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In Mixed Relations Regina Ganter argues convincingly for the need to consider Australian history from the north down, rather than Sydney-side up. The book’s re-orientation of the story of Australia asks us fundamentally to shift the way we view the country, its origins and its identity. When we consider that the first reliably documented seasonal encounters between (Asian) outsiders and Yolngu (Arnhem Land Aboriginal communities) lasted some hundreds of years, and commenced long before the British ‘discovered’ Australia, the need to recast the stories we tell about ourselves, as a nation and a people, becomes clear.
The first two chapters of this thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated book recount the long and close associations between seafarers from Macassar (in Sulawesi, Indonesia) and northern Indigenous people. The Macassan fishermen came each year to Australia’s northern coastlines in search of trepang or bêche-de-mer. In return for access to rich trepanging sites, and Aboriginal labour in procuring it, the Macassans exchanged hooks, knives, cloth, alcohol, tobacco and other goods. The legacy of these mutually beneficial relationships is still evident in Yolngu languages, stories, art, ceremony, and in family genealogies. These cross-cultural encounters are not historic relics of a forgotten past. They continue profoundly to influence the way Yolngu communities define themselves today.
As the authors of Mixed Relations ably show, the history of ‘the polyethnic north’ bears little resemblance to the ‘White Australia’ of the country’s south. This is largely due to the influx of relatively high numbers of East and Southeast Asians – Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and ‘Malays’ – who arrived from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s as indentured labourers in the pearl-shelling industry. The northern marine industry was so reliant on cheap Asian (and even cheaper Aboriginal) labour that those arriving from Asia were exempted from the provisions of the ‘White Australia’ policy. This enabled the northern economies to grow and prosper, but it also led to something that was a cause of great concern for the government – the emergence of a so-called ‘coloured’ population that existed in the interstices between protective legislation extended over Indigenous people, and restrictive policies controlling Asians.
Arguing that Asian-Aboriginal contact is ‘at the very core of the anxious nation’, Ganter points out that in their effort to curtail the emergent polyethnicity of the north, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory introduced legislation making it illegal for Asians to employ or marry Aboriginal people. For Ganter (and her co-authors), the emergence of a polyethnic community was especially threatening in the north because white Australians were far from achieving numerical dominance there. As she reminds us, it made little sense to celebrate Australia’s bi-centenary in 1988 as a national achievement because nowhere in the north does permanent white settlement yet amount to 200 years’ occupancy. Indeed, it was not until World War II that whites became the north’s majority.
Ganter provides exhaustive detail about the implementation of policies that sought to separate Indigenous and Asian people from each other. But she also illustrates the resistance of the legislated-against. Despite all the odds many Asian-Aboriginal families were able to circumvent the surveillance and control they faced. But Ganter might have provided more insight into the variety of official government attitudes towards inter-ethnic unions. Allowing that in many cases local police turned a blind eye to Asian-Aboriginal associations would have complicated the somewhat exaggerated image of a general populace wholeheartedly enthusing about ‘White Australia’.
More space might also have been given to the many ambiguities and tensions that characterised Asian-Aboriginal contact in North Australia. While Ganter does (briefly) gesture towards such complexity, her account is sometimes overly celebratory. What is the implication of Asian labourers (including ‘free’ and indentured workers) in the colonial venture? Would the colonising enterprise have been as widespread without the hard work that Asians contributed to clearing the land, raiding natural resources and helping to develop the economy? Significantly, how does all this impact on the position of contemporary Asian-Australians in terms of Reconciliation and Native Title?
To narrate its story of the north, Mixed Relations makes use of a wide variety of source materials. It incorporates scores of interviews, photographs and other imagery, official government reports, published accounts and artistic, musical and cultural production to weave a rich tapestry of cross-cultural encounter. The oral testimony of Asian-Aboriginal people gives the reader rare insight into the lives, subjectivities and experiences of this hitherto largely overlooked minority. Their stories also reveal much about the ideological and legislative effects of the anxiety Asian-Aboriginal alliances engendered in the white imagination.
In chapters 3-6 Ganter’s (and her co-authors’) analysis of North Australia’s rich polyethnicity indicates that while northern townships might have appeared to be spaces where a variety of cultures mixed freely, in reality this diversity was controlled. Real friendships developed between and within the north’s different racial ‘groups’, but they were formed against the backdrop of petty apartheid that operated in places including the local cinema, one’s living quarters, school and even where one worked and slept on a pearl-shelling lugger. Many kinds of ritualised contact occurred which allowed the contradiction of an appearance of friendly community—where everybody mingled—to coexist with a social environment in which all were segregated.
Different cultures were not only separated from each other, but were located within a hierarchy with white Australians at the top, Aborigines placed at the bottom, and Asians, subdivided into another hierarchy of race and class, situated between them. It is this stratification that calls for an analysis that scrutinises more closely the relative relationships that existed between and within different communities. While Aboriginal people were closer to Asians than whites on the racial ladder, they still did not possess the same social standing, cultural capital or material resources that their Asian counterparts enjoyed.
The various reasons for the near disappearance of the polyethnic north are established in chapter 7. Perhaps of most significance was the effect of World War II. With the mobilisation of troops into the north, whites finally became numerically dominant. This, coupled with the incarceration of the Japanese (including those born in Australia), the evacuation of white and Asian women and children, and the removal of Aboriginal people, resulted in the decimation of once strong polyethnic societies. Following the war the vast majority of the Japanese were deported, and those Aboriginal and Asians-Australians who did return found their houses and properties destroyed and their former enclaves razed to the ground. As the white majority became entrenched and the policy of assimilation implemented more stridently, there was little option for these communities except to adopt the (white) ‘Australian way of life’ so long a feature of the south.
Given the long history of polyethnicity she has painstakingly detailed, Ganter is critical of the perpetuation in Australian policy-making circles and the media of binary thinking. Her final chapter argues that Black/white and Asian/Anglo dichotomies simply do not make sense when we consider Australia’s polyethnic north. Where does this divisive way of thinking leave people of mixed Indigenous-Asian-white ancestry? Ganter argues against essentialist notions of identity and suggests, instead, that it be seen as ‘situational’ and contextual. She reminds us that there are many ‘ways of being Aboriginal’. Even though contemporary Aboriginal identity politics does not always allow for this, she illustrates that recent musical, artistic and cultural production is celebrating ‘shared histories and mixed lineages’.
Though the book’s material is presented chronologically, the subject matter does not always unfold in a neat linear fashion. The experiences of those it seeks to represent are far from clear-cut. Rather, they are open-ended and fractured by histories of removal, internment, deportation and repatriation as well as those of reunion and renewal. This criss-crossing of lives and identities and the blending of blood-lines often resist careful organisation and characterisation. This ambitious book at times strains under the weight of representing the diverse experiences of a huge variety of people living across a very large area of land and during an extensive period of time. The seemingly ad hoc inclusion of interviews within the body of the text sometimes adds to the sense of fragmentation. Because of this Mixed Relations might be a book to be dipped into, rather than read cover to cover. But that said, it is fascinating for the sheer number of stories it recounts, and the breadth, depth and sincerity with which it approaches them.
Dr Peta Stephenson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland. She is interested in how nations invent themselves, in whose stories get told or left out. Peta is currently researching why an increasing number of Indigenous Australians are identifying with Islam and is the author of The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (UNSW Press, 2007).