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Australians are often told that they should know more about Asia. They are urged to learn Asian languages, study Asian cultures, and adapt to Asian business practices. Yet it is often those doing the admonishing who know the least, and those they exhort to 'come to terms' with Asian countries who know the most. Much interaction takes place between Australians and Asians at an individual, not national, level. Throughout Australian history, more Australians have been attracted to Asia thanis usually recognised. Some sought to understand Asian traditions, some looked for new lifestyles, while others found stimulating sources of modernity. Mant projected their impressions through the arts. but t...
This study explores how Australia appears to people from to Asian societies with the most significant interactions with Australia. The surveys concentrate on people whose views are on the public record in various media, who significantly reflect opinion in their society, and who can therefore be taken to be both influential and to some extent representative. The results of this comprehensive survey, which suggest Australia has an image problem in the region, are detailed.
In Australia's rush to commemorate all things Anzac, have we lost our ability to look beyond war as the central pillar of Australia's history and identity? The passionate historians of the Honest History group argue that while war has been important to Australia - mostly for its impact on our citizens and our ideas of nationhood - we must question the stories we tell ourselves about our history. We must separate myth from reality - and to do that we need to reassess the historical evidence surrounding military myths. In this lively collection, renowned writers including Paul Daley, Mark McKenna, Peter Stanley, Carolyn Holbrook, Mark Dapin, Carmen Lawrence, Stuart Macintyre, Frank Bongiorno and Larissa Behrendt explore not only the militarisation of our history but the alternative narratives swamped under the khaki-wash - Indigenous history, frontier conflict, multiculturalism, the myth of egalitarianism, economics and the environment.
In many respects, Australia behaves as if it were still a colonial dependency. Our policies on foreign affairs, trade, human rights, and the environment seem to be uncritically allied to those of the United States. Alison Broinowski argues that Australia's development as an independent nation has stalled, and warns that behaving like the schoolyard bully's errand-boy has earned Australia a reputation for being ready to 'kiss up and kick down'. Broinowski shows how being so closely identified with current American policies harms Australia's interests, and how the United States alliance actually endangers Australia more than it protects us. But she remains optimistic that Australia may at last be turning in the direction of genuine independence. Allied and Addicted challenges many of the assumptions of conservative policy-makers, and highlights the need for informed choices in the debate about Australia's place in the world--Publisher.
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On 11 March 2011, a force-9 earthquake jolted the seabed 66 kilometres due east of Japan. Within 20 minutes, a black tsunami wave 14 metres high rolled in from above the epicentre. While struggling with the unfolding destruction, Japan had to cope with a third calamity -- the malfunctioning of a nuclear-power complex near the town of Fukushima.
‘Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.’ Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia’s commitment to fighting in Britain’s wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, a mythology about our colonial soldiers had already been crafted, and a dangerous precedent established. This is Henry Reynolds at his searing best, as he shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars – without ever counting the cost.
The Australian media has played a key role in debates over Australia's East Timor policy since the mid-1970s. - Introduced by the ABC's multi-awarding-winning reporter Chris Masters, this is the first book to analyse the interaction of newspapers, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and the public during this turbulent period. - It provides a vivid insight into the key role of the media in this controversial issue. - Australia's foreign affairs policymakers decided to adopt a 'pragmatic' rather than 'principled' approach to East Timor - That policy unravelled over the subsequent quarter century, under constant pressure from public opinion, the media, and international disapproval. - In the long run, argues Rodney Tiffen, Australia's stance was neither pragmatic nor principled.
"As part of the Asian Accounts of Australia project, this volume addresses a much-neglected issue and presents the views of pre-eminent scholars on how Australia is perceived among Chinese and Japanese and what this means for our future. Can Australia make the most of its opportunities to be well regarded and influential in China and Japan or will we be dismissed as a derivative culture, ignorant about our region?"--Publisher's description.
This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.