Penny Wong: ‘My story illustrates our shared history and future’
The famously private Malaysia-born Foreign Minister has invoked her family’s climb out of poverty to redefine Australia’s place in Southeast Asia.
Penny Wong has invoked her own deeply personal story, including her family’s devastating losses during world war two and eventual climb out of poverty, to redefine Australia’s place in Southeast Asia as a partner tied to the region not just through geography and trade but family.
The famously-private, Malaysian-born foreign minister gave a rare insight into her own history during a moving speech in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday in which she used the example of her own success, and that of her family, to highlight the benefits of regional cooperation in increasingly uncertain times.
“Australians know our future lies in the region we share with Malaysia. And it tells you something about modern Australia that I am here today speaking to you today as Australia’s Foreign Minister,” she told a business brunch.
In her first visit to Malaysia since being sworn in as foreign minister, Senator Wong credited her Hakka Chinese grandmother Madam Lai Fung Shim’s “determination to survive, and to save herself and her children” during the dark years of Japanese occupation in Borneo - in which most of her family died - for her own strength.
“She was barely literate. She was loving and humble, and the strongest person I have ever known,” she said ahead of a visit to her hometown of Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, where she will visit her grandmother’s grave and meet with relatives.
“Whenever times feel hard, I think of her, and what she had to endure.”
The 53-year-old also credited Australia’s Colombo Plan scholarship system for allowing her father Francis Wong - a noted Malaysian architect who designed many public buildings in Kota Kinabalu - to study at Adelaide university, where he met her mother Jane Chapman.
“The opportunity to study was the opportunity that defined his life. And mine. It meant he could climb out of the poverty he experienced as a child. It meant doors opened that would have otherwise been jammed firmly shut,” she said.
“It meant he could go to Australia - a very different Australia from what we know today. And it meant a charming young Malaysian man could meet a bold young Australian woman. The value of that education has never left him. He has always told me: ‘They can take everything away from you, but they can’t take your education’.”
Senator Wong has previously spoken of the racism she faced as a mixed race child moving to Adelaide with her mother and late brother in 1977 after the breakup of her parents’ marriage.
But on Wednesday she sought instead to highlight the benefits that have come from Australia’s shared history with Malaysia and Southeast Asia, as part of a consistent message to the region that the new government wants a different and closer engagement with its neighbourhood.
Later, after flying into Kota Kinabalu to a hero’s welcome, she spoke at a more intimate function of family, friends and local dignities of her return trip to Sabah as an Australian minister as “an act of hope and an act of respect”.
“It’s an act of hope that my story and my family’s story can contribute to the relationship between the nation of my birth and the nation to which I belong,” she said.
“My Malaysian heritage is one of the 270 ancestries now represented in Australia. Half of the Australian population was born overseas or has a parent who was born overseas.
“Australia will be reflecting this rich character back to the world, so the world can see itself in Australia.”
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