Asian Studies Review. ISSN 1035-7823 Volume 23 Number 2 June 1999 © Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. APPROACHING ASIA, AND ASIAN STUDIES, IN AUSTRALIA ANTHONY MILNER Australian National University Although “Asian studies” as an academic field is currently under attack (particu- larly in the United States 1 ), this category of research and teaching may possess a certain added resilience in Australia. Increasing interaction between Australian and Asian intellectuals may assist such a resilience, at least if the concept of “Asia” continues to gain ground as a cultural and political ideal in the region: it is, after all, one of the seemingly ironic developments in recent years that just as Australians through persistent public education are becoming genuinely discriminating in their awareness of the Asian region, recognising the fact that there are many different “Asias”, members of the Asian elite themselves are invoking such notions as Asian values, the Asian way, and an Asian unity (Milner and Johnson 1997). The main reason that “Asian studies” is likely to possess a continued strength as an aca- demic category in Australia, however, has to do with the particular historical and social importance that the single word “Asia” has had for European Australians. Long before Asian studies was established in the education system of this country, the term “Asia” was a powerful signifier, first in a negative sense and later in a positive one. European Australians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expressed their strong fears about the danger of cheap Asian labour, the social damage which would result from the immigration of Asians possessing different cultures, and the threat to national security posed by the proximity of the “great and rapidly growing populations of Asia which already suffer from inadequate resources” (Burton 1954, 72; see also Yarwood 1968; Brawley 1995; Broinowski 1992; and Hancock 1930). In the middle of this century national sentiment began to shift radically. Particularly in the 1950s, Asian markets, Asian students, and Asian “friends and neighbours” (to cite the title of an important book of the time) began to be seen in the most positive way (see especially Casey 1958). The rhetoric of “Asia” probably reached its enthusiastic climax in the early 1990s, but the commitment expressed in the 1950s and 1960s to engagement with Asia is a reminder of the historical depth of national policy, including educational policy, at the end of the twentieth century.