ABSTRACT
It was only two decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, that popular Western images of Southeast Asia were dominated by rice fields and peasants, military coups and generals. In many ways this was not an unreasonable representation of the social and political realities of the times. However, it is some measure of the rapidity with which changes have taken place in the intervening period that these old icons have been replaced almost entirely by new ones in which factory workers and businessmen, politicians and traffic jams are the central images, at least in Australia, which is the most sensitive barometer of the Asian region in the so-called West.
