The High Road to the Near North: Origins and Development of Sinology in Australia

Abstract

The development of Sinology in Australia was contingent upon, and serves as a lens through which to view, a number of transformations to Australian society in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as the country sought independence from the “Mother Country,” Great Britain, and reoriented itself towards Asia. These include Australia's first forays into independent international diplomacy and the introduction of the Ph.D. degree and postgraduate research in the university system—culminating in the first Australian postgraduate work on China in the 1950s. While government support has always been crucial to the enterprise, from the early years until today scholars have defended the Chinese humanities against the utilitarian “national interest” proclivities of governments. Adopting a broad definition of Sinology, one which encompasses post-war trends in “Chinese Studies,” this article surveys the universities that have been important to Sinology, the scholars who worked in them and the ongoing challenges to the discipline.

Introduction: The Post-War Institutional Setting

In the “Chinese Studies” section of a 1998 government-sponsored report on the state of the humanities in Australia, Beverly Hooper, then head of the School of Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia, wrote that: “Australian scholarship on China originally developed along the lines of the Oxbridge Sinology model, paralleling the integrated approach of the (European) Classics and focusing heavily on the acquisition and use of advanced text-reading skills as the basis for scholarship in the traditional humanities areas of literature, philosophy and history.” This Oxbridge Sinology model “provided the basis for Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney since its inception in 1918 as Australia's first university Chinese program,” and was later also instituted at the universities of Melbourne, Queensland, and “to some extent” at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Hooper continues: “A second development, particularly at … the newer universities established in the 1960s and 1970s,” saw a “shift towards modern and contemporary studies, with Chinese language and studies being part of new departments of Asian Studies.”¹

This is a bafflingly inaccurate description of the development of Chinese Studies in Australia. Hooper does not define what she calls the “Oxbridge Sinology model” that was apparently introduced at Sydney in 1918, but her summary seems to imply that Sinology in Australia developed along similar lines as it did in the European and American academy. Namely, that it began with a basis in traditional European Sinology (or hanxue 漢學) concerned with the interpretation of texts (“philology concerned with the linguistic remains of China—that is, with Chinese texts,” as Edward Schafer memorably defined it), and then shifted towards a modern discipline-based approach to pedagogy and institutional organization known as “Area Studies” (and, within this, Asian Studies) that became popular after World War II, especially in the United States.² As a part of Asian Studies, Sinology was subsumed within “Chinese Studies” (Zhongguo xue 中國學 or Zhongguo yanjiu 中國研究), and both the traditional and modern languages are taught and practiced alongside academic disciplines such as history, anthropology, linguistics, and other political and social sciences.³ However, as with all aspects of politics, culture and learning in Australia, to imply such a distinction based on European and American prototypes is misleading.

In the first place, there was never an exclusively “classical” Sinology pedagogy in Australian higher education or research (an “Oxbridge model” or otherwise), not at the University of Sydney from 1918 nor at any university thereafter. The 1918 program to which Hooper means to refer was in fact a chair and professorship of Oriental Studies in Sydney's Faculty of Arts, specifically intended for the teaching of the Japanese language. Commercial groups in Sydney had long advocated for Asian languages to be taught at the university. But the main motivation for the appointment was the military preponderance of Japan in Asia: it was funded mainly by the federal Department of Defence and connected to a Japanese language training program at the Royal Military College at Duntroon, Canberra, which aimed to train army cadets in deciphering Japanese communications. This was part of what the historian Neville Meaney called Australia's “cold war” against Japan during World War I. While engaged in a “hot war” in Europe, where Australians fought “as a British people [who] saw their own welfare, both cultural and strategical, linked inextricably to that of Britain and the British Empire,” the “cold war” against Japan entailed Australian intelligence services, acting independently of London, anxiously gathering information on Japan's military and the views of its leaders.⁴

The curious circumstances of the Sydney appointment have become something of a legend in the history of Asian Studies in Australia. In 1916 the federal Department of Defence cabled London and the British embassy in Tokyo, asking for advice about an appropriate candidate for a language teaching position. Disguising the security concerns behind the appointment, the request was expressed in terms of meeting “growing commercial relations between Japan and Australia,” and while the prospect of a teaching position at “an Australian university” (Sydney) was mentioned, the Japanese program for army cadets was not.⁵ After a brief search, in March 1917 James Murdoch, a Scottish-born historian best known for his multi-volume History of Japan, who had taught for more than twenty years at leading Japanese preparatory schools and universities—one of Murdoch's pupils was the later-renowned modern novelist, Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石⁶—arrived at the Royal Military College to commence language instruction to army cadets. At first compelled to base himself in Canberra and commute to Sydney for teaching two days a week, Murdoch returned to Japan in 1918 and 1919 to recruit native speaking tutors for the Duntroon program, thus freeing up more of his time to concentrate on Sydney.⁷

Murdoch's enthusiastic, however brief, advocacy for Australian engagement in Asian affairs is evident in his 1919 inaugural lecture, Australia Must Prepare. While his job was to teach Japanese language and introductory Oriental Studies courses covering “Japan, with the privilege of an occasional excursion in China, Central Asia, and India,” Murdoch clearly hoped to expand the program to include Chinese language and more advanced China-related undergraduate coursework. Even in the midst of war, he noted, universities in the United States and Europe had found the inspiration and funding to inaugurate chairs in Sinology. And despite the “brutally materialistic” grounds behind his appointment—again, Murdoch spoke at length about the potential for trade with Asian countries, without mentioning his secretive military activities—he hoped that Oriental Studies would foster in his students an appreciation for common humanity:

In America and Europe there are now more than a score of professorships of Chinese. Two were to be instituted in the new German Universities at Hamburg and Frankfort in 1914, while in 1916, right in the middle of the great war, there were said to be one hundred students of Chinese and twenty of Japanese in Berlin University. … [and] university tuition in Chinese is free for any German student who may choose to take it up. There are some half-dozen chairs in Great Britain.

…

So far we have been considering the position [of China] not so much on utilitarian, as on brutally materialistic grounds. But on the higher utilitarian grounds, there is also a great deal to be said. Anything which can satisfy a human want or desire is not devoid of utility; and to some few select souls the most imperious of desires is the craving of knowledge merely for its own sake. If we are to accept Matthew Arnold's rather odd definition of criticism—a disinterested endeavour to know the best that is known and thought in the world—we shall find ourselves constrained to admit that there are several things in the vast and voluminous literature of China which we cannot afford to ignore.⁸

Unfortunately, Murdoch's vision for a properly supported Oriental Studies department, one which would include the study of China, was cut short. He passed away in 1921 after just three years at Sydney, and the chair then passed to Arthur Lindsay Sadler, an Oxford graduate, who would remain in the position until 1947, keeping the ailing program going despite the withdrawal of support from the government (as discussed below).⁹ Furthermore, the security concerns that had motivated Murdoch's appointment in the first place soon dissipated, as the bipartisan 1902 Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty—which had been the source of Australian security concerns about Japan for some twenty years—was supplanted by much more reassuring regional strategic structure. With the establishment of the League of Nations in 1920, and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922—a multilateral agreement on collective security and arms limitation signed by Japan, Britain, the United States, France, and Italy—Japan now appeared to be much less of a threat. In parliament the minister for Defence, George Pearce, who had been among the original proponents the Japanese language program at Duntroon in 1916, declared that Australia had entered a new age in its relations with the “Far North.” He confessed to having “suspected Japan and her intentions in regard to the Pacific” in the past, but declared that Japan was now “peaceful,” and determined to avoid “isolation from the rest of the world,” as had been Germany's fate. In April 1922, the Prime Minister's Department told Defence that: “The Washington Conference has now brought about a great change in our position relatively to Japan. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the treaties made at the Conference, there can, I think, be no doubt that the detailed study of Japanese affairs which we contemplated in 1920 is, for the next few years at least, quite unnecessary.”¹⁰

Even though no Sinological work took place at Sydney's Department of Oriental Studies during the interwar years, below we will briefly revisit the department to show the extent to which it had declined by the late-1940s, the better to observe the monumental expansion in the study of Asia that began after World War II. Sydney's experience gives context to the beginnings of Chinese library collections from 1950 (albeit at the ANU in Canberra), as well as to the interwar origins and post-war revival (also at the ANU) of the George E. Morrison Lecture in Ethnology, the most important public lecture in the Australian Sinological calendar. Sydney also offers a cautionary precedent about the inherent problems for Asian humanities in an education system which is almost entirely state-funded, and beholden to what the government of the day perceives to be in the “national interest.” But it was not until 1955 that Chinese started being taught alongside Japanese at Sydney—and with “equal emphasis being placed on the classical and modern languages.”¹¹ Programs for Bahasa Indonesia and Malay would follow two years later, supported by Commonwealth grants to establish departments of Indonesian and Malay Studies at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and at Canberra University College (CUC), a branch of the University of Melbourne established to train public servants in the fledgling capital city, which in 1960 would amalgamate with the ANU.¹²

In 2002, the University of Melbourne organic chemist and science historian, Ian Rae wrote that “Australia's struggle to disengage from its colonial parent extended over many years and took many forms,” with “the 1939–1945 war accelerat[ing] Australia's progress towards independence in many fields, including the judiciary, defence and foreign relations, manufacturing and education.”¹³ Indeed, in the fields of defense and foreign relations especially there is a vast literature on moves to independence from the “Mother Country” and belonging in Asia; an entire subfield of what might be called the “history of Australian perceptions of Asia” has charted the vicissitudes of loathing and admiration in politics and society.¹⁴ The present author has explored at length Australia's first forays into independent diplomatic representation in the 1940s, and the role of Australia's first diplomatic ministers to China, Frederic Eggleston, who served in Chongqing during World War II, and Douglas Copland, who served in Nanjing from 1946–48, before returning to Canberra to take up a position as the inaugural vice-chancellor of the ANU, in introducing the study of China at the infant ANU in the late 1940s. It was Copland who invited the English Sinologist, C.P. Fitzgerald, whom he had befriended in Nanjing, and whom it might be argued was the founding figure of Sinology in Australia, to the ANU in 1950.¹⁵

But in drawing attention to the broad range of changes to Australian society that resulted from the war, Rae is in fact setting up a discussion of education reform, in particular the introduction of the Ph.D. and higher degree research in the education system. This issue has seldom been considered in discussions of the Asian languages and humanities in Australia (Beverly Hooper's summary of Chinese Studies does not seem to be attentive to it). But in making sense of Australian Sinology in relation to other national traditions of Sinology, the post-war expansion in higher education generally, alongside the advent of Sinology specifically, seems especially important to the discussion.

Australian higher education before and after World War II was poles apart. Considered alongside the longer-established national traditions of Sinology examined in this volume, it might be especially striking to the reader that the first Australian Ph.D. in Chinese studies, to the New Zealand-born ANU student Noel Barnard, was not awarded until 1957.¹⁶ And as we will see below, it was not until the 1960s that Chinese Studies doctoral students began graduating in more significant numbers. However, when it is realized that the first Australian Ph.D.s in any field of the humanities or sciences were not awarded until the late 1940s—one each to an historian and a metallurgist at the University of Melbourne in 1948; Sydney's first Ph.D., in 1951, was a chemist—the start of Sinology in Australia seems relatively less belated, and its subsequent pace of growth no less remarkable.

The title of this survey references ANU Professor Emeritus Wang Gungwu's 王賡武 acceptance speech for the 2020 Tang Prize in the category of Sinology, in which professor Wang proposed a “high road” towards a pluralist understanding of Sinology and its complex heritage; and, the 1939 inauguration speech of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, in which Menzies ominously declared that “what Great Britain calls the Far East is for us the Near North,” and that Australia would henceforth pursue “increased diplomatic contact between ourselves and the United States, China and Japan, and the other countries which fringe the Pacific.”¹⁷ This juxtaposition of sentiments is intended to affirm, if only in an abstract way, how Murdoch's scholarly “endeavour to know the best that is known and thought in the world” has been pursued by subsequent generations of Australian Asianists, during a long (and as yet far from complete) move towards societal and intellectual independence from Britain, Europe, and the United States. This goal has echoes elsewhere, for instance in Benjamin Schwartz's famous 1980 defense of Asian Studies, in which he stated that despite the post-World War II and Cold War origins of “Area Studies” in the United States, the best work produced over the decades since had not been overtly politicized or supportive of American strategic interests. Indeed, it had sought to “bring the experience of the entire human race to bear on our common concerns.”¹⁸

Rather than attempting to identify essentially “Australian” features of Sinological pedagogy (as an intellectual history might attempt to do, but which this author feels would be an unsustainable approach to this topic), this survey is better seen as institutional history of Sinological departments and those who worked in them. Most of the scholars mentioned below are historians (who may or may not also describe themselves as Sinologists); it is inevitable that this survey has neglected to mention, or not afforded due time to scholars whose disciplines might be in philosophy, literature, or linguistics (but whose work might equally be considered as constitutive of Sinology). Here the author is inclined to echo the Taiwanese historian, Wang Fansen 王汎森, who was tasked with composing the foreword to a recent collection of papers marking the fortieth anniversary of the Centre for Chinese Studies (Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin 漢學研究中心) at the National Central Library in Taipei. Wang remarks in his foreword that: “Hanxue is a vast field; owing to the limits in my own learning, the following comments are mainly related to the discipline of history … although one does hope that some of the points it raises may be useful for understanding other areas of hanxue as well.”¹⁹

An Australian Sinology?

Definitions of hanxue often note the presence of several pedagogical traditions in the study of Chinese civilization through textual analysis and interpretation, originating especially in China itself, Japan, and Europe. They observe the influence of these traditions, and the introduction of modern disciplines such as archaeology and linguistics on the development of “national studies” (guoxue 國學) in China from the late nineteenth century; and, as noted above, the development of Chinese Studies, especially in the United States from the 1950s. The indigenous Chinese origins of what became western Sinology were rooted in the practice of “kaozheng scholarship” 考證學 or “precise scholarship” of textual analysis by scholars such as Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 and Yan Ruoqu 閻若璩 from the early Qing period. Pioneering figures in modern Japanese Sinology, noted especially for its merging of Japanese textual criticism with the western historiography of thinkers such as Leopold von Ranke, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, include figures such as Shiratori Kuakichi 白鳥庫吉 and Naitō Konan 内藤湖南—whose work, in turn, was crucial to the development of guoxue in China in the early twentieth century. In Europe, what some call the “French School” or “Paris type of Sinology” was crucial to establishing the textual study of premodern China as a distinct academic discipline from the mid-nineteenth century—an approach which dominated the study of China in the west until being supplanted by Chinese Studies after World War II.²⁰ The “grand master of Swedish Sinology,” Bernhard Karlgren has been credited with fostering a Swedish tradition of historical linguistics in Sinology, an approach which was continued by two of his students, Hans Bielenstein and Goran Malmqvist, who, incidentally, were the first two heads of the Chinese language department at CUC and ANU in the 1950s and early 1960s. (See Figure 1 below for a chronology of early Australian Chinese Studies schools and departments, and notes on their faculties).²¹

Figure 1. Chronology of early Australian universities and years of establishment of Chinese studies, with notes on early faculty membership and other developments.²²

However, while it is feasible to speak of pedagogical traditions, founding figures and influential schools of thought for Sinology in cultural and academic contexts which developed in relative isolation from each other over longer periods of time, the picture becomes more complicated in the second half of the twentieth century. In his introduction to a series of papers on European traditions of Sinology, the German sinologist Herbert Franke writes that:

If there have existed in the past different “national” modes or approaches to Sinology in Europe they tend to disappear in our times because of the ever-increasing international communication between persons and institutions. It is hardly necessary to mention that this scholarly network is not limited to Europe but includes to a varying degree also North America and the Far East.²³

In a similar vein, in his 2014 acceptance speech for the inaugural Tang Prize in the category of Sinology, Yu Yingshi stated that: “Unlike in the first half of the twentieth century, we rarely, if ever, speak of Sinology along national lines such as Chinese, Japanese, French or American”; since the 1950s Sinology has “become thoroughly globalized” and “is one anywhere on the globe.”²⁴

In his 2020 speech for this same award, mentioned above, Wang Gungwu also highlights the complexity of defining Sinology, but arrives at three essential streams of thought underpinning the term: European “orientalist Sinology” (hanxue); twentieth-century Chinese guoxue, and the “modern Chinese studies” pioneered in the United States in the 1950s, the advent of which compelled orientalist sinologists “to divide between those who concentrated on the textual and philological base of Sinology and those who agreed that China studies should welcome the participation of social scientists.” Wang posits that these three traditions of inquiry had by the 1980s coalesced into a kind of “pluralist Sinology,” which he puts forward as an ideal type of inquiry, attentive also to the epistemological pitfalls of past approaches and the weaponization of knowledge in the context of superpower rivalry (here, of course, between the United States and China). But while western imperialism and the intellectual domination of China are often blamed, and rightly so, for the “orientalist” underpinnings of some Sinological work—on this point Wang cites the 1976 Morrison Lecture of his former ANU colleague, Lo Hui-min 駱惠敏, titled “The Tradition and Prototypes of the China Watcher”—Wang also duly criticizes the Chinese Communist Party. After 1949, while “those scholars exiled to Hong Kong and Taiwan were actively refreshing their guoxue heritage in cooperation with … modern sinologists [in the West],” three decades of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination in the People's Republic of China (PRC), especially after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, meant that “there is almost no scholarly work [in Sinology] published in the PRC from 1957 to 1978 that is worth anything.”²⁵

It was in such a “thoroughly globalized” and pedagogically “pluralized” environment of the post-war academy, then, one in which the influence of the social sciences was increasingly being felt in traditional disciplines such as history and linguistics, that Australia's first ventures in the study of China began. As the ANU historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki notes, the Australian academy adopted both the nomenclature that was becoming prevalent in postwar America—“Area Studies,” and within it, Asian Studies and Chinese Studies—as well as the kind of “interdisciplinary, regionally focus departments” in which Asian and Chinese Studies was taking place. Morris-Suzuki notes in particular the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU, as well as the Indonesian and Malayan Studies programs at CUC, Sydney and Melbourne noted above, as early examples of Asian Area Studies in the 1950s.²⁶

Unlike in the American academy, however, there has never been much critical discussion in Australia about the nature of Sinology, its relationship to other disciplines within Chinese and Asian Studies—themselves often maligned as hegemonic Cold War thinking in academia. In America the exchanges between Joseph Levenson, Mary Wright, Maurice Freedman, Frederick Mote, Benjamin Schwartz, Dennis Twitchett and others at the 1964 Association of Asian Studies symposium, “On Chinese Studies and the Disciplines,” is a well-known early example of scholars debating whether traditional western Sinology has a place among modern academic disciplines, or if it is no longer relevant.²⁷ To the best of the author's knowledge there was never any similar exchange in Australia. This is likely due in part to the aforementioned lack of any previous “classical” Sinological grounding in the Australian academy. But Australia also lacked an academic peak body equivalent to the Association of Asian Studies, at which such cross-disciplinary and intra-area discussions might have taken place, until 1975, when the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) was formed (as discussed at further length in the final section of this survey).

Indeed, it was in the ASAA journal Asian Studies Review in 1984 that the ANU-based Belgian Sinologist, Pierre Ryckmans (nom de plume Simon Leys) launched what would appear to be the first substantial discussion of Sinology in Australia, in the form of a scathing critique of Edward Said's 1978 study Orientalism—part of a series of responses to that work and its impact. Noting that he heard Sinology used “as a term of abuse” during a recent visit to the Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies at Harvard, Leys wrote that of the many assumptions that Said's concept of orientalism seemed to apply to Sinology—that it is part of a “colonialist-imperialist conspiracy”; that orientalists “hate and despise the orient” and “deny its intellectual existence”—the only one with which he could bring himself to agree with was Said's proposition that “we should question the advisability of too close a relationship between the scholar and the state”:

You bet we should! On this point, I could not agree more with Said—yet, it is hardly an original conclusion. The very concept of “the university” has rested for some seven hundred years on the absolute autonomy of all academic and scholarly activities from any interference and influence of the political authorities. It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him three hundred pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at least one sound and fundamental truism.²⁸

Leys's defense of Sinology, in turn, along with Tessa Morris-Suzuki's critique of Area Studies, were cited by Geremie Barmé, then also at the ANU, in a 2005 essay championing what he called “New Sinology” (hou hanxue 後漢學). Claiming to be “aware of the unsettling history and much-discussed limitations of Area Studies in post-WWII Anglophone academic institutions, and in particular the history of ‘Oriental Studies’ at The Australian National University”—and “alert to the complex and often disturbing (as well as disturbatory) issues at the heart of … the term ‘Sinology’”—Barmé sought to affirm the “distinctiveness of Sinology as a mode of intellectual inquiry” at a time when, he believed, the corporatization of higher education in Australia was imperiling intellectual engagement with China and the Sinophone world. Barmé's essay is discussed in the final section of this article, as it is important that his arguments be viewed in the context of changes in Australian academia that began in the 1980s. What is important to note here is that, apart from the handful of interventions on Sinology and Area Studies noted here, there has not been nearly as much criticism of Sinology and Area Studies in Australia as there has in America. Barmé attributes this to certain “Antipodean approach” to the Asian region and to China, characterized by “a certain intellectual freedom afforded by [Australia's] distinctly non-great-power but nonetheless developed-nation status,” and less reverence to the “hide-bound disciplinary approaches” of the American academy.²⁹

But if Sinology has never been a part of Australia's institutional foundation for the study of China, and has only been discussed in a handful of scholarly interventions (mostly in response to American debates), where, if anywhere, might we attempt to pinpoint a key founding institution or scholar? On this point, it seems sensible to turn to the forerunner institution to where the scholars involved in these debates have worked, namely the ANU's Department of Far Eastern History, founded and headed by the English Sinologist C.P. Fitzgerald from 1954 to 1967 (when Wang Gungwu took over). This department sat within the Research School of Pacific Studies, alongside departments for Anthropology and Sociology, Geography, International Relations, and Pacific History.³⁰

The University of Melbourne historian, Antonia Finnane, writes that “The serious study of Chinese and Japanese history in Australia is largely a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century,” and that “appointment of C.P. Fitzgerald to the founding chair of the Department of Far Eastern History in 1950 [sic: 1954] may be taken as emblematic of its beginning.” Yet for the purposes of the present survey these comments might just as well apply to Sinological work in Australia. And as Finnane also mentions questions concerning language acquisition, and Far Eastern History's importance to Australian universities more broadly, her summary is worth quoting at some length:

Language differences … long precluded the possibility of serious research being undertaken in Asian history except as it involved European exploration and colonization. The numbers of students studying Japanese at Sydney and Melbourne Universities before the war were very few and Chinese was taught nowhere outside of the Chinese community. Japanese language training during the second world war and the establishment of Chinese language courses in the context of the Cold War helped change this situation, providing the necessary base from which documental research could be pursued. From the fifties through to the seventies, departments of Chinese and Japanese were founded—or in the case of Sydney, revitalized—in a succession of universities across the country. In the same period the idea of the Pacific began to give way to the idea of Asia, with the introduction of courses in Asian or Far Eastern history both in history and in East Asian language departments. Despite these contemporaneous developments, relatively little postgraduate work was undertaken in East Asian history except at the ANU. Here, a strong faculty of Asian Studies and the specialist department of Far Eastern History together ensured a steady stream of postgraduate students, particularly in the domain of Chinese history. A large number of historians of China employed in Australian universities are in fact former students or research fellows of the Department of Far Eastern History.³¹

ANU was unique as the only university in Australia with a whole Research School (the largest unit of academic study in the ANU nomenclature of the day, equivalent to a College or Faculty) devoted to Pacific Studies (later renamed Pacific and Asian Studies, and today known as the College of Asia and the Pacific). Until the founding of the School of Modern Asian Studies at Brisbane's Griffith University in 1975, ANU was the only university with such an Asia-focused research school. At Sydney, Melbourne, and elsewhere, in the early years and still today, Sinological work takes place in smaller Asian Area Studies departments, situated within (most typically) Schools or Faculties of Arts (see Figure 1). ANU's key role in Sinology will become apparent below, as we now turn to C.P. Fitzgerald's involvement in early Chinese library acquisitions and the first Australian higher degree research in Sinology.

Canberra, Library Collections and the Morrison Lectureship

As noted in the introduction, government support for Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney was short-lived. It lasted from 1916, when the first cable was sent to London seeking advice about a scholar of Japan to invite to Australia, to 1922, when as a result of the Washington Conference, the Department of Defence decided that the study of Japan was “no longer necessary.” The program was threatened with closure in 1928 when Defence, disillusioned with the original scheme of collaborating with Sydney—which involved an annual salary of £1000 for work at both Sydney and the Military College in Canberra, paid for by Defence, with the university contributing a further £150 for travel between Sydney and Canberra—attempted to cut the funding, only to discover that they were contractually obliged to continue paying the incumbent professor his annual salary until such a time as he so chose to retire. This was Arthur Sadler, who had taken over the chair in 1922. Despite continuing difficulties, consisting of a “ridiculously inadequate” endowment of “about £30 per annum,” Sadler later wrote, which made it nearly impossible to establish a working Oriental library, and with the university unable to afford to employ more than one full-time lecturer in the department, he nonetheless remained at Sydney until 1947.³²

The dire state of the department is reflected in a February 1949 letter from Sadler's replacement and the third chair of Sydney's Department of Oriental Studies, John Kennedy Rideout, a graduate of the University of London who had recently taught at Cambridge, to Douglas Copland, who had recently taken up his position as the first ANU vice-chancellor after three years as Australia's diplomatic minister in Nanjing. Arriving at Sydney at the start of the 1949 academic year, Rideout was shocked to find that the library had not acquired any Japanese or Chinese texts over the preceding thirty years. Having heard that the Chinese embassy in Australia had the previous year donated a collection of texts to the ANU, Rideout asked the ANU if, considering postgraduate work in Canberra had not yet commenced, they might be loaned to Sydney. As Rideout wrote to Copland:

Three weeks ago I arrived here to take up the Chair of Oriental Studies and with the object of introducing the academic study of Chinese. My first task was to survey and classify the oriental books in the Fisher Library, and I found there only a very scrappy collection of Japanese texts, and one Chinese text, which had presumably got in by mistake. In fact, had I not possessed with me the nucleus of a working library of Chinese texts it would be impossible for me to start teaching at all. … I was, however, informed by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, that the National University had recently received a collection of some two thousand Chinese books, which were believed to be classical texts. I should be very grateful if you could obtain some more detailed information about this collection, and if you could let me know whether anyone at the National University is working, or proposing to work upon it. If not, rather than have the books lie idle, would the National University be prepared, purely as an interim measure, to lend this collection to the Fisher Library?³³

Copland readily acquiesced, as he told Rideout it would be some time “before active work is commenced in the School of Pacific Studies and the books are likely to be used by members of our university staff.” There was nobody that year at ANU who could make use of the texts, and the first research students would only begin to arrive at the university in 1952 (as discussed at further length in the following section).³⁴

At precisely the time that this exchange took place, C.P. Fitzgerald was bound for Australia at Copland's invitation, to survey the state of Sinological work being done in the country. Finding the state of Australia's Chinese library resources similarly dire, the principal duties of his subsequent, tentative “visiting readership” at ANU (which led to an associate professorship in 1952) were to undertake further institutional tours of the United States and Europe, and to purchase books for the library. Failing to re-enter the PRC due to political reasons, he went instead to Hong Kong, and in December 1950 the ANU council recorded that he had purchased some 20,000 books, among which were around 15,000 volumes from the private library of the translator and religious scholar, Xu Dishan 許地山, who had passed away in Hong Kong in 1941. A 1411 edition of the Buddhist text Fo ding zun sheng tuo luo ni jing 佛頂尊勝陀囉尼經 (Dharani of the Jubilant Corona) from the Xu Dishan collection is the oldest book (in any language) in the ANU library. But there were also many modern works, including a copy of Feng Youlan's 馮友蘭 1939 treatise Xin lixue 新理學 (New Rational Philosophy) signed and addressed to Xu, and translations by the eminent late-Qing intellectual and translator, Yan Fu 嚴復.³⁵

In addition to the ANU Department of Far Eastern History's importance to Sinology in the country as a whole, noted by Antonia Finnane above, it is also worth considering the city of Canberra more broadly—in this case, the ANU and its library in conjunction with the National Library of Australia (NLA), a mere twenty-minutes-walk from the campus on the opposite side of Canberra's central lake. Among many federal institutions initially based in Melbourne, which successively moved to Canberra once parliament began formally sitting there from the late 1920s, in the 1950s the NLA was also afforded federal support to commence collecting in Asian languages.³⁶ Seeking to avoid overlapping their respective collections, in 1956 the ANU and NLA entered into an agreement to coordinate their collection efforts in different focus areas. By the mid-1970s, following the normalization of relations between Australia and the PRC and the sudden availability of access to mainland publishing centers, the institutions had fallen into an arrangement whereby ANU focused its efforts on history, language and literature materials, while NLA assumed more responsibility for archaeology, fine arts, newspapers, government and party documents, and audio-visual materials—a sharing of responsibility which, while always flexibly implemented, has more or less continued to the present day.

The oldest book held in the NLA (in any language) is a single volume from an 1162 printing of the Da ban ruo bo luo mi duo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經 (Greater Sutra of the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom), which was part of a collection purchased from the Chinese librarian, Fang Chao-ying 房兆楹 in 1961, during Fang's two-year tenure as curator of ANU's Oriental Collection.³⁷ Today the ANU holds some 160,000 Chinese-language books and 6,400 series of journals; the NLA 250,000 books, 5,100 journals and 250 newspaper subscriptions. Combined, the holdings of the two institutions represent some 85 percent of the total Chinese library holdings in Australia; both have been vital to the work of scholars from across Australia, and overseas.³⁸

As well as bringing C.P. Fitzgerald to Australia, Copland facilitated the transfer of the George E. Morrison Lecture in Ethnology under the ANU's auspices. Founded with an endowment raised by Chinese-Australian community leaders in Sydney and Melbourne, William Joseph Liu (“Uncle Billy”) and William Ah Ket, originally with the purpose of raising appreciation and awareness of China in the aftermath of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931, its namesake was by far the most prominent Australian associated with China up until that point: Morrison had been a highly influential China correspondent for the London Times, and an advisor to Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 during the early years of the Chinese Republic. The first Morrison Lecture was held in 1932 at the Australian Institute of Anatomy in Canberra—a venue which, while ostensibly an odd choice for a lectureship on China, was at the time a “de facto national museum” and one of the only public buildings in the fledgling capital city in which events such as public lectures could be held. Proximity to the seat of federal parliament, Parliament House, which had opened just five years earlier, and the surrounding government bureaucracy also gave Liu, Ah Ket, and their colleagues better access to the political establishment, the better to get across their messages of anti-appeasement and solidarity with China. During this first decade Morrison lectures were delivered by prominent Australian, Chinese-Australian and visiting diaspora Chinese, including the Chinese consuls-general W.P. Chen 陳維屏 (inaugural lecture, 1932) and Chun-jien Pao 保君健 (1937), and the eminent Malayan doctor Wu Lien-teh 伍連德 (1935), famed for his efforts at eradicating an outbreak of plague in Manchuria.³⁹

The Morrison lectures lapsed after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. But after William Liu, attending a lecture by Copland shortly after his return from China, learned of the ANU's School of Pacific Studies and Copland's plans to introduce the study of China in the research school, Liu suggested to the new vice-chancellor that the lectureship might be revived under the university's auspices. Copland agreed—and delivered the first of the post-war Morrison lectures in September 1948. The lectures have been held without interruption every year since. Australian or Australia-based presenters have included Wang Ling (1964), Wang Gungwu (1979), Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) (1986), Rafe de Crespigny (1990), Geremie Barmé (1996), Anita Chan (2002) and then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (2010), himself a former ANU student who studied under Pierre Ryckmans. International presenters have included Jerome Ch'en 陳志讓 (1974), Fang Chao-ying (1980), His Holiness the Dalai Lama (1992), Wen-hsin Yeh 葉文心 (2003), Dai Qing 戴晴 (2007), Michael Nylan (2013) and Takashi Hamashita (2018).⁴⁰

Reversing the “Brain Drain”: Education Reform and Asian Students

Even if the government had deigned it “necessary” to support Oriental Studies at Sydney, to include Chinese in the syllabus, and to appoint a scholar of China to teach something more than “civilizations 101” undergraduate courses, as Murdoch had hoped from the very beginning, the Australian university system was still not equipped to undertake anything more than undergraduate teaching. As noted in the introduction, federal support for post-graduate research, and the introduction of the Ph.D. degree in the education system was just as much a part of “Australia's struggle to disengage from its colonial parent” during and after World War II as more studied changes in areas like defense and foreign relations. This section reviews some of Australia's first Ph.D. graduates through the lens of these developments, as well as the crucial contribution of culturally Chinese Asian students to the development of Sinology after the war.

In the early nineteenth century Germany had pioneered the Ph.D. degree, distinguished by its basis in original research, undertaken under the auspices of a university and with a supervisor, as opposed other higher degrees and doctorates conferred on the basis of a body of work or by passing examinations in specific disciplines. Proving popular among foreign students in Germany, the Ph.D. was introduced in the United States (from 1861), in the UK (first in Scotland from 1895) and in other Commonwealth countries in the early twentieth century. Recognizing the usefulness of the research-based Ph.D. in attracting overseas students—an important factor in Britain's adopting the degree—there were some calls in Australia to introduce Ph.D.s in the 1920s, especially at the University of Melbourne. Some state universities founded other higher degrees in areas where they particularly excelled—Adelaide, for example, offered a Master of Laws and Doctorate of Letters in 1924; Sydney considered introducing Doctorates of Economics and Letters in 1927; Queensland in Letters and Engineering—but they were ultimately frustrated due to a lack of unity between the states. Founded mostly before Federation in 1901, the six state universities, the two oldest of which are Sydney (founded in 1850) and Melbourne (1853), had developed under a colonial system whereby most key institutional linkages were with universities back in the “Mother Country”; they had always equivocated on the need for a more unified national system. Prior to the unprecedented systematization and funding of the university sector that followed World War II, it was also rare for a student from one state to attend university in another.⁴¹

But World War II had laid bare Australia's need for self-reliance in education, which was planned by a committee chaired by the economist Ronald Walker (known as the Walker committee), established in 1943 under the auspices of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. The Walker committee was tasked with overseeing increased federal funding for state universities according to the varying needs of each, covering university tuition costs for returned servicemen and women (a scheme later expanded more broadly via a variety of scholarships and subsidies), and providing, for the first time, the facility for Ph.D. programs and postgraduate research.⁴² With exclusively postgraduate research in mind, in 1946 the ANU was established by an Act of federal parliament and given a mandate to pursue research in areas of “national interest to Australia.” These were concentrated in Research Schools for Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Medical Research and Pacific Studies. As noted above, it was in Pacific Studies that C.P. Fitzgerald's Department of Far Eastern History was founded in 1954. A decade after the ANU was statutorily founded, the eminent Australian historian and first head of the School of Social Sciences, Keith Hancock, described the overarching goal of the ANU in terms common to the time, in a promotional film for the university filmed in 1956:

We are a small nation which produces a large number of creative people, both in the sciences and in the arts. But for a long time past we have been sending very many of these people overseas, and bringing in very few to take their place. No nation could stand such a heavy loss forever without becoming second rate. … The best men in research, as in other things … are bound to go where they can do their best work. We hope that many of them will find a chance to do their best work in this university … [which is] devoted to research and postgraduate teaching.⁴³

While the ANU was still touting itself as devoted to higher-degree and postgraduate research well into the 1950s, the six existing state universities—now also supported by unprecedented levels of federal investment—also embraced advanced studies and research. Figure 2 shows the results of a survey of the total number of postgraduate degrees in Asian Studies—Masters, Doctorates of Letters and Science, and Ph.D. degrees—awarded in Australian universities between 1926, the first year that an Asia-related degree was awarded in Australia, and 1970, the last year before the survey was taken. Enid Bishop, then head of Asian collections at ANU library, compiled these figures based on lists of library holdings and information in university calendars, an approach which she concedes was imperfect. For instance, it was “not possible to examine the works themselves except in the case of [ANU's] holdings” (as she was working from the ANU), and therefore the classification was “based entirely on the thesis titles.”⁴⁴ Bishop's classification scheme, which grouped the theses according “general areas” of area or comparative area study—for instance, under “East Asia,” the 1968 Sydney Masters thesis “Australia and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931–1933” by one Peter Harrison-Mattley—compared with area-specific topics, is problematic for the same reason. Nonetheless, it still serves as a useful indication of the rapid increase in early postgraduate thesis relating to Asia and China.

Figure 2. Distribution of M.A., doctoral and Ph.D. theses on Asia published up until 1970, by area topic and institution.⁴⁵

Figure 3 breaks this same data down according to degrees related to China (including a number of degrees which Bishop included as overlapping with other categories, and to which I elected to add Hong Kong and Taiwan) compared to degrees in other areas of Asian Studies as a whole. The data are separated into columns for both Masters (under which label non-research Doctorates of Sciences and Letters have also included), and research-based Ph.D.s. The first set of columns shows the total of all theses on Asia and China up until 1955, and in each year from 1956, the year the first Australian Ph.D.s on Asia were published, thereafter until 1970. Here, the rapid increase in higher degree work is especially clear. While there had been just 16 Masters and non-research Doctorates prior to 1955 (the very earliest dating to 1926), that same number had again been reached by 1960; after 1965 there were more than 16 Masters degrees on Asia awarded every year across the country.

Figure 3. Numbers of M.A. and non-research Doctorate degrees, and Ph.D. degrees in all Asian Studies disciplines and in Chinese studies, by year, from all years prior to 1955 up until 1970.⁴⁶

The contrasting career paths of two women who studied in Sydney's Oriental Studies program both during its troubled pre-war incarnation, and after its “renewal” from 1955, aptly illustrate this important shift in both undergraduate language teaching, as well as in the facility for higher research that is shown in this data. The first was Joyce Ackroyd (1918–1991), who graduated Bachelor of Arts with honors in English and a major in mathematics in 1940. Ackroyd's teacher's scholarship did not allow her to take a Japanese language major, because there were not enough high schools then teaching Japanese for it to be considered a subject in high enough demand; she took Japanese night classes under Arthur Sadler nonetheless, and this setback only strengthened her resolve to promote Japanese in the high school curriculum later in her career. After a period of lecturing in Japanese at Sydney in the mid-1940s Ackroyd then went to Cambridge for her doctorate, graduating in 1951 with a dissertation on the Japanese Confucianist scholar-bureaucrat of the Edo period, Arai Hakuseki 新井白石. Returning to ANU and playing a crucial role in the emerging Japanese Studies program in the 1950s, in 1965 Ackroyd was appointed foundation professor of the new department of Japanese language and literature at the University of Queensland—where, as she recalled, “students flocked to Japanese as an escape from the seeming irrelevance of European languages”—and remained at Queensland until her retirement in 1983. In 1990, one year before her passing, she became the first woman to have a building on the University of Queensland campus named after her.⁴⁷

Joyce Ackroyd would appear to be the only person to have studied Japanese in the pre-war incarnation of Sydney's Oriental Studies program who would go on to have an academic career in Japanese Studies in postwar Australia; certainly she was the most well-known and influential. Had Ackroyd been born some 20 years later, however, she might have pursued this career path without needing to go to England for postgraduate study. Indeed, she would have had the opportunity both to take undergraduate language classes and doctoral research without leaving Sydney's Oriental Studies Department, and, in addition to Japanese she would have also had the chance to pursue Chinese Studies, Indonesian and Malay Studies both in undergraduate language training and in postgraduate research. This was the case for the intellectual historian and literary translator, Mabel Lee (b. 1939), who in 2000 achieved global recognition outside the academy when the Chinese-French writer, Gao Xingjian 高行健, whose book Shanling 山靈 (Soul Mountain) Lee had translated, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the introduction to her 2018 A.R. Davis Memorial Lecture, reflecting on her long association with the university, Lee stated that:

I graduated with a BA (Hons I) degree in 1962 and then a Ph.D. in 1966 for research in the field of Late Imperial and Early Republican Chinese intellectual history, with a focus on economic thought. Born in Warialda in northern New South Wales, Christmas Eve 1939, I can lay claim to having been the first Chinese Studies Ph.D. graduate who had undertaken undergraduate studies entirely in Australia. I was appointed lecturer at the University of Sydney on 31 January 1966 with a brief to develop courses for the teaching of modern Chinese language, literature and history and, after a thirty-four-year career, I terminated my contract on 31 January 2000.⁴⁸

Mabel Lee's claim to being the first entirely Australian-educated Ph.D. in Chinese Studies seems valid. There were certainly some earlier Australian Ph.D.s, beginning with Noel Barnard in 1957. But as Figure 3 shows they were few and far until the late-1960s, when the introduction of classical and modern undergraduate language training over the preceding decade had begun to yield a critical mass of entirely locally trained scholars, who elected to studied in Australia under a number of difference scholarship schemes for postgraduate Studies. Noel Barnard had taken undergraduate Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Among other early Sinology Ph.D.s, Igor de Rachewiltz (“Sino-Mongol Culture Contacts in the XIII Century,” ANU, 1961), who would remain associated with ANU until his passing in 2016, had studied Chinese at Rome and Naples; John Frodsham (“The Life and Works of Hsieh Ling-yun, Duke of Kang-Lo,” ANU, 1964), who would later introduce Chinese history at Murdoch University in Western Australia, came from the University of London; Rafe de Crespigny (“The Development of the Chinese Empire in the South,” ANU, 1968), Australia's best-known historian of the Han and Three Kingdoms, had taken undergraduate study at Cambridge.

In addition to these students of European heritage were those from culturally Chinese backgrounds who came to Australia for postgraduate study on scholarships, part of Australia's rapid opening of the country to Asian students from the early 1950s. A phenomenon generally described with reference to the “Colombo Plan,” a multinational plan for aid, technical assistance, and development to Asian countries, founded in 1951, some 5,500 students from Asia—mostly from Malaya, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon—under a number of different scholarship schemes between 1951 and 1965.⁴⁹ The Colombo Plan proper was explicitly part of Australia's wider efforts to challenge the appeal of communism in the region. But elements of the plan which encompassed student exchange and training in Australia are generally regarded as having achieved a very positive effect in Australian society, even contributing, along with other Commonwealth scholarship schemes, to changes in public opinion that eventually see the abolition of the notorious “White Australia Policy,” a system of restrictions on non-European migration.⁵⁰

In an essay written the year after he took over from C.P. Fitzgerald as head of Far Eastern History, Wang Gungwu noted that there was something serendipitous in the timing of Australia's “awakening” to Asia. If World War II represented a “watershed moment” in terms of Australia's separation from “Mother Britain,” the same may also be said of countries directly to Australia's north, which during and in the direct aftermath of the war were also emerging from the shackles of Dutch, British, French, and American imperialism, with a new generation of young people eager for educational opportunities abroad:

Even more successful was [Australia's] policy of meeting Asia's education and specialist training needs. Although Australia was often merely the choice of those students who failed to enter Britain or the United States, it offered several advantages. It was closer to home for most Asians, especially Southeast Asians; it was far less expensive to reach; and Australian hosts were easy-going and friendly without being either patronizing or gushing. The Asian students who came found the newly discovered relationship comfortable, and as their numbers quickly grew Australia became one of the major training-grounds for the new Asian administrative, technical and professional élite.⁵¹

While most Asian scholars in Australia under the auspices of the Colombo Plan, or on other Commonwealth scholarships, were trained in technical professions such as engineering and public administration, Enid Bishop's survey lists a number of early Ph.D. degrees by scholarship students from Asia. Some of would go on to prominent positions in Australian academia. Ching-Fatt Yong 楊進發, who came from Malaya on a Commonwealth scholarship, graduated in 1966 with the dissertation “The Chinese in New South Wales and Victoria, 1901–1921,” which formed the basis of Yong's 1977 book New Gold Mountain, a pathbreaking history of Chinese migration to Australia. Joining the history faculty at the new Flinders University, Adelaide, in 1970, over the following decades C.F. Yong wrote on the history of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and colonial Malaya, and on the history of communism in Southeast Asia.⁵² Also from Malaya, Yen Ching-hwang 顏清湟 (“The Chinese Revolutionary Movement in Malaya, 1900–1911,” ANU, 1969) joined the history faculty at the University of Adelaide, and is a widely respected historian of the Chinese diaspora.⁵³ Originally from Hong Kong, Edmund S.K. Fung 馮兆基 (“The Hupeh Revolutionary Movement, 1900–1912,” ANU, 1971) would later join, along with fellow ANU Ph.D. graduate Colin Mackerras, the School of Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University, in 1973—the second university after ANU, with its Research School of Pacific Studies, to have a faculty devoted exclusively to the study of Asia. While best known today for his seminal intellectual histories of modern China, Fung also collaborated with Mackerras on an influential study of changing Australian perceptions of the People's Republic, in the years following the normalization of relations in 1972.⁵⁴

Further Developments and Debate

“Given the rapid expansion of Asian Studies in Australian university in the years following World War II,” writes John Legge, a Monash University historian who pioneered Southeast Asian Studies in Australia, “the formation of a nation-wide professional association was a slow and drawn-out affair.” The Oriental Society of Australia, established in 1956 at the University of Sydney, was “essentially a Sydney association” centered around a core membership who met in the city; there were other professional associations—such as those for historians and political scientists—which Asianists could join depending on their discipline and area. But considering the growing importance of Asian Studies as a concept both in higher education and in the school system, a professional organization was required. After the prestigious International Congress of Orientalists met at ANU in 1971, highlighting the need for a peak body in Australia, and after discussions with the Oriental Society, the Asian Studies Association of Australia was founded in 1975.⁵⁵

As noted above it was in the pages of the ASAA Asian Studies Review in 1984 that Australian scholars from across areas and disciplines were invited to discuss the impact of Edward Said's Orientalism—one of Simon Leys's most well-known polemical essays was published as part of this series of responses to Said. In addition to providing a forum for disciplinary discussions such as these, since its inception the ASAA has overseen several reports on the state of Asian Studies in the country, intended to advise governments and university administrations. In 1978 it reported that there were four times as many courses on Asia in discipline departments as there had been in 1970; by 1989, there were nine universities in Australia that offered Chinese language at the undergraduate level: Sydney and Macquarie in New South Wales; Melbourne and Monash in Victoria; the University of Queensland and Griffith in Queensland; Murdoch University in Western Australia; the University of Adelaide in South Australia; and, the ANU in the Australian Capital Territory.⁵⁶

Simon Leys retrospectively describes the years from the early 1970s to the early 1990s as a “golden age” for Sinology in the Australian university system; a 2002 ASAA report similarly described the flowering of Australia's Asia knowledge as a “national asset”—albeit one which was by then in “desperate need of renewal.”⁵⁷ Doctoral graduates during this period include the literary translator John Minford (“The Last Forty Chapters of the Story of the Stone,” ANU, 1980), who has translated numerous Chinese classical works, and taught literature in New Zealand and Australia until his retirement from ANU in 2016. Anne McLaren (“Ming Chantefable and the Early Chinese Novel,” ANU, 1980) and Antonia Finnane (“Prosperity and Decline Under the Qing: Yangzhou and its Hinterland,” ANU, 1985) both went on to long teaching and research careers at the University of Melbourne. John Fitzgerald (“Hollow Words: Guomindang Propaganda and the Formation of Popular Attitudes Toward the National Revolution in Guangdong Province,” ANU, 1983) went on to work at the ANU, La Trobe University, and Swinburne University in Melbourne. Geremie Barmé (“Feng Zikai: A Biographical and Critical Study,” ANU, 1989) remained at ANU until his retirement in 2015. Gloria Davies (“The Writer and Revolutionary Consciousness,” University of Melbourne, 1989) joined Monash University in Melbourne the following year, at a time when that university was expanding its Asian Studies department, which had previously focused on Southeast Asian Studies. John Makeham (“Xu Gan's Concept of the Name and Actuality Relationship,” ANU, 1991) has taught at ANU and La Trobe University in Melbourne.⁵⁸

These scholars represent, of course, just a fraction of those who passed through the Australian University during a rich period of expansion. Many are still active in senior positions. Yet as Leys would later write, the “golden age” for him ended in 1993, when he took early retirement from the University of Sydney: “That revelation forced itself on me the day I read, in an internal university review, an editorial in which the vice-chancellor instructed all staff to consider our students not as students but as customers.”⁵⁹ While part of a global phenomenon, the causes and implications of which are much too complex to review here, Leys is referring to the mercantilist culture and neoliberal rationality that took over the university system during reforms to higher education in the 1980s. While ostensibly designed to improve the quality of polytechnical schools and increase popular access to higher education, and welcomed by some in the more “practical” university disciplines such as medicine, law, and engineering, the Dawkins Reforms (so named after the federal Minister for Education, John Dawkins) saw the advent of new costing metrics such as the “EFTSU” (Equivalent Full-time Student Units), which began to form the basis upon which whole universities, departments within them, and individual courses within departments, were allocated funding on the basis of student loads.⁶⁰

This has severely affected the teaching of Asian Studies, with lecturers goaded into modifying their course content to meet the perceived needs of their “customers,” and less popular courses forced to close. In 2016, for instance, the ANU cut courses in what were dubbed “lesser-taught languages”—literary Chinese, Hindi, Thai, Sanskrit, and Vietnamese—in response to a budget shortfall in the School of Culture, History and Language, forcing what would have normally been classroom-taught, semester-long courses into shorter intensive programs delivered remotely. These intensive courses were described, in a heartless managerialist dialect typical of today's academic administrators, as “high-quality online languages offerings.”⁶¹ In ASAA's most recent report on Chinese Studies, Anne McLaren notes that Australian universities have been especially callous in their pursuit of the huge market for foreign students in Australia. At many universities native Chinese speakers are permitted to enroll in undergraduate Chinese language courses, which, while bringing in welcome revenue, has had a “dampening effect on the participation of domestic students.” Masters courses designed specifically for overseas students of Chinese background, such as professional translation courses offered at Sydney and Melbourne, while highly lucrative, are of little benefit to encouraging China-related research in other academic disciplines.⁶²

What should the approach of the scholar be to this culture of managerial control of the humanities? As noted in the introduction, Geremie Barmé's proposal for a “New Sinology” was intended to “safeguard and develop the wealth of resources [at the ANU]” and in Australia more broadly, through a “robust engagement with contemporary China and … the Sinophone world in all of its complexity” at once informed by the kaozheng methods of classical scholarship, while also attentive to contemporary languages and culture. Based on “strong scholastic underpinnings in both the classical and modern languages” and an “ecumenical attitude to the disciplines,” he argues that such a pedagogy, despite the ambition it would demand of students, is in fact necessary to comprehend the contemporary Sinophone world:

the age of revivals and rediscoveries of the past in mainland China (from the dynastic past, to the more recent Republican era), and the pursuit of historical and cultural particularism in Taiwan, have meant that those who are unlettered in the basic histories, languages, and ideas of the last few centuries will only ever be semi-literate in the culture, thought and even language of China today.⁶³

New Sinology may therefore be regarded as an eminently practical undertaking. It should be able to be appreciated even by politicians and “academo-crats” accustomed to buzzwords like “national security,” “economic benefit,” and “providing a ‘better understanding of our region’”—if “practical” may be taken to imply a serious, considered engagement with the Sinophone world on its terms, rather than in the terms of Australia's stolid (and ever shifting) perceived “national interest.”

In criticism of Barmé's proposal, John Fitzgerald argued that the kind of pedagogical tradition Barmé describes as having been fostered at ANU under teachers such as Liu Ts'un-yan and Simon Leys is “unknown outside the institution [of the ANU],” and irrelevant to safeguarding something more important; namely, an existing international reputation in Chinese history, which Fitzgerald suggested had begun to decline. In similar terms as the argument underlying the present survey, Fitzgerald notes that: “Chinese historical studies were practised and carried beyond the ANU not by Sinologists but by historians trained in the Far Eastern and later East Asian history programs. Graduate students in the history program were expected to be fluent in Chinese languages and studies, and they were expected to learn, practise and study history in the program.”⁶⁴ While Fitzgerald perhaps misconstrues Barmé's advocacy for New Sinology as an assault on history—at no point does Barmé propose New Sinology as anything more than an approach to pedagogy; it is certainly not suggested as a disciplinary replacement for anything—the argument that resources might be better directed to safeguarding historical teaching seems sensible as well. Quoting the same 1989 report on Asian Studies cited earlier, Tessa Morris-Suzuki points out that one disadvantage of Australia's rather lax disciplinary approach to the “Asian Studies model” has been that it:

tended to marginalize the study of Asia, by cutting it off from the major disciplines and producing graduates who had a great deal of knowledge of one or more Asian country, often proficiency in a language as well, but who were inadequately trained in one of the social sciences disciplines, such as history, politics, sociology, or economics. It also acted as an excuse for discipline departments ignoring the study of Asia.⁶⁵

Conclusion: Out of Asia?

As part of the present series of surveys of national traditions of Sinology, this article has argued that the Australian tradition is best understood in terms of a language and discipline-based “Area Studies” model—in which history has featured especially prominently—rather that as Sinology per se. Unlike elsewhere Sinology has not been widely discussed as a pedagogy in Australia, much less as a term of institutional organization. Appreciative of the inherent heuristic value of questioning and debating disciplinary approaches, which in recent years, as we have just seen, saw a debate between two senior modern historians of China about the relationship between Sinology and history, this survey has attempted to outline in particular the challenges that the study of China has faced in Australia. Rather than attempting to chart the course of a particularly “Australian” Sinology (or Chinese Studies), it has instead surveyed the main Australian institutions for the study of China, highlighting the careers of a few scholars discussed at further length as case studies illustrating how these institutions took shape. Such case studies cannot hope to cover the full experience of Sinology or Chinese Studies in Australia (reflecting as they do the author's own biases and interests, and certainly their lack of awareness of developments outside of history), but it is still hoped that they have served to usefully illustrated key themes and general trajectories in the study of China since the early 1950s.

We began with a badly neglected Department of Oriental Studies in interwar Sydney, and the negligence of the government that first funded the program to properly invest in library resources. Australia's pursuance of Japanese Studies for security reasons was, by the 1920s, no longer deemed to be “important” to Australia. We end a century later, when in May 2020:

The National Library of Australia … announced that it will cease collecting material on Japan, Korea and all of mainland Southeast Asia, retaining only some reduced acquisition of information on China, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Seventy years of commitment to collecting on the region have made the national library one of the world's greatest resources of information on Asia. This national treasure will now be left to wither.⁶⁶

It is too early to tell how Australia's ailing public university system will respond to the loss of revenue as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. China is critically important to Australia's “national interest” at this point in time. While those who study the modern Chinese language and related disciplines have perhaps less cause for concern than do students who work in the “lesser-taught languages,” we would be well advised at least to emotionally prepare for the day that our government loses interest. Just as it lost interest for Japanese Studies at Sydney in 1922.