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'Chinese and other Asians, this essay argues, performed a structural function in the developing national consciousness of Australia as the racial/cultural Other against which the national self was defined and towards which its fears and desires could be projected. Today, Chinese Australian writers use the image of the double to explore their own position in the national psyche. To what extent, they ask, is it possible to imagine a merging of Asian and Australian, observer and observed, representation and self-construction? Is the Chinese-antipodean identity always a site of conflict and contradiction or can it be lived as a happier kind of hybridity?' -- Author's abstract