Friday essay: how Australia’s ‘invasion novels’ have reflected our cultural anxieties around race

This month is the 30th anniversary of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech to Parliament in which she declared Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians”.

It’s the 25th anniversary of former Prime Minister John Howard stating, in the wake of the Tampa Crisis, “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

It’s almost 16 years since then-Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock told Australians they “faced a national emergency because as many as 10,000 illegal migrants were planning to flood into Australia from the Middle East”.

I could go on and on like this, naming examples of political figures from the late 1800s to today who have relied on images of tsunamis, waves, boats, floods and so on, to paint a literal and metaphorical image of Australia as a large, underpopulated island perpetually under imminent threat of invasion.

And, of course, Hanson is back at it again, riding a wave of popularity and talking of an Australia whose “western values” are “under siege”. Her words are a vivid dramatisation of an anxiety deeply ingrained in the Australian psyche – and a large part of our literary history.

The “invasion novel” has always been a persistent and popular sub-genre of Australian fiction. In fact, one of our earliest novels was William Lane’s alarmist, didactic White or Yellow (1888). In this novel, white Australians are enslaved by Asians, after contemporary governments allow a large number of migrant workers into the country.

In a 2006 study, literary scholar Catriona Ross counted almost 100 invasion narratives in Australian literature. I’ve counted more than 40 published in the 20 years since. It’s a large body of work for a nation with a relatively modest publishing history.

The invasion novel is not unique to Australia. But Ross argues ours differ from those found in other world literatures due to their hysterical urgency and prophetic insistence that an invasion will result in a complete annihilation of white Australia.

The anxiety inherent in our early invasion narratives is made clear in many of their titles: Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave (1895), C.H. Kirmess’s The Australian Crisis (1909), G.D. Mitchell’s The Awakening (1937), Erle Cox’s Fools’ Harvest (1939). Ironically, these were written at a time when Australia was quite a new settler society, itself born of invasion.

The prevalence of such narratives, particularly in our early literature, suggests the idea that we are a vulnerable nation, perpetually in danger of a loss of sovereignty, is one of our strongest founding mythologies and key to our national identity.

As one of Australia’s most experienced diplomats, Alan Renouf, argued in his book The Frightened Country, “an unreasoning fearfulness is central to Australia’s relationship with the rest of the world”.

Though most early invasion novels fall into the sci-fi/fantasy genre, the scenarios they explore are presented as believable and realistic. They were hugely popular, helping incite nationalism and resistance to the Asian “enemy” among a wide audience.

Lane’s novel White or Yellow, for instance, became a kind of bible to Australia’s first trade union movements in the late 1800s, who opposed non-white workers as an economic threat to working-class Australians.

His novel is widely cited as helping to popularise the White Australia Policy, which came into effect not long after its publication.

Security as our anchor

Around the time of the second world war, the invasion novel became more complex. One such work was Marjorie Bernard and Flora Eldershaw’s 1947 novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published under the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw. Though it would go on to gain a cult following, the novel received mostly negative reviews at the time of its publication, partly due to its authors’ communist leanings.

The novel is set in the 24th century. Much of the action looks back to an alternative WWII in which Australia withdraws from the war and is invaded by a fascist international coalition of former Allied countries, including the United States and Britain.

Bernard and Eldershaw’s book is deliberately provocative and was subject to heavy government censorship. It’s hard to do justice to such an unwieldy beast of a work in a short space but what’s interesting about it to me is its commonalities with the invasion novels published more than 50 years earlier.

It’s undeniably less overtly racist than a novel like White or Yellow but the novel still belongs to a time when Australians of European heritage were trying to work out what it meant to be Australian and to have a distinctive Australian culture and literature, apart from Britain.

Eldershaw and Barnard are thinking through this question in the writing of this book. What their answer has in common with the canon of invasion novels is its emphasis on the idea that security is not merely an economic or political problem but the anchor and contested site of Australian identity.

80s and 90s anxieties

A particularly large number of invasion novels were published in the 1980s and 1990s, most famously John Marsden’s bestselling Tomorrow, When the War Began series. This collection of seven young adult novels is about a group of teenagers who return from a camping trip to discover Australia has been invaded by a foreign power.

They must fight against the invaders to save themselves and their nation. The invading forces are originally not identified. Later in the series, they are described as a coalition of Southeast Asian nations keen to take our food, water and natural resources and occupy our “underdeveloped” land.

In recent years the series has been the subject of criticism for promoting anxieties about immigration and border control. Marsden himself said in 2018, “I wouldn’t write that book now – not because of a societal view but because of my own horror at the way refugees who have come to Australia have been treated.”

Invasion novels of this era seemed to reflect fierce public and political debates regarding multiculturalism, economic restructuring, and national identity, particularly the public panic over “Asian Gangs”. At its peak, during the recession of the early 1990s, polling indicated over 70% of Australians felt migration levels were too high. The arrival of migrants, especially from Vietnam and China, had necessitated different ideas about what it might mean to be Australian, which were challenging for some.

However, positioning Australia as a country under threat of invasion simplifies complex issues. It also gives Australians of European heritage an Indigenous status as the ones who, in Hanson’s words, need to get “their country back”.

Many invasion novels published during this time fell out of print but have recently become available again through Kindle Direct. They include titles such as An Act of War by Michael O’Connor (1990). In this novel an imaginary conflict between India and Australia means the Cocos Islands, off our mainland, are invaded by India and face the threat of annexation.

This book and others, such as Below The Line by Eric Willmot, return to the age-old theme of Australia being invaded by Asia and the Middle East. They are much discussed in historical novel communities online through mediums like Reddit.

The post-9/11 era

Arguably Australia’s first post 9/11 invasion novel was Andrew McGahan’s Underground (2006). A deeply fascinating, if not entirely successful work, it was a response to Howard’s “turn back the boats” policies.

In Underground, Australians are so anxious about an imminent invasion they hand over their democratic rights in exchange for the illusion of safety that comes with security checkpoints, citizenship tests, identity cards and detention without trial.

The catch is that in order to justify its policies, the Australian government is staging fake invasions here to keep stoking everyone’s fears. Consequently, a plethora of terrorist and counter-terrorist groups battle it out in every corner of the nation.

Underground reflects a new wave of invasion novels creatively confronting what anthropologist Ghassan Hage has labelled our paranoid nationalism.

One of the most unique examples of these books is Pat Grant’s 2012 graphic novel Blue. It is, in the most literal sense, extremely graphic; it begins with images of strange, blue, octopus-like figures arriving by boat. These creatures are subsequently beaten and noosed by people who find them on shore.

The story then moves to a montage of exaggerated images of a 1950s-style “safe” suburbia. This suburbia is later obliterated by the blue foreigners who take over and trash the place. Locals respond by installing security cameras everywhere and signs saying things like, “Fuck off. We’re Full.”

The images are designed to make us feel uncomfortable, partly because the rhetoric and the imagery are so familiar.

Enter Heather Rose’s 2019 novel Bruny. The premise of the book is essentially that China has conspired with the Australian government to buy Tasmania. After forcibly removing all the Australians, Tasmania will be used as a food bowl for China and a base to further colonise places such as Antarctica. The government stages a terrorist attack on a bridge connecting mainland Tasmania to Bruny Island, using it to justify flying in hundreds of Chinese workers to rebuild the bridge. These workers will eventually begin the takeover.

While some have seen the novel as satirical, others have criticised it for reproducing tired, racist tropes. Namely, that the Chinese will steal our jobs, food, water and land. Reviewing Bruny, critic Anne Barnetson suggested much of the dialogue “uncomfortably resembles the paranoid rants of xenophobes”.

Michelle de Kretser’s 2021 novel Scary Monsters is hyper aware of the politics and history of invasion novels. Unlike other novels exploring these anxieties, de Kretser uses an experimental structure to connect Australia’s fears around migration to similar anxieties elsewhere.

One half of the novel is told from the point of view of a young South-Asian Australian woman named Lili. While travelling though France, she repeatedly witnesses the harassment of North African migrants being herded off into police vans.

The other half of the novel is set in a futuristic Australia and centres the perspective of a man called Lyle. Even though he is a migrant himself, from “a troubled land”, he works for a governmental body called The Department. In his job, he contributes to identifying unlawful citizens, mostly migrants of Muslim origin or ones who demonstrate an inability to completely assimilate. This job makes him complicit with the police state.

In this book, de Kretser is also unpacking the complicated positions migrants and people of colour can hold in relation to Australia’s security fears.

As many commentators have noted, there is some support for the anti-immigration politics of parties like One Nation among migrant communities. This is particularly the case among voters from earlier waves of immigration. These groups can favour stricter migration caps out of economic concerns or a desire to limit other migrants who they see as holding different values to them.

As Christos Tsiolkas bluntly wrote in The Monthly in 2013, “the wogs are one of the hardest communities to make understand that asylum seekers are neither danger nor threat […] maybe it speaks to a certain success of multiculturalism”.

In my own invasion novel, No More Boats (2017), I tried to explore this complicated territory through the story of an Italian migrant, Antonio, who becomes enamoured with a local, far-right anti-immigration party. Migrant fear can manifest itself in complicated ways because their need for security often arises from the trauma of their own journey.

The migrants’ quest to secure their territory to the detriment of other migrants is a way of confirming their sense of belonging to their new nation. As Hage argues, “Race and race debates are not about racism itself but about who owns the nation.”

Each wave of migrants denies the exclusivity of the one before. The older migrants can feel devalued or threatened by the newer ones.

Still, despite these more questioning works such as de Kretser’s and McGahan’s, a more paranoid strand of populist invasion novels continues to resonate on Kindle Direct.

B.C. Coleman’s 2016 novel A Line too Far, in which Chinese commandos seize Northern Australia, has had almost 800 reviews on Amazon. Many reviewers implore “every Aussie to read it”, as a warning of “what could very realistically happen to us”.

Ultimately, I think the invasion novel of the future just might be one of best vehicles for considering the price we pay for allowing our fears to dictate what it means to be Australian.

It might ask, as political scientist Anthony Burke does, “whether things had to be this way: what other forms of being, identity and interrelationship might be imagined once the suffocating political embrace of security is escaped”?