‘You’ve got termites in the basement,’ said my friend the journalist after I poured out my story about the faltering capacity of Australian universities to teach and research about Asia. ‘Termites aren’t a story. It’ll be a story when the house falls down.’
‘But a large chunk of the house fell down on September 11,’ I said. ‘Another bit broke off when the club in Bali blew up.’
‘I don’t think newspaper editors see the connection,’ he said sympathetically, as one who suffers from editors.
As globalisation drags us into daily dealings with folk far away, you’d think that study preferences, educational policies and all those Thai, Chinese and Indian restaurants would lead to a steady diffusion of knowledge about Australia’s geographical and economic place in the world—that is, south-east of India and south of China, with more than half our trade flowing in those directions.
But you’d be wrong. In most universities, the vigorous but tiny base of research and teaching about Asia, built since the 1950s, is imperilled by funding cuts and restructurings.
Maximizing Australia’s Asia Knowledge, a report of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, illustrates the on-again, off-again quality of Australia’s attempts to understand its Asian surroundings. In 1988, when a push for ‘Asia literacy’ began, fewer than three per cent of Australian university students did any serious study of Asia. Maximizing Australia’s Asia Knowledge estimates that the proportion in 2001 stood at less than five per cent.
In areas like Chinese and Japanese language study, there have been increases—but from tiny bases—so that in 2001, no more than 9000 university students were studying Japanese and no more than 5000 Chinese. Students of Indonesian narrowly exceeded 2000. That means 16,000 in a student population of 830,000 individuals who represent Australia’s elite—the proportion of the population able to study at university. And a significant component were overseas students who would return to their own countries.
Study of regions like west Asia (the ‘Middle East’) and south Asia (India and its neighbours) have shrunk. In 1988, 15 universities taught about India; in 2001, only five. Five universities taught Arabic to a total of about 400 individuals. Hindi/Urdu, the second largest spoken language in the world, had a secure base only at the Australian National University (ANU).
Australia’s problem lies in creating an imagination that fits with its place on the globe. At one level, Australians have it too easy, sensing themselves part of an English-speaking, white-skinned