Friday essay: Japanese Australian veterans and the legacy of anti-Asian racism

Friday essay: Japanese Australian veterans and the legacy of anti-Asian racism


Japanese internees starting to leave the train which brought them from Hay on their way to the Loveday Internment Camp Group in the Barmera area (1943, Renmark, South Australia). Australian War Memorial/Photo: Hedley Keith Cullen


Friday essay: Japanese Australian veterans and the legacy of anti-Asian racismApril 24, 2020 6.00am AEST


Authors
Timothy Kazuo Steains

Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney
Shannon Whiley

Researcher, The University of Queensland
Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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As COVID-19 wreaks havoc on our usual way of life, the language of war proliferates. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called it the “the battle that all Australians are enlisted in as we fight this virus”. French President Emmanuel Macron has declared: “We are at war”; and US President Donald Trump is calling himself the “wartime president”.

For Asian Australians, and temporary Asian migrants, this fervour has brought increased racist attacks against them. This kind of xenophobia is common in wartime, and for Japanese Australians it was most pronounced during and after the second world war.

In considering the significance of the upcoming Anzac Day, we look back at the experiences of two of the estimated two dozen Japanese Australians (or Nikkei) who enlisted. Reflecting on their treatment during wartime, we ask what their stories reveal about the pressures on Asian Australians now.
Under the radar

Japanese people started migrating to Australia in the mid-19th century - before the White Australia Policy (established in 1901 as the Immigration Restriction Act). Some of the earliest Japanese migrants were circus performers, pearl divers, and sex workers. Japanese communities were established in cities including Broome and Darwin where the pearling industry was strong.

These migrants, referred to around the world as Nikkei migrants, established livelihoods and families in Australia, both within cultural groups and after marrying white and Aboriginal Australians. By the second world war, there were more than 1,000 people of Japanese descent living in Australia.

There were 28 Australians of Japanese descent who served. However, there may be more. Unlike their American brethren, including the famous Japanese-American 100th/442nd Infantry Regiment who became the most decorated unit in US military history, Australians of Japanese heritage were officially prohibited from enlisting. Those who did serve were only able to do so by hiding their roots.

There were two reasons for this. The first was a blanket ban on all non-Europeans from enlisting. The Defence Act on 1910 exempted all those who were “not substantially of European origin or descent” (as determined by an appointed medical professional) from miltary service. Nikkei were not considered for military armed service roles, or even translation and interpretation roles — despite the knowledge some had of both English and Japanese that made them suitable for such functions.

The second reason for their prohibition from military service was the classification of all Japanese as enemy aliens, leading to their mass internment in civilian camps during wartime. Around 4,000 Japanese (including Japanese Australians) were imprisoned.Japanese internees at Tatura line up for dental parade in 1943. Australian War Memorial

Unlike German and Italian Australians, who were selectively interned and largely consisted of adult men, a more blanket approach to the internment of Japanese. Australian-born citizens with Japanese heritage, young children and even Australian spouses were interned in camps, along with elderly residents who had been in Australia since before the White Australia Policy. Many were deported to Japan after the war.

In spite of this, we know at least 28 Nikkei did enlist.

One of them was a man named Mario Takasuka. Born in Mildura to Japanese rice cultivators Jo and Michiko Takasuka, Mario worked as an orchardist before his enlistment. Although arriving at the height of the White Australia Policy, the Takasuka family were able to enter and remain in Australia for an extended period because of their important cultivation research, which eventually led to them being the first rice growers in Australia.
Rejected twiceMario Takasuka on leave in Cairo, 1941. State Library of Victoria

In 1940, Mario volunteered locally to join the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF). After being rejected twice at his local enlistment centre, he was eventually accepted after travelling to Melbourne, where his Japanese heritage was unknown and the recruiting officer happened to be unaware of the military regulations excluding non-Europeans.

Mario initially served in Crete and Alexandria in the 2/3 Light Anti-Aircraft regiment. However, after Japan entered the war at the end of 1941, military authorities went to great lengths to have him removed, including launching an enquiry into “the presence of a full-blooded Japanese in the Australian army”.

Within his unit, Mario was well liked, and his commanding officer fought hard to keep him deployed, stating:


His record as a soldier both in and out of action has been exemplary and in consideration of his outstanding service in Crete, I selected him for promotion as a bombardier. He is most popular with the men in his [battalion] and the recent declaration of war against Japan has in no way affected his popularity or his ambition to serve.

Thanks to this support, Mario was able to remain with his unit and went on to serve in Palestine, where he received a written commendation from his general for his efforts in a train crash rescue. He was then promoted to gun sergeant and deployed to New Guinea. Mario returned from the war in 1945 and continued to live in Australia until his death in 1999, aged 89.
Brother Sho

The Takasukas were well-respected within their local community. Mario’s older sister Aiko was a school teacher, and his older brother Sho was the first Japanese born Australian citizen to hold a local government position. Sho did not serve in the second world war, but was a member of the volunteer defence force until his internment in 1941.

Unlike Mario, Sho was Japanese by birth and the military was unwilling to consider him for service. He was interned as a result. The local community fought hard for his release, with some members going so far as to testify on the family’s behalf at the Aliens Tribunal.

Sho is described in the tribunal minutes as being “as loyal a citizen as any living in our district… always willing to help”, and the family reputation was “absolutely one of the best”.

The Swan Hill police force apparently felt ashamed and embarrassed at the prospect of arresting the Takasuka family, and sought advice from the Attorney General about circumventing the regulations. The Takasukas’s tomato farm was supplying food to the Department of Defence after all. These examples of community involvement led to Sho Takasuka being released and allowed to remain within a 14 kilometre radius of his farm.Jo and Ichiko Takasuka surrounded by their rice crop, circa. 1915. State Library of Victoria
Born in Japan

Others were treated more harshly still. Unlike Mario Takasuka, Joseph Suzuki was born in Japan and migrated to Australia with his Australian mother just six months after his birth. On June 19, 1940 he registered for service in the AIF in Sydney, falsely listing his birthplace as Geelong and raising his age from 17 to 22.

Joseph served in the 2/1 Survey Regiment in Australia until February 21, 1941, when his identity was discovered. He was discharged “on racial grounds” and was interned at the Japanese Internment camp in Hay, NSW.

Suzuki was steadfast in his fight to prove his loyalties to the Australian government. He applied for release from internment and on May 13, 1942 stood before a tribunal where he emphasised his desire to assist the war effort in any way he could, including being prepared to take the risk of being taken prisoner or shot as a traitor by the Japanese military.

Joseph had a tattoo of a map of Australia, and in an interview with researcher Yuriko Nagata, his sister spoke of him as always being a loyal Australian, adding “the proof is that he got a medal from the Queen”. Suzuki later told The Sunday Telegraph in an interview that he was “an Australian to the backbone”.

Although the tribunal concluded in 1942 that Suzuki should be released, he remained interned until August 21, 1944. This was due to reports from the Australian Military Forces (AMF) Eastern Command in July 1942 which argued that as a person with Japanese heritage born in Japan, Suzuki was under “the influence of the fatalistic Emperor cult; [and] the obligation on Japanese to report intelligence to the Consulate”. It said “evidence of conversion to Christianity was no argument for Australian orientation”.Two Japanese internees on a Holland celery planter. Australian War Memorial/Photo: Hedley Keith Cullen

The military was also concerned Suzuki’s skills as a surveyor would be useful to the enemy. Further, his Security Service assessment presented to the government argued that “the son of a Japanese is always regarded as a Japanese even if he had some other nationality”. Because of his prolonged internment, Suzuki’s mental health suffered and he was hospitalised. This eventually triggered his release.

Suzuki and several of the other “mixed race” or Australian-born internees did not get along with the Japanese nationals in the camp. They were referred to as The Gang and were segregated in a separate tent. Suzuki said the other internees were friendly enough, but they had to “try to speak English” to communicate with him, as he did not speak any Japanese. Suzuki’s actions at Hay served as the inspiration for a fictional character named Peter Suzuki in After Darkness, the 2014 Vogel’s Literary Award-winning novel by Christine Piper.

After his release, Suzuki returned to Newcastle, where he was naturalised on June 12, 1945. He eventually changed his surname due to continued discrimination. In Yuriko Nagata’s influential book on Australian internment, Unwanted Aliens, Joseph’s sister Hannah stresses she does not want Joseph to be contacted for research, as it would upset him too much.
A sense of belonging

Mario Takasuka and his family experienced acceptance from the Australian communities around them. They had deep social ties and their loyalty was never in question. Suzuki, on the other hand, was continually rejected by his nation for being half-Japanese. Despite his loyalty to the nation and his white heritage, he was regarded an enemy and this resulted in significant psychological pain.

Many Asian Australians will be experiencing an array of feelings to do with their sense of belonging to the nation right now. Do they feel included? Are they targeted for their race?

Earlier this year, it was reported planned Anzac Day celebrations at RSLs in WA were going to take place strictly in English and without Aboriginal flags or Welcome to Country. Thankfully this divisive approach was overturned.Lest we forget. Unsplash/Trevor Kay, CC BY

Other Anzac Day ceremonies proffer a more inclusive attitude celebrating Aboriginal diggers and other ethnically diverse soldiers – including Chinese Australians. Reflecting on Takasuka and Suzuki’s lives prompts us to imagine the version of Australia we want on Anzac Day – especially in these alarming times of social isolation.

Asian Australians are among the vulnerable groups in our society during this pandemic. Wartime Nikkei histories may give us some perspective on the present.

It’s significant that so few Japanese Australian families share their internment stories. Just 141 Nikkei Australians were allowed to stay after the war; the rest were repatriated to Japan. As such, post-war Japanese Australian migrant identity was not built on the particular shared trauma of marginalisation that internment represents. Conversely in the US, internment galvanised the community into a powerful cultural and political force.

Nikkei Australian stories raise questions about Asian Australian responses to marginalisation. Joseph Suzuki remained loyal to a nation that repeatedly rejected and ostracised him. Is this a likely response from Asian Australians in the current COVID-19 climate?

Many Japanese Americans rejected former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s call in the Washington Post early this month for Asian Americans to “embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before”. They recalled the pain of wartime internment, saying that now (and indeed, then) “being American should have been enough”.

It wasn’t possible to form an Asian Australian community response to racist attitudes during the second world war. It isn’t entirely clear if that is possible today. However, Mario Takasuka’s story does show us that Australians of different backgrounds can band together to defy racism and support each other in hardship.

White Australia policy
World War II
Anzac Day
Nikkei
Friday essay
Japanese internment camps

Before you go...

200 years of Chinese-Australians: First settler's descendants reconnect with their roots - ABC News

200 years of Chinese-Australians: First settler's descendants reconnect with their roots - ABC News





200 years of Chinese-Australians: First settler's descendants reconnect with their roots


By Jason Fang
Posted 10 JunJune 2018, updated 29 AugAugust 2019

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Nick and Barry Shying, in his 80s, are related to Mak Sai Ying, the first Chinese settler in Australia.
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Barry Shying and his grandson Nick have a unique surname, which many people over the years have jokingly said sounds "very Chinese".
Key points:
The Shying family are descendants of Mak Sai Ying, who arrived in 1818
Mr Mak is believed to be the first Chinese settler to come to Australia
He had four children, one of whom was Barry Shying's grandfather

Barry used to just laugh off the suggestion, as his parents had never mentioned anything like that to him.

However after the Melbourne man received a phone call from a stranger in Sydney more than 30 years ago, Barry became convinced that his great-great-grandfather was in fact a man named Mak Sai Ying — the first Chinese-born settler to come to Australia.
Mak Sai Ying, also known as John Shying, would sign his name using Chinese characters.(Wikimedia Commons)

The Chinese community is this year celebrating 200 years of settlement in Australia, and Barry Shying has been invited to many functions and seminars to commemorate the occasion.

"I feel a bit overwhelmed, quite truthfully," he said.


"I have spent 86 years of my life being almost invisible, and suddenly everyone wants to photograph me and invite me to things."

"But I am very glad to do it. It sort of gave me a feeling of connection which I have never had before, and that feeling of connection has continued on."
'John Shying' and his famous friends
John Joseph Shying, a grandson of Mak Sai Ying, may have been the first Chinese-Australian serviceman.(Supplied: Museum Of Chinese Australian History)

While there are no paintings of Mak Sai Ying, researchers have been able to piece together the story of his time in Australia through public records.

Mr Mak, who was also known as John Shying, arrived in Port Jackson aboard the ship Laurel in February 1818 — decades before the gold rush that saw many more Chinese people travel to Australia.

He was born in 1796 in the Chinese city of Canton, now known as Guangdong.
Blaxland paid Mr Mak the same amount that he gave his European employees.(State Library Of New South Wales)

After arriving in Australia, he worked as a carpenter for the famous English settler John Blaxland, who he met aboard the Laurel.

He later worked for the pastoralist Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of Australia's wool industry pioneer John Macarthur.

After that, Mr Mak became a successful entrepreneur in his own right, owning the Peacock Inn in Parramatta and several other shops. Blaxland once wrote a reference for Mr Mak describing him as "an honest, respectable character".

Mr Mak was reportedly paid the same weekly wage of two pounds that Blaxland's other workers received.

Dr Kate Bagnall from Wollongong University, an expert in early Chinese settlement in Australia, said early Chinese free settlers encountered relatively little discrimination.


"Because of the nature of the port, there was probably more diversity in Sydney than we imagined," she said.
James Shying married two European women during his time in Australia.

"The number of Chinese was very small. With this small number, I don't think it would be the same sort of discrimination that we saw later from the 1850s on, when there were very large number of Chinese coming who were perceived as a threat by the British and Europeans."
Mysterious return to China

Under the name John Shying, Mr Mak married Irish migrant Sarah Jane Thompson in 1823. They had four sons, but he returned to China shortly after the birth of their fourth child in 1831.
A painting of John James Shying, Mr Mak's eldest son and Barry's grandfather.

Nobody knows why he chose to return, but Dr Bagnall said it was likely he had family obligations back in China.


"We do know from later families that it was not uncommon for Chinese men of this time, from southern China like Shying, to have families in both Australia and China," she said.

"A lot of families I have looked at later in the century, their Australian wives and family were sort of a second family, and there was also a family in China. This is one possibility."

Barry Shying has had no luck finding the reason either, and said he finds it hard to understand how his ancestor could leave his Australian family.

"He left his wife and four children here. The children would be very young. It was only the early 1830s — I don't know how they were supported," he said.


"No one knows why he went to China and what he did there. There is no record available to anyone."

He returned to Australia five years later, after the death of his wife. Historical records show that John Shying married again in 1842, but his second wife died a few months later.
Two of Mak Sai Ying's children ran an undertakers business.(State Library Of New South Wales)

Barry says records show his great-great-grandfather sold his properties in Parramatta and very likely left Australia permanently, leaving his four sons.

Some of John Shying's descendants picked up furniture making, and others became undertakers.
'I can't say I feel part Chinese'
Barry Shying grew up not knowing about his Chinese heritage.(ABC News)

Adjusting to the discovery that he has Chinese ancestry has been an interesting experience for Barry Shying.

"I can't say I feel part Chinese, but I know I am," he said.


"As somebody said to me recently, 'his blood continues to flow through your veins'. That's how I feel about it."

Nick Shying has also been in the Chinese media spotlight this year, but unlike his grandfather, he has known about his Chinese heritage since he was young.

"I haven't always appreciated and fully understood what it meant, but I have certainly been brought up in an environment where I have known our family history," he said.
Gold rush era apology


Victoria's Premier apologises to the state's Chinese community for the racism and unjust policies their ancestors endured.Read more

Nick studied Chinese at high school and went to China for a study tour, and said he was excited to be connected to the local Chinese community.

"It is hard to say that I feel naturally like I am a Chinese in the same way others who might have a closer connection probably do," he said.

"But I think it's been specifically interesting for me to learn about that history, language and culture because of the fact that I know that part of my family history extended back to China."

He said the next step in finding out more about his family's roots would require going to China, but acknowledged trying to find out more information within the country's public records is a daunting task.

"Maybe one day, I'll give it a crack and see if I can find something."
Posted 10 JunJune 2018, updated 29 AugAugust 2019
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Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans - The Atlantic

Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans - The Atlantic




Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans

Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.

APRIL 29, 2020
Jeffrey Ostler
Professor of history at University of Oregon
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An illustration of Native Americans with red dots surrounding them.

CULTURE CLUB / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC

As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most vulnerable are Native Americans. To understand how dire the COVID-19 situation is becoming for these communities, consider the situation unfolding for the Navajo Nation, a people with homelands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As of April 23, 1,360 infections and 52 deaths had been reported among the Navajo Reservation’s 170,000 people, a mortality rate of 30 per 100,000. Only six states have a higher per capita toll.

The spread of COVID-19 is reminiscent of previous disease outbreaks that have ravaged Native American communities. Many of those outbreaks resulted in catastrophic loss of life, far greater than even the worst-case scenarios for COVID-19. Even the 1918–19 flu pandemic, in which an estimated 650,000 Americans died (0.6 percent of the 1920 population of 106 million), pales in comparison to the losses Native Americans have suffered from disease.

Until recently, histories of disease and Native Americans have emphasized “virgin-soil epidemics.” According to this theory, popularized in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they brought diseases (particularly measles and smallpox) that indigenous people had never experienced. Because they had no immunity to these diseases, so the theory goes, the resulting epidemics took the lives of 70 percent or more of the Native population throughout the Americas.

New research, however, provides a much more complicated picture of disease in American Indian history. This research shows that virgin-soil epidemics were not as common as previously believed and shifts the focus to how diseases repeatedly attacked Native communities in the decades and centuries after Europeans first arrived. Post-contact diseases were crippling not so much because indigenous people lacked immunity, but because the conditions created by European and U.S. colonialism made Native communities vulnerable. The virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis was valuable in countering earlier theories that attributed Native American population decline to racial inferiority, but its singular emphasis on biological difference implied that population collapses were nothing more than historical accidents. By stressing the importance of social conditions created by human decisions and actions, the new scholarship provides a far more disturbing picture. It also helps us understand the problems facing Native communities today as they battle the novel coronavirus.

Virgin-soil epidemics undoubtedly occurred. In 1633, for example, a smallpox epidemic struck Native communities in New England, reducing the Mohegan and Pequot populations from a combined total of 16,000 to just 3,000. The epidemic spread to the Haudenosaunee in New York, but no farther west than that. Smallpox did not hit communities in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes until 1756–57, a century or more after initial contact with Europeans. When it did, it was because Native fighters, recruited to fight for the French against the British during the Seven Years’ War, had contracted the virus in the east and infected their communities when they returned home. Lack of immunity mattered, but it was the disruption resulting from war that promoted smallpox’s spread.
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MORE BY JEFFREY OSTLER

An illustration of Pontiac and other Native Americans meeting with Major Gladwin
The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence

JEFFREY OSTLER
Read: How disease and conquest carved a new planetary landscape
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Smallpox did not arrive in the Southeast until 1696, a century and a half after the Hernando de Soto expedition. It was once thought that de Soto’s men carried smallpox, but this view reflected the flawed assumption that Europeans were always infected with smallpox and always contagious. De Soto’s expedition did cause disease to erupt in Native communities, but the reason was that the expedition’s violent warfare led to outbreaks of pathogens such as dysentery, which was already present in the Americas. When smallpox finally hit the Southeast, it spread rapidly from Virginia to East Texas across networks created by an English trade in Native captives for enslavement in their coastal and West Indies colonies. Raiding, capturing, and transporting human bodies created pathways for the smallpox virus. To make matters worse, those bodies were already weakened by war and its companions—malnutrition, exposure, and lack of palliative care.

By the end of the 18th century, most Native communities in what would eventually become the United States had been exposed to smallpox. Nevertheless, as smallpox recurred in the 19th century, its impact correlated not with a lack of prior exposure, but with the presence of adverse social conditions. These same conditions would also make Native communities susceptible to a host of other diseases, including cholera, typhus, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, scrofula, and alcoholism. Native vulnerability had—and has—nothing to do with racial inferiority or, since those initial incidents, lack of immunity; rather, it has everything to do with concrete policies pursued by the United States government, its states, and its citizens.

Consider the impact of the Indian Removal Act. Formally adopted in 1830, this policy called for the relocation of Native peoples east of the Mississippi River to “Indian Territory” (what would eventually become Oklahoma and Kansas). Most everyone has heard of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but it is seldom considered a U.S.-caused health crisis. The expulsion of the Cherokee from their homeland in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee had three phases. In the first, the U.S. Army forcibly evicted Cherokees from their homes and held them for several months in concentration camps with inadequate shelter, insufficient food, and no source of clean water. The camps became death traps. Of the 16,000 people held in them, about 2,000 died from dysentery, whooping cough, measles, and “fevers” (probably malaria). In the second phase, the journey west, an additional 1,500 perished, as people, already sick and further weakened by malnutrition, trauma, and exposure, succumbed to multiple pathogens. In the months after reaching Oklahoma—the third phase—an additional 500 died from similar causes. The death toll was 4,000, or 25 percent of the original 16,000 forced from their homes.

Although the Cherokee Trail of Tears is the most well known, there were dozens of other such forced removals. Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Senecas, Wyandots, Potawatomis, Sauks and Mesquakies, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Miamis, Kickapoos, Poncas, Modocs, Kalapuyas, and Takelmas represent only a partial list of nations that suffered trails of tears. Not all experienced the same mortality as the Cherokee, but many did, and for some, the toll was even higher. The allied Sauks and Mesquakies were forced to move four times from their villages in western Illinois—once to central Iowa, once to western Iowa, once to Kansas, and finally to Oklahoma. In 1832, the time of the first expulsion, the Sauks and Mesquakies numbered 6,000. By 1869, when they were finally sent to Oklahoma, their population was only 900, a staggering loss of 85 percent. Year after year, unrelenting diseases, including an outbreak of smallpox in 1851, took many lives. Low fertility and infant mortality, the result of malnutrition, sickness, and trauma, hindered population replacement. The Sauk and Mesquakie catastrophe was not an accident. It was a direct and foreseeable consequence of decisions made by the United States and its citizens to dispossess Native people of desirable lands and shove them someplace else.


Read: The people who profited off of the Trail of Tears

Navajos (Dinés, as they refer to themselves in their language) were also evicted from their homelands. In the winter of 1863–64, the U.S. Army pursued scorched-earth tactics—destroying their peach trees and cornfields—to drive them to a barren reservation at Bosque Redondo, on the Pecos River in New Mexico. On the 250-mile forced march, known as the Long Walk, several hundred of the 8,000 to 9,000 Dinés died en route. Over the next four years, Dinés lost as many as 2,500 of their people to disease and starvation. In their darkest hour, though, Diné leaders successfully prevailed on government officials to release them from their prison and return home. But even though their population has grown over time, the legacies of the Long Walk remain. The Diné historian Jennifer Denetdale observes that “severe poverty, addiction, suicide and crime on reservations all have their roots in the Long Walk.”

As cases of COVID-19 began to appear on the Navajo Reservation in late March, tribal President Jonathan Nez spoke to his people on Facebook. Summoning memories of the Long Walk, he “called on citizens to help one another,” reminding them “that’s when the best came out of many of our ancestors, helping each other out, carrying the load for the elders, carrying the children for our mothers.” “Now it’s our turn,” he said, “to think of our future, our children, our grandchildren.” Ongoing colonialism makes fighting COVID-19 a challenge. Although the Navajo are a sovereign nation with resources of their own, Dinés have a high incidence of conditions—diabetes, hypertension, and lung disease—that increase their susceptibility to becoming severely ill from the coronavirus. Lack of access to clean water makes hand-washing difficult. Many people cannot afford food, hand sanitizer, and other necessities. And there is an acute shortage of hospital beds and medical personnel.

Many public officials, health experts, and journalists are drawing attention to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. Even so, large segments of America are indifferent, if not outright hostile, to recognizing these disparities and the inequities underlying them. Native Americans are visible to the general public far more often as sports mascots than as actual communities. The Trump administration initially resisted providing any relief to tribal nations in the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in early April, and although the legislation ultimately appropriated $10 billion to tribal governments, the Treasury Department, tasked with distributing these funds, has failed to disburse them. According to New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, Treasury Department officials “don’t know how to interact in the appropriate way with tribes and they’re just not getting the job done.”

Countering the invisibility of Native peoples, of course, means greater awareness of how COVID-19 is affecting them and enhanced efforts to provide resources to help them combat the current outbreak. It also means creating a deeper understanding of the history of American Indians and disease. Although the virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis may have been well intentioned, its focus on the brief, if horrific, moment of initial contact consigns disease safely to the distant past and provides colonizers with an alibi. Indigenous communities are fighting more than a virus. They are contending with the ongoing legacy of centuries of violence and dispossession.
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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

JEFFREY OSTLER is the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection



Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection
December 20, 2019MCCAdmin
Photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels.com

Submission by: Assoc. Prof. David Chapman

In 2007, Assoc. Prof. David Chapman led a project highly successful symposium held at the University of Queensland entitled “Japan in Australia“. The symposium sought to investigate a curious gap in the literature on Japan-Australia relations. While previous discourse on the two countries had focused primarily on the relationship between Japan and Australia, there had been little focus “on Japan’s place within Australia and within the nation’s social, cultural and historical landscape”. Furthermore, “with the changing dynamic of Australia’s relationship with Asia [particularly with Australia’s increasing focus on Chinese and South Korean relations] there is a need for a fresh look at Japan within Australia and how Japan has been understood and conceptualised”.

From the research presented at the symposium, Assoc. Prof. David Chapman and Assoc. Prof. Carol Hayes (ANU) edited the newly published collection: Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection. This collection is “a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances”.Photo by Catarina Sousa on Pexels.com

As the publisher notes: “Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on ‘people to people’ narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.”

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connections thus “explores notions of Australia and ‘Australianness’ and Japan and ‘Japaneseness’, to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship.” This collection features several chapters from our team of academics who research cultures out of the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland who have previously submitted posts to this blog including Assoc. Prof. Tomoko Aoyama, Dr Lucy Fraser, and Rebecca Hausler. Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connections is currently available through Routledge via e-book, with a hardback edition. It will be of particular interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese, and Japanese-Pacific studies.


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Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection

by 

David Chapman (Editor),

 

Carol Hayes (Editor)

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Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances.



Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on 'people-to people' narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways in which the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.



This book explores notions of Australia and 'Australianness' and Japan and 'Japaneseness', to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies. (less)

Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker

Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker





A Strange Australian Masterpiece


By Ben LernerMarch 29, 2017






Gerald Murnane captures the paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter, in his novel “The Plains”: small differences have an outsized power amid so much sameness.PHOTOGRAPH BY AUSCAPE / UIG VIA GETTY





The Australian writer Gerald Murnane was born in a suburb of Melbourne, in 1939, and has spent his entire life in Australia. His novel “The Plains,” first published thirty-five years ago and reissued next month, is a bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.

Having grown up in a small capital city located on the Great Plains of North America, I recognize something in Murnane’s descriptions of expansive grasslands, unobstructed sky. He captures a plain’s paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter: small differences—a hill, a sudden patch of wildflowers—have an outsized power amid so much sameness; they’d fail to stand out among the dramatic natural beauties of California or the overwhelming built spaces of New York. Sometimes, to break up long drives, my dad would pull onto the shoulder of the highway, and we would look for fossils in the limestone that crops out in the road cuts. The traces of ancient invertebrates with astonishing names (crinoids, fusulinids, and so on) were just one of many signs that the landscape my coastal relatives used to mock for its monotony in fact harbored wonders.


In the world of “The Plains,” which both is and isn’t Australia, the plain people and their plain speech also serve to conceal things—elaborate rituals, cosmologies, obscure passions, arcane knowledge. The apparent provincialism of the inhabitants of the plains is actually a kind of camouflage:

A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

The cosmopolitan coasts leave nothing to the imagination. For Murnane, for the plainsmen, this obviously apparent richness of the actual is a kind of poverty. To quote the narrator of the short story “Land Deal,” a distant cousin of “The Plains”:

Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud . . . The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

The poet-philosophers of the plains (and every plainsman is one) know that the plains are unknowable in their totality, and are therefore charged with possibility. This is because what at first appears “utterly flat and featureless” reveals, as you learn to look, “countless subtle variations of landscape.” But it is also because there is another plain (or plains) behind this one, “always invisible” even though you’ve “crossed and recrossed it daily.” “The Plains” is a book about the planes of the actual and the possible, about their interplay, how one haunts the other.

Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism; they are measured, both in the sense of “restrained” and in the poetic sense of “metrical,” the former meaning often giving way to the second as you read. Take this sentence, although any of a thousand sentences would serve, from part two of “The Plains”: “None of the scholars I mention can even guess how many successive encroachments of afternoon sunlight on the shadowy corners of libraries will have bleached the glossy inks on the books that they open at last.”

The sentence begins with an anthropological tone, the restricted affect of objectivity, but it transitions, starting with “afternoon sunlight,” into a more romantic register as it slowly zooms in on the letters and their lustre. The grammar here is both plain and elaborate: there is no internal punctuation, just a repetitive chain of prepositions (of, on, of, on), but there are delicate changes of light and shade and scale as the sentence unfolds. Beats fall with considerable regularity within the internal divisions of phrase and clause, so that a sense of poetic rhythm accumulates as you go. (I read it as anapestic and dactylic—the accentual stresses tending to be divided by a pair of unstressed syllables.) Murnane’s mysterious plainsmen pursue the “lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth.” And this is what Murnane achieves, again and again, through his carefully shaped sentences, the prosaic becoming poetic along their length.

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“The Plains” is an ekphrastic novel, full of descriptions of other works of art. The narrator arrives from “Outer Australia” (“the sterile margins of the continent”), as the people of the plains call it, determined to make a film—he plans to title it “The Interior”—that can capture the evasive truth of the plains. Much of his narrative is taken up with describing attempts in other media to produce art works worthy of the place. There is the controversial painting “Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass,” for instance, which appears at first full of “deliberately imprecise” shapes, “of no style known from history,” and yet, when you step back, you can see “a painting of plants and soil.” There are poems such as “A Parasol at Noon,” vaguely reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, which imagines “a land apart” that is “neither a plain of old nor yet a dream.” And there is the composer who, in an attempt to find “the musical equivalent of the characteristic sound of his district,” stages a performance that, in Murnane’s telling, sounds like a synthesis of Kafka and John Cage:


the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grass-blades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.
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The works of art that Murnane describes are failures. The composer responds to critics of his work’s insufficiency by saying that “the purpose of his art was to draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.” And yet he hopes that he can capture a “hint of the whole” through his experiments. For this composer, for Murnane, for his narrator, any serious art work will fail, as soon as it becomes actual, to capture the possible; but that failure itself can gesture toward, offer a hint of, the invisible topology that is no less real for being unrepresentable. A hint of the narrator’s unmakeable film survives only by collapsing into this novel.

Gerald Murnane has never been on an airplane. He’s left the state of Victoria few times in his almost eighty years. He suffers from anosmia, the inability to smell, although perhaps “suffers” is the wrong word, as he says it has intensified his experience of color, given him the gift of synesthesia. (“If you were to say to me,” he told an interviewer, “the smell of the lilac was very strong this afternoon, I would see little droplets of lilac-coloured moisture floating through the air.”) To experience one sense in terms of another, to transpose smell onto the plane of vision, is a kind of embodied ekphrasis. Perhaps it adds to the mystery of the world to hear constant talk of a sense you don’t possess, just as refusing to travel might keep the allure of other landscapes intact.

Certainly, Murnane is interested in what part of consciousness—of sensation, of emotion—might be shareable and what part is irreducibly individual, a private territory. This is a concern that scales up in his work from the question of what one person might know of another to larger questions of collectivity, of those “imagined communities”—to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase—called nations. While a plainsman likes “to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain,” a nation of one, the plainsmen’s constant debates about art, ornament, architecture, and archive, their rivalries and sports, their concern with differentiating themselves from Outer Australia, betray an obsession with constructing and contesting collective fictions. “Australia” is the name of Murnane’s supreme fiction, the idea that his private landscapes might somehow correspond with those of his countrymen and women, or at least be glimpsed by them, without having to be translated into mere “taste or fashion,” where commonality is purchased at the price of standardization. “The Plains,” as much a prose poem as a novel, is this Australia’s interior, Murnane’s heartland, a realm of possibility, where “the invisible is only what is too brightly lit.”

_This essay was adapted from the introduction to a new edition of “The Plains,” by Gerald Murnane, out in April from Text Publishing. _

Ben Lerner is a MacArthur Fellow. His most recent book is “The Topeka School.”

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing

ABC Arts 

By Sarah L'Estrange for RN's The Book Show

Updated 8 Apr 2019, 1:50pm

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane says he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for about a decade. (ABC Arts: Zan Wimberley)

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AUDIO: Gerald Murnane's novel A Season on Earth republished in full (The Book Show)

RELATED STORY: Your guide to this year's best books by Australian women

When Gerald Murnane came into the ABC's Southbank centre for an interview and portrait session recently, he regaled photographer Zan Wimberley with a rendition of the Hungarian national anthem (he learned Hungarian late in life). He sang with gusto and a big grin. He certainly has a lot to be happy about.

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Since his first novel Tamarisk Row came out in 1974, Murnane has been known as a writers' writer — which is shorthand for saying the author's work is highly regarded in literary circles, but not broadly read by the public.

As the author of 16 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, Murnane is also known for not winning the Miles Franklin, arguably Australia's most prestigious literary prize.

However in 2018 several things happened that seemed to signal a shift: his 2017 novel Border Districts was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Best Fiction, and got a US release via Farrar, Straus and Giroux (alongside a collection of his short stories).

Then the New York Times touted Gerald Murnane as the next Nobel laureate for literature, describing him as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of". (The 2018 prize was subsequently cancelled, due to a sex scandal.)

This particular type of praise is not new for Murnane — he says that for the last 10 years he's been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel; it does provide satisfaction, however.

"The satisfaction comes just from being considered an Australian candidate, never mind the vague possibility that I might actually win it."

Certainly, the attention of international reporters has propelled him beyond his coterie of readers.

In 2019, Murnane has two books being published: his four-part novel A Season on Earth (through Text) which was written more than 40 years ago but never published in full; and a collection of poetry titled Green Shadows (through Giramondo).

Ironically, perhaps, he has also announced that he will no longer be writing for publication — only for himself.

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane says Goroke in western Victoria "fulfils the geometry" of his life. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)

Finding big success in a small place

The resurgence of Murnane's career seems to have coincided with his move to the tiny town of Goroke, in western Victoria.

He moved there from Melbourne in 2009, after the death of his wife of 43 years, to live with one of his sons.

Since being in Goroke, he's had eight books published. In 2017 an academic conference was held in his honour, at the local golf club.

Murnane finds it hard to explain the attraction of Goroke but says "my interest in the place is partly explained by the fact that it fulfils the geometry of my life".

"I don't expect anyone to understand."

Living in Goroke does seem to be an uncanny fulfillment of his literary preoccupation with landscape (most clearly seen in his lauded 1982 novel The Plains, which mythologises the people of the flat lands).

A novel's true ending finally revealed

Murnane turned 80 in February, and he was given a heartwarming birthday celebration by the "citizens of Goroke" (again, at the golf club).

The publication of A Season on Earth the same month was the "icing on the cake" for the writer, as he's waited 43 years to see the book published in its complete state.

PHOTO: A Season on Earth has been published in its entirety for the first time. (Supplied: Text Publishing)

It was first published in 1976 as A Lifetime on Clouds (through William Heinemann), but only the first half of the manuscript was published, as his editor at the time felt it was too long to publish in full.

Murnane was not happy with this decision, nor with how it was described as a comic romp.

"Now that the four parts are published it looks anything but a comic romp," he says.

A Season on Earth is about Adrian Sherd, whom the reader meets as a teenager going to a Catholic school in 1950s Melbourne.

Reading the first part of the book, it's easy to see why it was considered bawdy — it opens with Sherd's fantasies about an orgy with Hollywood starlets.

The second half, which wasn't published at the time, is about Sherd's time in a seminary, and concludes with him leaving to embrace the philosophies of poets.

Murnane did try to shorten the book without changing the four-part structure, but in the end he had to admit he was wasting his time.

"The experience of running around in circles trying to cope with the publisher's demands — and other problems at the time — slowed me down by a couple of years."

His next book (The Plains) didn't come out for another six years.

"That's a long time without anything happening," Murnane concedes.

With the publication of A Season on Earth, the book is now as Murnane had imagined it, and he says it will satisfy "some puzzlement that people felt about A Lifetime on Clouds."

"People have often said to me 'A Lifetime on Clouds doesn't seem quite the same as some of your other works, not quite so substantial.' My answer to that would have been 'No, because it's half a book — and now the whole book can be understood and comprehended.'"

He says, "Michael Heyward's (director of Text Publishing) decision to publish was a great for relief to me".

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane is no longer writing for publication, but for his archives. (Supplied: Ben Denham/Giramondo Publishing)

Still writing — but only for himself

Murnane says that Border Districts is his final novel.

"When I did write it, I felt there was nothing more to write about," he says.

"For me it had the quality of someone's last fictional statement."

This doesn't mean the author has stopped writing completely, however.

"I'm always writing," he says, explaining that it provides relief for the "unbearable build-up of imagery and feeling" that he experiences.

The author has also taken up playing the fiddle, after letting it slide for a few years, and he plays golf.

Between these activities, he says, "I'm just about able to express all that I feel needs to be expressed".

And then there are his archives. Since writing his first novel, Murnane has meticulously documented his life and writing in filing cabinets which are now held in his Goroke home.

He says he is now writing just for his archives, which includes a 20,000-word autobiography that he doesn't want published in his lifetime.

"One day I will probably be remembered for the contents of my archives, even when I'm forgotten as the author of some of my books," says Murnane.

"There's a lot in those archives that will change people's view of things. I'll just say, there's a few surprises."

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, books-literature, author, fiction, poetry, awards-and-prizes, goroke-3412, australia

First posted 5 Apr 2019, 5:38am