As an immigrant from South Asia myself, I have heard with great interest the commentary on Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin win, for her third novel, ‘Chai Time At Cinnamon Gardens’. Much of the commentary has come from the author herself, in interviews which have been widely quoted by the print media.
The first phrase to catch my ear was the phrase ‘Trojan Horse novel’, a phrase Shankari Chandran herself used in describing her book. The phrase ‘Trojan Horse’ is generally used to describe the infiltration of a country or a site by an enemy who appears to be legitimate but whose ill intentions are disguised. The phrase carries connotations of deception, strategy and cunning. Used by the author of the book, it suggests that the book, set in an elders’ home full of senior citizens, may seem to be sweet and gentle, but is in fact full of very confronting material.
But it strikes me that the connotations of the phrase can also apply very effectively to successfully assimilated immigrants in general. Many people in countries which have taken in immigrants suspect the immigrants of being less than forthcoming, and more than meets the eye. They look different, and under their similarities of learned adaptation to mainstream culture, may think very differently from the citizens in their host country. This visible external difference, not being understood, can be seen to be a source of tension, unease and distrust.
And these differences need to be admitted and addressed, in the context of the upcoming Referendum on The Voice. Because immigrants and the right they have to speak up in Australia is also part of the public discussion about who is Australian, and how we can co-exist in a country which is founded on invasion and immigration.
Shankari Chandran’s comments at meet and greets at book clubs held in libraries and at literary festivals in the buildup to the Miles Franklin Award have been forthright and clearcut. She states that she was told by publishers in Australia that Australian readers would not be interested in reading about the lives of her South Asian immigrant protagonists. And she states that ‘this was really upsetting, and a repudiation of my place in Australia,’ and that it caused her to feel ‘rage’ at the complex situation in which she was placed, as a writer. Her upset and rage can certainly be understood, both personally as a migrant who ‘does not have access to her ancestral homelands’ in Sri Lanka, and professionally as a Human Rights lawyer.
Shankari Chandran is identified in Australia as a Tamil Australian author, not as a Sri Lankan author. And this distinction has been respected by the journalists who have interviewed her. Her family had been driven out of their country in the 1980s, and for her to call herself ‘Sri Lankan’ now would be to disrespect that truth. Her honesty and the balanced and judicious way she speaks about these matters, of ‘navigating race and identity every day’ in Australia in her life as an immigrant, has prompted me to do some recollecting of my own.
I’ve been thinking about ‘dark horses’ and ‘Trojan Horses’. When I worked hard to develop some basic skills in Maths, in 1981, I was awarded the highest academic accolade that a student could be given in my school in Year 10: Dux of the Year. I remember my Maths teacher saying to me, ‘You’re a dark horse, aren’t you?’
Years later, on a ferry trip from Holyhead to Ireland, a merry Irishman hailed me cheerfully as ‘Hey! Black Beauty!’ Neither teacher nor ferry man intended offence. But yes, to them in different ways I appeared to be a dark horse.
I think back to the former Australian Prime Minister known as ‘ScoMo’ and his phrase ‘Quiet Australians’, and the photographs shared on his social media showing how much he enjoys cooking Sri Lankan chicken curry (made famous on Master Chef Australia) for the women in his family, but whose political party blocked Sri Lankan refugees from achieving asylum.
I remember John Farnham’s song ‘The Voice’ and Moving Pictures’ song ‘What About Me’. Topping the charts for so many weeks, way back when. Let’s remember some of the lyrics of ‘The Voice’:
That song is part of ‘Whispering Jack’ - which remains the biggest selling record album in Australia to this day.
I remember how another ‘Voice’, the great soprano Joan Sutherland, described as ‘The Voice Of The Century’, expressed herself forcefully, when she was asked to have her passport and identity papers renewed by Asians, on the subject of immigration and its consequences in Australia, in 1994:
‘I used to have a British passport, and it really upsets me that I don’t any more. It also upsets me that it is such a damned job to get an Australian passport now - you have to go to be interviewed by a Chinese or an Indian. I’m not particularly racist, but I find it ludicrous.’
I register the Tampa Crisis and the ‘Children Overboard’ saga that swept John Howard and the LNP into power. ‘Refugees don’t look like us or think like us, or feel like us. They would throw their own children overboard, to get into Australia.’ ‘Tampa affair’ | Australia’s Defining Moments Digital Classroom | National Museum of Australia.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/tampa-affairYet, concurrently, information about the Stolen Generation, and the growing Reconciliation movement, made mainstream Australia begin to empathize with the First Australians. ‘We’re all someone’s daughter. We’re all someone’s son.’
I remember the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the uproar when Cathy Freeman chose to run in front of a global audience with the Aboriginal flag along with the Australian flag on her victory lap when she won the 400 metres. Cathy Freeman was warned not to carry the Aboriginal flag at the Olympics.
https://guyanachronicle.com/2020/09/27/442990/
I recall Yassmin Abdel-Magied, former Queensland Australian Of The Year, and how her social media comment on Anzac Day got her drummed out of Australia. The haters are still out there, and voting in this upcoming Referendum.
And how Stan Grant, speaking up recently about the late Queen and the colonization over which Britain presided, and its impact on his people, attracted so much hatred.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/20/stan-grant-faced-unrelenting-racism-fellow-abc-panellists-say-as-scale-of-conservative-coverage-revealedThe Voice Referendum is a significant moment for immigrants to Australia.
I have been thinking about how I, now a columnist in Sri Lanka for four major publications, both in print and digital media, never spoke up publicly about any of these issues while growing up in Sydney. As immigrants, we may wonder if our citizenship will be taken away if we criticize our host country, an uncertain status inhabited by many immigrants who were forced to leave their countries of origin by the prevailing regimes. Some wonder if they will be heard or read when they speak, or write. Others (depending on their specific cultural experiences) worry that they may be jailed or killed.
What are the lines of acceptable public criticism? Who is permitted to speak up, unapologetically? What happens to those who cross the lines of what is deemed acceptable? Many immigrants are living productively in Australia in preference to the countries they left, in which their human rights and dignity were not only suppressed but aggressively and continually violated. Australia, with its rule of law, and respect for democracy, less racist than the USA, less classist than the U.K., seemed like the best option out of all the so-called First World Countries. (Canada was too cold.) After the White Australia Policy was revoked, in the early 1970s.
In the light of all this, I was struck by Shankari Chandran’s forthrightness in the interviews she has been giving, associated with The Miles Franklin Award win for her recent book, and her honest exposure of the frustration she had felt when her first two books were rejected for publication on the basis that with South Asian protagonists they would ‘not be of interest to Australian readers... they were not Australian enough.’
Much has clearly changed, in Australia in the past decade. And if we look back on the last 25-30 years, we can see that the complex and conflicted attitudes many Australians hold on these matters can be seen in a series of public incidents and comments which we can all recall. Perhaps now we can view them not as a series of one offs, but as part of a pattern. A pattern which shows growth.
First off, let’s look more closely at the phrase ‘Trojan Horse’. It is an allusion to Greek Mythology, meaning ‘a person or thing that joins and deceives a group or organization in order to attack it from the inside.’ It carries connotations of infiltration, deception, cunning and strategic camouflage. Can immigrants speak, contribute, gain recognition in modern Australia untainted by these residual connotations? Or are we always to be slightly suspected, looked at askance, and seen as ‘dark horses’?
We need to look into each other’s faces, in a modern pluralistic nation. This is why Pauline Hanson pulled her offensively performative burqa stunt in Parliament. How can we know what people are really thinking, if we can’t see their faces? Can outsiders ever really be trusted? And can they be openly recognised as representing the best values of their adopted country?
How do we recognise and reward immigrant contributors to Australia? Is it merely ‘affirmative action’ when an immigrant individual of great calibre is awarded the Order Of Australia 20 years before their Anglo-Celtic counterparts? If people who were ‘here first’ feel comparatively unrecognized, are prizes and awards in a state of scarcity in the country of Australia? A country so prosperous surely cannot have a fear that there is not enough to go around. Can it?
When ‘What About Me’ hit Number One on the Australian Top 40 in 1982 it really struck a chord.
I remember the respected statesman Kim Beazley commenting to the media re: immigration that his mother used to say ‘there’s always room for one more’. A comment promptly mocked by some sarcastic bystander as having come to him in a pie shop, as Beazley was publicly attempting to address his own generous girth at the time with diet and exercise. Australian irreverence for authority, right there. But also a shared human understanding. Sometimes we all ‘want our share, we want more than what we have got.’
Growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, my generation was governed by Labor Party policies, presided over by first Whitlam and then Hawke and Keating, with their progressive opening of Australia to Asia, and the visible growth of multiculturalism. It was done at some speed, and too fast for many Australians, who felt unconsulted. This gap between public policy and individual anxiety was mined by Pauline Hanson and One Nation in the mid 1990s and ever since.
Winston Churchill is famous for his speeches. And in one of his famous statements, back in 1937, he said this:
This ‘evolutionary/survival of the fittest’ thinking was probably endorsed - silently - by many Australians who felt ties to ‘the Old Country’. But Darwin had commented on the ability to successfully adapt to changing circumstances as being the reason for the evolutionary survival of the human species. This is the challenge that modern Australia faces today.
One of my childhood friends, now a Supreme Court Judge, has a mother who once expressed to me her anxiety that the ‘Anglo Celtic values of Australia were under threat’, as a result of the increase in immigration. My friend said to me in response that her mother’s political opinions should not be heeded because they were prompted by whatever she had had for breakfast.
Some Anglo European Australians quietly complained to me that the suburbs of Sydney like Chatswood and Epping were now excessively populated by South East Asians, and thus not so pleasant to live in, any more, with all the rude, jostling, jabbering crowds.
Were immigrants bringing their violence and their societal problems with them? Were our neighborhoods changing for the worse, because of our own lack of enforcement of our rights, and our misguided generosity? Were we inviting in Trojan Horses? I listened, in silence. But I began to ask myself questions.
Did we ask where Aboriginal people were, when we were attending University in Sydney? We never met any. There were no indigenous students in the Department of English. Where did they live? Why were their settlements so remote? Why did so many have English names? Were they allowed to enter University on a quota? Were they getting accorded special status and access because of their heritage of cultural erasure and dispossession? My Asian Australian students reading Noel Pearson’s speech for their HSC English courses in the early 2000s did not know at first that he was an indigenous man. He was so eloquent. So loquacious. So articulate.
In the context of this collective uninformed ignorance, and despite the Howard Government’s refusal to apologize for or even admit to historical wrongs, and comments made about ‘black armband views of history’, the move towards Reconciliation got traction between the Bicentennial and the 2000 Olympics. Movies like ‘Australian Rules’ and ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ were made. Christine Anu, a Torres Strait Islander, sang ‘My Island Home’. Yothu Yindi sang ‘Treaty’. Midnight Oil sang ‘Beds Are Burning’, and Paul Kelly sang ‘Special Treatment’ and ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’. Songs of protest and celebration amidst a public silence.
At Graduate Law School at The University of Sydney in the mid 1990s, when the tutor mentioned the well-known aggression towards indigenous people shown by colonizers and settlers, one young man, a direct descendant of landowners, vehemently denied that such grotesque atrocities had ever taken place. Not on ‘his’ family’s lands, anyway.
And this was in the context of The Mabo Case, beginning in 1982, and being decided in 1992. Speaking of ancestral homelands. Where Indigenous land title rights were first claimed, and upheld.
In history class at school we viewed archival footage of a politician giving a man a handful of sand. It was a progressive school. We studied Asian Social Studies. And in Year 10 History, our teacher asked us to do a special interest project showcasing a world issue of human geography which had an Australian aspect. I chose Genocide as my topic. And the Australian section of the project focused on the treatment of the Australian Aborigines. Since I have lived in Sri Lanka, I see that the pictures of First Australians look very similar to those of the Veddas, the indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes of Sri Lanka. The Geopolitical and Genealogical experts will tell us this is because long, long ago Sri Lanka and Australia were attached geologically, linked with India in the supercontinent called Gondwanaland. But not many Sri Lankan immigrants to Australia today will be aware of that, or comfortable admitting that very likely connection, even if it shows in their own family photograph albums.
In Australia, in my opinion, human decency is the shared territory, the ground we all stand on. Solid Rock. Sacred Ground. Terra Firma. Because all of us understand what that means, whether we have lost access to our own, or had ancestors who have taken it from others, or are living on ground taken from the First Australians, in our suburban houses with our nature strips and community parks.
That decency I witness in the textured specificity Australians now show in referring to First Australians not as a homogenous block, but by their individual tribal identity names and respecting the specific areas in which they live and work, and acknowledging the elders that have presided there, in their Acknowledgments Of Country, in email signatures and in welcoming speeches. Respect which is not superficial is shown every day in contemporary Australia to cultural diversity, and to spiritual difference - when programmes are screened on television, and photographs or images of ancestors of First Nations people are shown. A warning is always issued, before the programme commences, to protect people who are viewing the footage from inadvertently experiencing pain.
The colonizing settlers did not all come from privileged backgrounds. In fact, many Australian settlers and immigrants like those escaping the Great Famine in Ireland in the 19thC were extremely poor when they first arrived, and had to effortfully make a life for themselves and their families in an alien country. Post WW2, many were refugees from Central Europe, seeking refuge from the horror of the Holocaust and the famine and displacement that resulted in those years. The Vietnam War just two decades later coincided with a major Sri Lankan civil uprising in the early 1970s. The Civil War there broke out just a decade later in July, 1983. So many immigrants to Australia have a lot of disruptive experiences in common.
In recent years, in response to mass displacements caused by war and famine, there has been a movement towards a tightening of immigration restrictions across the world. People have to prove they can contribute, have skills the country needs, and have basic understanding of the history and culture of the country, as well as the English language, before being granted access to all the opportunities of the Lucky Country. Indeed, how can an immigrant truly assimilate if they cannot speak or read the primary language of the country into which they are being welcomed? Australians do not like social welfare parasites, coming in to take but with no thought of giving or contributing.
And now that we are all here, chewing the fat, so to speak, how long does it take to see people who look like us on mainstream television, and being honored by being called Australian Of The Year? Who wins the Gold Logie? Who represents the best of us? Can an immigrant aspire to that primary status? First access, then inclusion. It’s a process. But is assimilation required from immigrants at the expense of ethnic identity? Especially when that identity has itself been attacked and eroded in an immigrant’s previous homeland? Not in Australia, in 2023.
We now have a Sri Lankan Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. I wonder what the late Dame Joan Sutherland would have had to say, about that.
In the old TV series ‘Kingswood Country’, I remember Ted Bullpit’s wife saying the entertainer Marcia Hines had ‘Vegemite on her legs’. And a beautiful girl I knew at school who was of Fijian Indian and German heritage, was described by a boy from a GPS School in Sydney’s North Shore in my hearing as a ‘bush pig’.
The First Australians were not forcibly imported from another continent, but were already here. In possession. In occupation. And they may have been far more developmentally sophisticated, as the ‘Dark Emu’ controversy indicates, than Australians have previously known. They were invaded, and active attempts were made to obliterate their tribal culture, and when the word ‘genocide’, used by First Australians is objected to by decent, ‘Quiet Australians’, it is important that the revulsion all decent people feel towards such gross inhuman cruelty is felt and endured, prompted by programmes such as ‘The Australian Wars’ which screened last September on SBS. And it is important that this confrontation of myths and received wisdom that results creates new understanding.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/18/dark-emu-story-bruce-pascoe-controversy-legacy-abcWhat is required at this juncture is a revision of where we are, and a re-evaluation of what we mean by sacred ground. What ground was never ceded, what was stolen, what was taken by force? Who in Australia has access to their ancestral lands? Who is allowed to speak of these things, without backlash? What common ground do Australians have today, and what common ground can we create? In the face of the hierarchies we have been introduced to in our countries of origin?
Nugget Coombs said Australians need to heal the fractured foundation of their relationship with the Aboriginal people. Or they would create a misshapen culture, with what Richard Flanagan calls an ‘inauthentic heart’.
Sri Lankan people don’t really make the news in Australia. Because of where they hail from, they are pretty good at avoiding controversy: trained from an early age to people please, and fulfil parental expectations. You see them everywhere, playing at being what a diaspora author described to me as ‘good little immigrant boys and girls’. You don’t hear them much. They are very polite guests. They often - in their home country - ‘sit in silence’. And they cannot ‘write what they want to write’.
Shankari Chandran said in an interview shown on SBS that she does not like her ‘gratitude being weaponised to silence her’, if she wants to speak up on issues that concern her in her country of choice, a place that she loves, and which is her home. She would not be able to write or speak the way she does in contemporary Sri Lanka.
‘Terra Nullius’ was an opportunistic concept and an outdated belief: overthrown as a guiding doctrine for legislation by the High Court in 1996. Australians have a history of challenging their own myths, and taking down even respected and lionized figures who have been found to have breached the rules of decency, high officials of the church and decorated war heroes included. I cannot think of another country which has investigated figures in their own public services and institutions and held them to account in such an admirable way.
Even the aforementioned former PM, the curry loving Scott Morrison, is being called to account for his conduct during his term serving in the highest office in the land. No one in Australia is above the law. We may all come from different backgrounds, but we agree to adhere to the same requirements of decent and responsible conduct.
Because of this, and because Shankari Chandran has now won The Miles Franklin Award 10 years after she was told books with protagonists and subject matter like that would not sell in Australia, I have hope that Australia will continue to progress. But this depends in part on the calibre of the public discussions leading up to the Voice Referendum.
The myth of the need for patriotic Australians to be ‘quiet’ needs to go, for starters. Since when are Australians cowering, hide-bound, compliant and conformist? We can see that people who speak up to challenge certain ideas often do so out of belief in a better future, one in which we can all be heard, and not only seen - and judged - on our appearance, and condemned by a one-size-fits-all stereotype.
Let’s agree in 2023 that everyone has the right to speak up, and speak out.
And that - in all fairness - there are now many ways of being Australian. ‘With the power to be powerful. Believing that we can make it better’. We do now have a ‘chance to turn the pages over.’ Listening to difficult historical truths from immigrant writers can help us listen to our own.
We can mend the fractures, and make the common ground solid.
We can make the common ground sacred.
And we can turn our natural human wish to ‘want more than we have got’ into a bigger wish for a broader common ground, and a deeper co-existence.
