Where are You from?': Aborigines, 'Asians' and the Australian National Imaginary, 1901-2001 (Essay‪)‬

The partitioning of 'the Indigene' and 'the immigrant' in dominant Australian ideologies and policies leaves the question of Aboriginal/ migrant relations virtually unexplored. The policy of multiculturalism in Australia pays scant attention to Indigenous issues, and reconciliation debates often centre on a 'Black/white' binary that excludes diasporic communities. Despite the separation and bifurcation of Indigenous and multicultural discourses, this paper shows that many Asian-Australian communities have shown solidarity with Indigenous people in their support of reconciliation and Native Title. I show that the cross-cultural dialogue between Indigenous and Asian communities challenges the prevalent Black-white partitioning of race relations in Australia, and undermines the continuing cleavage of 'the immigrant' and 'the Indigenous' in contemporary paradigms of reconciliation. The re-emergence of race-based discourses in the public debates triggered by Pauline Hanson in 1996 was directed largely at Indigenous rights and immigration policies. Hanson's re-racialisation of Australian identity targeted Indigenous and Asian-Australians, in particular, as those who are intractably unassimilable. In other words, 'Aborigines and Asians' symbolised the most obvious examples of racialised 'Otherness' in the white Australian imaginary. In dominant Anglo-Australian ideologies, signifiers such as Aboriginality and 'Asianness' function to symbolise or represent a threat to national homogeneity and 'oneness'. 'Aborigines and Asians' are perceived as antithetical to the project of national unity and exist in the white national imagination as problematic or troublesome, as the following quotation reveals: 'There are two major groups of nonwhite Australians, both of which have been here a very long time and we have had problems with. One is the Aborigines ... And the other one is Asians.' (2)