Pandanus

One sun-filled Saturday in spring 2000, I wandered through Salamanca market, in and around the historic sandstone buildings on Hobart’s waterfront. After a long absence, I expected the arts and crafts, antiques, and books amid tourists and the local caffe latte set. What surprised me were stalls of beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables, grown and sold by smiling ethnic Hmong. The bright front cover of The Hmong of Australia zooms into that image of my memory.

It is pleasing to learn from sociologist Roberta Julian that, for Tasmanians, the Hmong ‘symbolise a new openness to Asia’. Yet it is disconcerting to be told: ‘Insofar as the Hmong are accepted as Tasmanians, however, their identity has become commodified, trivialised and marginalised … a superficial Hmong identity.’ Any more so than that of the Han Chinese and Italian vendors, who draw camera-clicking busloads to Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market? Or that of the colourfully clad Hmong minority in China’s southern Yunnan province, ancestral homeland of the Hmong?

In 1927 the London firm Chatto & Windus published a book titled A Chinaman’s Opinion of Us and of His Own People. Supposedly the translated letters of a young Chinese man, Hwuy-Ung, sent home during his years spent in Melbourne, the writing suggested itself to its European and Australian readership as a delightful take on their society as witnessed by an innocent outsider; an enchanting, amusing and unwittingly insightful journal of a sensitive and bewildered Oriental gentleman. Written by an Australian called Theodore John Tourrier, the book was eventually exposed as a hoax, a cheeky, vaudeville-style tease hamming up the image of the courteous and comical Chinaman.

Geckos and Moths is a time capsule. A note by the author, Patricia Johnson, indicates that the first draft of the book was written thirty years ago, after her partner had drowned in the Trobriand Islands. In many cases, a book begun so long ago and in such circumstances might best have been left in the bottom drawer.

Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.