Yesterday, when the yellow peril began

Unsettling echoes of yesterday, when the yellow peril hysteria began

Critics of Tomorrow, When the War Began claim the film makes assumptions about an enemy

THE film begins with scenes of Australians at play. Superimposed on their faces, however, are threatening images of an Asian invasion force. Soon these foreign aggressors are taking over key buildings in Sydney, including the mint and state treasury buildings. The invasion is on and it's up to ordinary Australians to take up arms to repel the alien forces.

No, that's not a description of the new Australian action film, Tomorrow, When the War Began, whose story of Aussie teens -- including a Chinese-Australian -- becoming guerillas to repel an Asian invasion went straight to the top of the box office charts when released just more than a week ago. Instead that scenario comes from Australia Calls, a 1913 feature directed by Raymond Longford, intended to alert complacent Australians to the dangers of the yellow peril lurking on the nation's doorstep. Described as "Mongolians", the invaders in the silent film were cast from members of Sydney's Chinese community. Although like 90 per cent of Australia's silent film heritage, Australia Calls has long been lost, film historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper leave us in no doubt as to the film's xenophobic intent, pointing out that it was scripted by C.A. Jeffries and John Barr, two prominent writers at The Bulletin, whose attitude towards race was best encapsulated by its slogan, Australia for the White Man.

Despite the obvious plot similarities between the two films, there seems to be no intentional xenophobia or racism in Tomorrow, When the War Began, adapted from John Marsden's 1999 bestseller for young adults. Speaking to Inquirer, the film's writer-director Stuart Beattie is keen to point out that he was aware of the sensitivity of the race issue and tried to deliberately avoid identifying the invading forces by ethnicity or country.

But while the film's dialogue contains no reference to the origins of the invaders (bar a couple of lines to the effect that it doesn't matter where they come from, they're here in our country), the film arguably identifies the invaders' Pacific-Asian origins using visual cues: their faces.

Beattie says he was careful to cast the invading soldiers from multi-ethnic Asian backgrounds. An examination of the cast list shows that some have Vietnamese or Japanese surnames. Still, most viewers will assume the only Asian nations capable of mounting an invasion of this audacity and scale are China and Indonesia, and the actors clearly look much closer to Chinese than Indonesian. For all the filmmakers' hemming and hawing , to all intents and purposes the film is about a Chinese invasion of Australia.

Does any of this matter? After all Salt, the Angelina Jolie action thriller that Tomorrow knocked off its top box-office perch, resurrects Russia as a nefarious enemy of the West, going so far as to posit that nation as hell-bent on triggering nuclear war.

Sino specialists have reported that China is undertaking a substantial build-up of its armed forces, albeit to strategic ends that are hard to predict. In addition both films are hardly presenting themselves as social realism. They are action movies with huge elements of fantasy, their primary purpose being not to instruct or propagandise but to entertain.

The difference, however, may lie in the context in which both films are being received.

As the Longford silent demonstrates, Australia has a long tradition of xenophobic fears of being swamped by Asia, whether by Indonesian armed forces or, in more recent years, by boatloads of refugees from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Even though it could not have been predicted by the filmmakers, it's hard to ignore the fact Tomorrow has been released directly following an election campaign in which one of the parties' main slogans was Stop the Boats, aimed squarely at Asian refugees.

Marsden was sufficiently sensitive to the issue to avoid naming the invading nation in the book and its sequels, though he makes it clear they are from a neighbouring country (and it's unlikely anyone concluded this meant New Zealand, Papua New Guinea or Solomon Islands.). He has praised the adaptation and called Beattie's decision to go with Asian faces as "gutsy", contradicting a bizarre comment by the film's executive producer, Christopher Mapp, that the invading army "is definitely not specifically Asian at all".

Asian-Australian filmmaker and former Young Australian of the Year Khoa Do says the decision to make the invaders Asian is "unfortunate", especially given Marsden's decision to avoid identifying them in the novel. While he doesn't think the filmmakers' intentions are racist, he worries the film has "the potential to foster racism against future Asian-Australians", especially given the popularity of the film and book. He says he has worked often with high school-aged children and is aware how easily racism can be stirred up in that environment.

The editor of literary journal Overland and Victoria University research fellow Jeff Sparrow has criticised the film for its treatment of race, saying it fits into a long line of Asian-invasion literary narratives cited by academic Catriona Ross, stretching from William Lane's 1888 novel White or Yellow? up to Colin Mason's Northern Approaches (2001).

"The early invasion novels were, for the most part, self-consciously didactic, as much political tracts as entertainments," Sparrow writes on the ABC's website The Drum. "Books like The Yellow Wave, The Coloured Conquest, The Awakening and Fools' Harvest warned about specific, named threats (even if the source of the menace oscillated between China, Japan and Russia -- or sometimes a combination of the three). Tomorrow, When The War Began is different: a slick commercial production, an action flick aimed at teenagers. Nonetheless, as Beattie unwittingly acknowledges, when audiences think of an Australian invasion, those long-standing generic conventions still come into play."

Sparrow tells Inquirer the film's net impact is racist, even though he recognises that is not the filmmaker's intention.

"On one level the film is trying to eschew political interpretations," he says. "It's just that you can't tell that story without touching upon these archetypal narratives. Definitely it will be of comfort to racists, but more at the structural level. I don't think the filmmakers are ideological.

"What makes the audience believe in this narrative is that they have heard it time and time again. It's part of our political DNA, part of our deep sense of anxiety about being a white settler state in South Asia."

Beattie says: "I never felt it would work to keep the invaders' race a complete mystery. Film is a visual medium and to have the enemy in balaclavas -- at some point you're going to see their faces. I wanted to spend as little time as possible explaining who the invaders are. If they were Russians, I'd have to have a long explanation of why they are invading. Because Asia is a neighbour, that leads to us not having to explain it that much, because they are close [to Australia]. In the books the clues all hint at a regional conflict."

Beattie suggests that decidedly non-nationalistic agenda is at the heart of his film. The fact that part of it is set during Australia Day is a reminder that "this is the second invasion of Australia. I'm looking at my own history in a different light."

Meanwhile, Tomorrow has racked up the biggest opening weekend box office for an Australian production since Baz Luhrmann's Australia, a film that, perhaps coincidentally, features a fictional land invasion of Australia, this time by Japan.

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