This study examines Australian foreign policymaking under the Fraser government towards In- donesia’s military invasion of East Timor (Portuguese Timor), which turned outright and massive after 7 December 1975. It involves the period from 11 November 1975, when the Fraser government was established, to 15 December 1978, when its intention to accept East Timor de jure as a part of Indonesia was publicised. Finally, the Indonesians, who declared East Timor as the country’s 27th province on 17 July 1976, controlled the territory for more than two decades until 1999. Under Indonesia’s occupational rule, particularly during the second half of the 1970s, more than a hundred thousand Timorese were reportedly killed because of starvation, disease and war. Did the Fraser government not have any other choice but to condone Indonesia’s actions and accept East Timor as part of Indonesia? If not, why was it so? This study argues that it was difficult for Prime Minister Fraser to have Indonesian President Suharto withdraw his country’s armed forces from the territory of East Timor after the full-scale attack on Dili in December 1975. While there might have been a slight chance for Fraser to dissuade Suharto from intervening in such a massive way, immediately after he assumed power as caretaker Prime Minister of Australia on 11 November 1975, such a policy, if introduced, could have caused a serious setback for Australia’s relations with Indonesia. Thousands of Indonesian soldiers were already deployed to East Timor. Further, Australia, a middle power, was unable to exert effective pressure on Indonesia to disengage its forces without diplomatic backing from the United States and other Western powers, which had actually adopted a rather cooperative attitude towards Indonesia. Being constantly pressed by the Suharto government, the Fraser government finally relaxed its diplomatic protest against the Indonesian invasion despite its public support for an appropriate act of self-determination by the Timorese, which was expressed by the Foreign Minister, Peacock, many times during December 1975 and July 1976. The Fraser government’s stepwise decisions to recognise East Timor de facto and de jure as a part of Indonesia in 1978 were apparently unavoidable. However, despite the international community, including the Japanese government and its people, choosing to turn a blind eye to this issue, we should not forget what happened in East Timor.

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Global waves of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim discourses have swept across the world in 2016. Australia has not been exempted from these global waves. After a decade of absence in politics, Pauline Hanson, who is known for her anti-Asian migrant propaganda in the 1990s, has made a come-back to politics and is promoting anti-Muslim migrant discourses. And a well-know TV presenter, Sonia Kruger, has called on morning television for Australia to ban Muslim migrants. These anti-Muslim migrant discourses, however, are not new to Australia at all. Such discourses have been reproduced since the Gulf War in 1990 and repeatedly appeared in Australian society. And a far worse recent Muslim backlash occurred in fact in 2014, right around the time of the rise of ISIS, when Australia was under the Abbot government. This anti-Muslim backlash has recreated the border between Australian Muslims and non-Muslims. This article is an attempt to tackle this binary structure in Australia. Gassan Hage successfully demonstrates in White Nation that negative discourses about migrants are created to enable Australian White Nationalism to keep functioning and justified. Although Hage’s concept of White Nation is still the most convincing explanation about the mechanism of a particular form of Australian nationalism, its implications contribute to create the binary between White Australia and migrants, in particular, Australian Muslim migrants, in recent years. This article therefore sets out to ask whether these nega- tive images about Australian Muslims – the very ground of this binary - are true or not, by critically investigating negative images about Muslims in Australia by deploying statistics and existing research findings. By doing so, it also aims to suggest a feasible and practicable approach of articulating migrants’ voices from where they stand in Australian society. Firstly this article will detail the recent Anti-Muslim-backlash in 2014, and secondly it will trace back a history of anti-Muslim discourses demonstrated in Australia over the 13 years of the war to identify negative images created in the past. Then it will investigate popularly consumed negative images about Australian Muslims by using statistics and existing research. The concluding remarks will introduce recent new trends in articulating migrants’ own voices, and suggests that these trends are a clue for how migrants can resist negative representations of them in Australia.

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This paper attempts to analyze the tex“t, Sorry Day and the Stolen Generations” posted on the Australian government’s website, using a method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in order to unveil the current government’s view on indigenous issues, including the Stolen Generations. Theoretical frameworks adopted in this paper are based on the studies of N. Fairclough (2003), Van Leeuwen (1996, 2008) and M.A.K. Halliday (1994). Van Leeuwen (1996) highlights the importance of investigating characteristics of each stage of a text. Here in this website article, it is found that at the beginning of the text‘, governments and missionaries’ as‘ Social Actors’ are represented less explicitly. However, in the middle part, where the text goes on to show how smoothly the reconciliation has been progressing‘, the government’ as a Social Actor becomes more explicit and is placed particularly in the initial position of grammatical clauses. The strategies of‘ Aggregation’ and‘ Nomination’ are also spotted in the latter part of the text to showcase how successful a series of apologetic social events have been and how many Aboriginal individuals have now made social advancement in the field of art. In conclusion, this text is supposed to infuse and stabilize the peaceful image that the reconciliation is progressing without any difficult problems in Australian society.

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