(audience chattering)
- Ladies and gentlemen, can I call you to attention please?
Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
I trust that you're enjoying your entrees
and your mains are about to be served.
Ladies and gentlemen and special guests,
our next special guest tonight is considered to be
one of Australia's most prominent
and accomplished journalists
across print, television, and radio.
At the ABC and also at Channel 10,
she's presented and reported on national news
and current affairs.
She was of course, also the host of "Life Matters"
and "Compass" on ABC Radio for 30 years,
and as Michael mentioned earlier,
tackled these difficult issues of faith, spirituality,
topics like religion and ethics
with always relevance and meaning.
In 2003, she was recognised
an Officer in the Order of Australia
for her services to the community and media.
And it's my great pleasure and delight
to invite Geraldine Doogue, AO, to speak to you now.
(audience applauds)
- Well thank you, Heidi, very much indeed.
You get lovely sort of intros like that,
you remember Nicholas Tomalin,
who was one of the better known members of my profession
said "The only qualities necessary
for real success in journalism,
are a rat-like cunning, a plausible manner,
and a little literary ability."
(audience laughs)
So, I bring that with me with a small dose of humility.
Look at this, it's wonderful to be here,
in this lovely venue and event.
I think it is the first event (chuckles)
I've realised I've been to for a long time.
We were talking here about dusting off suits
and had to go to the dry cleaner and so on,
for this Lunar New Year celebration.
Among people who it seems to me,
are the active players in the so-called
Australia-China relationship or seek to be,
and most of you, I know quietly get on with that job,
all power to you.
There are people here who willingly enter the public fray.
Only the experienced and the brave and the impervious,
it seems to me these days, choose to raise their heads
above the parapets to argue that a better functioning
Australia-China relationship is surely
in our national self-interest.
Because as Jeff was saying earlier,
it has really become so very much harder in recent years
by comparison with earlier times.
What deep-seated scabs does this debate scratch
within the Australian psyche, given our history?
That's what preoccupies me,
and what I'd like to talk about tonight, or riff on.
How much does this drama play with our minds
in a way that borders on the neurotic?
A bit more than alert and alarmed,
to plagiarise John Howard.
It's as if the identity wars
have come rushing into this arena, big time,
pretty suddenly too, which has all been a bit of a shock.
And various people whom I had judged
to be rather cool cat commentators,
virtually compete these days to articulate
the most ghastly outcomes should we remain
naive, little ockers ready to walk unprepared
into devilish Chinese traps.
Now admittedly, a middle power like us
has to maintain constant vigilance
about the geopolitical scene.
Who will be our great and powerful friend into the future?
How do we thrive despite our fear of abandonment,
that wonderful phrase that Allan Gyngell coined
to describe an existential fear that he thinks we harbour,
and I agree with him actually,
about reliable allies should hostile forces gather.
I mean, Singapore's fall just on 80 years ago
sealed that one.
But given my ABC position, I can't really wade
into the outright politics of these issues.
I can choose to enter via the side door
to explore, to almost psychoanalyse,
what I think is happening within the commentariat,
my particular world, which I find fascinating.
Now, maybe I'm guided by some personal history.
My late mother, Peggy Normoyle as she was,
was born in Young in 1918, just up the road
from a place called Lambing Flat,
where there's now a lovely garden,
honouring the contribution of Chinese people in Australia
over many years.
But that horticultural beauty covers up a really awful time
in our modern history.
A 10-month-long agony in 1860, '61,
marred by shocking riots between Anglo-Celtic
and Chinese miners on the gold fields.
The worst violence on Australian soil,
other than the Frontier Wars,
vastly worse than the Eureka Stockade,
much more demanding for authorities.
And just to prove how little does change
in Australian politics,
it was bookmarked by simultaneous debates
in the Macquarie street parliament, just along the road,
about who had the right to enter Australia
and who would say they could stay.
But the interactions were nasty, they were vicious,
they left very long scars
and real doubts that Chinese and Australians
could ever work side by side.
There was real sexual tension and competition too,
because the essentially young male Chinese
arrived accompanied by very few women.
Well, they weren't really allowed in any way,
but in fact it's quite amusing to read through
some of the newspapers at the time,
as not infrequently, very poor women, white women,
often Irish Catholic girls, decided to throw their lot in
and marry Chinese men because they knew how to treat women,
unlike the brutes, the Australian brutes they'd experienced
in the rocks and the ports of Melbourne.
Really quite true, it's fascinating to read.
Gradually though, the Chinese chose to leave gold mining
and move to menial but vital jobs
that the Australians didn't want to take up,
market gardeners, cooks, bakers, laundry men, and so on.
So they weren't in direct competition
with native-born Aussies and that seemed to relieve things,
which I think is pertinent.
Toss into that brew some Chinese readiness
to work for less than half the existing wages on ships,
plus the post-war 1950s debates with displays,
you remember those giant arrows pointing down to Australia
from the east, amidst fear of invasion,
as well as the ubiquitous opium den references,
the mysterious separate Chinatowns
in so many of our settlements,
the persistent talk of opium dens and depraved practises.
And look, this was powerful imagery, about otherness,
going very deep I would argue,
leaving lingering, insidious impacts.
And we haven't even mentioned
the white Australia policy for instance.
Even reading some of the history's quite instructive.
The Anglo miners for instance,
this is just a little sort of side fact,
the Anglo miners liked to work individually,
or in small groups of mates to work the fields
and extract the gold.
It was hard, unrewarding work.
A lot of them failed in this sort of desperate bid
to win the lottery and change their fate.
The Chinese apparently came in big groups.
More accustomed to tougher life and privations,
they fanned out across the fields,
in a sort of military operation,
to winnow out the reluctant gold.
Were they successful?
It's pretty hard to be sure,
that's quite an interesting debate in historical circles.
What was clear was the bitter competition
among the different national groups,
all our earliest battlers.
That's the point, there were no rich people there.
Which I contend bequeathed us images and attitudes
as potentially challenging as the anti-Semitic tropes
in Dreyfus' time in France,
or as we've heard more recently in the Old Dart
right up to the present day.
After Calwell's famous, "Two Wongs don't make a white,"
quote to that year, it's funny but not,
to the House of Representatives, it was just one
obvious manifestation of this lingering suspicion.
And he was known to have a lot of Chinese friends
with whom he maintained private friendships.
He couldn't do so publicly though.
And by the way, I heard a gorgeous story the other day,
there's a new St. Kilda cafe called Two Wrongs.
And it's got a particularly burgeoning,
multi-cultural clientele, which is really rather,
I suppose that does show progress.
In my own state, in WA, a rather prominent labour man
and character, Alexander McCallum,
was completely unapologetic about racial differences.
My old UWA history professor Jeffrey Bolton
loved this quote of McCallum's,
"No matter where I eat in Perth,
I can always tell whether it's been cooked by a Chinaman."
And yet you could say ironically,
that Chinese food was the first non-Anglo cuisine
that many of our mothers mastered.
And going out to a Chinese restaurant at the age of 12
at the north end of St. George's Terrace,
if there are any West Australians here amongst you,
that was truly a highlight of my young life.
It was incredibly fast and sort of sophisticated at the time
to have the fried rice,
which you probably all would have hated.
I mean, we did emerge clearly
from the crudeness of all this,
but don't imagine that it didn't leave lasting scars.
It did seem to me though, for the 10 years prior to 2017,
and I reported this accordingly,
that many, many Australians were actively relishing
the exploration of the Middle Kingdom
and the People's Republic, not seeking full compatibility,
but being happy enough with a congenial mutual search,
which promised more was going to unfold.
That was the sense I had anyway.
We had splendidly impressive China scholars,
not that the broader population ever really sought
to find out about the history of China,
but things were moving in a positive direction.
Well, how much that has changed and so fast.
I truly find it astonishing, how in a sense
national debate sort of turned on a dime
with those security concerns triggering rational,
some definitely rational, but some irrational fears
that I thought we'd worked through as a people,
but I was wrong.
After all, I sat and listened
to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
deliver a typically stylish luncheon,
I gather he did this here last year,
luncheon address to delegates
at the marvellous Crawford policy forum at the ANU
in June, 2017, with the inevitable reference
to Thucydides Trap and how we had to
work our insides out to avoid it.
But the clear sense was then, I remember it vividly,
this was a game worth playing in.
Possibly the game that Australia faced, the true big game.
Then three months later I think it was,
came the various U-turns about China.
The initial "Four Corners: Power and Influence" programme
had emerged, if you can recall, and Pandora's box was open.
Within months the Sam Dastyari, Huang Xiangmao affair
broke on our television screens,
an absolutely devastating development,
I thought then and now.
Its ramifications still not fully grasped in my view.
And something big shifted, it just did.
People became comfortable with their fears.
If I had to summarise it that's how I'd put it.
They became comfortable with their fears.
Less inhibited about plumbing them,
unworried by prejudice they didn't even seem conscious of,
and I don't know that they could have named.
Well if they are, they certainly don't
articulate that out loud.
They don't, it seemed to me,
to express any doubts or reflection.
Maybe it's there, but I can't sense it.
A psychologist reminded me once in an interview,
that mere anger about others can be voiced out loud,
whereas prejudices tend to stay subliminal,
because we're partly ashamed by them.
It definitely began to affect my listening audiences,
in the texts I receive especially.
"You can never trust those Chinese."
"What sort of fool are you Geraldine?"
"Yet again, you refuse to see what's in front of your face."
"You and your mates," and so on and so forth.
And that would be sort of sort of casual remarks.
Then there'd be the big fears.
"We'll be overrun, so we might as well give in now."
Really big stuff.
And actually I routinely deleted them
because some of them were just so offensive
and I wish I hadn't, so I could read them to you now.
'Cause I think they would surprise you with their vividness
and their no-holds-barred stridency.
Maybe not, maybe a lot of you have experienced it,
but it was a shock to me.
But the consensus from within the media,
especially that from Canberra harboured few doubts,
it would seem to me, as any glance at insiders proved,
very little doubts about their analysis
that we were into this new world
and that it was a deep-seated, worry.
It left the Melbourne political scientist Joe Camilleri
wondering out loud whether China critiques
risked becoming a national pastime.
Remarkably little revelling too, it seemed to me,
or even dwelling upon the unseen,
behind-the-scenes influences from the United States,
which I would have thought
that some of the Canberra journalists
might've been a little bit perplexed by,
but I didn't hear it.
There has been push back, but mainly in the financial press,
which was then characterised as people merely defending
their filthy lucre, their investments.
I thought that meant Australian jobs,
I said once to a colleague.
That's certainly how West Australians feel I can assure you.
Had I fallen for a three-card trick, I asked myself.
Had I been groomed, as people sort of were suggesting,
been bewitched by the well-known ability of China
to weave its magic on westerners.
I did love exploring its history.
I'd visited three times, including twice as a guest
of the 33-strong Australian studies centre in China,
more than any other single country,
and my goodness wasn't that something.
Discovering venerable Chinese scholars
who turned their lives over to translating
and interpreting Patrick White,
who'd always overwhelmed me completely.
Well, look, I don't think I had been suckered in.
Though I will concede that due to the overt fears
being happily explored by my own profession
and a sense that there were influences there
that were not being named,
I did perversely resist a bit I realise, maybe for too long,
a full realisation of just how much Xi Jinping
has altered the rules of engagement.
I do concede this.
Although I did hear H.R. McMaster,
the great military thinker say in a webinar
earlier last year, that he couldn't quite understand
what was happening either.
I can remember he actually said, "He," Xi Jinping,
"must feel much more insecure than we realise.
That's the only thing I can make sense of."
It was quite an interesting thing from H.R. McMaster,
who's known to be a very good thinker.
I must say, I rather like the approach
of the ex-head of PM&C Martin Parkinson,
the other day at a Sydney conference.
I don't know how many of you saw it.
"It's not how we choose, it's how we balance.
It's all together different language.
It doesn't dodge anything, but it invites something more.
And that's what I'd like to see,
much more introspection from those with overt fears.
I don't blame people for having fears.
I just wish they'd name them properly.
And with platforms to expound them.
Do they see themselves somehow, I've started to wonder,
as faded inheritors of Churchill and his mates,
nobly warning, warning without being listened to
of a coming catastrophe in the '30s
that everyone other than them is an appeaser."
I had quite an experience some years back
that's never quite left me.
Of being at a small Admiralty House function,
I can't even remember what it is now,
at the invitation of then Governor General Michael Jeffery.
It was October, 2003, when Chinese president Hu Jintao
was hosted around Sydney after the APEC leaders summit
in Bangkok, on route to Canberra to address
the joint houses of parliament the following day.
I think we can all remember that amazing,
George Bush one day, Hu Jintao the next.
And from inside the house at my little function,
I saw the Chinese leader standing alone
on the shores of those beautiful gardens at Kirribilli,
gazing out over Sydney Harbour,
Gadigal land in all its majesty.
Just gazing around, mesmerised it seemed to me and why not?
I wondered then and now really,
what passed through his mind that day about us Australians?
I can't know of course,
but it was an awfully long way from Lambing Flat.
And somehow or other that trajectory
can't be a bad one for either country.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)