By Elena Williams, higher education consultant

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan, its flagship program for Australian undergraduates to study abroad, intern and build networks in the Indo-Pacific. Since 2014, the program has awarded more than 70,000 scholarships and mobility grants to Australian students, with the goal of building knowledge of our Indo-Pacific neighbours and deepening relationships both in the region and back in Australia. 

They now represent a little appreciated new ‘micro diaspora’ in Australia who can work with the more traditional diaspora communities to educate other young Australians about the region, before they even contemplate living there. Foreign Minister Penny Wong underlined this in her recent speech to the inaugural Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership.

In its first decade, the NCP has succeeded in reorienting Australian student mobility and has amassed a sizeable alumni community of passionate, committed young Australians in the early stages of their careers. Yet, for some Australian students who take up an NCP award, the journey is more personal: it is about discovering where their Asian-Australian identities “fit” outside Australia in the new communities they connect with while away. 

Almost 28 per cent of the population was born overseas and nearly 1 in 2 Australians has a parent born overseas. Mandarin, Vietnamese and Cantonese are among the top five languages spoken at home, with 20 per cent of Australians speaking a language other than English at home. As the nation has become increasingly more diverse at home, those who travel abroad come to represent what Australia looks like today. 

A new vision of Australians overseas 

But what does it mean to be an ‘Australian’ overseas? To challenge a stereotype of the ‘white Aussie abroad’? In my research on the New Colombo Plan and Australia-Indonesia relationship building, one of the clearest themes to emerge was that of identity: who represents Australia? It was not only the Australians asking this, but also the Indonesians I spoke with, many of whom had previously thought of Australians as “white, Christian and English-speaking” before they met and discovered “Australia’s rich multiculturalism”. Some students, namely Chinese-Australians, recounted difficult experiences of prejudice and racism, owing in some part to longstanding discourses on race and foreignness in Indonesia which have positioned Chineseness as “foreign” and often subsequently considered “less than” other Indonesians. Yet, for others, they described positive encounters based around their identity, and a sense of belonging they did not always feel in Australia. This was particularly for those of mixed Southeast Asian-Australian heritage. 

Here, students described feeling “more of an understanding about their Indonesia-Australia identity now”; feeling they were “part of a Southeast Asian family” after revealing their Malay heritage; and experienced a kind of acceptance they had “never felt before” in Australia, as one student of Filipina-Bangladeshi heritage describes: “I liked how in Indonesia, when I would say I was Australian, people wouldn’t question it. Whereas here [in Sydney], if someone goes, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Oh I’m from Penrith, near the Blue Mountains,’ and they’re like, ‘No but where are you really from?”

When these students are overseas representing Australia, they—knowingly or unknowingly—play a role in challenging assumptions of what an Australian looks like today, challenging stereotypes to align with contemporary, multicultural and multi-ethnic Australian identities at home. But more than that- when these students return home, they can then play a significant role in shaping the national discussion about identity, about “Australianness”, and contribute to building better Asia literacy. Instead of continuing to consider Asia as something out there that Australia must travel to, here is a group of young Australians with a unique vantage point on how to build better relationships between Australia and the region, not as an academic or policymaking exercise, but as a personal, lived experience. They have much to teach us about who we are, and who we can become, as a nation. 

New diasporas working together 

This holds enormous potential for Asia literacy in Australia, and for future NCP intakes. These alumni could work with Australian diaspora communities to offer powerful and nuanced pre-departure briefings for students, raising awareness of some of the issues—both positive and negative—that might arise in-country, and how to prepare for them. They could be engaged in mentoring NCP students on-award and in post-return debriefs, helping students to better process their time away and to ‘connect the dots’ as they grapple with how to convert their cultural and linguistic capacities in a professional Australia that doesn’t always value their Asia-literate skillsets. 

This is now a sizeable alumni community of young Australians with lived experience of our region, and for some, with deep familial ties. These young alumni are well placed to be informing the next cohort of NCP awardees as to how to navigate their experiences in-country as Asian Australians, and how to connect with vast diaspora communities across Australia. Moving into its second decade, this is an opportunity for the NCP to continue building young Australians’ knowledge of the Indo-Pacific region by recognising that learning ‘abroad’ can start right here at home, before  students have even boarded the plane.  

Elena Williams is a higher education consultant, a PhD researcher in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University, and a former Associate Director with Asia Society Australia. 

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