AustLit

'In the first chapter of The Factory (2005) the Australian protagonist Hilda, writing from a Japanese prison, says,

I remember someone saying to me when I first came to this country, "You may speak perfect Japanese. You may live like the Japanese, sound like the Japanese, believe what the Japanese believe. But you will never be Japanese:" (2).

'This statement provides the spur for the novel's sustained engagement with the nature of national, cultural, and racial identity. This essay highlights the way the novel both problematizes and reproduces the borders that govern who is Japanese and who is Australian and, by extension, who is not Japanese and who is not Australian. The above extract presents Japanese identity as incommensurable with Australian identity, and in turn sees Australia as distinct from Asia:

The label "Australian" [. . .] separates Australia from its place in the Asia-Pacific region and from the plethora of its connections with and interests in other parts of the world; one of the effects of this is to assimilate it to a model of white and settled Australianness that does little justice to its internal heterogeneity. (Frow 60)

'Suvendrini Pemra characterizes the imaginary bottlers between Australia and Asia as not simply territorial or national but defined by racial identities as well: "the geographical differentiation of the island-body, Australia, from the islands of Asia is paralleled by a process of racial differentiation' (3). (Introduction)