From Indonesia To Australia
The first thing that we noticed when we travelled from South-East Asia to Australia was a quite remarkable drop in the number of Asian people.
Everywhere you see European faces, English street names and pubs and meat pies, Greek restaurants, and Italian cafes. 30% of Australians claim Irish ancestry. John Howard visited Dublin this week and said "coming [to Ireland] is part of the journey of being an Australian Prime Minister."
It only takes a few days to sail from Indonesia to Australia. Intrepid researchers have shown that the first Australians could have drifted there from Timor on bamboo rafts. Aboriginal Australians had been trading with people from Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for a thousand years before Europeans stumbled across the great southern continent. Some Aboriginal people may have been living in Indonesia in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived.
But today there are no passenger ships that sail from Indonesia to Australia. There aren’t any cheap flights either. Terrorism is one factor, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon and not confined to Indonesia.
Here’s another way of looking at it. About 8 million people migrated from Mexico to the U.S. between 1990 and 2002, just counting the ones who filled in a census form. In the last ten years, only thirty thousand people have migrated from Indonesia to Australia. Allowing for the big difference in total population, that’s still twenty Mexicans entering the U.S. for every Indonesian who entered Australia.
I am not suggesting that America’s current relationship with Mexico is a model for Australia to follow (much less the EU’s relationship with Turkey and North Africa). I am just pointing out that the cultural distance between Australia and her nearest neighbors is much, much greater.
A celebrated book, The Tyranny of Distance, claims that the history of Australia has been driven by its sheer remoteness; geography is destiny, etc. etc. As if the country had only recently moved in next door, Indonesia is not mentioned until page 224. I asked a bookseller in Melbourne if he could recommend any books on Australia’s relationship with Asia. He laughed, and said nobody has written such a thing. (He was wrong, but there isn’t much. One book is simply titled The White Tribe of Asia.)
Australia - or at least its current administration - sees America as its most important partner in the world. By sending just 6,000 troops to Iraq, John Howard has minimized political risk at home while winning himself a state dinner at the White House. That’s a big deal - the Chinese President only got lunch.
But most Americans know less about Australia than they do about Europe, and that’s not much. Australians seem to realize that their most important relationships in the future will be with South-East Asia and China. But the gulf seems a lot wider than the Timor Sea.