What have we got to show?
One of the things that appeals to me about Chinese culture is the notion of the ‘scholar-official’, in exile from the court, who goes on chastising the emperor even when the emperor is not listening.
The brows of Australian officials furrow over Australia’s image abroad, particularly in Asia. Australia already had an image problem in 1688, when William Dampier arrived at the north-west coast of what was then New Holland and recorded in his journal that the natives were unfriendly and the place unfit for civilised life. But that apparently negative image has never stopped Australia from attracting people, whether they have come here as invaders or investors, dreamers, migrants or tourists.
A rough way to understand this paradox is to split Australia into ‘land’ and ‘people’, as the word ‘Australia’ refers both to a physical place and a nationality. It doesn’t matter that, in fact, the land, Aboriginal Australians and everyone else are inextricably linked, for better or worse, sharing histories, the present, and putative futures. The split between land and people exists as a construction in many minds. When Australians overseas are homesick, for example, they often speak of missing ‘the light’, ‘the sky’, ‘the smell of gumleaves’, in order to express what is perhaps a more complex, and more cultural, feeling of absence.
Discussion of Australian culture for consumption overseas often, in my experience, works with narrow or wishful notions that, in a similar way, split culture from its connections with the other parts of Australian life, whether physical, economic or political. In this way the possibilities of cultural relationship are diminished. Culture becomes something of a vanity exercise, the packaging and not the package. A broader conception is needed, one that might see culture as the expression of all a community’s values and that might encompass all kinds of imaginative interactions between people, both individually and collectively. The discussion has opened up in the 1990s, and there is a new awareness – or sense of urgency – about Australia’s cultural relations with other societies. Perhaps that also means an opportunity to do things differently.
The realisation that Australia is able to relate more closely to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region has brought the question of culture to the foreground in a new definition, referring not to painters and pianists, but – as in the now-common phrase, ‘cultural sensitivities’ – to a broad range of values, customs, etiquette, lifestyle, including core cultural concepts, such as human rights, environmental issues, religion and so forth. Australia’s preparations to become a republic, along with Australian-style multiculturalism, as part of a determination to re-make our history, are altering the domestic consensus about what Australia is. Mabo, symbolising ‘reconciliation’ between Aboriginal and other Australians, incorporates a process of cultural relationship that cannot be separated from political, economic and broadly human means and consequences. It is part of what Australia wants to show the world in the 1990s. Indeed, showing the world is an integral part of achieving the domestic vision: Asia, the Republic, Mabo – all have a dimension that engages with perceptions from outside. What have we got to show, culturally speaking, that other people might be interested in? The creations of our society include the major intellectual processes in the life of our society, which should not be cordoned off because they have also become items on the government’s agenda. These value-laden mappings of an emergent society are shapes which it will take a whole host of more specific activities to fill out. Australian Studies, presence in print and electronic media networks, long-term interaction between arts communities, arts export, tourism, shared environmental and heritage practice, and people-to-people exchanges of all kinds are only some of the means at our disposal. There is much at stake, then, in cultural relations.
Prime Minister Paul Keating has referred to the overseas dimensions of culture, noting that the arts industry is an export earner ‘in Asia and elsewhere’ and that Australia ‘needs to be a country which releases self-expression and which can sell to the world an unmistakeable identity’. These two strands combine in initiatives foreshadowed in Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy (1994) ‘to develop an international cultural marketing structure that encourages cultural exchange’ and ‘to develop an international marketing strategy to increase export potential’. One aim is to support Australia’s independent standing as an originator of culture; another aim looks outward ‘to improve understanding and recognition of Australia as a natural and long-term partner in regional development’. Just how these ideas will translate into practice remains to be seen.
In addressing itself to issues of Australian culture overseas, Creative Nation has tried to take into account the different Australian government agencies (quite apart from the array of market forces) with rival interests in this area. The Australia Council is aiming at a more export-orientated international strategy. The Department of Employment, Education and Training is a player, through its support for Australian Studies abroad and through the International Development Program of Australian Universities and Colleges. The Department of Communications and the Arts has plans for its own off-shore activities to assist cultural export. Obliquely, the Department of Immigration too plays a significant role in projecting Australia’s image to the wider world.
Crucially, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (dfat), through the Cultural Relations and Overseas Information Branches, and through bilateral councils such as the Australia–China Council, has had a longstanding interest in Australia’s cultural presence in Asia. In my experience, however, there is a public expectation of the role of Foreign Affairs that differs markedly from the department’s own definition of its role; an outside perception, in arts communities and even their administrative organisations, such as the Australia Council and the Australian Film Commission, that dfat should or could play a larger role than it does. The reality is that dfat’s allocation of staff and resources to cultural relations is under siege. The Australia–China Council’s budget, for example, has dropped by about half in real terms since its founding in 1978–79, while the council has broadened its area of activity to include Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as the People’s Republic of China, where things are much costlier than they were fifteen years ago.
Perhaps out of desire to delimit his department’s cultural objectives, in contradistinction to those of contending agencies, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Senator Gareth Evans, has sought to describe quite specifically the domain of what he calls ‘public diplomacy’. Senator Evans emphasises that ‘public diplomacy’ is ‘no longer … an optional extra in our foreign and trade policies’. A major task of ‘public diplomacy’ is to build ‘a more accurate and rounded image of Australia than currently exists’, especially in Asia.
This can seem like a very general undertaking, encouraging Australians and Asians ‘to devote more attention to Australia and Asia “in each others’ minds”’ – to quote Ross Garnaut – but there are exclusions, according to Senator Evans. ‘It is important to stress that our cultural relations are not designed to assist the Australian cultural community, or to directly involve the government in establishing links between cultural disciplines in Australia and overseas.’ ‘“Public diplomacy” is not about tethering community groups to the government’s foreign policy agenda. It is not even about co-ordinating government and non-government activity.’ The sentiments are echoed in Creative Nation: ‘the principal reason for sending arts overseas under dfat’s auspices is to enhance our national image at critical times or to support particular goals’. Notice too that ‘dialogue’ and ‘exchange’ have been overtaken by a one-way process of projecting outward.
These demarcation lines must puzzle an outsider. There is an emphasis on ‘image’ rather than ‘substance’, that perhaps risks hiving off too much. The then head of dfat’s Cultural Relations Branch, David Ambrose, clarified this point in a speech in 1993, when he said that ‘Australia’s successful long-term economic engagement in Asia has to be underwritten by a widespread appreciation among our neighbours of the socio-cultural realities [my emphasis] of contemporary, multicultural Australia, not frustrated by incomplete, partial, or inaccurate stereotypes not representative of us at all.’ Ambrose gives to ‘image’ such a generous interpretation that it almost becomes ‘substance’. So perhaps Cultural Relations can look beyond massaged images after all.
I would start any discussion of Australia’s cultural relations in the region with two empirical observations. First, wherever you go, you find almost no Australian-published books – in libraries in Taiwan, in bookshops in Hong Kong, even in Australian Studies Centres in China. (The observation is confirmed by the Australia Council Literature Board’s 1994 report on International Publishing and Promotions.) Second, wherever you go, you must eventually expect the White Australia policy to be raised. (It was current until very recently, for example, in the entries on Australia in Taiwanese school texts.) I sympathise with Senator Evans who must have had White Australia trotted out to him often, and tendentiously.
I suspect there is a connection between these two empirical observations. The absence of books and other publications is an absence of substance. It is the absence in other societies of access to our society’s information about itself, our ideas and imagination, which not only stimulate the purchase of more books, and translation rights and film rights and all those industry benefits, but are also the basis for study and research, and travel, and understanding. The absence of books is a prime instance of the absence of ‘presence’, from which many of the image and other problems arise. Fortunately the situation is improving, slowly.
There is an opportunity at present, as well as a necessity, to reconceive Australia’s overseas cultural relations in the national interest. Although Senator Evans describes his department’s ‘public diplomacy’ as not about co-ordinating government and non-government activity, it is hard to see where, other than Foreign Affairs, with its international perspectives and infrastructure network, such guidance could be offered. Or should other agencies re-invent the wheel, because there is no way to quantify what Foreign Affairs might, or might not, have achieved in the past? For a relatively small country such as Australia to achieve an identity in the world, co-ordination of and communication between all parties that share the same broad interests is surely desirable, if limited resources are to be managed to achieve maximum results. Co-ordination and communication only follow where there is real commitment and political will. That will only come when cultural relations are understood as not a matter of image enhancement but an integral part of articulating what Australia is. Culture is substance: the total package. That will be evident as cultural relations activities draw on the energies of their constituent communities – sponsors, target audiences, host societies, artists and writers – enabling the interconnected workings of the medium, the message and the market to be better understood and appreciated.
Hong Kong, as the exchange hub of the Chinas and of East Asia, is as good a place as any to start. From Hong Kong, dynamic, ever-changing, endlessly responsive, it might be possible to look back and out at Australia’s presence, at what we have to show for our efforts in cultural trading so far, as a basis from which to suggest strategies that, using all possible resources, will make us as present in the regional networks as anyone else.
1994