the world, Australia is a place still in the process of being
built -- and, as such, at the beginning of something that others
may someday envy.