The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian Story (review)

Voices, performances, novels, playscripts, poems, memoirs, re-enactments, all telling stories about past and present relations between Aboriginal people and Asians in Australia—these are at the core of Stephenson's The Outsiders Within. Oral histories are an integral part. Included are interviews the author conducted, the use of interviews others conducted, and the ever-present reality that the stories retold in the book could only be collected through listening, hearing, and sharing memories within and across communities.

And Stephenson presents the stories for a clear purpose: they join a growing body of studies and other cultural products that challenge, reconfigure, and even upend established orthodoxies about the boundaries that, in Australian life, have kept Indigenous, Asian, and European Australians in separate compartments. This is a book that relates the dark history of Australian racism and discriminatory practices. There are stories of children taken from parents, fathers deported or interned, and women sexually exploited. There are stories of the blinkered and insensitive administration of discriminatory legislation and of equally blinkered and insensitive attitudes and behaviors. And there is an emphasis on the continuity of these from the early days of the European presence through to 2006.

Yet white Australian discrimination is only the grim framework. The spirit of the book is the diverse and complex ways in which Indigenous and Asian Australians have survived within, defied, and confronted a white Australia seemingly determined to exclude them and to keep them apart. It is also a spirit that accommodates negative relations and perceptions between Indigenous and Asian Australians and that incorporates the traumas and tragedies of separation, denial, and discrimination.

The book is structured around what the author describes as "four historical moments of heightened antipathy toward Australia's outsiders" (207). These four moments are the outlawing in 1906 of the Makassan trepang trade with northern Australia that had influenced the lives and lifestyles of the Yolgnu people for the preceding two centuries; the era around Australian federation in 1901 when there was a rush of legislation aimed to prevent Indigenous-Asian relations occupationally, privately, and socially; the irrational reactions to Japanese entry into World War II which imagined Indigenous Australians banding with an invading Japanese force; and the ongoing antipathy among some white Australians toward their Indigenous and Asian compatriots that gained particular expression through the rise to momentary popularity of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in the late 1990s.

Each of these "moments" is located within broader contexts. For example, the stories of internment and separation during World War II reside within the longer history of the relations established between Japanese pearlers and Aboriginal women and within the longer history of invasion literature. Pauline Hanson's sentiments are set within the revival of anti-Asian fear mongering of the late twentieth century.

The events, their contexts, and their meanings, however, take on new energy and meaning as Stephenson presents the ways in which Indigenous and Asian creative artists have converted their experiences and those of their families and communities into plays, multimedia presentations, novels, poems, and documentaries. She uses interviews with some of the artists. She recounts processes in which working closely with community members to share and collect their stories and traditions are central. She both subtly and overtly demonstrates how oral history meets history meets public history and is presented to different audiences.

Throughout, the message is strong and clear. The time for compartmentalized views of Indigenous, Asian, and European Australians should be past. From before European settlement, sharing across cultures and relations across cultural divides have persisted, and the descendants of those relations and traditions have—over the past couple of decades—explored their histories and ancestries in ways that evoke the oral storytelling traditions of their mixed cultural heritages. The journeys undertaken have been emotive, difficult, confronting, and energizing just as were the journeys of their predecessors, and the journeys can only be relayed through the sharing of stories. As...