Discovering Australasia: Essays on Philippine-Australian Interactions

Abstract

An extract from the Introduction:

We began investigating the history of Philippine-Australian interactions in the late 1980s. One of our tasks was to convince first ourselves, then some of our more sceptical colleagues, that Filipinos and the Philippines did have a place in Australian history, that we were engaged neither on a fruitless quest nor on an attempt to manufacture or inflate a strand of our past merely to serve present needs. We are now able to report that Filipinos and the Philippines are an important if hitherto neglected part of Australia's past. At the same time Australians and Australia have a place in Philippine history: the interactions go both ways. In the late nineteenth century Charles Robinson, perhaps the first Australian-Filipino, settled in Manila and married locally. In his turbulent scrapes with authority he resembles some at least of his Filipino counterparts in Northern Australia like Maximo Gomez and Sibio. We have yet to encounter an Australian of that era who achieved in the Philippines the solid business success of Heriberto Zarcal in northern Australia. Australia was important to General Emilio Aguinaldo in the 1890s and in Filipino plans for a new order in the Asian-Pacific region after World War Two. While those plans were frustrated we are in no doubt that the future will bring the Philippines and Australia much closer together. Show more