Media images of Australia/Asia
My guide to the island of Rodrigues, a little-known adjunct of Mauritius, where part of my novel The Rose Crossing (1994) is set, was François Leguat, a Huguenot who was part of a short-lived settlement there in 1691–93, the place’s first human habitation, of any kind, apparently. His detailed account of the island, Voyages et avantures de François Leguat, et de ses Compagnons, en deux Isles désertes des Indes Orientales, published in London in 1708, was widely read in its day as the chief authority on Rodrigues. Closer to our time, the book became the subject of critical study by a young American academic keen to make his name. Geoffroy Atkinson’s work on extraordinary voyages in French literature was published in 1920 and 1922. The scholarly world seemingly concurred with Atkinson’s conclusion that the account ‘which had hitherto been believed to have been founded on a real voyage … is purely an imaginary novel’, allegedly written in a London armchair, not even by Leguat but by one Maximilien Misson. Leguat and his information about Rodrigues were discredited for half a century. It is only since the publication in 1979 of The Vindication of François Leguat by Mauritian historian Alfred North-Coombes that Leguat’s account of the island of Rodrigues has again been reclassified as fact not fiction.
Going and seeing a place with your own eyes, as Leguat had so arduously done, doesn’t necessarily convince people that what you say is true. If there is no disposition to believe you, or inadequate corroborating evidence, fact can readily be discounted as fiction. By the same token, the convincing lie, the one that works carefully on what people expect or like to hear, can be accepted as truth.
When Mauritians heard that I was including their island in a book on the basis of a brief visit, they were alarmed. They insisted I supplement my own random impressions with information obtained from meetings with government ministers. I didn’t have time. At last they simply asked that I ‘write something positive’ – something to attract visitors, investment and international friends to the island. ‘Write something positive’: you are conscious everywhere of the same wish. Something that serves the interests of those you are talking to, as representatives of their group, community or state. It is a natural wish – no one likes to be bad-mouthed – even as it identifies writing with propaganda or advertising copy. You are seldom encouraged to ‘write something truthful’, unless by the disenfranchised who want a voice for their cause, and almost never to ‘write something untruthful’. Yet how often really can readers tell the difference?
Write fantasy. Fiction as a kind of licensed lie, pretending less, may reveal more. It seems to have a capacity to cause greater offence than error or misrepresentation in factual reporting. We should remember that the television series Embassy and the film Turtle Beach, about which there has been so much fuss from Malaysia, are blatantly screen dramas. As with Australia’s libel laws when applied to works of the imagination, the voodoo fear of images exceeds concern about fact.
If you write for television, you are told that there are only ten plots. In order to fit the conventions of the form, the mass of characters, themes and narrative elements must be boiled down to one of the known structures. Reading Western newspaper reports from Asian countries, you could be forgiven for thinking there were far less than ten stories. In the case of China, there are three. There is the free-wheeling capitalist road story, prevailing in stories of the Shenzhen stock exchange and Shanghai real estate. There is the oriental communist despotism story, which covers restriction of human rights, arbitrary detentions, forced abortions, as well as lighter matters such as Peking’s No Flies Bid for the 2000 Olympic Games. Thirdly, there is the freak story – the record-breaking athletes, or the report of green prawn shell use as human skin substitute in cosmetic surgery.
An experienced correspondent will know which of the categories a possible story falls into, and which of the current categories is the go. If a story mixes the categories, the desk editor will generally sort it out, to achieve a result which clearly reads China as up, down or sideways. There’s not much room for complication and confusion. Editors know how the China card plays among others in the deck. They know the larger stories the community is telling itself about China, which are not easily challenged.
The media in China, and in other countries where the media are less than free, are just as responsive to the preconceptions and wishes of their audiences as in Australia. Media that work explicitly in the service of the state also depend for their effectiveness on interacting with the larger stories that people are telling about their place in the world. Nor are the contrasting systems of information management as independent of each other as talk of free or controlled media cultures might suggest. The Western journalist in China, for instance, will supplement personal impressions and sources with official press reports (appropriately reinterpreted), the official/unofficial Hong Kong press, and the swirl of palace gossip – leaks, rumours, straws in the wind – that is part of a more subtly orchestrated process of opinion-forming. The journalist’s story, like the diplomat’s cable, is then dropped into a moving current back home.
The domestic political agenda is a variable that mediates the reception of foreign stories. In the case of stories from Asian countries, the Scylla and Charybdis of fear of immigration and anxiety about relative trade competitiveness regularly exert their influence. For China, the good/bad switch is flicked off and on in ways that can link with the Immigration Department’s headaches in dealing with refugees and boatpeople.
The Chinese who wish to come here are in turn lured by conceptions of Australia prompted by information in the Chinese media, including our own press releases, as part of our cultural diplomacy, that promote Australia as a peaceful, prosperous, democratic, free and multicultural land that is developing rapidly. Such positive views are, of course, set against a good deal of negative propaganda, including pieces from the Chinese press in Australia that document hardship, homesickness and discrimination. The moral according to the Chinese press is that, in the end, you’ll return gratefully to the bosom of the motherland. That’s the moral – which those reading it apply to everyone but themselves.
The understanding of Australia in varying Asian communities is built up through a mixed application of logic, fantasy and extrapolation from what is already known. One small example nicely illustrates the vagaries of the process. An article in the Japanese English-language press headlined, ‘Passion for equality keeps Australia’s global profile low,’ adds the subtitle: ‘“Tall puppy” syndrome makes heroes of underdogs.’ The author has heard of hot dogs and top dogs, and, by extension, the Australian sympathy for the underdog. A typo or mishearing takes the analogy, with impeccable plausibility, a stage further to invent the ‘tall puppy’. It could just catch on.
In constructing an image of Australia, whatever is available will be used. We, as Australians, have little control over the process, and not much idea of the ingredients to hand in any particular Asian community, but we must live with the consequences. The need to ‘improve’ Australia’s image in Asia by providing more and better information is regularly indentified in government reports and other documents, yet implementation is fuzzy, partly for want of understanding of the mental environments in which the changing images are to grow.
By contrast with mainland China, Taiwan has been a minimal target for Australian government cultural diplomacy over recent decades. But there are longstanding unofficial links between Australia and Taiwan, and substantial trade. I was fascinated, therefore, on a recent visit to Taiwan to see what kind of image of Australia exists, where there has been almost no official effort to shape one, except for the purposes of tourism. (The Gold Coast rings bells.) Then I discovered Green Oil. It is an extremely popular Taiwanese product that, in the tradition of tiger balm, goanna salve and snake oil, claims to cure ‘headaches, nose complaints, cuts, burns, bites, abrasions, muscular pain, stomach ache, and seasickness’. It is advertised widely, on billboards, on radio and television. People associate it with Australia, which I understood when I heard its advertising jingle (in English):
Kookaburra sits in an old gum tree,
Merry merry king of the bush is he,
Laugh, kookaburra! Laugh, kookaburra!
Gay your life must be!
The healing properties of Green Oil symbolise an unspoken identification of Australia as a healing place, a clean zone of purity and nature. White beaches and fresh food imports are aspects of this image. A Taipei taxi driver assured me there is so little dirt in Australia that you need wash only every third day. Green Oil, the packet tells us, contains 15 mg of eucalyptus oil – probably from Thailand, since eucalyptus oil plants are virtually a thing of the past in Australia.
Green Oil. It is a wonderful image for Australia to have in Taiwan. I have no idea how it has come about. We couldn’t have manufactured it if we’d tried. It provides a fine foundation to work with, and suggests a lesson. In nurturing its image in Asia, Australia must be aware of what already exists over there, which will differ significantly from place to place, yet must be worked with, because it won’t be quickly changed. Every society has its Green Oil, in the sense of a ground of awareness – film and lubricant – which leaves its mark, sometimes its stain, on stories and images coming from elsewhere. It is an environment, or medium, a bricolage of economics, politics, history, personal and imaginary associations, into which any new conception of a foreign country will be immersed. In considering how information from an Asian country is mediated for Australia, or how our own images will be seen by a neighbouring community, it is worth stopping to ask: what is the Green Oil this time?
1993