Comrade Ambassador

Stephen FitzGerald's story is one of Australia's change from the White Australia of the 1950s to acceptance of Asian immigration, Asian influences in everyday life and increasing enmeshment with Australia's Asian neighbours, a change in social attitudes he considers more dramatic than any other in Australian history since Federation. His own story is part of this change, reflecting and at times anticipating it. He writes: 'If Vietnam was the catalyst for the first major shift in public attitudes to Asia since Federation, Whitlam's breaking of the political embargo on relations with China was the central and symbolic beginning of Australia's coming to terms with it.' Chinese-speaking FitzGerald was to become Australia's first ambassador to the PRC. The only Australian living to have met both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, his tale takes us from an apprenticeship as China-watching diplomat in intrigue-ridden 1960s Hong Kong and Taiwan, through his near-lynching by Red Guards in China's Cultural Revolution, adventuring in China with Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser and excursions in North Korea, to his involvement in scenes both sobering and comic from the Australian 'discovery' of China in the decades since diplomatic relations and the drama of China's 'rise'. His China tale is counterpointed throughout by the Asia one and his own passionate involvement in public policy for Asia over an Asian Half-Century, from the mobilisation of Asian scholars in the Vietnam War years, though his development of strategies for the Hawke government on Australia's immigration policy and Asia literacy for Australians, his founding of a university institute to promote closer integration with Asiaa to spruiking in Mandarin for Maxine McKew in John Howard's heavily Chinese Australian electorate in the 2007 election.