Australia: In Search of Itself

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 decade 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.