Ross Terrill - Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square

Ross Terrill , an Associate in Research at Harvards Fairbank Center for East Asia, is the author of eleven books. He did history at the University of Melbourne and joined the Australian Army. He took a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard in 1970, where his thesis on the philosophy of R. H. Tawney was published by Harvard as Socialism as Fellowship. While associate professor at Harvard he taught political thought, Chinese politics, and international affairs, and wrote 800,000,000: The Real China ; The Future of China after Mao; Flowers on an Iron Tree: Five Cities of China , and the original edition of Mao. His other books include White Boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao ; The Australians; China in Our Time , and The New Chinese Empire. Terrill was visiting professor at Shandong University in Jinan, University of Texas at Austin, and Monash University in Melbourne.

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IN MEMORY of

Yang Bingzhang
19452020

Bruthen sits in a green valley 200 miles east from Melbourne, Australia. The sounds of a Bruthen night return as if I had just woken up there. The mellow chime of bellbirds. A sighing wind in the eucalyptus trees. My father was the head schoolteacher in this township of 600 people in the state of Victoria. My mother was an assistant teacher.

National events seldom touched us. Even Melbourne was far distant to a small boy. Our universe was nature, and a ragbag of local characters assembled by chance within its harsh but beautiful realm. In Bruthen, children came barefoot to school. My elder brother and I wore shoes only on Sunday for church. This was not because of poverty, but closeness to nature. Climate was benign. Paths of soft earth and green grass were gentle on our sun burnt toes. We learned to watch out for the occasional snake.

One day during family breakfast in 1941 the radio brought news that two Japanese submarines were in Sydney harbor. A worried look crossed my fathers face. What were the Japs doing so far south from Tokyo? A child of four does not understand war, but everyone in Bruthen believed the Japanese were dangerous. Soon, in 1942, Japan bombed our northern city of Darwin.

World War II gave the Australian Bush a new consciousness of Asia-Pacific. As a toddler, I was tossed candies, wrapped in foil of brilliant colors, by American GIs who arrived to resist Japan and defend Australia. We heard tales of the USAs wealth and energy. We also knew that China was on our side in the war. My mothers father heard a lot about Japans attack on China in 1937 from his Chinese friends.

Yes, in Melbourne of the 1940s, where my relatives lived, grandfather knew Chinese folk. He had taught English to merchants and workers in the evenings in the citys China Town. In these narrow, aromatic streets, descendants of Chinese who had come to seek gold a century earlier ran shops, restaurants, and civic organizations serving new arrivals from China. For many ordinary Melbourne folk China meant mainly the Chinese cooks and laundrymen in China Town.

On the walls of grandfathers living room in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena were two beautiful cork-carved paintings depicting south China scenes. Their camphor-wood frames of a rich golden color hung by a thin wire at a forward-tilted angle. Grateful Chinese from grandfathers evening classes gave them to him as a memento of his volunteer teaching. I often gazed at these pictures of lakes, pavilions, and hills, the cork landscapes set against a background of pale blue cloth. The smell was fragrant and old, quite unlike the plastic, modern smells of my grandparents home. I tried to imagine this land to Australias north. My elders told me only that China was old and big and in chaos.

It must be strange for Chinese people to read these thoughts on China from an isolated son of the Australian Bush in mid-20th century. That is how life proceeds. We come out of a particular environment; we learn of life in wider spheres; we try to make a unity from our background and our successive encounters.

Chinese people and Australia met each other because of gold. In the early 1850s as the Taiping Rebellion erupted and the Qing Dynasty fumbled the problem of an intruding Britain, Chinese sailed to Australia in search of fortune on gold fields. Earlier they had done so in San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands came. Soon 20% of the population at the gold fields of Victoria was Chinese. In one decade, thanks in part to the Chinese, the population of Australia trebled, passing one million.

Cooktown, a village in the far north, became the second busiest port in Australia, after Sydney, as boats came south from Canton (Guangzhou). Full of Chinese hoping for wealth from gold, the vessels passed by Singapore and reached Cooktown as the first port of call in Australia.

Today Cooktown (named after British explorer James Cook) is not much bigger than Bruthen. However, it has three large cemeteries from gold rush days. One for blacks (the original Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent of Australia), one for Europeans, as white people were called in Australia in the 19th century, and one for Chinese. When I visited the cemeteries in 1987, on assignment to write a story for the National Geographic , the largest of the three still was the Chinese.

Like everyone else who came to Australia, the Chinese arrived in boats. Tens of thousands of years ago, the Aborigines island-hopped eastward from western Asia and reached Australia. Later arrivals also got to Australia by sea, mostly through a roll of the legal, climatic, economic, or political dice. In part because European boats, by the 17th century, were superior to Asian boatsunlike in the 15th century, when China had fine ships but no desire to found coloniesthe long isolation of the Aborigines was ended by white arrivals rather than by non-white. The Chinese turned out to be latecomers.

Figure 1.1. Author with his Chinese girlfriend, c.1949, Bruthen, Australia. Authors sister photo.

A legacy in Bruthen of the gold rushes of the mid-19th century was Violet, a dark-haired, demure girl who attracted me. Violets father, the local pharmacist, was the townships only Chinese by the 1940s. As a primary school boy, I did not know that my first girlfriend was half-Chinese.

Children are not much aware of race. In later years, traveling in Sichuan Province, on another assignment for National Geographic , I would learn that Han (Chinese) and Tibetan village children did not care whether their playmates were of the same race as themselves. However, I wonder, today, what Violet thought of the notices, a common boast of quality and mark of Australian defensiveness in the 1940s that were branded in purple paint on Australian furniture: MANUFACTURED BY EUROPEAN LABOR ONLY.