Review of 'The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian Story' By Peta Stephenson. Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2007. 250 pp. Softbound, $30.00.

Abstract

Voices, performances, novels, playscripts, poems, memoirs, re-enactments, all telling stories about past and present relations between Aboriginal people and Asians in Australia - these are at the core of Stephenson's 'The Outsiders Within'. Oral histories are an integral part. Included are interviews the author conducted, the use of interviews others conducted, and the ever-present reality that the stories retold in the book could only be collected through listening, hearing, and sharing memories within and across communities. And Stephenson presents the stories for a clear purpose: they join a growing body of studies and other cultural products that challenge, reconfigure, and even upend established orthodoxies about the boundaries that, in Australian life, have kept Indigenous, Asian, and European Australians in separate compartments. This is a book that relates the dark history of Australian racism and discriminatory practices. There are stories of children taken from parents, fathers deported or interned, and women sexually exploited. There are stories of the blinkered and insensitive administration of discriminatory legislation and of equally blinkered and insensitive attitudes and behaviors. And there is an emphasis on the continuity of these from the early days of the European presence through to 2006.