Friday essay: how Australia’s ‘invasion novels’ have reflected our cultural anxieties around race
Foreign ‘invasion plots’ have featured in Australian literature for more than a century. Though critiqued by some authors, fears of white erasure endure.
In this 30th anniversary of Pauline Hanson's maiden speech, where she declared Australia in danger of being "swamped by Asians," we recall the 25th anniversary of John Howard's statement in the wake of the Tampa Crisis, affirming Australia's decision-making on who enters the country. Forty years prior, Phillip Ruddock informed Australians they faced a national emergency, with as many as 10,000 illegal migrants from the Middle East planning to flood the nation.
This recurring theme of invasion narratives in Australian literature highlights the deep-seated cultural anxieties surrounding race, a sentiment that continues to resonate with the populace.
The invasion novel has been a persistent and popular sub-genre of Australian fiction for centuries, with one of the earliest examples being William Lane's White or Yellow (1888), which portrayed white Australians being enslaved by Asians after allowing a large influx of migrant workers. Over the years, numerous invasion narratives have been published, with Catriona Ross estimating nearly 100 such novels in Australian literature and more than 40 in the past 20 years alone.
What sets these invasion narratives apart from those found in other world literatures is their hysterical urgency and prophetic insistence that an invasion would lead to the complete annihilation of white Australia. The idea of a vulnerable nation constantly under threat of losing sovereignty has become a cornerstone of Australia's founding mythology and national identity.
As Alan Renouf, a prominent diplomat, suggested in his book The Frightened Country, "an unreasoning fearfulness is central to Australia's relationship with the rest of the world."
While most early invasion novels belong to the sci-fi/fantasy genre, their scenarios are presented as believable and realistic, inciting nationalism and resistance to the Asian "enemy" among a wide audience. For instance, Lane's White or Yellow became a bible for Australia's first trade union movements in the late 1800s, opposing non-white workers as an economic threat.
Even during WWII, the invasion novel evolved into a more complex narrative, with Marjorie Bernard and Flora Eldershaw's 1947 book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow exploring a fascist international coalition invading Australia in an alternative timeline. Though less overtly racist than earlier novels, Eldershaw and Barnard's work still grapples with the idea of security as the anchor and contested site of Australian identity.
Written by urgent.news from The Conversation AU's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
