Australian Anxiety Research Articles

The Kerguelen Archipelago and Australian Security Anxieties

The Kerguelen archipelago in the Southern Indian Ocean was never militarised and never posed a realistic naval threat to Australia or the British Empire during the twentieth century. However, there were two episodes, once in the Federation Era and during the Second World War, when there was debate within Australia as to whether this outlying French possession posed a threat to Australian security. By examining these periods of Australian anxiety surrounding the Kerguelen archipelago, it becomes possible to see that these concerns were more reflective of Australian strategic angst than any tangible threat posed by a remote, unpopulated, nominal French possession. This episode is an example of a broader Australian angst in the early and mid‐twentieth century that remote colonial possessions could be weaponised to isolate Australia and threaten it. The Kerguelens represent one of the most peculiar examples of the manifestations of Australian strategic insecurity.

Global Forces and Local Responses: The Case of the Mongolia ‘Riot’, Sydney, 1908

Australian press reports of a ‘riot’ between two groups of Indian lascars at Circular Quay and subsequent demonstration through Sydney streets in 1908 illustrate the collision between the forces of globalisation – in the form of the transoceanic passage of South Asian seafarers – and those of nation formation and white racial identity, in the response of the local authorities. Australian anxieties over the transgression of space by mobile South Asian labour were confirmed. The incident was a reminder that the ambition of establishing a White Australia behind secure borders had not been achieved successfully.

‘Swamped by Muslims’ and facing an ‘African gang’ problem: racialized and religious media representations in Australia

ABSTRACT Despite the implementation of multicultural policies since the 1970s, anxiety over cultural and religious ‘others’ continue to challenge Australia’s diversifying national identity. Problematic media representations of racial and religious minorities persist in Australia and continue to shape public perceptions and political discourses on issues of migration and intercultural relations. This paper examines how Muslims and Africans are contemporary scapegoats of Australian anxieties. These fears continue to be present in racialized rhetoric and attacks on Chinese Australians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying discourse analysis on two recent case studies as illustrative examples – the 2018 Bourke Street attack and the so-called ‘African gangs’ – this paper argues that despite substantial research and critique, mainstream media continue to rely on familiar and problematic tropes for framing racial and religious minorities that dehumanize them based on essentialized characteristics of crime, violence and anti-social behaviour. These characteristics tend to be exploited for political gain, with Muslims and Africans portrayed as a disruption to social cohesion and national security. A critique of the role of media and political discourses is presented, as they remain critical instruments in the pursuit of a new ethics of openness, respect and mutual understanding, which are fundamental to living well with difference.

'I know you shouldn't compare to other people, but I can't do anything most people can': Age, family and occupation categorisations in men's reasoning about their anxiety in an online discussion forum.

Despite its prevalence, men's anxiety is arguably under-researched and poorly understood. The present study explores the reasoning provided by male posters to an online discussion forum about the source of their anxiety. Posts were collected from an Australian anxiety online discussion forum. This study utilises discursive psychology, informed by principles of membership categorisation analysis, to describe how age, occupation and family-related identities can be invoked within common sense reasoning about the source of male anxiety. References to various identity categories were routinely employed by male forum posters in their representations of themselves, in order to describe the source of their anxiety in terms of a contrast between how they are, and how they should be. In examining accounts of anxiety and responses to those accounts, we can trace cultural knowledge about issues regarding men, masculinity and anxiety that those accounts make relevant. Findings illustrate how men's descriptions of the source of their anxiety should be understood as culturally bound and related to expectations and obligations associated with their social context and category memberships. By enhancing understandings of how men describe the source of their anxiety, this study offers insight into improving the identification and engagement of men experiencing anxiety in health services.

“An Isolated Outpost of Western Civilization”

On his Australian lecture tour of 1950 Russell talked more about the global dimensions of the Cold War than about the politics, culture and society of the country he was visiting for the first and only time. As a keen but non-specialist observer, however, he readily offered his impressions and opinions of Australia and its place in the world. Like the majority of his hosts, Russell regarded this British Commonwealth state and American ally as an integral if distant part of the “West” and assumed that its comparatively small and overwhelmingly white population could continue to exist largely apart from the region within which it was situated. In so doing, he emphasized Australia’s geopolitical vulnerabilities and demographic challenges, sometimes also displaying a Cold War mindset that remained decidedly anti-Soviet at the mid-century mark. Russell’s reflections on these matters, and the linkages he drew between them, spoke to (rather than questioned) deep-seated Australian anxieties and prejudices about national security, race and immigration.

“Neither Here nor There”: Landscape, National Identity and the Rise of Australian Slow TV

ABSTRACT Slow television has emerged as an intriguing cultural phenomenon over the last decade, but it has not yet been considered in an Australian context. Many slow TV productions around the world draw on elements of national identity and history to engage viewers. In this article, we examine the advent of slow TV in Australia, focusing on two recent slow TV programs that garnered a large Australian viewership—The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey (2018) and The Indian Pacific: Australia’s Longest Train Journey (2018)—to examine the ways in which slow TV’s conventions have been adopted and reworked to address distinctively Australian anxieties about landscape, isolation and ownership. We interrogate the ways in which Australian slow TV invokes key iconographies and mythologies of Australia’s pre- and postcolonial history and landscape to present a revisionist Australian history in which the Australian landscape and its enduring anxieties are rendered tame and resolvable. Finally, we argue that while Australian slow TV highlights frequently overlooked elements of Australia’s multicultural history, it also coopts and reinforces enduring narratives about Australia’s sublime but “potentially devouring and overwhelming” landscape that have been inscribed in the cultural imagination since colonisation.

“An Isolated Outpost of Western Civilization”: Russell’s Appraisal of Mid-Century Australia

On his Australian lecture tour of 1950 Russell talked more about the global dimensions of the Cold War than about the politics, culture and society of the country he was visiting for the first and only time. As a keen but non-specialist observer, however, he readily offered his impressions and opinions of Australia and its place in the world. Like the majority of his hosts, Russell regarded this British Commonwealth state and American ally as an integral if distant part of the “West” and assumed that its comparatively small and overwhelmingly white population could continue to exist largely apart from the region within which it was situated. In so doing, he emphasized Australia’s geopolitical vulnerabilities and demographic challenges, sometimes also displaying a Cold War mindset that remained decidedly anti-Soviet at the mid-century mark. Russell’s reflections on these matters, and the linkages he drew between them, spoke to (rather than questioned) deep-seated Australian anxieties and prejudices about national security, race and immigration.

Performance and the politics of distance: Exploring the psychology of identity and culture in politicized Australian performance landscapes

Abstract The politics of distance in Australia has shaped our history and informed the psychological landscape of Australian cultural identity since settlement and colonization. Distance is a subjective space for Australians, and as a result the national subjectivity can cause significant problems for immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees and exiles from 'other' homelands who experience a disjunction of place and culture, and seek sanctuary. Drawing on current post-colonial Australian anxieties, this research investigates Australian concepts of distance alongside what has become a politically contested Australian racial and cultural agenda. Analysing these issues through the lens of Australian Gothic drama, the article also integrates examples from Hassall's performance research, Salvation (2013), to support the discussion.

A Subject Deferred: Exposure and Erasure in an Ethnographic Archive

ABSTRACTFrom as early as the late 1970s anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have been both analysts of and advocates for institutional worlds of Aboriginal art and media. Keenly aware of the Faustian character ascribed to the Indigenous embrace of media, and attuned to the ironies of its governmental subvention, such work of necessity took shape in dialogue with specific institutional possibilities and Australian anxieties. This paper revisits the historical coordinates of Indigenous media research in the age of social media, exploring the relationship between institutional representation and recognition, and the avatars and memes afforded by contemporary social media platforms. Drawing from an ethnographic archive of online media, the essay seeks to better understand the dissimulation and self‐erasure these artefacts entail.

‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.

Losing the Blanket, Building a Fence: Australian Anxiety and the End of Military Colonialism in Malaysia

ABSTRACTFrom 1955 to 1988, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) maintained a large airbase in Northern Malaysia. For the first 15 years of its existence, RAAF Butterworth had a modest and incomplete perimeter fence. With the end of British military colonialism in Malaysia and Singapore following the implementation of the ‘East of Suez’ policy, the Australians became preoccupied with their physical security and the role of the perimeter fence. By exploring the adoption of practices of exclusion via physical barriers in the wake of British withdrawal, this paper argues that the changing psychological outlook of Australian military officials reflected broader Australian anxieties about their own sense of ‘Britishness’ and the nation’s place in a decolonising Asia. As the Australians lost their British ‘blanket’ they built a fence.

“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Australian Perceptions of Japan-as-Child

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the important symbolic role of photographs of children in the context of developing diplomatic and trade relationships between Australia and Japan between the 1880s and 1920s. A fascinating series of studio, commercial and tourist photographs are examined, including commemorative postcards marking the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and hand-coloured lantern slides produced commercially in Japan. Building on political and military studies of Australian–Japanese relations, it explores the ways that Australian–Japanese relationships were mediated and reproduced through photography practices operating across private and public domains. In these photographs, children feature simultaneously as the face of Japan and an interface for political and cultural interpretation. As photographs of children helped to reinforce conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise, a budding military power and an industrial threat, they offer insight into Australian anxieties about what modernity meant for the two Asia-Pacific nations.

Asia. The fifth column in World War II: Suspected subversives in the Pacific War and Australia By Robert Loeffel Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 220. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Asia. The fifth column in World War II: Suspected subversives in the Pacific War and Australia By Robert Loeffel Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 220. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 48 Issue 2

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction

Productive Anxieties: Lostness in The Arrival and Requiem for a Beast


 
 
 The classic Australian children’s story Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) opens with a quintessential scene of lostness:
 Little Dot had lost her way in the bush. She knew it, and was very frightened [...] she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. [...] The thought of being lost and alone in the wild bush at night took her breath away with fear, and made her tired little legs tremble under her.
 (Pedley 1982, p. 1)
 In part, Dot’s anxiety derives from her knowledge of children lost before her. She remembers the loss and death of a neighbour child whose mother ‘never saw that little boy again, although he had been found’ (Pedley, p. 2). The allusion to lostness as a state especially threatening to children informs Dot’s fear, so that Dot and the Kangaroo both draws on and extends what has been influentially described as a particularly ‘Australian anxiety’ (Pierce 1999). The same landscape which gave rise to mythologies of frontier-like hardship and survival posed real threats to anyone who might become lost in it. Accordingly, the capacity of the Australian environment to consume people infused the cultural productions of a relatively young and sparsely populated colonial society.
 
 

Lao Australians on Sydney's Urban Fringe: A Non-Cosmopolitan Transnationalism?

The research project on Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian Australians that informs this essay was designed in part in reaction to the marked stereotyping that has beset these communities from the early days of their settlement in Australia.1 Representations of the Vietnamese community as insular, secretive, and anti-assimilationist continue to this day, and reflect traditional Australian anxieties around Asian migration. The media-fueled moral panic around the Vietnamese ghetto in Australia has gained support from the fact that, from the early days of settlement until now, Vietnamese Australians show the highest levels of residential concentration of any ethnic minority community in the nation.2 Cambodian, and to a lesser extent Lao, Australians also live in relatively concentrated communities in the same suburban areas as do their Vietnamese Australian counterparts, and have been tarred with the same brush.

Not quite Mad Max: Brian Trenchard-Smith's Dead End Drive-In

This article suggests that Dead End Drive-In (1986), Brian Trenchard-Smith's little-known Ozploitation film, deserves reconsideration from Australasian film scholars because it offers a valuable contribution to discussions about Australian masculinity, car culture, phobic narratives and the White Australia Policy. It is argued that the drive-in as detention centre foreshadows later Australian anxieties about immigration and border protection. Clearly a ‘phobic narrative’ full of ‘white panic’ (Morris, 1989, 1998), it exhibits many of the anxieties about Australians and ‘auto-immobility’ that Catherine Simpson (2006) discusses, and fits neatly into Tranter's (2003) discussion of cars and governance and Bode's (2006a) arguments about whiteness and Australian masculinity in crisis.

The Mythical Australian: Barry Humphries, Gough Whitlam and "New Nationalism"

Gough Whitlam's decision in 1974 to appear in Barry Humphries's film about a larrikin abroad, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, marks a potent moment in Australia's post-imperial history — a moment when the politics of Australian theatre and the theatre of Australian politics directly coincided. In their different spheres, Humphries and Whitlam dramatised the waning British connection felt by Australians. Whitlam's own version of “new nationalism” was brash and confident enough to embrace the eccentricities and vulgarities of Humphries's satire. Yet Whitlam's “new nationalism”, like Humphries's satire, was highly ambivalent. Humphries's first film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was a direct product of the new nationalist enthusiasm that had brought Whitlam to power. Although it was savaged by the critics, the film was a box-office success. Intellectuals such as Patrick White, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Dutton lavished praise on Humphries and his satirical portrayal of Australian anxieties about culture and national identity. Humphries portrayed the underlying dilemma that Whitlam faced in refashioning the image of modern Australia: how to throw off the symbols of colonialism and find meaningful symbols to replace them. In the process, both the politician and the humourist rediscovered a particular and enduring affection for the mother country.

The country of lost children: an Australian anxiety

Part I. In the Nineteenth Century: Discovering the Lost Child: 1. The lost child introduced: Henry Kingsley's The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn 2. 'Come let us sing of this fair child heroic': Jane Duff and her brothers 3. Alfred Boulter A Monument at Daylesford 4. Marcus Clarke's Lost Children 5. The case of Clara Crosbie 6. Frederick McCubbin's Images of the Lost Child 7. Fairytales of the 1890s 8. The bush balladists' turn 9. Mrs Praed and the punishment of Mrs Tregaskiss 10. Henry Lawson and 'The Babies in the Bush' 11. Joseph Furphy's 'Perfect Young-Australian' Part II. In the Twentieth Century: The Child Abandoned: 1. In the theatre 2. In fiction 3. Book into film 4. True stories Works consulted Index.

Review of *The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety*, by Peter Pierce

This is a book I was eager to read. I have long been an admirer of Peter Pierce's writing, and the subject of the study—the trope of the lost child within Australian narrative—is a rich and fascinating one. Also, I will admit to retaining enormous sympathy with what is still a relatively slim but valuable Australian literature which attempts to investigate and explain broad cultural patterns through the close analysis of key textual forms and their cultural contexts. For much of its length, this is such a project.