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

Reneto Arrap/Getty/Goodreads via Canva , CC BY-NC 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.

Goodreads 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.