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I was three years old when Pauline Hanson announced in Parliament that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’ In her 1996 maiden speech, Hanson intoned the most famous words spoken about Asian Australians in our national memory:   I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate Of course, I will be called racist, but if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country   I grew up in the shadow of this slung mud I was a part of the Asian swamp I grew up in a lower- to working-class part of outer north-west Melbourne – a ghetto – where my parents chose to live because another Malaysian Chinese family they knew had moved there before them I did not assimilate We lived five minutes from the Tullamarine airport, Melbourne’s main airport, the tense border which immigrants like my family crossed to be here   *   Wetland conservationists will tell you that we don’t use that word any more   In the Western imagination, swamps are associated with disease, pollution and evil In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the final resting place for the damned is a marsh in the Upper Hell The underworld in Beowulf is portrayed as marshy swamp land, a ‘flood under the earth’ In J R R Tolkien’s The Two Towers, Sam and Frodo must wade through The Dead Marshes, an abject wasteland filled with ‘snakeses, wormses lots of nasty things’ The bogeyman, in many European traditions, is a man who emerges from a bog Swamp Thing, the original comic-book character who has spawned several film and TV spin-offs, is a huge slimy mass who wanders swampland alone In Australia, swamps are associated with crocodiles, who issue deadly attacks a handful of times a year British tabloids are