Pauline Hanson nearly fell off her chair upon learning that Sam Dastyari, her co-panellist on Q&A last week, is a Muslim (albeit a non-practising one).
What then would the One Nation leader make of Eugenia Flynn, a Chinese-Aboriginal Muslim? "I think her head would probably explode," Flynn laughs.
Flynn, an author, arts worker and panellist at the Danger Asians session at the West Writers Forum in Footscray next weekend, shares with Dastyari a view that Hanson has simply chosen a new target to reinvigorate her campaign, this time focusing on Muslims.
"It's very telling that she's moved on to a different group of people, and we're seeing a rewriting of that script and seeing a lot of people saying she's on the side of Aboriginal people and she really wants to help," says Flynn.
"I'm thankful that a lot of Aboriginal people have very long memories and they're not fooled by that."
Flynn has an Aboriginal father and a Chinese mother and was born in Darwin, where such unions were relatively common. She converted to Islam aged 19. She doesn't find her cultural make-up as interesting as many others seem to, but it does allow her to reflect on identity from a variety of perspectives.
She's one of five Asian-Australians speaking at Danger Asians, all of whom have written for the online magazine Peril. Named after the racist "Yellow Peril" tag that originated in the late 19th century in reference to the perceived threat of east Asians to the Western world, Peril was founded by Hoa Pham in 2006.
"At the time there wasn't a great Asian presence here culturally, either writing-wise or in public life," Pham says. In the US they had the likes of Hyphen magazine and in Canada they had Ricepaper. In Australia there was nothing.
"I thought, why couldn't we have one here, because we had a significant portion of the [diaspora]."
Peril is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, but the return of Hanson to the senate – 20 years after she famously said we were being "swamped by Asians", who "have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate", is a blow to Australian culture, says Pham.
"Peril is more important than ever now."
Flynn agrees, not least because the opinions of those diametrically opposed to Hanson and her views need to be heard, too. "I'm a big believer in alternative voice, it's about representing diverse people," she says. "That's not just about culture, it's about gender, sexuality, disability, and all those sorts of things, and it's about seeing yourself and seeing diverse peoples reflected in everything."
As Asian-Australian writer Alice Pung puts it so eloquently in the unpublished introduction to her 2008 anthology of Asian-Australian writing Growing up Asian in Australia (her publisher advised her a "heavy" introduction addressing the historical reasons for the scarcity of stories not fitting into the traditional "migrant narrative" might put off would-be buyers at Borders), it is vital these stories are told by the people who have lived them and not by Anglo-Australians, however well-intentioned.
"These writers are the tree, and they write from its roots," Pung says. "Their stories are rich with heritage – south Asian, east Asian, south-east Asian and Eurasian – but they also reveal that there is more to a person than inherited cultural identity."
It's this tricky conundrum of being compelled to talk about cultural identity yet not wanting to be defined by it that presents an ongoing challenge for non-Anglo Australian writers working in the autoethnographic field.
"We're going to bring our perspective to it," Flynn says. "It doesn't mean that we need to be corralled into enclaves, but I do think publications by us and for us are really important as well."
The West Writers Forum is still a niche event likely to appeal to a select group of people, but that's ok; the academics and editors within this group are precisely the kind of audience that minority voices need to reach, says Flynn.
"It's about tastemaking. If the people who curate festivals, who put on events, who edit mainstream publications, if they continue to be predominantly white men, you're never going to have the diversity because they're never going to be as attuned to the work of Asian writers."
The West Writers Forum: Our Stories runs from July 29-31 at Footscray Community Arts Centre.
