The New York Times, August 30, 1995, p. A17.
Australia Goes Pacific [Foreign Affairs column]
A 'wok' society flavored with environmentalism.
By Thomas L. Friedman
Canberra, Australia. Sometimes a government has to totally
misread the mood of its own people to fully appreciate
where the soul of the nation is on an issue. That was
certainly the case here when, after the French announced
plans for seven nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the
Australian Foreign Minister said the decision was
"unfortunate" but could have been worse.
The Australian public didn't think so, and it went on a
spontaneous rampage against all things French. The Asian
Wall Street Journal even reported that Australian
prostitutes were charging their French customers double
(Sacre bleu!). Since then, the Australian Government has
been scrambling to get ahead of the public bandwagon.
What's funny is that it was the Australian Government that
had built the bandwagon.
You see, the Australian public reaction against the French
nuclear test is not just a sign of the popularity of
environmentalism here. It is also a sign of how successful
Australian governments have been in reshaping this
country's identity -- from white, English-speaking and
Anglo-Saxon to multiracial, multilingual and Asian-Pacific.
Think about this: In the 1950's the British tested nuclear
weapons, *above ground*, in Australia's desert. At the
time, there was not a peep of protest here. Since
Australians thought of themselves as British subjects, they
didn't even consider their own backyard their real
backyard. They thought their real backyard was back in
England. Today the French are testing their nuclear weapons
at the Mururoa Atoll, which is 4,000 miles from Australia
in the South Pacific. But because Australians now think of
themselves as a Pacific nation, they are protesting the
French testing as though it were being conducted under the
Sydney Opera House.
Ever since Australia ended its whites-only immigration
policies in 1966, the country has been taking on an
Asian-Pacific identity, but particularly under the current
Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who has passionately promoted
multiculturalism. There are now 140 different ethnic groups
here, speaking 90 different languages, and of the 85,000
new immigrants each year the vast majority are from Vietnam
and China. The popular Vietnamese family name Nguyen is the
sixth-most-common name in the Melbourne phone book day.
Goodbye Crocodile Dundee, hello Bruce Lee.
No wonder Mr. Keating refers to Australia not as a melting
pot but as Asia's great "wok" society, into which all sorts
of ethnic groups are being diced and stir-fried for a new
Asian-Pacific mix. Go to a pub along the Sydney harbor, and
you are more likely to be served Indonesian satays, or
fettuccine with Thai sauce, than steak and kidney pie.
Australia's increasing Asian-Pacific identity reinforces,
and is reinforced by, its desire to do more business in
Asia. Eighty percent of Australia's trade today is with
Asia; 30 years ago it was 20 percent. American Express just
decided to put its new credit card service center for all
of Asia in Sydney. Amex chose Australia over other
countries in part because it offered a pool of employees
who could speak English and either Korean, Japanese,
Cantonese, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese
or Hindi. All Australian high school students today are
required to study either Chinese, Korean, Japanese or
Indonesian as a second language.
All of this adds to the desire here to break Australia's
last ties with the Queen of England, who is still,
formally, Australia's head of state. Mr. Keating, who has
declared that "We are not a political or cultural appendage
to another country's past," wants Australia to elect its
own president for its centennial in 2001.
Which gets us back to Australia's opposition to the French
tests. Historically, nations have tended to define their
political identity as something separate from their
environment and ecosystem. But for more than a decade now
the Australian Government has been imbuing its people with
a sense of pride in where they live, and building a new
political and economic identity out of that.
"Well," said an Australian environmentalist, Paul Gilding,
"the people have been listening, and that's why they are
telling the French to stay away. This may be the start of
a global trend; Australia's people are defining and
expressing their political identity through a commitment to
protect the environment. Now we just have to get that to
happen in the rest of the world."
[End]
