ABSTRACT
In a documentary entitled 40,000 Years of Dreaming: A Century of Australian Cinema (1997), director, writer and narrator George Miller (of Mad Max fame) boldly connects Aboriginal dreaming and songlines to the idea of Australian national cinema. Miller suggests that Australian films are the ‘whitefella’s’ public dreaming and the songlines that ‘sing us into being’. This connection is no doubt a contentious one, opening the film to charges of cultural appropriation and misattribution. However, what is equally conspicuous in Miller’s broad sweep of Australian cinema is that it is noticeably devoid of any representations of Asians in or of the national cinema. Asians do not fit comfortably into any of the film’s categories such as ‘the bushman’, ‘the convict’, ‘the digger’, ‘gays’, ‘wogs’, or ‘blackfellas’, to list a few of the film’s section intertitles. 1 Despite the proliferate categories for the nation’s cast of marginal characters, there is a reluctance, or an inability, to make space for Asians within such a seemingly leveling discourse of marginality. It is not that prominent films recounting the stories of Asians in Australia, or of Australians in Asia, do not exist. Rather, this silence is perhaps due to the fact that the Asian Australian relationship is one that is difficult for many Australians to dream or conceive of fully yet.
