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ARTICLES:
Eurasian Experience
Phenotype:
The Story of a Eurasian Australian Family By Michele Marsh November 2002 Author's
Note: My family began our association with Australia with Sir William Light. Unbeknown to most Australians, Light was a Eurasian who planned the city of Adelaide. William Light was the son of Sir Francis Light, who set up office for the British East India Company in the late 1700s, in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. Centuries later in 1980, and with many more racial additions to the bloodline, a very distant relative stands all of 5 years old at Sydney's Kingswood Smith airport with her family awaiting the arrival of a van to take them to their hotel. It is a cushioned landing into our new home. My father, a highly qualified civil engineer with a sponsored job in Australia, is able to settle his family in a space of a few months in a brand-new project home in Sydney's northwest. We are lucky. We came in the early eighties during the Asian "brain-drain," when the government was looking for skilled professionals and we avoided the Euro-centric Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, a.k.a. the "White Australia Policy." Fifty years earlier however, my maternal grandfather did not have such luck. My great-grandfather, an Irishman, was allowed to bring Uncle G, his blond-haired blue-eyed son, and his youngest daughter, another assimilable-looking child to Perth, but was told by Australian authorities that his Eurasian wife would have to stay behind in Singapore with his other two children: my grandfather, whose hue was significantly darker, and his sister, who was also an "unacceptable" coloring. This was a blow no doubt that added to my grandfather's already fragile psyche in his early twenties and who in his youth was the whipping boy for his Aryan brother. Being Eurasian for my grandfather was nothing more than a curse. He was a second-class citizen in his own family. His Eurasian siblings of more European characteristics lived life untainted by British social constructs in Australia during the late 1930s. My grandfather's migration to Perth did not occur until 1985, when my aunt sponsored my grandparents out from Malaysia and till this day his siblings who assimilated into mainstream Australia, have not and will not remain in contact with him. It never ceases to amaze me how institutionalized bigotry could have its effect on family dynamics and more so my family dynamics. Australia's socio-politics, however, left me unscathed in my youth. I was not punished by society in the 1980s for looking different, partly due to the fact that no one really knew what my heritage was and by that stage, Australians in Sydney were just getting used to people of Mediterranean hue. I didn't look Asian and yet I wasn't quite Italian-looking, not quite Maltese-looking nor Greek-looking. I grew up thinking, "I am Australian." I spoke English as my first language, had an Aussie accent and my friends were mostly Anglo-Celtic. I shared Sunday roasts, did school bush dances, played netball, went to school fetes and had sausage sizzles and became school captain. I was a regular Aussie. With my olive skin, dark hair and eyes, I probably stood out but those early years of childhood innocence cocooned me from reality. I truly believed in a "fair go" and "she'll be right mate." I thought these sentiments were truly what Australia and Australians were all about. But as an adult exposed to the reality of the forces of power and survival both domestically and internationally, I have become more cynical to who the real recipients of a "fair go" are in Australia. It wasn't until my late twenties when I followed the Aussie backpacker trail to England, Europe and America that I realized what and who was regarded as Australian to the rest of the world. There's nothing more truthful than a sentiment couched in jest, hoping the audience will receive it as a "joke." It was at a local pub with a group of Englishmen that the term "mongrel" from the colonies was used and in my half-drunken stupor, I laughed it off, only to wake the next morning realizing a missed opportunity to retort. In France, I was cursed by a taxi driver in Montpellier for being an Arab. In Asia, I was a "white devil" and treated accordingly, as I did not approximate anything that looked Asian even though my families' heritages spanned centuries in trade and British administration of Malaysia and Singapore. In America, I was treated as an "illegal ethnic alien." I had security guards following me in affluent shopping malls; I was searched at every regional airport through my travels in America; I endured derogatory comments and was even spoken very slowly to in English, less I could not understand what was being asked by a Texan tourist in Pyke Place Markets in Seattle. I was told by countless numbers of people that I didn't look Australian, and when asked what an Australian looked like, the bronzed Aussie lifeguard, Paul Hogan and Olivia-Newton John would get a mention. Our successful Aussie tourist advertisements, films, movie stars and singers, did nothing more than ostracize me as being Australian to the rest of the world. My experience in America, the country my friends and I so lusted after, was one that excluded me to the margins in its society and consequently questioned in me what and who was Australian when I arrived home. Using the common clichés, I did believe Australia was a kaleidoscope of colors, a rich fabric of migrant, indigenous and British ancestry that showed the world what an evolved modern society could be like. The realization that government and media in this country wanted nothing more than to keep Australia tied to its British ancestry and "assimilable types" and the struggles with our indigenous population became more evident from affirmations of others overseas as to who and what to them was an Australian. In Australia, these notions were prevalent in who was elected to run Olympic committees, who became famous singers and models, and which migrant population could enter politics and the police force without challenging ethnocentric sensibilities and the "norm." I had come to realize that in spite of the rich diversity in Australia, we are still a nation trying to hang onto bygone British colonial days, furthered more by the current government's political decisions and inertia to dim racist commentary due to "freedom of speech" albeit without social responsibility. I had lived in an illusionary world. I returned to Australia, realizing for the first time that I am a minority. The conservative politics my parents followed, the hard-line views on migrants my friends spoke of whilst sipping boutique beers at North Shore parties, were all facets of my existence that I comfortably engaged in without realizing I was like the pot calling the kettle black. In a sense, the teenage need to feel affiliated with one's peer group, and in my case a peer group that consisted of conservative private school girls, I was going along with their ethnocentric world views and betraying all the time who and what I was. I was accepted because I didn't question; I had learned the "easy-going" nature of what it is to be Australian. My intellectual curiosity sprouted in my late twenties and made me critically see the world and my place in it. My travels reinforced that being Australian was not as transparent as I had thought it to be in my youth. I have learned the heartache of my grandfather and so many like him who looked "different." In discussing my issues with close friends, I wish I had the ease to reply to someone like myself "I'm sorry but I don't understand you, I'm on the other side of it." What luxury and privilege to be in a society that embodies all one's identity, one's comfort zone and one's values and belief system; a society that actively promotes one's own sense of identity in positions of affluence, power and control. I am torn between wanting that simplicity and challenging the status quo to accept, to evolve and to change. Today I look at my niece and nephew, born in Australia; a mix of Eurasian with Maltese-Italian. My niece with her dark hair, eyes and skin is the antithesis to her brother, a pink, fair-haired, light brown-eyed cherub, representing the racial disparities in their gene pool. I wonder what their future will be like; if they will have a blissful childhood like mine only to reach an adult identity crisis in a country that is also struggling to define what and who is Australian. I hope we as a nation can focus on values and individual merit as I know existed in my youth and we can truly hold onto the concept of a "fair go" for all. I believe most Australians are down-to-earth, are compassionate people and can appreciate differences. But in recent years, political and social events have led me to hope that we do not follow other countries in over-emphasizing race and ethnicity in domestic issues. When will we learn the lesson that race and ethnicity have always been a convenient and simplistic way to categorize others, a way to govern, to rule, to hold power over and to give legitimacy to atrocities? How long will it take people to see that race and ethnicity are nothing more than social constructs based on arbitrary notions used by those who live in fear? When are we going to be governed by visionary leaders and not myopic, greedy, self-interested politicians? We need to develop critical analysis to become aware of ourselves first and then social maturity as communities. I live in hope that as a society, Australia can be based upon inclusion, that the basic condition for migrants is a healthy respect of what it is to be Australian, that the road to a harmonious society involves collaboration and compromise on both sides. Being Eurasian, I assume that I am privileged to understand these issues at a much deeper level than those complacent in their comfort zones. The time has arrived that phenotype can mislead our assumptions and stereotypes. About
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