Shades of Denial: Australian Responses to Foreign Possession and Dispossession

This essay proposes a new way of thinking about asylum and refugees by bringing the contemporary discourse of forced displacement into conversation with that of the transnational mobility of today’s financial elites. It does so with respect to the Australian context and the affective registers of xenophobia and antiracism routinely exploited in public debates not only on boat people and asylum, but also on immigration to Australia at large. Thus, the essay responds to calls in the fields of migration studies, critical theory, and economic geography for a closer examination of the socioeconomic inequalities produced by a neoliberalism fast transforming national economies and compelling, or enticing, people all over the world to leave their homelands. Since such inequalities are currently receiving keenest attention in the popular media, it is to these that this essay turns first, with the aim to cast light on the argumentative impasses and ethical dilemmas which the task of chronicling the extravagant lifestyles of super-rich migrants poses. For ways to resolve these, it then moves to literary fiction, notably the novels Birds of Passage (1983) by Brian Castro and The Ancestor Game (1992) by Alex Miller, exploring how they displace the popular narrative of Asian invasion by situating contemporary immigration from Asia to Australia in a wider historical context and returning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to tell the stories of wealthy Chinese families forcing their dependants to emigrate to Australia. The final section of the essay relates Miller and Castro’s appraisals of the grim legacy of these first engineers of forced migration from Asia to Australia to more recent literary protests by Geraldine Brooks, Raimond Gaita, Stephanie Johnson, Tom Keneally, and Kim Scott against the Australian nation-state’s denial of its obligation to grant asylum to refugees.

from Asia to Australia in a wider historical context and returning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to tell the stories of wealthy Chinese families forcing their dependants to emigrate to Australia. The final section of the essay relates Miller and Castro's appraisals of the grim legacy of these first engineers of forced migration from Asia to Australia to more recent literary protests by Geraldine Brooks, Raimond Gaita, Stephanie Johnson, Tom Keneally, and Kim Scott against the Australian nation-state's denial of its obligation to grant asylum to refugees.
They come to this country. They wanna buy something special. The first priority is view. So, water front with a view, with a nice house on it and preferably with a boat, a marina. You know, it's something money cannot buy in China. (Besser and Hichens 2015) This is how real estate agent Lulu Pallier from Sotheby's International Realty in Shanghai explains her mission in an interview for the ABC documentary The Great Wall of Money. Graciously, gently, she hammers home the special longings that bring Chinese multi-millionaires to Australia. They are quite simple, these longings. What Lulu's clients desire does not seem to be muchjust "something money cannot buy in China"; and this "something" can be put in quite simple terms too: "Water front with a view, with a nice house on it and preferably with a boat, a marina." The Great Wall of Money features almost all of this: a view, a waterfront property, and a nice house. The ultimate object of Lulu's clients' desire, howevera marina with a boatis shown only briefly and only from a distance.
There are shots of Lulu Pallier being taxied across Sydney Harbour, passing several trophy properties on Point Piper, and recounting how they came, first to the attention, then into the possession of Chinese buyers. Apart from this, the documentary steers clear of imagery more commonly deployed in an entirely different discourse, yet one also centred around foreigners seeking a home in Australia: the discourse of refugees trying to reach Australia via the Indian Ocean or the Timor and Arafura Seas. As Keneally (2016, 235) has pointed out, in the context of this discourse, the boat has proven the "most disturbing" and also the "most politically useful footage." Its graphic power has been exploited to excess and with the effect of inflaming popular fantasiesand fearsof hoards of foreigners crossing over from Asia to seek refuge in Australia. Images of boats overflowing with refugees have rendered this threat imaginable in concrete terms and caused asylum seekers to be routinely imaged en masse (Cox 2015, 3), that is, not as individuals, but as human cargo passively awaiting collection and handling by state authorities. Repeated reports of their punishment by way of detention at the end of their arduous voyage seal the otherwise contentious identification of interventions -21:8 refugees as illegal entrants. For Keneally, such punishment constitutes an irremediable injustice, only exacerbated by the fact that 80 per cent of the boatpeople processed in Australia since 2001 have eventually been identified as genuine refugees and granted asylum. As Keneally observes, by the time they were finally allowed to participate in Australian society, detention had broken most of them beyond repair (2016,(236)(237)(238).
In 2014, a few months after the implementation of Operation Sovereign Borders, 1 refugee boats stopped reaching Australian waters altogether. Still, the specter of foreign poverty invading and "contaminating" Australia continues to haunt public consciousnessso much so that, as Cox (2015, 3) notes, it has become practically impossible to imagine what Australia means without the issue of refugees. To be sure, the "meaning" of Australia as a place of asylum has been acquiring ever more sinister significance since the notorious riots at the Woomera detention camps starting in 2000 and the "Tampa" and "Children Overboard" affairs in 2001, in which the Howard Government refused to assist hundreds of shipwrecked refugees on the fabricated grounds that, in a ploy to obtain passage to Australia, a group of boatpeople had thrown children overboard. Its subsequent insistence on offshore detention and special measures to prevent visa applications by "boatpeople" 2 has consolidated Australia's reputation as practitioner of one of the harshest or, as Farrier and Tuitt (2013, 263) have put it, as one of the "most parsimonious" asylum policies in the western worlda plausible verdict, given that, between 2005 and 2015, Australia's contribution to the resettlement of refugees worldwide was less than 0.99 per cent (ABC News 2016). 3 Despite its open hostility to refugees, the Australian Government has had a vested interest in sustaining the debate about asylum and boatpeople. As a key strategist of the Liberal-National coalition reportedly told US officials in 2013, for his party, the issue of boatpeople was "fantastic": "The more boats that come, the better" (Dorling 2010). Thus, in October 2016, just after Australia had celebrated its eight hundredth day without a single refugee boat reaching its waters, it announced a lifetime ban on asylum seekers arriving illegally by boat. As if to rescue the "fantastic" issue of boatpeople from fading from public consciousness beside the European refugee crisis, PM Turnbull declared the need for an "absolutely, unflinching, unequivocal message" to migrants attempting to get to Australia by boat that they would never be allowed in the country. "This," he asserted, "is a battle of will between the Australian people, represented by its government, and the criminal gangs of people-smugglers." "You should not underestimate the scale of the threat," he further warned. "These people-smugglers are the worst criminals imaginable. They have a multibillion-dollar business. We have to be very determined to say no to their criminal plans" (Palazzo and Agence France-Press 2016). The Australian Government does not always perceive multibillion-dollar businesses as a threat. In 2012, it devised both a "Significant" and a "Premium Investor Visa" for owners of just such businesses, dubbing them "visa subclass 188" and "visa subclass 888" by way of reference to the promise of great material fortune the number eight holds in Chinese. According to the website of the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, the purpose of such visas is "to boost the Australian economy and to compete effectively for high net worth individuals seeking investment migration" so that they may "contribute their entrepreneurial skill or talent to Australia" (Australian Government 2017). The number of S-and PIV owners (or, more colloquially, "golden ticket holders") has been growing steadily from a mere sixty-five in early 2015 to over 1,600 by December 2016, when, by comparison, the number of refugees held in onshore detention in Australia was 1,351, and of those in offshore detention 1,649 (Davidson 2016).
This similarity in numbers marks only a momentary point of convergence in the steady increase of migration across all social classes, but especially among the most vulnerable and the most affluent strata of contemporary societies. While in the past years the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide has risen above 6.5 million, that of ultra-rich persons seeking offshore protection of their fortunes has as well. Thus, in 2012, just after Canada had become the first country in the world to devise special immigration policies for High Net Worth Individuals, CNBC reported on a veritable "mass migration" of millionaires (Frank 2012). Other countries soon followed Canada's example and are now eagerly "trawling for homo economicus" (Ley 2010, 21), especially in the Asia Pacific region whose "stock of HNWIs" is currently the fastest growing in the world (Beaverstock and Hay 2016, 5). Australia has been particularly keen to attract investors from this region and, to quote immigration minister Chris Bowen, devised a whole "armoury" of financial services to compete "for high-wealth and high-skilled migrants and the capital that comes with them" (Harper 2012;Park 2012). In 2015 alone, it gained 8,000 new "affluents," while France lost 10,000, China 9,000, and Russia, sixth on the list of countries "abandoned" by their millionaires, lost 2,000 (Kotkin 2016).
Like boatpeople, the majority of "millionaire migrants" to Australia are non-citizens. Not required by Australian law to apply for a special investor visa in order to get "what money cannot buy" them at home, many of them choose not to. The legality of their "investment," especially in Australian real estate, has, however, begun to be questioned. In 2015, almost two hundred foreign property buyers came under investigation for infringement of Australian property rules (Ryan 2015). Still, while Australia is holding nearly two thousand people in on-and offshore detention for unlawfully entering Australian waters, punishments for unlawfully acquiring Australian interventions -21:8 land have been generously deferred. While, on average, "unauthorized" arrivals by boat are held in captivity for a whole 478 days (Refugee Council of Australia 2016), fines for breaching Australian home ownership rules have ranged around $4,600, and thus far below the $120,000 mark authorities had promised to observe in fining buyers from abroad found guilty of violating Australian property law (Janda 2016). Such leniency is in keeping with PM Turnbull's emphatic pledge to observe a "very open foreign investment policy." "China has more freedom to invest in Australia," he declared in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, "indeed all foreigners have more freedom to invest in Australia, than [in] almost any other country." Protectionism, he added on this occasion, would be "the road back to poverty" (Guardian, with Australian Associated Press 2016).
Turnbull's openness to foreign possession and his simultaneous categorical rejection of foreign dispossession are not uncommon among western governments, which, as David Ley stresses, have become increasingly willing to accept socioeconomic inequality as the price they must pay for globalization. Rejecting claims of a "general rolling back of the power and reach of the nation-state," Ley insists that the state has shown itself to be more enterprising than it is often given credit for. While "ultimately preoccupied by what lies within its borders," he holds, the state is "fully capable to reach beyond its borders and play if imperfectly the globalization game. Indeed, in its attempt to recruit millionaire migrants, the state has acted as if the world is borderless" (2010, 7-8). Conversely, in its attempt to exclude poor arrivals, the state has acted as if the world is full of borders. Such double standards confirm Bridget Anderson's thesis that the xenophobic resistance societies tend to form against immigrants is due less to racist resentment than to a deep-seated fear of poverty on the move or of what she calls "unruly mobility" (2013, 179). Destitution crossing borders militates against the idea of mobility being a prerogative of the prosperous, following rather than preceding sedentariness. As Anderson argues, it challenges imaginaries of ancestry, authenticity, autochthony, and belonging, and calls in question received assumptions of entitlement to harmony, justice, and wealth. While a fashionable theoretical model, the porous border, then, constitutes anything but a political reality at a time when ever-growing numbers of the world's poor are forced to seek refuge abroad. As Woolley (2014, 18) has rightly noted, claims for asylum, rather than displacing the idea of national territory, only enforce it.
Still, routine as the invocation of the growing divide between the world's rich and poor has become also in scholarly discourse, practically no attention has been paid so far to the glaring divide between m/billionaire migrants and boat people, let alone to the very different discourses their mobilities have generated. Predicated on diametrically opposed notions of non-citizenship, the discourse of asylum tends to picture refugees as human cargo, stripped of their individuality, whereas the discourse of foreign wealth scrupulously screens the personal identity of ultra-rich migrants. While the former exploits the graphic symbol of the boat to expose asylum seekers' abjection as a mark of their foreignness (and an undesirable foreignness at that), the latter uses the ownership of western luxury items to demonstrate rich immigrants' at-homeness in and adaptability to western consumer culture. While the discourse on boatpeople identifies geographic fixity (detention) as the necessary closure to illegal arrivals, the discourse on entrepreneurs from overseas foregrounds their mobility and constructs their presence in Australia as sporadic and transient. While the discourse on refugees seeks to provoke a whole range of affective responses (from compassion to xenophobic resentment), the discourse on foreign money seeks to pre-empt and curb such responses above all by exploiting the fascination great wealth of any provenance tends to hold.
So far, comparisons such as these have had no place in scholarly, let alone public debates on immigration to Australia, which continue to be conducted in predominantly cultural and racial (or culturalist and racist) terms, drawing heavily on Australia's legacy of yellow perilism and exploiting it either to breed racist resentment or to level the charge of doing so. In the event, boat people and foreign investors alike have been framed as victims of xenophobic intolerance and just as Australian offshore detention has been critiqued as a racial injustice, media reports all too critical of the current housing affordability crisis have been slated for criminalizing and vilifying Asian property buyers (Rogers and Robertson 2015;Rogers, Lee, and Yan 2015). In both cases, the criticism voiced remains dependant on the self-Other binary it claims to question and, as a result, only perpetuates the polarization it so emphatically rejects. By ironical contrast, media reports expressly faulted for their open criticism of foreign investment seem to accomplish just this: they depart from established notions of cultural and racial otherness by speaking to new forms of economic inequality currently forcing (or tempting) people to leave their homelands. That these reports should also inflame public indignation at foreign investors is due not least to the failure of scholarly discourse to help forge a critical awareness of capital power as a potential threat in its own right and detached from cultural, ethnic, or racial otherness.
The work of the critical theorist Nancy Fraser helps understand this failure as the outcome of a development spawned by the neoliberal climate of the 1980s and the conviction that cultural recognition can help redress socioeconomic injustice. In her poignantly titled book Justice Interruptus, Fraser explains how this conviction caused justice to be understood in the first place as a cultural category "rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication" (1997,14) and how, as a result, the struggle for cultural recognition became the paradigmatic form of political conflict. Demands for "recognition of difference," Fraser writes, interventions -21:8 fuel struggles of groups mobilised under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, "race," gender, and sexuality. In these "postsocialist" conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilisation. Cultural domination supplants exploitation as the fundamental injustice. And cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle. (Fraser 1997, 11) Fraser's main objection to late twentieth-century culturalism is that cultural validation does not of itself restore socioeconomic justice but, to effect actual change, needs to be followed by concrete measures of redistribution (12-13). However, with the conflation of justice and redistribution, attention shifted from socioeconomic to cultural difference, from socioeconomic to cultural injustice and from the mitigation of economic disparities to the contestation of gender, ethnic and racial discrimination.
It is especially to the latter that postcolonial critique has been pledged, confident that the conferral of visibility on disenfranchized groups and their cultures can counteract marginalization and thereby serve also the restoration of socioeconomic justice to victims of (neo)colonial exploitation. Yet this has been true only to a point: investment in the cultures of subaltern groups, while profitable to certain institutions, professions, and individuals, has not changed the situation of entire communities, ethnicities, or nations. This is the uncomfortable conclusion postcolonial critique needs to draw from Fraser's work, which, in the past ten years, has placed increasing stress on questions of redress and the agency thereof (Fraser 2008, 393-396). With this shift of focus it has opened up new avenues for the conceptual extension urgently needed also in the postcolonial field: that from the victims of exploitation to its beneficiaries, from the injustices and atrocities perpetrated in the scramble for capital to the gains reaped in its wake.
While postcolonial critique is only just beginning to endorse this extension, it is in the field of cultural economic geography that scholars have come to recognize the need for contemporary wealth concentrations to be remapped in terms challenging the familiar binarisms of a global North and South, the West and "the rest," a presumed European metropolitan centre and a "less European" periphery. Already in 2004, Beaverstock, Hubbard, and Short called for a shift of academic attention from "marginalized populations living below the poverty line" to "the principal beneficiaries of contemporary capitalismthe super-rich" (1). Since then, they have been reiterating their plea for a more comprehensive study of socioeconomic inequality taking into account the extremes of both poverty and wealth. In the introduction to their 2016 Handbook on Wealth and the Super-Rich, Beaverstock and Iain Hay still describe this project as an interdisciplinary "uprising" against academic conventions and assert once again that "It is past time for broader parts of the social sciences and humanities communities to look as SHADES OF DENIAL H e l g a R a m s e y -K u r z critically at the rich and wealth as we have at the poor and poverty in global society" (2016, 7).
Although they do not expressly speak about migration, Beaverstock and Hay's work is crucial for a proper understanding of how contemporary migration flows are perceived and represented. It throws into relief a deliberate and systematic avoidance to relate the mobility of the world's super-rich in any wayleast of all causallyto the unruly mobility of the world's poor. Arguably, this conceptual separation serves above all the neoliberal agenda to sustain the collective veneration of affluence so characteristic of all capitalistic societies. With no shadows of other forms of migration cast on them, the cosmopolitanism and residential promiscuity of global financial elites sustain the glamour that renders wealth both immune to criticism and subject to blind admiration.
In this way, the unprecedented indiscriminate acceptance extreme riches are enjoying in the contemporary neoliberal era has significantly aided Asia's super-wealthy. It has enabled a popular discourse which, as if to trivialize the continent's rise to a global economic power and gain in geopolitical leverage, exploits its fast-growing wealth as material for "a nouveau voyeurism" craved by readers "who long ago burned out on American and English aspirational fantasies" (Maslin 2015). Kevin Kwan's novel Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and its sequels China Rich Girlfriend (2015) and Rich People Problems (2017) have responded to this appetite for new versions of affluence with positively staggering success. They portray ultra-rich families in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Mainland China shuttling between their luxury homes in Europe, North America, and Australia, busy squandering their money abroad and oblivious to the rest of the world as long as their purchasing power is duly honoured. Cosmopolitan sophisticates, as far as their lotuseating and global chic are concerned, Kwan's "new elite breed" "sporting Huntsman blazers and matching Queen's English" (Park 2013) defy identification as wholly other and rather than alienating readers with their crass materialism and flagrant wastefulness, charm them with their likeness to the western super-rich they emulate and outshine.
Recent documentary filmsthe genre in which the lives of the super-rich have found most extensive and varied representation since the 2008 financial crisis 4likewise capitalize on the proverbial lure of luxury. As reality stranger than fiction, the baroque spectacles of extreme wealth have crucially challenged the format's standards of veracity and effected their alignment with the conventions of obfuscation and denial endemic to modern regimes of capital accumulation and protection. Symptomatically, productions such as The Great Wall of Money, which expressly set out to expose the Australian government for its failure, or unwillingness, to control foreign investment in the local housing market, scrupulously avoid extending their criticism to the ultra-wealthy immigrants they feature. Instead, they take pains to frame 4 Due to the genre's capacity to draw on public sentiment, it has also been "one of the most prominent and widely circulated modes of representing asylum stories in Australia" (Cox 2015, 11). By contrast, narrative interventions -21:8 them as harmless global nomads with no ambition to interfere in the neighbourhoods of their overseas residences. Suggestive images of aircraft and limousines and of expensively furnished apartments devoid of any signs of habitation emphasize the fleetingness of their presence in Australia, as do interviews at safely "offshore" locations in which millionaire migrants give reassuring demonstrations of their cohorts' characteristic "indifference and aversion towards more established or grounded notions of belonging" (Caletrío 2012, 144). "I haven't seen it," a young millionairess cheerfully admits in one such interview, meaning a property in Sydney she is about to buy at a real estate fair in Shanghai. "But I've been living in Australia, so I'm kind of like familiar with that area, so I don't need to see … It's just sign and email it. It's very convenient. Yeah" (Besser and Hichens 2015). Her merry show of naivety is beguiling and allows the "friendly façade of power" (Zukin 1993, 229), typically erected around enormous capital, to work its intended effect by arousing the viewer's concern for the delicate young female on the screen about to risk her fortune for a home in Australia.
The disarming power of wealth on display for everyone to see finds similar exploitation in the SBS documentary China's Millionaire Migration (2013), a backstage reportage on the Canadian reality television web series Ultra Rich Asian Girls (2014). Right at the beginning of the film one of the stars is invited to comment on her family's immense wealth and promptly asserts that she does not regard herself as super-rich. "I just think," she explains, "we're at a point where we're satisfied" (Thomas and Cornish 2016). Interviews follow in which median income earners vent their anxieties about the growing presence of foreign capital in their region. Experts are heard validating their concerns before the documentary resumes its portrayal of the reality stars, following them on the daily shopping and dining escapades which they have so successfully turned into a lucrative media sensation. Towards the end of the film, one of the stars is finally invited to speak to the mounting resentment among Canadians about foreign billionaires buying up their country. "I totally understand," she offers and adds: It feels like there's a rush of water coming to the land. All of a sudden you are not living on dry land anymore, you are living in the ocean. I totally understand that. But then, hey, time changes. Everywhere changes. Chinese brought you great food and a better economy, what's there to complain about? (Thomas and Cornish 2016) Her rhetorical question remains unanswered. In a voiceover, the commentator ruminates: "After generations of economic weakness, China is now flexing its financial muscles," and that in finally "enjoying the good life," it is only doing what "every empire and super power before it" used to do. "It's up to its neighbours around the world," he concludes, "to figure out how to cope fiction has been chosen far less frequently as a vehicle of asylum stories. As Woolley explains convincingly, this is due to the "anxieties around veracity and authenticity endemic to the legal process of decision making on asylum" (2017,(376)(377).

SHADES OF DENIAL
H e l g a R a m s e y -K u r z with the new guests at the party. And for the guests to figure out how they are going to fit in" (Thomas and Cornish 2016).
The commentator's retreat into historical amnesia and facile legitimation of erstwhile empires "enjoying the good life" beg to be seen as more than a bland apology for his interviewee's callousness. Not only do they give chilling evidence of popular culture's slavish reliance on the affective power of extreme wealth; they also testify to a facile exploitation of the ideal of tolerance as an excuse for a reverence that makes no distinction between foreign and domestic capital. At least indirectly, this confirms Anderson's claim that resentment held against forcibly displaced persons stems not from racism but from a fear of poverty on the move. Current escalations of this fear worldwide are not really surprising in societies that have become unable conceptually to connect rich and poor lives, and perfected their ways of consistently seeing the extremes of the socioeconomic spectrum in isolation.
In light of such developments, two pieces of Australian literature merit special attention. Written just before the triumph of neoliberal capitalism in its current form, the novels Birds of Passage (1983) by Brian Castro and The Ancestor Game (1992) by Alex Miller are still able to offer accounts of migration from China to Australia which, while overtly critical of yellow perilism, do not exploit it as the only explanation of their protagonists' alienation. Instead, they complicate the popular narrative of Asian invasion by extending their considerations of Asian migrants' difference to socioeconomic inequality and recounting also the emigration of enormously wealthy Chinese to Australia. This has been largely ignored by critics who have predictably been more intrigued by the novels' portrayal of cultural encounters. Thus, Birds of Passage has typically been hailed as the first Asian-Australian novel and The Ancestor Game credited with "drawing attention to the contribution of Chinese culture to Australian history" (Jensen 2002, 134). In addition, both texts have been noted for reconstructing the notorious beginnings of Asian emigration to Australia and recalling the horrendous atrocities suffered by Chinese migrants on the Australian goldfields. This, however, has caused some remarkable parallels between the novels to be overlooked that result from the juxtaposition both Miller and Castro devise of the historical quest for gold with their modern Asian Australian protagonists' quest for understanding of their past. It is the kind of understanding documentaries such as China's Millionaire Migration cannot be expected to proffer because it entails learning about unpalatable trajectories of personal enrichment by horrendously brutal exploitation of one's own kind and even one's own kin. For Miller and Castro, knowledge and acceptance of such trajectories are ethical imperatives, fulfilment of which holds the promise of a clearer sense of Australia as home.
In Birds of Passage and The Ancestor Game this sense crystallizes gradually during a complicated journey into the past on which the protagonist comes to interventions -21:8 weigh the multiple cultural as well as social inequalities he experiences either personally or through the accounts of his forefathers. The journey leads back to pre-communist China, where the protagonist's estrangement begins as one from a family obsessed with increasing their already immense wealth. Leaving the emotional barrenness of his home is not difficult for Lo Yun Shan, who right at the beginning of Castro's novel recalls how one day he simply walked out of his parents' house and boarded a ship bound for Australia. The reasons for his spontaneous departure are implied in the introduction Lo offers of himself as the son of a rich opium dealer. "My father wore a long gown and received taxes from the villagers," he writes in a diary entry dated 1856.
I was his principal tax-collector, walking from farm to farm among the different hamlets of our region … I had no time for poetry or such musings; and in this I shared the characteristics of the Kwangtung people … We are businesslike; we want to get on in the world. We live for barter, trade, catties of ricethe essentials of society and community. (Castro 1989, 2) The self-scorn surfacing in this scene increases as he relates how one day when he was travelling in his sedan chair and watching the people in the street, "a beggar came up to [him] and attached his grimy fingers to [his] sleeve, hobbling alongside, focusing the liquid whiteness of his bad eye on [his] face." "I pulled my hand away," he remembers, and ordered the chair coolies to increase their speed. The beggar kept pace, his shaven head bobbing beside me. I leant back into the box and reached for a coin, but then I hesitated, my warring conscience having reached stalemate. The shaven head disappeared in a stream of curses. (Castro 1989, 5) This incident, in its depiction already replete with references to movement, is Lo Yun Shan's last recollection of China. Still, a complete escape from the injustices in which he feels implicated at home proves in vain. Even in Australia he finds himself the beneficiary of the terrible privilege he enjoyed as the son of the principal tax collector of Kwangtung province. Wherever he goes, the wealth of his relatives protects him against the calamities other Chinese have to suffer at the hands of white Australians. In fact, his sojourn in Australia ends with him killing two white men and escaping to Melbourne, where he finds a wealthy uncle who conveniently buys him a "clean and fast" passage back to China.
As a reflection of modern Australia's need for just such stories, Castro has the second narrator in Birds of Passage, Seamus O'Young, admit to his personal longing for an ancestor with both Lo Yun Shan's wealth and his ruthlessness. Seamus recalls how, ridiculed for his looks (he is a blue-andslant-eyed Asian Australian), he began to invent fictions of his past: I dreamt (usually in class) that my father was a visiting seaman … from Manchuria; that he was a descendant of a great Manchurian lord. I dreamt that he stepped ashore Sydney, off his ocean-going junk which was furnished in the fashion of elaborate Chinese temples; that he was entertained by all the society ladies of the North Shore; and that he fell in love with one of them, a rich heiress with blue eyes. I dreamt that her parents forbade their marriage, and so they eloped and went to live in a grand house in Point Piper. While my mother was pregnant, lying in her feather bed, the descendant of the Manchurian lord weighed anchor and slipped out of Sydney. In despair and shame, my mother placed me in an orphanage. (Castro 1989, 9) Like his ancestor, Seamus goes abroad, like him he finds temporary happiness with a woman, but abandons her in order to return home to Australia where he discovers a stack of old papers hidden behind a mirror and soon realizes that they were written by Lo Yun Shan. From them he learns of an offspring of Lo Yun Shan's liaison with the Australian Mary Young and comprehends that he himself might be a descendant of the author of the diary fragments he has been reading. He resolves to travel to the Turon River where Lo Yun Shan lived with Mary and, in a spiritual encounter with his presumed ancestor, relives the moment when Lo Yun Shan slew his adversaries. The experience instils a new awareness of difference in him, the awareness that he is different less from other Australians than from the man who might be his Chinese forefather. Able to understand himself as other in this moral sense, Seamus is finally overcome by a deep feeling of belonging to Australian land, of being more part of it by virtue of his decency than of the family whose genes he probably shares. This realization allows him to arrive literally at a sense of ownership radically different from the entitlement that used to propel his ancestor. As he approaches the site of the murder committed by Lo Yun Shan, Seamus knows, "The historical moment is near. I am myth, rushing God-like to the salvation of the man": The sun beats down on my head. Below the rise I can hear the water. It roars when the wind comes rushing up. It makes me nervous as I go down to the river along little narrow sheep tracks. Here and there I can just make out their droppings, pellets scattered like confetti; and all of it speaks of the country, the wind, water, trees, droppings. It all belongs to me. (Castro 1989, 139-140, emphasis added) The scene compares to the reenchantment of Australia towards which Alex Miller steers The Ancestor Game after recounting how the calligrapher and interventions -21:8 poet Huang T'ing-chien's daughter comes to marry the dreaded H. C. Feng, or Feng Three, the grandson of daring Feng who was dispatched to Australia as an indentured labourer, worked there as a shepherd, then discovered gold. He returned to China a rich man to lead a double life, straddling a wife with children in Amoy and another in Melbourne, while successfully trading in human cargo between the two continents. Though wealthy enough to forge a better life than his people-smuggling grandfather, H. C. proves just as coldblooded and despotic. "A Shanghai capitalist, a banker and dealer in international commodities" (Miller 2003, 24) as well as a connoisseur of expensive European artefacts, he reigns his household with awful brutality and "an aversion to the traditional cultures of China" (29). Rumour has it that he "possesses a mandate from the Lord of Death to accomplish their will without hindrance from mortals" (87). After several miscarriages and a lifethreatening pregnancy and birth, Feng Three's wife finally delivers the heir he has been requesting. Almost immediately though, he takes a dislike to the child because of the deformity the boy incurred at his birth. Disappointed by his son's failure to outgrow his misshapenness, the father decides to dispose of his offspring by sending him to Australia for his education.
Realizing the young Lang Tzu's devastation at his father's rejection, the family doctor August Spiess seeks to console the boy by encouraging him to see Australia as an alternative home. "Don't be afraid of Australia," he advises Lang Tzu: Long for something you can't name … and call it Australia. A thing will come into being. See a golden city on a plain, shining in the distance, and be certain: the greatest prize existence can bestow on you is to belong somewhere among your own kind. Let it be Fairyland, an other-world. A land imagined and dreamed, not an actual place. The ancients of all nations understood that we don't belong anywhere real. (Miller 2003, 259) To be sure, Lang Tzu never regains any sense of belonging, but at least one of distance from the "indestructible Feng," whom he gradually learns to think of not as "father" but as "a dangerous entity" capable of inflicting "unspecified damage" on anyone's life. In order to document the damage his father has wrought, Lang Tzu invites an unsuccessful writer from England stranded in Australia to write up his family's history. This writer is the narrator of the novel. He relates how the ancestor game for which he has been hired gradually evolves. Started as an exhumation of Lang Tzu's forefathers with the purpose not to revere and honour but to expose them in all their cruelty, it is fraught with difficulties steeping Lang Tzu into bouts of depression. Eventually, the chronicle sees completion, after which Lang Tzu resolves to bring the horrible legacy of the fiendish Fengs to the only honest closure he can envisage and commits suicide. The narrator refrains SHADES OF DENIAL H e l g a R a m s e y -K u r z from judging Lang Tzu's decision, knowing that, at least for the duration of their joint endeavour to record the past, Australia proved a better home for Lang Tzu than China had ever been.
In Robert Dixon's words, the ending of The Ancestor Game suggests "the geo-social space of Australia-in-Asia" has become imaginable as "a spatial field of migration and diaspora, a space of hospitality, a space that is open to the other" (2014,30). Even so, in the past twenty-five years since the publication of The Ancestor Game, little inspiration seems to have been drawn from Miller's special vision of Australia. As Australia keeps attracting worldwide attention for the inhospitality it extends to refugees while courting foreign investors, it is barely surprising that Brian Castro, with his Birds of Passage almost forgotten and sadly out of print, has moved on to tell tales of leaving Australia and remembering it from a distance. Alex Miller, in turn, has joined writers raising their voices against Australia's refugee policy, albeit not without reluctance. Symptomatically, with two and a half pages, his essay "Asylum: A Secure Place of Refuge" is the shortest in A Country Too Far, a collection compiled by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally with the aim to bring "a different perspective and depth to the public debate on asylum seekers" (Scott 2016b, 1). With the following ending, it is also the one most explicit in its unwillingness to offer a simple explanation of the current discourse on boatpeople in Australia: We enjoy the riches of being one of the world's most successful multicultural societies, surely? So why don't we feel betrayed and shamed as Australians and as human beings by the cruel and inhuman treatment our government is meting out to refugees? And when we see that both our major political parties share the same views on this question why don't we feel a kind of despair about the failure of our democracy to offer us a choice? I'm sorry I don't have any answers to offer, but only these questions that are forcing on me to reconsider what it means to be Australian. (Miller 2016, 193) Other contributors to the book valiantly assert their faith in Australia as a country not "too far" for refugees. Kim Scott, for instance, following Agamben's idea of the refugee as the most crucial political figure of our times, argues "If … exclusion … is indeed fundamental to Australian identity, then … exclusion can also serve as a means of linking those excluded" and forging an "un-" or "non-Australia" that is home to all marginalized people (2016a, 147). Stephanie Johnson, while conjuring the chilling dystopian scenario of Australians having to take flight from the effects of global warming to a refugee camp in New Zealand, still insists on some form of hope to which an overseer at the camp gives expression by telling a child detainee, interventions -21:8 Imagine the best … imagine that a time will come when no one will believe how we behaved, how we fought over what we've got left, our narrowing resources. A time will come when we live in peace and welcome one another to our shores. (Johnson 2016, 139) On a similar note, Geraldine Brooks has the reader look back to "the poorest, most despised outcasts of nineteenth-century society" coming together in Australia "to forge one of the best and fairest and most prosperous nations the world has ever seen." By recalling their struggle, Brooks suggests, Australia can become a country that does … away with millionaires' business visas and … makes a more generous choice, in favour of the despised people, the desperate, … the driven" (2016,16).
Much as one wants to believe in Brook's vision of a more generous Australia or in Kim Scott's idea of an "un-Australia" uniting with the wretched of today's world, one cannot help feeling ill at ease at so much optimism. For, as Gaita (2016, 96) observes, it is "in the key of the heroic and the noble" and "the language of rights and Dignity" that one all too easily fails to speak honestly and truthfully about and to affliction, and worse, that one overhears the cry of the afflicted: "Why am I being hurt?" To seek an adequate answer to this cry is the moral responsibility also of literary and cultural critics. However, with social criticism having fallen into disuse, scholarly discourse seems capable of little more than expressions of commiseration with those hurt. Such solidarity remains unconvincing and ineffective as long as it fails to consider and address those who inflict hurt while asking "What's there to complain about?"