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COPYRIGHT 2006 Deakin University
Since 9/11 there has been a spate of cultural texts for young people which attempt to move away from the sensationalised connotation and reductive stereotyping of the Muslim as the homogenised, dehumanised, violent and/or exoticised pariah/Other, and to represent Muslim characters sympathetically instead of as potential terrorists (see, for example, Nadia Jamal and Taghred Chandrab's The Glory Garage (2005), and Morris Gleitzman's Boy Overboard (2002) and Girl Underground (2004)). One of the first of these was John Doyle's Marking Time, which was shown on ABC television in 2003, and which the promotion material describes as 'a Romeo and Juliet story set in a rural Australian town. Told with warmth, humour and acute observation, Marking Time traces Hal Flemming's journey from boy to man ... [It] is the coming of age of a boy and a nation' (http://www.abc.net.au/markingtime/). Marking Time shows a changing Australian society, with the innocent euphoria brought about by the Sydney Olympics distorted into fear and distrust following the Tampa incident. Literally Hal is 'marking time' until he goes to uni, spending an aimless gap year in the company of lowlife friends. Indeed, the text's strength lies in the comic depiction of young Australians like Hal's friends Bullet, Shane and Belinda, whose rowdy, raucous, partying behaviour is also a response to terminal boredom; in this case it seems to be the only recourse of those not bright enough to make their way out of this small town.
Marking Time is a worthy, well-meaning story, and a moving one, offering, in Edward Said's words, that 'marvellous instance of the interrelations between society, history and textuality' (Said 1979, p.24) which accompanies Orientalist discourse. For example, in one key scene the town conservatives and progressives meet to thrash out arrangements for their upcoming festival, and the talk turns to the Afghanis on Temporary Protection Visas who live in the town and work in the cannery while their refugee status is assessed. The town villains--that is, those who swallow the Howard rhetoric about refugees and believe that 'the boaties could be terrorists'--are stereotyped as insular and ignorant (one is also guilty of raping his assistant), and are contrasted with Hal's father Geoff, the enlightened high school teacher who believes in fair play and the Olympic ideal, and whose voice of reason is not listened to in this hysterical microcosm of Australian society. Meanwhile the objects of this heated discussion are discursively silent, unable to represent themselves, passively 'participat[ing] in [their own] Orientalizing' (Said, 1979, p.345). Nonparticipating, non-autonomous, non-sovereign, they are seen as the mere objects of history, not the creators (Said 1979). In all fairness, it should be noted that Doyle is aware of their passivity, and various characters offer the reason that they had to behave like that in order to survive under the Taliban. Nonetheless the impression remains that Doyle knows little about Afghanis, whereas he is very familiar with the two types of Australians depicted in this story.
And so Marking Time offers a wonderfully literal example of Ghassan Hage's notion in White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, that the Arab is the passive exotic object in an argument between whites over the mastery of the national space; an argument in which white...
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