"China Fiction" In Contemporary Australian Literature

With the abolition of White Australia Policy and Australia's growing recognition of its location in South-East Asia, the past two decades has witnessed an increase in Australian fiction about China. One prominent feature of contemporary Australian writing about China is that not just writers of Chinese descent have authored or published fiction about the country. Also, joining in the ranks are Anglo-Australian writers. In this thesis, I examine two different kinds of China writing produced by both streams of these writers.This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One introduces the concept of literary images and the theory of Orientalism while briefly taking stock of recent Australian fictions about China. Chapter Two examines the works of Anglo-Australian writers, such as Nicholas Jose's Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), The Rose Crossing (1995) and Alex Miller's The Ancestor Game (1992). And I contend that contemporary Anglo-Australian writers reinforce and reproduce the Orientalist discourse in their writing. Although the two writers differ considerably in their representations of China and the Chinese, their basic attitudes are remarkably similar. Chapter Three discusses Brian Castro's Birds of Passage (1983), After China (1992), and Ouyang Yu's The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002) and offers a critique of the subtle or obvious operation of Orientalism in the works of these Chinese-Australian writers. As Chinese Australian writers, Brian Castro and OuyangYu are unable to release themselves from the diasporic umbilicus of 'writing China', but they have tended most often to do it in such a way which would help them win the hearts of western readers. Chapter Four is a conclusion in which I claim that, despite their diverse backgrounds, the four writers unanimously represent China and the Chinese as the "Other" in their novels and that such treatment of the China theme provides a glimpse of contemporary Australian literature as a whole. My thesis also suggests that the reason for the operation of the Orientalist discourse in all six contemporary Australian novels resides both in Australian history and contemporary Australian social and political conditions, and that it still takes time and efforts forAustralian writers to truly accept China and to fully appreciate Chinese culture.