What do you think?
Rate this book
Below the Line
202 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 29, 2022
In the early decades of the twentieth century, many novels were published in Australia based on fear of an invasion. The invaders in most were Asian--Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian. The representations of the invaders was blatantly racist. The genre mostly petered out after roughly the 1940s, although some books on the same theme continued to appear from time to time.
Eric Willmot's Below the Line, which appeared in 1991, is a late entry. His invaders are Indonesians, who cleverly secreted thousands of fifth-column forces into Australia under the guise of tourism. Then the Indonesia army, after taking New Guinea, flooded the continent; it was stopped roughly around Lake Eyre. The northern reaches of Australia were set up as a new country, South Idrian, basically a puppet state. Many white Australians who lived north of the new dividing line fled, some to the rump Australia in the south, others overseas, to the US or Canada.
The plot revolves around Angela Steen, who was from a town now under South Idrian control, and her efforts to decide whether to join her refugee husband in Canada or to return to her hometown. She gets caught up with the Australian military and underground resistance fighters. Hovering around her situation--and that of Australia as a whole--is the presence of the Indigenous population. They are depicted as the Chosen Ones, the only people whom the continent has accepted as its true inhabitants. The rest--be they white or Indonesian or anything else--are invaders, colonists, whom the land rejects.
Willmot is an Indigenous writer, so the role of the Indigenous is no surprise. He mostly avoids the anti-Asian racism of his predecessors, although the whole business of Indonesian invaders--who do not shrink from brutal torture--still feels a bit yucky. When he wrote the illegal occupation by Indonesia forces of East Timor, which began in 1975, had not yet ended (they did not withdraw until 1999), so the potential fear of Indonesian expansionism into Australia may have had its frisson.
The most interesting aspect of the book, in my view, is just the conflict between colonialism and the Indigenous presence on the continent. This theme is not especially emphasized, unfortunately, till the very end; but it does cohere with a longstanding and contentious problem in Australian politics, history, and sociology that still has not been fully addressed.
Eric Willmot's Below the Line, which appeared in 1991, is a late entry. His invaders are Indonesians, who cleverly secreted thousands of fifth-column forces into Australia under the guise of tourism. Then the Indonesia army, after taking New Guinea, flooded the continent; it was stopped roughly around Lake Eyre. The northern reaches of Australia were set up as a new country, South Idrian, basically a puppet state. Many white Australians who lived north of the new dividing line fled, some to the rump Australia in the south, others overseas, to the US or Canada.
The plot revolves around Angela Steen, who was from a town now under South Idrian control, and her efforts to decide whether to join her refugee husband in Canada or to return to her hometown. She gets caught up with the Australian military and underground resistance fighters. Hovering around her situation--and that of Australia as a whole--is the presence of the Indigenous population. They are depicted as the Chosen Ones, the only people whom the continent has accepted as its true inhabitants. The rest--be they white or Indonesian or anything else--are invaders, colonists, whom the land rejects.
Willmot is an Indigenous writer, so the role of the Indigenous is no surprise. He mostly avoids the anti-Asian racism of his predecessors, although the whole business of Indonesian invaders--who do not shrink from brutal torture--still feels a bit yucky. When he wrote the illegal occupation by Indonesia forces of East Timor, which began in 1975, had not yet ended (they did not withdraw until 1999), so the potential fear of Indonesian expansionism into Australia may have had its frisson.
The most interesting aspect of the book, in my view, is just the conflict between colonialism and the Indigenous presence on the continent. This theme is not especially emphasized, unfortunately, till the very end; but it does cohere with a longstanding and contentious problem in Australian politics, history, and sociology that still has not been fully addressed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review