Tonight's Morrison Lecture is being given by a truly eminent scholar, Professor David Walker. I won't do the honours of introducing him, but I'll be handing over to Mark Wainwright in a moment. But I'd just like to note that the Morrison Lectures are the longest continuous public lectures at the Australian National University. Indeed, they precede the Australian National University, having first taken place in the Institute of Anatomy, building which is now the National Film and Sound Archive. They began in the early 1930s and they have continued uninterrupted except for the Second World War since. They moved to the ANU on the establishment of this university after the Second World War. David Walker is therefore the most recent in a long line of really eminent scholars, if you look down the list, who have delivered the Morrison Lecture and it's a very great pleasure personally. And I'm sure you will also appreciate that after you hear his lecture tonight. For me personally, I've known David for some years and it's a wonderful thing that he's here. Professor Mark Wainwright, who will introduce David, retired as Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales in 2006, after an academic career of some 32 years. On retirement he was appointed to be chair of the Australian-China Council, which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or at least is related to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The current chair of the ACC is Warwick Smith, who is also the chair of the advisory board of the Australian Centre on China and the World. In 2011, Professor Wainwright was appointed as the inaugural chair of the Foundation for Australian Studies in China, FASIC. And in that capacity one of his first jobs was to appoint the first BHP Billiton chair professor of Australian Studies at Peaking University and that professor is of course David Walker. So it's my pleasure to ask Mark to come to the microphone to introduce our speaker tonight. David says he will speak for 50 minutes or an hour or so. There will be questions and answers afterwards and I will stand here and help to direct that, but we will have microphones around to help facilitate. So Mark, thank you very much. Well thank you Benjamin, isn't it great to be in this marvellous building. I chair another organisation here at the ANU just down the road, which is a super computer, have done for the last eight years but doesn't have anything like this. But what a wonderful university and the Morrison Lectures of course are just typical of what goes on in this place, which people from other universities such as my old university just envy so much. So welcome to you all as well tonight on behalf of FASIC. And I'll talk a little bit, I'd just like now to introduce someone who does need no introduction to this distinguished audience because David is so well known to you. And if you want to find out more of course you just go to Wikipedia and it goes on forever about David's career. But of course we should note that he's a very distinguished alumnus of this university having done his PhD here just one or two years ago. Of course David as Benjamin said has had an outstanding career as an academic historian and is a leading authority in the study of Australian perspectives of Asia. And of course that was one of the things we were looking for when we established the BHP Billiton Chair at Peking University. Since 1991 David has been a professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University. David's academic stand of course is almost so unbelievable. It's not often that people get admitted to one of the academies but in 2001 the Academy of Social Sciences elected David a Fellow and in 2005 the Academy of Humanities also elected him. A very rare honor and it shows David's standing in the community in these fields. Now let me turn to David's appointment to the BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University. In November 2012 David was appointed as the inaugural BHP Billiton Professor of Australian Studies at Peking University. The chair is an initiative of the Australia-China Council where we conceived of the idea but we needed a lot of money to make that happen. So BHP Billiton came on board and also when we established the Foundation for Australian Studies in China and Peking University has been an enormous player in this whole activity and I know David will probably talk a little bit about that because it's just been a great initiative with Peking University. And of course is the first high profile privately funded Australian and professorial position in China. It was a rather select committee that appointed David. We had a very strong field and we did our interviews in Sydney and turned out on the day there were only two members of the panel. One was me and the other was Jeff Rabie and Jeff and I often congratulate ourselves over a couple of glasses of red wine. What a great appointment we have made. David's appointment of the chair was announced by the then Minister for Trade, the Honourable Craig Emerson. Minister Emerson praised David as an outstanding ambassador for Australian education who would engage Chinese researchers, students, government and the community to lift the profile of Australian society, history and culture. He said that David would also provide academic leadership to a network of more than 30 Australian studies centres in Chinese universities which have been supported by the Australia-China accounts for more than two decades now going on for three. David with the outstanding support of Karen has more than met those expectations of the Minister by a long, long way. Under David's leadership the number of Australian studies centres has grown to over 40 and the pre-existing centres have all been greatly revitalised. David has been an outstanding inaugural BHP Billet and Professor at PKU. His achievements have been monumental and next month he will convene the Third Annual Australian Studies Conference in Shanghai. David conceived of this great series of conferences which have done so much to foster the awareness in China of contemporary Australia. David we thank you for that. There have been so much more I could say about David's achievements over the past two and a half years but it would take longer than their time allotted for his lecture and he's known to go on a little bit. So I think I should stop now and as I said you can find out more about David's achievements and we'd like to talk more about them on other occasions. So thank you David and we look forward to delivering the 76th Morrison lecture. Thank you all. Thank you very much Ben for your introduction. It's a great pleasure to be at China in the World. China in the World and the ANU have a very strong connection to the Australian Studies Program at Peking University and in particular the ANU is a strong supporter of our intern program which we're extremely proud of. We have some of our interns here this evening and some others have entered DFAT. So we're colonising the academic and foreign affairs space with our interns at tremendous speed and thank you Mark for your introductory comments as well. It's been a tremendous pleasure and honour to take up the BHP Billiton Chair at Peking University. Mark mentioned that it's the first privately funded chair of its kind in China in fact it's the first privately funded chair of its kind Australian Studies Chair anywhere as far as I'm aware and the model that has been established by the Foundation for Australian Studies in China is being looked at very closely in Japan, in Indonesia, in India and elsewhere to see if that model can also be applied to the development of Australian Studies in those societies. China of course presents a particular challenge for us because it is as you will readily appreciate a large country. We also have as Mark mentioned over 40 Australian Studies Centres and programs and funding those programs is a particular challenge so we needed a different mechanism to make it look appropriate to make the funding we provided for these programs appropriate and FASIC Foundation for Australian Studies in China with BHP Billiton support has been absolutely essential in building that network, in persuading people in China that we have a serious interest in their interest in Australia and as I keep saying and I've not yet been contradicted so I'll give it another shot there are more Australian Studies Centres in China than there are in the rest of the world combined here I pause and await contradiction. None? Good. So we have them all over China and they're staffed by Chinese academics they're staffed by Chinese academics for the most part with Australian visitors so if you need to know more about the network or want to know more about the network please ask me and we also have a Peking University Australian Studies Centre website which provides wonderful information on all the activities that we undertake. I should also point out that I left Beijing about two weeks ago in rude good health and arrived in Canberra and got the flu so this gives you an idea of the quality of my thinking that I think there's far too much fresh air in Canberra. I think it's harmful to the health and so I look forward to returning to Beijing and finishing the last six months of my assignment there in a couple of weeks or so and we have a replacement my successor coming in February 2016. So the BHP Billiton the FASIC initiative has been a tremendously important one I think China matters enormously to us in all sorts of ways but I think it matters to us very much in an educational sense and that 40 centres or so is a tremendous platform for us to further development that relationship so we have a lot to look forward to in the development of Australian studies in years to come. Okay, water is there. I have to be careful about the management of that because already there have been sharp size and anxious glances. I wish to begin this discussion of Australian representations of Asia, Australian understandings of Asia around the 1890s and the early 1900s. I will then move to the 1930s and then I will progress to the 1950s and early 1960s. If I'm still talking at the time that people want to go out and have further snacks, Ben has indicated that he will creep across the floor and tug my right leg so that we can stop. So if you see anything ostentatious of that kind happening, just take no notice. It's a time management arrangement for the Morrison Lecture which is of course also time on it. So let's go to the first slide which takes us to Lord Northcliff who visited Australia, the great UK press baron, bombastic, loudmouth, a person who owned much of the media around the First World War and tremendous presence and often an adverse one in the media world. He had some Australian connections. He was a mentor to the young Keith Murdoch who was so close to Northcliff during the First World War that Murdoch was called for a time Southcliff, Lord Southcliff. And it was Murdoch that also introduced Northcliff to the Australian wartime Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. And it was Billy Hughes who was instrumental in pressing Northcliff to pay a visit to Australia in 1921 to talk about the world and the empire and all that sailed in her. Now Northcliff was a person who hit upon all the major themes of that time, 1921. So he toured Australia, gave a lot of talks along the way and warned Australians not to be, that they had a dog in the manger attitude towards their continent which he meant that they were too few of them to defend a continent the size of Australia and yet they demonstrated a serious unwillingness to allow other people to join them in the settlement process. He referred as many people did at that time to the empty North and noted the vulnerability of Australia to Asian invasion. He was also very, very concerned about the role of Australia within the empire itself and saw Australia as critically important to the maintenance of that empire and as Billy Hughes would have wanted, he spoke at every address about the importance of the white Australia policy the need to maintain that policy and the danger that policy was in from the North. He also referred as many speakers at that time did to the proximity of Asia but Northcliff came up with a metaphor that I have not encountered before in this discussion in arguing that or proposing that you can almost smell the east on your northern breezes. So he gave it a powerful, gave proximity a powerful olfactory dimension. In the course of his tour he also referred to the American race theorist Lothrop Stoddard who in 1919 had published a book called The Rising Tide of Colour. The Rising Tide of Colour and Northrop pointed out to Australian audiences that this was a book that was very, very relevant to them and to their circumstances. The title you can see in the slide I think indicates clearly enough. It was one of those wonderful books. You didn't have to read the book to know what the book was about and I think that's the kind of book that suited Northcliff down to a T. So there it was, the full argument, the full thesis was present on the front cover and Stoddard's warning stood out very, very, very starkly indeed. The book was being reviewed in Australia from about the mid-1920 and was reviewed very favourably. People took this warning very much to heart. Stoddard had also referred to Australia as an important continent in the saving of the white races but the warning was taken very much to heart. So much so that the book marched out of the bookstores and the copies were to be found by the end of 1920. So a new shipment had to be rushed to Australia to feed the hunger for the Rising Tide of Colour. In the course of that book, in the course of writing the book, Stoddard also acknowledged the profound influence that an Australian writer had had on him in his thinking, in alerting him to his theme about the rising importance of colour in the post-war world. And that figure, that author was Charles Pearson. Scholar pauses for water. It's an artefact of my flu. Pearson had written National Life and Character a forecast, a very influential book in 1893. It was very widely reviewed in Australia and Europe and North America. Theodore Roosevelt, not yet president of the United States of course, reviewed it at very considerable length and admired it. A great deal as a work of scholarship. Lord Curzon also reviewed it and very much doubted that a person from Australia could write a book worth thinking about on matters relating to the East. But the East wasn't Pearson's only topic. He had a number of speculations about the nature of the modern world, about what would happen to modern literature, about what would happen to the epic form, about what would happen to heroism in the modern world and so on. But one of his central themes was the rise of China and the ways in which that would impact the modern world. And Pearson made two particularly important observations on that theme and it was these observations that Stoddard had noted and which alerted him to some of the important themes that he later took up in his ominous, the rising tide of colour. One of those propositions was that the world was, or the western world, or the higher races as Pearson referred to the European races, the higher races in his view had reached the limits of their expansion. They could go no further. They could not expand into the tropical regions because the argument of the day was that the tropical regions were not suited to the white races. They could not develop in such places. Whereas the Asian races, or as again in this invidious terminology, which I beg you to excuse, the invidious terminology of the late 19th century, the lower races had available to them many more spaces for colonisation. The one exception to that proposition was Australia. And Pearson, who was Oxford educated, came to Australia in the 1860s and became a minister in the Victorian Parliament and later a prominent educator. Pearson looked into this question as a historian would, noted that the world was closing in for the European races. And in looking at Australia, argued that this was the last available continent for the development and expansion of the European races. So Pearson reconfigured the whole idea of Australia around this proposition, around the centrality of Australia to what he saw as the great geopolitical conflict arising in the 20th century, the great battle between East and West, much commented upon, much anticipated and much talked about and discussed in national laughing character or forecast. So for Pearson, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that everyone swung in behind the Pearson argument, but the proposition I'm putting here is that Pearson's redefinition of Australia as geopolitically central to one of the world's great upcoming conflicts turned Australia from that remote outpost of empire, a place of no particular significance in the world to a place of strategic importance in the determination of the future and particularly the future between Europe and Asia. So it was a moment of dramatic reconfiguration that put Australia in a central place in the great upcoming battles that he anticipated for the 20th century. The other point he made was that if you look at the world from the vantage point of Melbourne, the map changes very, very dramatically that the European world shrinks in power and significance and importance and size very, very considerably that somehow the reassurance of European power which was available to British people and to people living in Europe was somehow denied Australian settlers. So Australian settlers were exposed to a different looking world and if you look to Asia, Pearson argued, it grew much more powerful in its dimensions and more significant, more portentous and more ominously dangerous. So what Pearson is arguing here is also a changing sensibility and his contention is that Europeans living in Australia were the first to see the rise of Asia in these terms. They were the first to feel in a visceral way what the rise of Asia might mean for the eclipse of European power and that generated a particular kind of nervousness, a particular kind of unease which in writing about this subject I refer to as anxiety called a book on the subject anxious nation which seeks to characterize some of those responses to the rise of Asia at this time. So one of the propositions I'm putting to you is that the rise of Asia, the idea of rising Asia coincides almost exactly with those discussions around federation and the federation movement and the framing of the Australian nation itself. The nation that we became in 1901 is a nation that was built against the backdrop of that rising Asia set of understandings, expectations and anxieties. Pearson was particularly influential coming the immigration, when the immigration restriction debates took place in 1901, was often quoted and his views were taken seriously in federal parliament. Now his, we move on, his arguments around the rise of Asia and his arguments around the possibility that Asia might overtake Australia were captured in a number of texts from the 1880s through to the First World War which in various ways form a body of invasion literature which picks up the theme of invasive Asia in this formative period of Australian development. So we start in 1888 with William Lane, White or Yellow, a story of the race war of 1898 which has the Chinese seeking to invade Australia. It's a long, complicated, very dramatic, wholly unbelievable plot but it's wonderful reading and I urge it upon you. Even better in some ways Kenneth Mackay, the Yellow Wave which is ingeniously subtitled a romance of the Asiatic invasion of Australia. Another very worthwhile read. Sometimes I think I'm the only person who'd read some of these books which is quite a wonderful position to be in as a scholar. Kenneth Mackay, the Yellow Wave. Artie Roidhouse, The Coloured Conquest published in 1903. C.H. Kermess, three different editions of Kermess were in circulation at the same time at around the time that the Great White Fleet visited Australia in 1908. So you have the Commonwealth crisis. Some people felt that maybe Commonwealth was too difficult a word so it was called the Australian crisis but in any event it was a story of the Asian invasion of Australia. Banzai, fabulous book, wonderful story, Ferdinand Grouthoff. Too little is known about Ferdinand Grouthoff. Banzai, a great story of the Asian invasion of Australia which also involves America and so on. So when America falls, Australia is next. William Strang, no, Herbert Strang, The Air Scout. So for young adolescents could not reasonably be denied a good invasion story. So Herbert Strang, who wrote dozens of books for adolescents in that late 19th, early 20th century adventure mode, wrote an absolute thriller about the invasion of Australia which was largely by air and foiled, I'm pleased to say. So all of these, there are nervous people still about this subject so I feel that I should let you know that. Actually, I digress to say that when Anxious Nation was launched in Queensland there was a very avid group of people sitting in the front row who were very enthusiastic about the broad argument of the book which was an argument about the rise of Asia and its implications for Australia and it turned out that they were all One Nation people who accepted the argument of the book fully and thought that I'd done a wonderful job in exposing the danger but it actually missed the fact that I was a scholarly person who was merely drawing attention to a theme that had perhaps in some respects passed its day but there you go. So these invasion texts were also supplemented by other stories and there's a film unhappily about the Asian invasion of Australia not unhappily but there's a film unhappily The Films Lost but there was a film also made on this theme and many short stories and so on so it was a widely discussed topic in this period. It of course raises the question of what we do with this what we do with this literature how do we interpret this literature and I think too often it's been regarded as a kind of literal statement about Australian anxieties about Asia while there's obviously some reason to think that may well be the case there's also a considerable invasion literature in Europe in the United States and in Britain from the 1880s onwards in the British case of course it's nearly always continental Europe that's doing the invading and there are stories of tunnels and so on but the argument I think that it translates automatically and literally to a fear of Asia needs to be looked at a bit more carefully because clearly the subject of invasion provided tremendous copy for writers and the writers involved clearly also wanted to sell their books they wanted to make an impact, they wanted to make money they were in the business of writing they weren't necessarily in the business of truth telling about the rise of Asia in part we need to look at this as a genre driven enthusiasm for an exciting topic which could promise all sorts of danger ominous threats, conspicuous heroism and wonderful plots it also of course picked up lots of other opportunities this sort of literature created many opportunities to survey some of the contemporary preoccupations of late 19th century Australia these have indicated some of them here but these included things like the relative merits of the bush versus the city was the fact that Australia by the 1890s was the fact that it had emerged as the most urbanized society in the world was that a source of serious concern was that something that spoke negatively about Australian characteristics where Australians are better people in being a people who settled the land and built rural Australia up as a source of strength and so on so there's a considerable discussion through the 1890s and the early 1900s around those things and the invasion novel provides a perfect opportunity to address some of those concerns all of them, all of the invasion novels are set in rural Australia or at least the defence of Australia is set in rural environments so the bush is seen as the heartland of the patriotic defence of Australia but again looking at the 1890s and the early 1900s it's possible to see this also as an opportunity for writers to address the great gender battles that were taking place in Australia at that period this is the period of the rise of the new woman of votes for women, of women becoming more public in public settings and for nationalist publications like the Bulletin this was very much a no-no, the Bulletin was absolutely opposed to the new woman absolutely opposed to votes for women and very very critical of the rise of women as demonstrated by these movements so a lot of the invasion literature is an opportunity I think or can be seen as an opportunity to either masculinise or remasculinise to re-emphasise the centrality of the male in the development of Australian culture and the rise of Asia is also an important opportunity to reconfigure the male back into the centre of that story of defending an imperiled continent I've also argued completely without success I might point out that the idea of the bush itself I think coincides with or the enthusiasm for the bush coincides pretty much with the rise of Asia so the first invasion novel, the William Lane story 1888 also installs the bush and the bushman as central figures in defending Australia so I've argued that in some respects I think we should consider the enthusiasm for the bush in late 19th century Australia as having some influence from this rise of Asia argument the bush becomes the source, the heart of our defence of the Australian continent as I say as a scholar I've been totally unsuccessful in persuading anyone of the enormous merits of that argument so please if you thoroughly persuade about rush up to me afterwards and say I've never heard anything more convincing than that and the other point to be made and that's a point that continues through a lot of this Asia related discourse is that right from this period the invasion literature sets Asia up as in some respects Australia's future so the idea of Asia as Australia's future is installed in the invasion literature and it continues to be the case it continues to be the case in all the many reports that we have on the relationship to Asia including Australia and the Asian Century which is a report which has no commentary whatsoever on the history of the relationship with Asia and is totally predicated on an understanding of what Asia will mean to Australia a generation or so hits so it has a slightly different theme from William Lane's White or Yellow it has a similar kind of time frame and a similar way of posing Asia as Australia's future so if you're ever worrying about or wondering about where Asia is the simplest answer to that is it's the future, it's our future it's a generation of him, he's we are getting there, we're getting there slowly okay now among those titles are referred to the colored conquest published in 1903 which is the year after the Anglo-Japanese alliance and it's a very very interesting text I think because it's narrated by the narrator of the colored conquest is the last surviving white man the Japanese have conquered Australia they allow this man to remain alive to tell the story of white Australia they allow him to do that because he'd formed some strong bonds with the Japanese invaders and they respected him now it's interesting I think because at that time in the late 19th and early 20th century there was also a very widespread discussion around the end of Aboriginal Australia and many Aboriginal figures were presented as the last of their tribe as the last witness to the passing of Aboriginal society and Aboriginal culture so in 1903 right at the moment of federation there's a story which is proposing that the period of white colonisation of Australia is likely to be a brief interregnum between an Aboriginal past and an Asian future and again forgive the language but as white replaced black in 1902 would yellow replace white so the message of the colored conquest is not to invite Australian readers to reflect upon the dispossession of Aboriginal society and to concern themselves about the implications of that dispossession white readers into a kind of preemptive pathos about the disappearance of white Australia that they're invited to think about what the passing of the European races in Australia might mean so that in a sense before the invasion has happened the emotional anticipation of what that might mean has been written in to the language of late 19th and early 20th century federation so I'd again propose that in our thinking about the nation in our thinking about the idea of the nation and the role that the nation has played the idea of our being supplanted by Asia and this sits very very close to the heart of those federation conceptions of white Australia there's also in the course of the book a thing called Fair Lily Colonies which are designed to have the finest of the European women put into situations where they breed with Japanese men a new race adapted for the Australian continent I at other points make the observation or I sometimes wonder what one might learn about Asia from such texts and one of the conclusions one has to draw about that is perhaps not much that often in this literature what we're looking at is the ways in which our current concerns whatever the current concerns of the day are are projected onto Asia and the ways in which we read Asia through that Australian lens so one of my contentions would be and I may return to this right at the end but one of my contentions would be that in a lot of the debate about Asia literacy there is not much Asia but there is a great deal of Australia but we need to be much more explicit much more clear headed about the ways in which Australian assumptions, Australian anxieties and Australian preoccupations shape what we imagine Asia to be and the colour conquest is quite a nice example of that phenomenon okay now very very partial to Frank Fox first of all I just love parents who would call their boy Frank Frank Fox because we know that this is completely inappropriate naming for a fox because Fox is there anything about Frank but there they are Frank Fox editor of The Lone Hand which was a monthly publication that ran alongside the bulletin and it too shared a lot of those nationalist concerns about Asian invasion about invasive Asia it was very committed to events like the visit of the Great White Fleet in 1908 and so on and a special commemorative issue supporting that and so on so Fox was very much at the heart of this discussion about the imperiled Australian continent at the time of federation and I do love that quotation of his and I do also wish to spend a little bit of quality time with that notion of the bushman again as being the backbone of resistance to the flow of Asia across the Pacific along the Pacific and it's interestingly juxtaposes I think the idea of again the idea of the male who is in some regards and looking at this argument is the ideal race patriot in Australia at this time but it also situates him in a defensive position I think because as noble as it is to be the backbone it's defensive, it's a backs to the wall position and it has a certain kind of ominous quality to it that you're forced into this position of defensiveness and in a sense you're up against something in the flow of Asia which seems so powerful so irresistible so silently ominous that you worry about the poor bushman and his backbone that you know will he withstand a force so powerful and so difficult to resist there are also I think some interesting gender implications in these juxtapositions that the bushman is clearly there defending the continent but the flow of Asia is also women as we know flow rather more than men so the in the gendering of these things so crowds and women are associated with flowing and movements and surreptitious movement feline movements so part of what's being presented here I think is an idea of Asia not just as invasive as is often captured or attempted to be captured in the invasion literature itself which is clearly about literal things like armies and borders and invasion but this notion the Fox notion I think points to something much more sinister much more harder to pick much more harder to to evade much more elusive and a kind of infiltration and that again goes back to one of the points that Pearson made in the 1890s when he was talking about not only the geopolitical sense of Asia becoming closer and Asia expanding its place in the world but Asia entering spaces cultural spaces that were previously the exclusive reserve of Europeans so Pearson poor Pearson worried about going to the races at Ascot where you could reasonably assume that you would be among your own kind but speculating that the day would come when there'd be Chinese people there and so that that kind of exclusive cultural space or the high cultural spaces of European society opera theater would be places infiltrated by an Asian presence so it's not only the grand geopolitics of Asia and the West it's also these more intimate cultural spaces which have been infiltrated and closed in which are no longer to be relied upon in these discussions and in these debates so I am very partial to Frank and I do love that quotation because it sets up I think a very interesting juxtaposition between the desire to defend Australia but also and sitting beneath that a kind of ominous sense that this is going to be a very very difficult and perhaps futile undertaking Right, I now leap forward to the 1930s How are we going for time Ben? 10 to 7, it's good It's often argued that the discovery of Asia is really something that happens with the Second World War and after and part of the purpose of mentioning the 1930s here and indeed this is one of the ways in which this particular topic connects with the current exhibition at China and the World which is an examination of the ANU and its commitment to China studies and Asian studies more broadly that a lot of these understandings of Australia's place in Asia come together in the 1930s in a differently configured way So I'm not for a moment saying that in the 1930s all the old arguments about invasive Asia disappear they do not, there are still invasion stories written in the 1930s but there's beginning to be a new language around Australia's place in Asia That I think is interestingly signalled in Robert Menzies first broadcast to Australians on the 3rd of May 1939 on becoming Prime Minister and he makes a point of arguing that Australia should consider itself, should think of itself as a Pacific power He argues that that brings with it important responsibilities for Australia a new way of thinking about our place in the region and it's a theme that he returns to on a number of occasions through 1939 on visits to other cities across Australia So it's not just an accidental allusion to the Pacific power idea Referring back to the ANU, RM Crawford also wrote quite eloquently about how Australia needed to think of itself as a Pacific power at the same time Now it's not that the term hadn't been around for a while My first discovery of the use of that term dates back to 1875 So in 1875 there's a very fully argued piece setting out the fact that what's the far east of Britain is the near north to Australia and spelling out the implications of that discovery That language was available but it's not until the 1930s that that language is picked up at the highest level of Australian politics and found to be useful Now among historians there's been a discussion about what this usage of the term means Why did Menzies do this, why did he pick up that term and use it in that way Now historians are inclined to see it as being relatively unimportant They feel that it didn't necessarily lead to anything much But I would argue that it's an important lexical shift in trying to shape an argument again around the Australian relationship with Asia Another dimension of that argument has been whether in using the language of Pacific power In an attempt to shift Australia on to a more independent course To have Australia think independently about its place in the region And I'm not convinced by that either particularly I think what's happening here and it needs to be understood in the context of the 1930s Is that Menzies and others, Agustin, Latham Were wanting to find a way for Australia to make an intellectually reputable contribution to international debates This discussion was taking place across several fields PR Stevenson wrote an essay called The Foundations of Culture in Australia published in 1936 Subtitled an essay towards national self-respect Stevenson wanted Australia to develop a national literature believing that without a national literature we had no self-respect I think for the international studies community The idea that Australia could make no contribution had nothing to say about international affairs Was a sign of our lowly status, our undeveloped status as a nation So in order to be a fully fledged nation, in order to be a nation that might be taken seriously We needed to sit at the top table, we needed to be able to make a contribution to those debates So for Menzies, the contention that Australia should be a Pacific power was not in any sense an argument That Australia should withdraw from Britain or take a different course from Britain It was exactly the reverse It was Australia's opportunity to step up to the obligations and responsibilities of its place within the British Empire And the responsibilities that befell those who were British If we were to be a fully fledged, respectable British nation, we had to do this kind of thing So for Menzies, it was part of our responsibility of nationhood to become a Pacific power, to become a Pacific nation So the Imperial framework was important for his argument and in no sense was he saying we had to chart a different course In the same year, Sir Robert Garen wrote one of the first arguments in favour of Asian studies in Australia And he did that as a retired senior public servant, a figure greatly respected for his knowledge of the Commonwealth and Commonwealth politics And in making that argument, Garen points out that Australia has a special opportunity to understand the region He also goes out of his way in the course of the argument to say that Australia cannot reasonably hope to make any impact on the affairs of Europe Australia cannot reasonably hope to have a seat at that table But we can reasonably hope to garner enough expertise, enough knowledge of the region we inhabit to make a significant contribution to the understanding of the Pacific world and Pacific affairs And he goes on to argue that the study of Asia, we need to know Asia and they, we hope, will also know us And the language of naveliness comes into Garen's argument and would be much repeated in the post-war period I think it's also interesting that the emphasis in this period is on Pacific, again the terminology Pacific Because I think the use of the word Pacific in Australian minds conjured up oceans and sea power and that brought to mind Britain and the United States If you were talking Asia that referenced the land mass, teaming Asia and invasive Asia, the old Asia of the late 19th and early 20th century and of those stories of invasion So the lexical repositioning of Australia as a Pacific power is also an attempt to reassure the Australian people that if we become a Pacific power, we do not do so on our own in Asia We are not on our own in this part of the world that we are surrounded by ocean, we, our side, commands the ocean and we will be looked after My next figure has very little in common with either Menzies or Garen and that's Frank Cloon Frank Cloon, a popular writer, he had all the credentials that you need in order to become a popular writer including service at Gallipoli When I looked up his record at Gallipoli, this is no adverse comment on Frank Cloon, he was there a day, took a bullet at the end of day one and was repatriated But he was able to have Gallipoli served at Gallipoli in the CV and was presented himself always as a very down to worth Australian Cloon made absolutely no pretensions to being a writer, he abhorred the idea of writer and he ran a mile from any suggestions that he had rightly skills or ambitions His prose was absolutely home made and rough, rough as bags and he had no pretensions either to be part of the international relations, international studies community That was not his world at all, Frank Cloon was an accountant by training and books were things that he produced in order to make money There is no possibility that Frank Cloon would have entered the field of writing about Asia if he thought there wasn't an audience for such speculations or an audience for work about Asia And if he didn't think he'd make money from it Cloon also was a very keen broadcaster, so although the ABC abhorred the fact that he spoke with an Australian accent, he was nonetheless popular with audiences, so they couldn't avoid him So Cloon persuaded the ABC to run some broadcasts on a trip to Asia which became in his typically alliterative way Sky High to Shanghai, his first book on Asia published in 1939 In the course of that book, Cloon also makes a number of references to George Ernest Morrison, a person who I must also refer to of course But it's very interesting Cloon's positioning of Morrison is as the exemplary white man in the East, whose intellectual command is such that he is able to provide leadership of the eastern world when there was so few of him and so many of them So for Cloon, Morrison is the perfect exemplification of something that Cloon wanted so badly to believe and that is that there was a role for Australia and there was a role for the white man in the leadership of the Asian region So Cloon comes into this enthusiasm for Asia believing in the idea of white leadership Remember that he's a working class Catholic lad who grew up as a newspaper boy in the working class suburb of Wulamalu in Sydney He did not have a whole lot going for him but he had the fact that he was white and the fact that he was male And those two attributes got him into some very very plush circumstances in his travels So Asia for Cloon in the late 1930s was a wonderful place It delivered all sorts of special opportunities, some fantastic hotels, some great company on flights and all sorts of opportunities that would be denied him in other circumstances So he loved the idea of Asia, loved the idea that white leadership in this world could provide He wrote about seven or eight books on Asia including a biography of Morrison And his last book was published in 1955 Flight to Formosa Now it's a pretty odd time to end your Asia related career So what the question arises is what went wrong, what went wrong for Frank Cloon's idea of Asia And I think the short answer to that story, being a scholar I can provide a very long one And I do an upcoming book on these subjects but the short answer to that I think is that for Cloon decolonizing Asia was absolutely not what he wanted or needed He did not want an Asia that would talk back to his preferred white man He had terrible trouble travelling around India because he was charged with the responsibility of explaining to the Indians that the white Australia policy had nothing to do with race This proved to be an exceptionally difficult mission And Cloon was constantly annoyed, baffled, irritated and made irate by the fact that so many extremely eloquent Indians didn't seem to believe a word of what he was saying So the idea of an Asia that talked back, the idea of decolonized Asia, an idea of Asia in which there was no such thing as European leadership Was of no value to Cloon at all, so he retreats entirely from his Asia related project So there's again one of those brief interregnums there where it just for a moment seemed possible that Australia could play this leadership role Cloon was so invested with the hope of that being a role that Australia might play in which would reinvigorate the nation, re-energize the nation, bring it out of the doldrums of the 1930s To give it a role and a promise and then it disappears and with it disappears Cloon's project as a writer about Asia We move to the 50s and to the project of knowing Asia Now what happened between 1939 when I'm proposing that the idea of Australian leadership in the region was very, very powerful in figures like Menzies and Garen and Eggleston and Latham and others A decade later, 1949, there's the general election, the prosecution of the White Australia policy by Arthur Cole has been so brutal, so harsh, and so bitterly rejected in the region Australia has gone from a kind of leader or imagining the possibility of leadership in 1939 to recognizing the fact that it's a pariah in the region in 1949 So the idea of Australia playing a leadership role virtually disappears across that decade and with the incoming Menzies government there's an immediate recognition that Australia had to rehabilitate its reputation in Asia It's not so much or any longer an unequivocal position of leadership, it's a question of rehabilitation And across the decade, across the 1950s, the Menzies government with RG Casey playing the primary role introduced a number of schemes which are designed to build Australia's reputation in the region Radio Australia is given a stronger mandate to broadcast into the region and its signals are boosted so that it has stronger power to transmit to the north of Australia and its messages are very carefully managed Casey is very interested in joining Britain and the United States in a cheap books for Asia program which was designed to find books which exemplify Australian characteristics and have them published in cheap editions for Asian readers It's an absolutely fascinating story, not one book was found that exemplified Australian characteristics, it's a lovely story, I will not tell it here There was also an Asian visitors program designed to fund people who had been critics of Australia particularly Indian critics of Australia and the White Australia policy to bring them to Australia and to show them what hospitable people we were and how well disposed we were towards Asia. One of the other missions of the Asian visitors program was to expose these visitors to some of the hottest and most arid parts of Australia in order to drive home the message to them that this was not a place for mass Asian colonisation and indeed the itinerary of these programs was very carefully managed, at one point there was a complaint that having been taken through the Barossa Valley after heavy rainfall the visitors formed the mistaken impression that Australia was a fertile continent so the next tour they dropped them in Perth and took them across the Nulliball Plains in January and the visitors were pleading for relief when they reached Adelaide in temperatures of over a century So these programs were and the Asian Australian associations which KC created as well to welcome Asian visitors and so on. So there are a range of schemes established across this period to help build Australia's reputation in the region but also to drive home this message which had been so badly damaged by a corval that Australians were of course extremely well disposed towards Asia and the people of very conspicuous hospitality and among those schemes is the magazine Hemisphere Asian Australian magazine first published 1956 and Hemisphere is an interesting study I think in this question of projecting an image onto the region because it had some very very particular themes which were addressed insistently across each issue of the journal It was published by the Department of Education but everything that appeared in Hemisphere was carefully vetted and managed by the Department of External Affairs The Department of External Affairs had a committee that reviewed every article and the only people in my estimation who ever read Hemisphere at all closely were the people sitting on the committee of the Department of External Affairs and believe you me they read it very closely indeed and they across time and across all of these platforms, the cheap books platform, the Asian visitors, Radio Australia, Hemisphere etc they established this list of objectives around which are ideals or images that they wanted to project onto the region and you see them there At the top of the list always was the absence of racial prejudice in Australia which was an heroic mission in the late 1950s but it's very interesting as a historian to see how insistently this idea was promulgated across the period And I think I've come to understand it a little bit better now than I did originally because one of the if you again go to the literature that sits behind this discussion one of the points that they were making very very routinely through the 50s and 60s was that Australia had no calibre So once the Asian visitors got from Perth to Adelaide and survived the trip they were free to travel on public transport, they were free to go to restaurants, they were free to go wherever they wanted in Australia So on the Australian side there was a consistent messaging that we had no racial prejudice, these people were free to go wherever they wanted We didn't actually want them in the country of course as permanent immigrants but if they happen to be here, if they happen to find a way of getting here we were very welcoming and very hospitable So the idea of Australian hospitality was part of the insistent message coming through these publications There was also a regular appeal to the idea of innovative Australia and those acts of innovation which had made Australia proud And they kept coming through this list of topics which Hemisphere promoted, Cheap Books for Asia promoted, Radio Australia promoted, etc, etc It was also interesting that Hemisphere did do some surveys of Asian student opinion, the journal was intended for an Asian readership And sitting in the files of Hemisphere are some responses from Asian students What Asian students wanted to read in Hemisphere were articles about immigration and the White Australia policy They wanted to read articles about Aboriginal Australia and they wanted to read articles about colonialism and the West New Guinea dispute Hemisphere carried no articles on Aboriginal Australia for 20 years Although there were considerable debates within the Department of External Affairs about whether it was possible to have an article appear in Hemisphere on Aboriginal humour It was found that that might be too provocative, it did not appear So we have here a very interesting gap between what the Department sought to project onto the region about Australia, the understanding of Australia And again high on that list always was what was often referred to cryptically as Waterless Australia The idea of Australia is an arid country and then built into that is also a rediscovery of the pioneer as the person who exemplified the settlement of Australia in harsh conditions And the hardworking Australian was also emphasised in that discussion And if you read the notes that accompany these discussions in the Department of External Affairs, the hardworking Australian was important to try and persuade our neighbours that it was inappropriate for them to wait for Europeans to develop the continent And then just walk in and believe that they could take it over, that was not considered nice So hardworking Australians had built this continent in harsh and waterless conditions and these were the images that were insistently projected through those forums that were promoted through the 50s and through the 60s So no discussion of Aboriginal Australia and Hemisphere, no discussion of the West New Guinea dispute, very little discussion of anything that related to re-immigration or the White Australia policy And it was often the case through this period, through the 50s and 60s that again reading the Hemisphere files that student opinion was often, Asian student opinion was often dismissed as being erratic and emotional These were emotional responses to subject matters that Hemisphere knew were rather less important than the topics that it had established So through the 50s and 60s there was a habit of assuming on the Australian side that they could speak for Asian opinion and Asian student opinion and where that opinion diverged from the Hemisphere agenda that could be easily explained in psychological terms It was emotional and inaccurate representation of Australian realities which needed to be corrected So so many of these activities had a corrective bias Okay, we are closing in on time We have closed in on time, haven't we? Let me just end then with what in camera I think should be called talking points or even announcements I think I've touched upon some of these points already The idea that Asia is Australia's future is a constant in these debates That we as a society don't give enough in my view enough serious reflection to the ways in which we have constructed and understood Asia over the last 130 or 140 years That if we were to look more closely at that it would say a lot about the fact that so much of what we in these debates understand Asia to be a projections upon Asia of Australian concerns, preoccupations and anxieties The other point I'd make is that if you look at the history of the case for knowing Asia better It has quite a strong conservative political impetus which I think is interesting in view of a lot of the current debates Where the conservative side of politics often walk away from or repudiate or regard the idea of Asia literacy itself as being a labour or a progressive enthusiasm And that's pretty much an artefact I think of the use of the term from 1988 when Bob Hawke took it up in the Centenary year and made Asia literacy an important national project But the longer history of knowing Asia has strong conservative impetus I think in looking at this debate it's also difficult to find while the terminology can suggest that there's unanimous objectives or similar objectives in mind When we talk about knowing Asia there can be very very different agendas and objectives at play in that discussion And perhaps my final point is that if you're looking at this history from the early 19th century An interest in Asia seems to me always stronger where there's defence, security and economic motivations for studying Asia Then there are four arguments based around education and intellectual curiosity Thank you very much Thank you very much That was a wonderful talk, a real tour de force I think only someone who's spent, I mean you wear the years of study and archival research and reading rather lightly But it's all there, it's all there to be displayed Thank you That's fine The other thing I'd like to say is that it's wonderful to hear someone speak with such an ear for the language The language of the texts that you're reading, the implications, the subtle underpinnings of the discourse That we've all lived through Much of what you spoke about of course is deeply resonant to the present for better or worse So David has kindly agreed to take questions, we still have some time for that So Neil here and Nancy over there have got microphones so please, the floor is open Will Thank you for that Professor Walker I just got a question with regards to the literature of the first period that you mentioned from 1880 to 1910 How much was that a reflection of the experience of, I suppose, the direct experience with Chinese people who were in Australia in the gold mines I believe that there was some stats around one in five men in Victoria at one stage was Chinese How much of that was a reflection of those experiences, all those romanticised experiences I think that experience of the Chinese from the 1850s played very significantly into these debates It did so in a number of ways, it played into the invasive Asia debate very centrally I think Because the Chinese were found to be so remarkably adaptable Their colonising prowess was evident at a time when there was a lot of adverse comment on the fact that after a century of European colonisation The population of Australia was still thought to be remarkably low And that colonising process was again judged often to be slow and ineffective So there was the unnerving prospect sitting behind that discussion about Chinese adaptability, Chinese capacity The ability of the Chinese to make a go of colonisation That they were in some ways the supreme global colonists So coming down into a discussion like William Lane's White or Yellow The juxtaposition there is absolutely plain, you cannot possibly compromise on whiteness If you have any tinge of yellow in there then you will be defeated And a lot of this also plays into late 19th century debates about the, if you like, the biological power of the Chinese That there were, Pearson talks about evanescent races who will disappear Aboriginal people are deemed evanescent He manifestly does not regard the Chinese as evanescent That their bloodlines will become dominant And so running through all of that discussion I think is an unease that our colonising project Our European white colonising project is inherently weaker than the case that could be made for a Chinese colonisation of Australia Peter Drystow from the ANU Thanks very much David for a fascinating exposition of the major forces that shaped Australian constructs of Asia over the generations The thing that interests me is the change in these constructs What drove the change in these constructs And when you think back for example from the age of the fear of invasion to the age of the emergence of thinking about Australia as a Pacific power It's difficult to conceive of that change taking place without there having been some continuity in contesting constructs of Asia through the whole period And I wonder if you could reflect upon that because you think about the people who influence thinking about Asia Contrary to the main and dominant themes in the 20s and 30s The Clooney's Ross family as boy as a whole range of people Young Crawford when he set out his essay in the early 1930s wasn't absent anchors from the past or the late 1930s for that matter What soccer was given in the Australian intellectual and social environment to those contesting conceptions of Asia in earlier periods That made it possible in fact to have significant policy change when you might not have thought it possible to have significant policy change towards Asia Like in the middle of the Second World War and the early part of the Second World War And of course after the Second World War as you described Yeah, well I think Peter I think the One of the arguments I go back to for the 1930s is the self-respect argument that there's a lot of commentary through that period that Australia The only thing Australia was known for was wall and cricketers and that as a nation that this was just not enough We had to do more than that so in the area of a national literature in the area of creating an Australian poetry There was a great deal of discussion about finding an Australian voice that would speak to the world about our condition and our particular circumstances And I see a lot of the international relations debate and the Pacific Power debate has been connected to that wider discussion About how Australia might move to another phase of development that we move And there was a lot of discussion again through that period about the end of the pioneering era And Brian Penton and other commentators were writing novels about the end of the pioneering age We can no longer rely upon that That had served us very very well through the late 19th and early 20th century depending on what you believe served us well might mean But there was a kind of rhetoric and a sustaining language around pioneering which by the 30s had gone So part of what's happening across each of these forums I think is a desire to find something intellectually reputable for Australia to be good at And so much of the discussion again going back to Pearson I mean one of Pearson's arguments is absolutely that Australia is central to the coming geopolitical debates of the 20th century So already there's an argument that says that Australia need not be at the remote end of the British Empire that it can be a significant player And while to be invaded is a very very undesirable thing Not to be thought worth invading is not so great either So in a way Australia is reconfigured as a prize And that value that's added to Australia increases the argument about how Australia might play a role in the region But I think what's also and absolutely critical to the 1930s and as Japan leaves the international community as the international situation Fragments and deteriorates is the need for the United States and Britain to come together And Australia through the 1930s is increasingly positioned as the settler society, the one that's and Boyer and others are very Very invested in the idea that Australia is in a position to talk both to the United Kingdom and to the United States And to be the bridge that brings them together to save Western civilization So part of the logic of the Pacific argument is also a logic about the role that Australia can play in bringing together Two very estranged partners, in the 1930s the relationship between the US and Britain is not great The relationship between Australia and the US is very poor So the argument emerges that if there is to be a coherent Pacific then Australia has to play a role in bringing the United States and Britain together And that also is where figures like Hartley Gratton become quite important in being American witnesses to the argument of Australia Taking a Pacific turn through the 1930s The language of neighbourliness is also very much a language that we pick up from the Americans in relation to their attempt to build connections to Latin America That's the language the Americans are using in the early 1930s and we pick it up as a way of re-apilitating our relationship and reshaping, re-arguing our relationship with Asia in the late 30s But America is central to that argument and it's not something that I brought out in the talk Hi, hello, I got a question I think at moments we may see like, I don't know what's the exact population We see Australia receives accommodates, a huge number of Asian immigrants simultaneously Asian students rec number like Chinese till 2014 become the largest international students body in Australia And also India And also we may see a booming Asian tourists So something I might call like we call Australia's cultural accommodation People come to Australia Also Australian simultaneously actively participates, so for example Asian Cup and this year Australia held it So this is something I might say like Australia's cultural accommodation So what I'm thinking like in coming future decades Do you think Australia will be think or transfer its cultural accommodation into cultural export? Something like compare like US, like England to more traditional Western countries Like probably something like compare to those kind of cultural accommodation to export This is my first question The second question, so like those influence maybe in cultural But how about Australians political and economic influence in Asia, more specifically Thanks They're both very large questions I heard a broadcast recently on the ABC and I think it was a former Italian Prime Minister who was in Australia to examine our adaptation to Asia And the belief that Australia had made a relatively successful accommodation Again giving the history that I've outlined That you could argue that Australia has made a relatively successful accommodation to its place in the Asia Pacific region And while he was not necessarily proposing this as a bottled and export item I think his contention was that Australia did have some responses to changing realignments And changing rethinking and acts of redefinition and flexibility around those redefinitions that were worth considering I think of the Australian case, it's probably easier to do that Because part of the notion of who we are is not necessarily fixed rigidly in a deep understanding of in a storied past going back centuries It's a settler society adaptive community rhetoric and language And I think that can be deployed and redeployed to help frame our place in the region And I think those skills and capacities are probably ones that are worth looking into and worth exploring for us And they do have an interest outside of our borders And I think other societies may well respond to them The other question was one about our influence in the region, or was that right? Different from what you mean Yes We have all those specific rights You will notice that I have staged a rival event to an event taking place in Beijing today So I do thank you for coming along to this one Which does display less military power But I think the only sensible answer I can give to this I think is one based on the experience I have of teaching students at Peking University And one of the interests they have, they have a number of interests in Australia And those interests vary of course across the student group But they have a couple of absolutely immovable understandings of Australia One is that Australia is pristine So that we as a human society have no significant footprint on the continent And if you are teaching in Beijing you can kind of understand why a pristine world and a pristine environment might be very desirable So I think anything that in Australia markets or presents pristine as desirable is likely to get a good reception in China Which I think is also why we are better at selling milk powder than we are at selling wine Milk powder speaks to cows, grass and pristine environments And wine speaks rather more to history, culture and human habitation So when the Chinese wish to impress their friends they will often give them expensive French wine And if they want to cultivate favour with babies they give them Australian milk products That I don't think is an answer to your question but it's the best a flu-afflicted brain can do I think I think the last question I just wondered if you'd perhaps comment on the way and perhaps the experience in the Second World War Had some impact on nuancing our views on Asia, in particular China and Japan From the beginnings of white Australia the principal problematic was China It was so big there was such a lot of them, Japan occasionally came and went a bit But some people remembered that we'd been sort of allies in the First World War briefly Then Japan becomes more threatening but then when we are actually in the war Even before we get involved in the war ourselves With China resisting Japan in a pretty heroic fashion That's the story we're getting into and once we become allies in the war Well they are our allies and we're in this together And I just know from some of my older generations our families saying how they really changed their views About China from having a notion of an amorphous mass of Asians out there Who's somehow threatening in a sort of way I tell them that there were some of them at least quite a lot who are on our side And that really started to make things look and feel different Yes I'd agree with that Richard But I'd also place it a bit earlier actually I think that's beginning to happen in the late 1930s Because the Chinese consular officials in Australia at that time are very eloquent and persuasive There's the author of Dr Tao, Two Pacific Powers Which spells out a story of connection between Australia and China defending democratic values and so on And there's also the visit through 1939 A lot of things happen in 1939, it's quite interesting, you know the means is the garen, the clue in et al But Anna Mae Wong the Chinese-American actress visits Australia in that year as well And she is remarkably well received but she's remarkably well received I think Partly because she's such a different view of the Orient and China She's very articulate and very elegant And she wears a very fine top hat which in Australia in the 19 on a female actress Actor in 1939 is powerful But I think a lot of those understandings and images of the Chinese are changing really quite significantly Through that period and they're consolidated in the Second World War But the other point I'd make in relation to the observation you make Is that in talking about these histories I think we need to nuance the periodization a lot more There are many more kind of moments in this story, shorter moments and interesting moments That sort of dreadful late 40s period when Australia's reputation in the region syncs so dramatically If you look at the commentary from the Asian press about the defeat of the Labour government in 1949 It's kind of euphoric about the fact that this dreadful government and the dreadful Minister for Immigration Has been defeated but there are lots of and then the calibre moment For a moment we cling to the idea that we don't have the calibre But within the broader history of Australian representations of Asia There are many more nuanced periodizations I think that we need to work towards to get a better understanding of how These perceptions, these constructions of Asia work and how they shift across time Thank you very much Before we wind up I just want to say a few things The first is that David referred to the exhibition that is currently on in our building next door China and ANU diplomats, adventurers, scholars It's certainly worth seeing and colleagues from the centre have generously given their time to make sure that it's open now So that exhibition will be open from now until 8 o'clock or a bit after So that if you haven't seen it, it's a good opportunity to have a look around that exhibition now You can get there just through the main doors of the main centre building and it's just the gallery is just on the right The other thing I'd like to do is to thank some people First I'd like to thank the Federation of Australian Studies in China For financially assisting with getting David here and allowing this lecture to take place I'd also like to thank the China Institute for co-sponsoring the lecture and my colleagues, Mark Strange and Andy Kipnas on the Morrison committee Most of all, however, obviously I'd like to thank David once more for such an eloquent speech tonight One that will enhance, if that's possible, the reputation of the Morrison lecture series Certainly a notable example, a notable entry in the panoply So thanks so very much David and it's great to have you here, it's wonderful to hear your words My pleasure


Hey guys, welcome back to our channel. My name is Andrea with Foodimentary Adventures in Food, and I am here today with a quick and simple recipe for graham cracker toffee. You just need a few simple ingredients. You're going to need some chopped pecans, brown sugar, butter, graham crackers, and that is it guys. So if you wanna see how this comes together, stay tuned. So I have my graham crackers laid out in a 15 inch jelly roll pan. And the difference between a regular cookie sheet and a jelly roll pan is that the jelly roll pan has sides that are pretty high up. So these are about maybe a half an inch in height, and that's gonna keep the toffee mixture inside the pan and keep it from dripping out into your oven. So there are about 12, not about, there are actually 12 graham cracker whole sheets in this pan. So now what I'm gonna do is move across the room to the oven and I'm going to show you how to put the toffee mixture together. So in my heavy saucepan over medium heat, I have two sticks of unsalted butter and one cup of packed brown sugar. So I'm just waiting for this to melt and come to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, I'm going to let it boil for two minutes and then I'm going to remove it from the heat and add the pecans. Okay, so my mixture has just come to a boil, which is exactly what I'm looking for. So I'm gonna let this boil for two minutes. As you can see, I had to work pretty quickly to get the mixture spread out all over the graham crackers and I spread it from edge to edge. I am going to pop this in the oven. My oven has been preheated to 350 degrees for 10 minutes. And then I will show you what everything looks like when it comes out of the oven. So here is the toffee right out of the oven and it smells so good. And as you can see, it's spread even more. So I am going to let this cool just a little bit more and then I'm going to cut it and I will come back and show you the finished product. Here are the bars. They have cooled completely. And when you cut these, you do want them to cool off but not be completely cold. So they have a praline taste to them. They're really good. So I'm going to ask my husband to break one open so that you guys can see. And that's what it looks like on the inside. And there's the back of it. You can see where the butter soaked through. And both of us really like these a lot. So this is a quick and simple recipe. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please make sure to give us a thumbs up. And if you haven't subscribed to our channel, I certainly hope you'll do so. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you guys next time.