Our Future has been the subject of regular comment for most of the period of white settlement, for the obvious reason that our Anglo-Celtic past provided relatively little to write Home about. We were perched on the edge of the world and on the edge of Asia. Our future was a problem. Clearly, the belief that our future lies in Asia is gaining adherents. There is a lot to be said for having the future framed in this manner. Asia answers the purpose rather nicely: it has a geographical and business/trade logic, it is arresting enough as an idea to attract notice and debate, and it suits the current mood which requires old dogs to acquire new tricks or make way for more able dogs. There is also a heady uncertainty about what constitutes Asia, though commentators need not have a geographical entity in mind, so much as Asia as a field of action and a state of mind. More often than not, there is a suggestion of dynamism, danger and complexity about the Asia that we are being invited to join. Asia suggests energy, economic growth and a bold splash of the unknown.

The old Australia had made quite a thing of keeping its distance from Asia, and often on grounds that related to health and hygiene. Australians at the turn of the century made cleanliness a national ideal, giving it powerful racial associations as is evident in the sentiments of Randolph Bedford, author, entrepreneur and politician writing in 1910: ‘Australia has been given to it as a sacred duty the breeding of a pure race in a clean continent.’ The division between the clean and the unclean world has blurred a good deal since Bedford’s time.

Presumably an Asian future no longer poses the threat that was once associated with unclean Asia. The same could also be said for the apprehension that Asia at its most generalized was considered so lethargic and dissipated that it posed a threat to the moral and physical energies of young Australia. There were crossovers into purity and health concerns here, but one of the futures that young Australia at Federation took seriously was its role as a guardian and repository of racial energies that were considered under threat in class-divided Britain. A commentator in the 1920s remarked, ‘Australia is the largest sized and most tremendous experiment ever tried in race-building and Australia knows it’. Race-building in this context meant creating a new national type energised by Australian conditions (space, sunshine, diet and progressive legislation were commonly invoked).

We are now less convinced of our superior energies than we were, while the post-war decolonisation of Asia, followed by the rapid development of Asian economies, has helped redefine Asia. Asia is no longer perceived as an assemblage of ancient civilisations encrusted with superstition and wearied with age. It is now tiger country, bounding with energy and full of entrepreneurial zeal. Looking to our future it now seems possible that our own energies, far from being compromised in Asia, will be developed and enhanced by closer ties. If we get close enough some of their energy may rub off on us.

Despite Hawke’s insistence that the Vision of Australia in Asia was his, Asia (variously understood) has figured in speculations about Australia’s future for at least a century. It is not the recent discovery that many of our politicians would have us believe. Beyond that, the Orient has been a Western preoccupation for at least two hundred years. In his influential Orientalism, Edward Said explored the shifting meanings of the East/the Orient for Western commentators from the late eighteenth century when French and British interests sought to control the Middle East. Then again, for Australians reared on the Bible, the Holy Lands were steeped in familiar associations. The now unknown James Hingston, one of our wittiest and most persevering travel writers, entered Egypt with Bible in hand in the late 1870s. As he recorded in The Australian Abroad: ‘We know so much about Egypt, and hear it so often spoken of in sermons, and read about it in church and school lessons, that one can be scarcely anxious about it. Its characteristics get mixed up with our figures of speech – “Egyptian bondage!”; “as dark as Egypt!”; “the spoiling of the Egyptians!”; “all the plagues of Egypt!” – and the like have made the country and its peculiarities a part as it were of our experience.’

In Japan, a country that Hingston loved for its people, scenery, culture and cleanliness, he made the rather surprising claim that ‘scarcely an Australian but can remember some one from some part of Australasia who has made Japan a home’. The volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography that cover notable lives from around 1890 to 1939 reveal an array of Asian associations, for Australians have been great travellers, though I am sorry to say that the spirited Hingston is not among them. In volume twelve of the ADB, we learn that the theatrical manager, Robert Smythe, toured Asia in 1863, claiming to have been the first theatrical manager to enter Japan with a touring company after the port treaty of 1854. Allan Wilkie’s Shakespearian company spent two years touring India, Ceylon, Singapore, Malaya, China, Japan and the Philippines. And so on through a range of performers, artists, architects, soldiers and travellers. Over the last three years, Ros Pesman, Richard White and I, with Terri McCormack, have compiled an annotated bibliography of Australian travel writing with overseas settings. There are no fewer than five hundred entries dealing with travel to Asia before 1970, a much bigger haul than we expected. In short, our Asia links have a history, a point reinforced by Alison Broinowski’s study of Australian Asian interactions in The Yellow Lady.

It may be conceded that there were any number of comings and goings through Asia, the wanderings of the idle, the curious or the rich, but were there facilitators of increased enmeshment? That must be new. Put in those precise terms, it certainly is. But the idea that proximity to Asia might have benefits for Australia was not unknown.

In 1829, Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his A Letter From Sydney, ridiculed the notion that Australia was a continent remote from great centres of population when Asia was on Australia’s door step. Instead of being positively ‘out of the way’, he suggested, Australasia offers all at once better means and greater motives for a more frequent intercourse with a greater variety of nations and a larger number of people than any other country without exception. Wakefield was particularly interested in the possibilities of immigration from China, but those ‘greater motives’ are a direct reference to … enmeshment.

In 1888, the Reverence James Jefferis used the centenary to speculate upon Australia’s future and predicted that ‘Australia will become great by a fusion and mingling of races. The New and Old World meet on our shores. East and West will join hands.’ More enmeshment. In Temple and Tomb in India and Irrigated India, both published in 1893, Alfred Deakin explored, albeit rather more cautiously than was the case with Jefferis, the links between India and Australia. At the close of Temple and Tomb Deakin asked, ‘What can we know of Australia if we limit enquiries within our borders, to the neglect of our relations far and near, and of those Asiatic empires which lie closest to us, with whose futures our own tropical lands may yet be partially identified?’ In Irrigated India, Deakin observed that, since geography had brought Australia and Asia ‘face to face, it may yet bring them hand to hand, and mind to mind. They have much to teach each other.’

As is now very apparent from Al Gabay’s fine study of Deakin, spiritual wisdom was his lifelong pursuit. In matters of faith, Deakin wrote in Temple and Tomb, ‘The East remains mother and mistress of all’. In his biography of Deakin, Walter Murdoch quotes a passage in which Deakin spelt out the meaning that the word India had for him: ‘some words are enriched with historic memories and the reflection of early enthusiasms so that they present themselves before us with a glamour greater than that of romance. Such a magic name is India, before which the throng of unimpressive words falls back as if outshone by a regal presence, clothed with “barbaric pearl and gold”.’ That passage is not without orientalist assumptions, but it points to an intellectual indebtedness to ‘the East’ which was not uncommon among nineteenth-century intellectuals. James Hingston had some witheringly dismissive things to say about parts of modern Asia, particularly the Holy Lands, but he concluded his mighty travel tome with a resounding affirmation of the significance of the Eastern world which ‘has made two thirds of all history, and cradled all the existing faiths worthy of the name’.

With Deakin and Hingston, the fascination with Asia owed a great deal to their broad grounding in world religions. Moreover, they were both persuaded that the British Empire, for all its flaws, was a civilising force in Asia and particularly so in India. Indeed, in this period, the imperial connection and the sheer range of British interests throughout the world encouraged those who followed imperial developments to think globally. This combination of religious and imperial interests was a powerful force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century reflections upon Asia and its contribution to world civilisation.

One of the most striking Australian treatments of the theme of East and West coming together in mutually enriching ways is to be found in Rosa Campbell Praed’s Madam Izàn: A Tourist Story, another product of the 1890s. Madam Izàn was blind, beautiful, Australian and visiting Japan in the company of other Australians, among them a wealthy young Queensland squatter who was very smitten by Madam Izàn. A serpentine plot ensured that Madam Izàn had to choose between the squatter’s muscles and money or the intricate culture of Japan as represented by a very earnest and scholarly Japanese mentor with no muscles to speak of. She chose the Japanese gentleman. One can assume that Madam Izàn’s blindness was a device which enabled Praed to eliminate the obvious signs of racial difference between the bushbred squatter and the Japanese gentleman allowing Madam Izàn to base her choice on inherent worth and cultivation. In any event, this was a spirited challenge to the view that Queensland masculinity and bush prowess had to be treated with respect on the grounds that they constituted the front line of defence against the descending hordes of Asia, a view widely circulated in the labour paper, the Boomerang and the writings of William Lane.

Of course, there were any number of texts in which getting closer to Asia was not encouraged (including the Bulletin and the Boomerang). But they are familiar enough and have attracted so much comment that we need reminding that the case for enmeshment also has a history. As one would expect, there was often considerable ambivalence about the role that Asia might play in Australian affairs.

There was the story published in Australia To-day in 1909 of a journalist who was asked to give a talk on Australia’s future. He told a story within a story of another journalist who had accepted the same offer. This fellow thrilled his audience with an account of Australia in 1960. He had had a dream in which he saw a land of busy agriculturalists and thriving villages dotted across the entire continent. There were ports full of ships and every sign of a powerful trading nation. The audience lapped it up and shouted their approval. Filling the empty spaces of Australia was a pressing concern and it was reassuring to learn that Australians had solved the problem of settling an entire continent, much of which lay within the tropics. The speaker, however, had not finished with his audience. He quelled their enthusiasm and observed that he had one more point to make. At no stage in his dream had he seen a white face. Australia had achieved its prosperity as an Asian nation. Outrage. Snatching hat and coat, the speaker beat a hasty retreat from the hall.

His was another version of Australia’s Asian future, but one in which Asia was already identified with enterprise and energy beyond that displayed by Australian settlers. The idea that Asian skills and capacities might do a better job of settling Australia and creating a productive continent was not easily banished. Indeed, one of the reasons for keeping Asia at bay was the fear that China or Japan might well mount a formidable colonising challenge to a sparsely populated Australian continent.

The most direct expression of this view was the invasion literature which emerged in the late nineteenth century, but by their nature invasion narratives present Asian adversaries as formidable opponents often combining warrior capacities with skilled leadership. Where Asia was positioned as young Australia’s major adversary, logic required an Australian response to this challenge. While the fear of invasion might seem to belong to a very different set of responses to Asia from those we hear now, there is a common thread in the realisation that Asia might play a decisive role in shaping Australia’s future. Keeping Asia at bay seemed to require fit bodies and bushcraft, whereas making our way into Asia is now linked with cleverness and negotiating skills.

The possibilities of trade with Asia, which now dominates discussion, has formed part of this speculative interest in Asian developments. In 1906, the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures invited Colonel George W. Bell to address them on the subject of Japan’s emergence as a major power in the Asia–Pacific region. He told his audience that Japan was destined to become ‘Australia’s largest and most profitable customer’ and backed his comments with an analysis of the areas in which trade might develop between the two countries. Two years later, the Journal of the Institute of Bankers of NSW published an article by J. Currie Elles, a regular contributor, on the relationship between commerce and civilisation. Elles concluded his elaborate survey with a call for all Australian Universities to establish chairs of Commerce and, acknowledging Australia’s proximity to Asia and the rapid development of the Asia–Pacific region, ‘chairs and professorships of Oriental languages’ as well. He hopes that these developments might help educate the commercial community in Australia ‘to understand, appreciate and respect the great civilized nations of Asia, from whom most, if not all, of our civilisation has been derived, then may commerce and civilisation go hand in hand, and may it be said about Australia that she has derived “Ex Oriente lux”’. On their own, these episodes may not say terribly much about connections between Australia and Asia, but even on matters of trade, which are now so dear to us, there were those who saw the potentialities of trade with Asia in the first decade of the new Commonwealth.

Colonel Bell and J. Currie Elles may seem rather too exotic to be believed. Is there someone nearer to hand and rather more mainstream? Brian Penton, author and newspaper editor, turned his attention to Australia’s future in Advance Australia … Where?, a pugnacious booklet published in 1943. ‘One cannot peer too far into the postwar future’, Penton observed, ‘without coming up against the question, “Will Australia break away from the Empire?”.’ He argues that Australia should break away and one of the most persuasive grounds for doing so were the political and economic changes that would emerge from Asia after the Second World War.

According to Penton, Australia had to reverse ‘her external policies ... of arrogant detachment from Asia’ given that the Empire would be unable to secure Australia’s defences. On matters of trade, Penton provided a detailed analysis of Australia’s trade with Britain, America and Asia and concluded that ‘our economic future lies in Asia’. He could not have made the point more clearly that in the postwar world Australia would need to revise its historic attachments to the British Empire and find a new Asia–Pacific identity.

In the 1993 Pocket Asia, John Andrews of The Economist declared that, ‘By the growing weight of its populations and the pace of its economic development Asia is bidding to be the centre of the world’. The criteria by which centrality is judged have certainly changed, but I can still detect echoes of the views expressed by Deakin, Hingston and Elles that Asia was once the source and centre of civilisation and might become so again. Of Australia’s claims to be part of Asia, Andrews writes that they are ‘recent and often disputed’. Recent, yes; disputed, yes; but speculation about our Asian future does have its own history. As for the Eagle, he was last seen over South Africa.