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The word 'America' was poetically employed by John Donne as a synonym for a hope and a dream: 'O my America! my new-found-land.' The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)  defines it as: 'A place which one longs to reach; an ultimate or idealised destination or aim.'

The word 'Asia' does not exist in the OED. Is it a phantasmagorical idea? There are entries for Asiatic, Asian flu and Asian contagion.

The word 'Australia' exists as a double celebration of Indigenous demise and colonial appropriation: 'Australia Day'. In terms of contagion we now have our own horse flu, every bit as deadly as the bird or swine varieties, though there is as yet no mention of this in the OED as 'an Australian contagion' ...

I hope that there will be a considerable change to Australia's historical racialism, but it may not be in economics or globalisation. The change may be in art, music and lifestyle. It is already quite apparent and subtle. Young Australians prefer to be cosmopolitan, out of here. My eighteen-year-old blonde stepdaughter wants to live in Japan because of that country's graphic pre-eminence. My karate-kid nephew shaves his head and calls himself a black man because he desires to be a movie extra. It is here that popular culture can override race-thinking. There may be a moment when sameness, whether hybrid or global, whether multicultural or exotic, will paradoxically determine individualism, outstripping and out-quantifying those who take umbrage at the siege of colour. The mythologies of race will crumble with the copy ...

It will be difficult to leap over this idea of Asia. I speak here about being threatened by a vague geographical region. Where it begins and where it ends has been at the whim of colonial mapmakers &ellip; It is the same irrationality which knits together generalised articulations over the body-as-object before the gaze. Visualisation assumes too much in its reading. It is more important, of the utmost importance, that there be a translation between pernicious language, visual assessment and the ethics of art. Because there is always an ethics as well as an aesthetics in interpretation in the face of the refusal of artists to explain. Francis Bacon, Bill Henson, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov &ellip; the list is unending. Those interpreters who trumpet democracy must also work their way through their own deceits about middle-class humanism. This is triply difficult in some countries, not least in Australia, where literalness, not literariness, reigns supreme ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.