An early warning

Dear Editor,

The deep unease felt by many observers and participants about the directions of university funding in Australia over the past decade finds articulate expression in Simon Marginson’s article ‘They Make a Desolation and They Call It F.A. Hayek’ (ABR, April 2004). Marginson has once again explored a meeting place of contemporary higher education policy and economic theory and described the terrain evocatively and incisively. New generation universities – those formed fifteen years ago in the ‘Dawkins reforms’ – are particularly exposed to engineered, but inherently unequal, competition. Their youth, the lack of a buffer of endowment and investments, their regional and community outreach obliga­tions, and their commitment to widening access make them vulnerable to its adverse effects. Their students, most from low- and middle- income families, will feel most keenly the burden of educational debt throughout much of their adult lives, especially if a fee-paying place is their only option.

It would be a sad irony if the current reforms create not only a divided sector but one in which opportunity is dictated less by ability to learn than by ability to pay. Marginson ‘s article is an early warning signal, which government and the sector should heed.

Professor Janice Reid, Vice-Chancellor, University of Western Sydney, NSW

Reclaiming education

Dear Editor,

My wife and I recently returned to live in Australia after spending practically all of our 45-year working lives in California. Latter-day Rip Van Winkles, we are astonished to see the extent to which the Australian education system has become privatised with government support. Even in the US – in many respects the world leader in the transfer of public utilities to commercial markets – private schools receive essentially no public funds. There, only about nine per cent of children attend private schools, and that proportion has remained approximately constant over the past thirty years. In Australia, the proportion of children attending private schools has increased from about twenty-two to thirty-two per cent over the same period, and continues to increase. This is thanks largely to the fact that our government provides, on average, more than half of the operating expenses of private schools. Bizarrely, the government subsidy to private schools enables them to keep fees low enough to attract students who would otherwise go to government schools! Our private schools now act as independent businesses, and our universities as commercial enterprises in which resources needed for teaching and research are instead devoted to marketing.

We were at a loss to understand how the education system had arrived at this condition, until we were enlightened by Simon Marginson’s La Trobe University Essay, ‘They Make a Desolation and They Call It F.A. Hayek’ (ABR, April 2004). That article explains clearly how this country’s whole­hearted embrace of Hayek’s economic theory, based on the primacy of competitive markets, has led to the present situation. The importance that Hayek places on the principle of the ‘survival of the fittest’ ignores man’s intelligence, which enables/obligates us to transcend the law of the jungle.

Unless Australian governments take decisive action to reverse the current trend, we will reach the point at which not one-third but two-thirds of students will attend private schools. Public schools will become little more than detention centres ‘taking care’ of the poorest, most disadvantaged and worst-behaved children, and our universities will have completed their race to the bottom. Readers of Professor Marginson’s essay can be left in no doubt that the only way forward is to reclaim education as the quintessential public trust.

Willaim Riedel, Maranga, SA

Back on the warpath

Dear Editor,

Over the years, Peter Ryan has developed a reputation as a forthright commentator with entrenched opinions but a clear head. This makes his muddled review of our critical anthology of Australian military travel, On the Warpath (ABR, April 2004), somewhat alarming.

Ryan says of the book that ‘we are on the whole better off having it than not’, but warns that it is not ‘a suitable addition to school libraries’. Apparently it might corrupt our youth, owing to its ‘lack of balance and proportion’. What evidence does he provide to support this claim? The veteran of World War II, whose Fear Drive My Feet is one of the most enduring of all Australian war narratives, perceives a ‘certain underly­ing readiness to characterise Australian soldiers as loud­mouths and racists’. Admittedly, it would be possible to tailor battalions of anthologies to exemplify this negative stereotype. Nevertheless, the fact is that perhaps a mere ten per cent of the nearly sixty extracts that comprise On the Warpath could be so construed. Objecting to the quality and quantity of the pieces representing World War II, Ryan cites the unwelcome presence of George Johnston on the grounds that his war journalism was ‘partly a fake’, when the Johnston excerpt is from the celebrated novel My Brother Jack. Ryan’s general charge of the ‘political correctness’ – however ‘implicit’ – of our selections is as predictable as it is absurd. But his particular observation that Lily Brett’s description of a Melbourne Holocaust survivor’s return visit to Auschwitz is unfit for inclusion (in a section dedicated to accounts of war tourism and remembrance), because it is ‘neither military nor Australian’, is a surprising misprision to say the least.

As a publisher with Melbourne University Press and in his more recent incarnation as a critic and columnist. Peter Ryan has been a stickler for textual accuracy. There is no more implacable enemy of typos in the business. In his review, he admonishes us for not paying due attention to ‘elementary editorial matters’, remarking that it came as ‘a shock’ to see ‘Militades’ spelt incorrectly. We own up, and apologise for the shock – the Miltiades, the troopship that took Martin Boyd and many other young Australians to World War I, appears as ‘Militiades’ in the book’s introduction. Thankfully, it is accurately registered later in the book, in the extract from Boyd’s A Single Flame.

Typos and other niggling little lapses are, of course, an occupational hazard. No matter how diligently one tries to root them out, it seems impossible to eradicate them all – even in a small thing such as a 1000-word review. Yet it is disconcerting, in the response of someone with an indefatigable capacity for highlighting the factual failings of others, to read Ryan’s error-riddled account of the anthology’s contents. A couple of howlers stand out. He has ‘that doughty old war correspondent’ Banjo Paterson reporting from the Sudan, when Paterson’s dispatch stems from South Africa during the Boer War. (The extract’s title, ‘The Arrival of the New South Wales Troops in South Africa’, is a bit of a give­away.) Strangely, he calls the well-known novelist Georgia Savage, whose extract he likes because it is suitably patriotic, by the exotic misnomer ‘Georgia Savigne’. He quotes two sentences from her, and in his enthusiasm manages to make two errors of transcription.

We thank Peter Ryan for noting those elements of the anthology of which he approves. Both of us owe him a debt of gratitude for publishing individual books of ours during his time at the helm of MUP, books whose subject matter he didn’t necessarily find personally congenial. But we will leave it to more reasonable readers to judge On the Warpath is ‘a suitable addition to school libraries’.

Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce, Melbourne, Vic

Hsu-Ming Teo responds to her critics

Dear Editor,

Let me clarify my position again: I believe Australia’s Ambivalence towards Asia (which I reviewed in the February 2004 issue of ABR) to be a very important and timely book. Although I wish there was more discussion of the things we have got right in order to encourage reform – the carrot as well as the stick, as it were – I support and agree with the main arguments put forward by the authors where Australia’s internal and international race relations are concerned. However, there are very few books with which we agree completely; dissent on some points does not negate the overall value of this work.

Hideki Kizaki raises a number of criticisms that I find bewildering (ABR, April 2004). Firstly, I don’t believe J. V. D’Cruz and William Steele are Asian nationalists; I thought they were Australian and identify themselves as such. As to believing the authors and their work to be ‘doomed to inevitable disappearance in the near future’, my review stated that Ambivalence is an ‘enlightening, thought-provoking and desperately needed’ clarion call to reform, one which I very much hope will reinvigorate our society.

Furthermore, I’m not sure how my position ‘runs the risk of putting these supposed "oppressors" or "religious fanatics" or "the poor ‘ into a too-familiar binary category of the "inferior", "uncultivated" and "unenlightened" to the superior West’. I would argue that the dichotomy is created when the ‘compradors’ are set against Asian governments, social and religious conservatives, and the poor whose interests are conflated. At no point do I denigrate the latter, nor do I make mention of ‘religious fanatics’. I totally reject the categories of ‘enlightened’/’unenlightened’ as useless descriptors of cultures or societies.

Moving on to D’Cruz and Steele’s letter (ABR, May 2004): their objection to my remarks about Turtle Beach are fair enough. I stand corrected on this point. In Ambivalence, two chapters are given over to detailed analysis of Turtle Beach, in addition to about twenty-seven other references invoking the racism of the book as an exemplar of Australian attitudes towards Asia. So unremitting was the attack on this book that, although I was persuaded by the authors’ arguments, I felt sympathy for d’Alpuget as a well-meaning author. I accept Turtle Beach’s importance in terms of sales and its influence as a film. I only wish that, given the wealth of periodical evidence marshalled by the authors for other parts of Ambivalence, other texts could have been discussed to shed further light on Australian attitudes towards Asia. In my desire to see something positive salvaged for contemporary Australia, I would have liked to see how the new generation of cultural producers and academics might have balanced or ameliorated the attitudes presented by this one text, however influential.

My charge that ‘[i]n denying the intellectual "compradors" a say in their society because they have imbibed the value system of the West, the authors are guilty of ethnic or cultural essentialism’ has provoked the most disagreement. I agree with Kizaki and Boey Kok-Choy that this is a book about hybridity and the continuum of cultures, and the authors make a strong argument for these points. However, I still believe that to call Asians who espouse an agenda of liberal human rights ‘compradors’ is to take a position of cultural essentialism on this one point because it suggests that this agenda does not belong in Asia since it has its origins in the European Enlightenment, has been implicated in the European imperial project and is therefore a ‘foreign ideology’ imposed on Asia. Ideas can become indigenised over time if they are recognised to have sufficient worth or if they are regarded as a useful strategy. Look at religions such as Buddhism. Hinduism and Islam.

The authors would argue that it is precisely the case that this has not occurred with human rights; therefore new approaches need to be developed that arise from within ‘Asian’ cultures. I’m all for this. One of the most interesting sections of Ambivalence is where alternative approaches to human rights discourse are listed but, unfortunately, not sufficiently elucidated. In the meantime, why shouldn’t the ‘compradors’ try to achieve similar goals to these ‘homologous indigenous traditions’ if they believe liberal human rights can be an effective strategy?

I don’t believe I took the quote about ‘Third World compradors who will mimic whatever political garb is in fashion’ out of context. Firstly, the term ‘comprador’ (OED: ‘agent of a foreign power’) is a deeply negative, insulting term. While we are told that prominent Asians such as Cory Aquino, Marina Mahathir and Aung San Suu Kyi would be accepted as ‘liberal democrats’, they are nevertheless not ‘compradors’. The only ‘compradors’ who are actually identified as such are Nirad Chaudhuri (no argument here!), Shiva Naipaul and Kim Dae Jung. How, then, do we identify the ‘compradors’ except from their (unreflecting or self-interested) promotion of a culturally inappropriate human rights agenda? The authors offer the following definition in the endnote : ‘the intelligentsia – academics, creative writers and artists – whose independence may be compromised by a reliance on and identification with, colonial powers.’ All references to the ‘compradors’ are derogatory: they ‘frolic’ around and ‘mimic’ Western civil rights-espousing liberals; they are the West’s ‘subalterns and compradors on tap , whom the Koreans accuse of sadaejuin (flunkeyism), the most heinous of political sins’. I accept that D’Cruz and Steele do not intend to ‘deny anyone a say in their society, nor do we deny agency and authenticity to those individuals and groups who might prefer (certain) Western values’. But who could take the intelligentsia seriously after they have been reduced to ‘comprador’ status?

D’Cruz and Steele rightly accuse me of reading their book from a Western liberal human rights agenda, but it is precisely because of this agenda that I find myself taking their side on many issues: distorted reports on ‘Asia’ by the media, which reinforce racist representations; an ingrained attitude of superiority on the part of Australian political leaders to their Asian counterparts; discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations; refugees and asylum seekers; the use of human rights issues by Western governments to bludgeon other nations, coupled with a hypocritical unwillingness to submit themselves to the same standards of accountability; the list goes on.

In Australia, at least, we place the same value and worth on the same goals, even if we reach them by means of different theoretical routes. I applaud the authors’ courage in speaking out so strongly. If other intellectuals in Asia use the human rights agenda to fight for freedom of speech and expression, shouldn’t we support them in that endeavour? I’ll let Boey Kok-Choy have the last word: ‘Feel free to disagree with it: that is the essentialism of relativism. I’ll celebrate that freedom’ (ABR, May 2004).

Hsu-Ming Teo, Sydney, NSW

Seeing a ghost

Dear Editor,

Christen Cornell dismisses my novel The Girl in the Golden House (ABR, April 2004) as a culturally insensitive Western fantasy of Hong Kong. I was astounded that she used a well-intentioned hoax, published seventy-five years ago, as a benchmark for judging a contemporary novel. Within that framework, she then restricts her focus to my use of phrases and idioms to establish her case. She seems to assume that English-speaking Hong Kong Chinese do not use English idioms. Middle-class Hong Kong Chinese are educated in English and they use English idioms both when conversing in English and in Cantonese. Specifically, your reviewer attacks me for putting the phrase ‘you look as if you’ve seen a ghost’ into a Chinese mouth, a saying that has an exact Cantonese counterpart: ‘lei hochi geen-jor gwai gam.’ Neither does she realise that names such as Billy, Flora, Fanny, Emily and Lucy are very common Hong Kong names – which is of course why I chose them – but sees this as evidence of the ‘Enid Blyton’ nature of the book.

At no stage does she refer to what the novel is about – the turbulent politics leading up to the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, a time of confrontation between Western and Chinese values, and its effect on many Chinese families, especially that of my protagonist. May I compare her comments with those of other reviewers, who probably know more about Hong Kong than your reviewer? Christine Loh, a leading political activist and lawyer in Hong Kong, said at the Hong Kong launch and in a forthcoming review for Asian Review of Books:

Writing in another cultural voice is not uncommon of course... Biggs does it well enough. He has after all spent considerable time living and teaching in Hong Kong... For those of us who are from Hong Kong, the places Biggs describes in the book are well known and the familiarity brings a sense of identification with the story... The book is a jolly good read – better than a number of recent novels set in Hong Kong precisely because Biggs is able to evoke believable everyday local characters.

And Rosie Milne, reviewing for Hong Kong’s Sunday Morning Post (14 December 2003), wrote:

Biggs focuses on a time of vital importance to Hong Kong, capturing something of the anxiety, confusion, hope and expectation of 1997. His portrait of Hong Kong – its sights, smells, noise and confusion – is convincing, and his descriptions convey the beauty and the darker sides of the territory.

I can only suggest that ABR readers read the novel themselves and make up their own minds.

John Biggs, Sandy Bay, Tas.

Axes and encomia

Dear Editor,

Do I detect a subliminal vocabulary test in Peter Porter’s review of Jaynie Anderson’s Tiepolo’s Cleopatra (ABR, April 2004)? In four successive sentences we have the words ‘disputatious’, ‘tenebrous’, ‘phantasmagoric’, ‘ekphrastic’ and ‘encomium’ to destroy what otherwise is the mellifluous flow of the review. I suggest that there be a poll of your subscribers as to whether they reached for their dictionary either to confirm meaning or to find out how to spell ‘pretentious’ as they nominate the set for ‘Psued’s Corner’ in Private Eye.

Gavan Griffith QC, Melbourne, Vic.

H. G. Welles

Dear Editor,

Is it possible that in your generous notice of Meanjin (ABR, May 2004) your reviewer Roy [Robyn] Tucker has confused H. G. with Orson Well(e)s?

Ian Britain, Meanjin, Carlton, Vic