‘She’ll be right, mate’: multiculturalism and the culture of benign neglect

Abstract

‘Multiculturalism', writes Pnina Werbner, is ‘an important rhetoric and an impossible practice'. Tracing the rhetoric surrounding the term multiculturalism in recent political debate in Australia, this article examines the relationship between rhetoric and practice, and between different meanings of multiculturalism as they have evolved over the last decades, particularly in the climate of ‘backlash' during the Howard government.

Keywords:

• Australian multiculturalism
• political rhetoric
• tolerance
• ‘relaxed and comfortable'
• ‘alert but not alarmed'

Notes

 1. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998; and Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003.

 2. Quoted in Hage, ibid., p 188.

 3. Pauline Hanson, The Truth, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, Ipswich, Queensland, 1996, p 1.

 4. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Moddod, Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, Zed Books, London, 1997, p 22.

 5. Mark Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp 5–6.

 6. Jon Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998.

 7. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, Routledge, London, 2001.

 8. See Lopez, op. cit., p 458.

 9. ibid., pp 26–7, 453.

10. ibid., p 38.

11. Hage, White Nation, op. cit., p 20.

12. ibid., p 23.

13. ibid., p 89.

14. ibid., p 90.

15. ibid., p 91.

16. ibid., p 241.

17. Quoted in Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, op. cit., p 77.

18. Andrew Lattas, ‘Racism, guilt and Aborigines’, UTS Review, vol 7, no 1, May 2001, p 122.

19. ibid., pp 108–9. For examples of how the rhetoric of ‘multicultural industry’ and ‘multicultural myth’ is deployed to denigrate multiculturalism in the name of anti-racism, see Paul Sheehan, Among theBarbarians: The Dividing of Australia, Random House, Sydney, 2001. Sheehan dedicates his diatribe against multiculturalism to ‘the colourblind’.

20. Quoted in Steve Dow, ‘Fortress Australia: The age of unenlightenment in the arts’, The Age, 28 July 2003, Review (A3), p 11.

21. ibid.

22. The time of writing was April 2004, a moment characterised by the ascendancy of the Opposition leader Mark Latham and a heated debateabout whether Australia was at greater risk from terrorist attacks as a consequence of its participation in the 2003 war in Iraq.

23. Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Multiculturalism and the problem of multicultural histories: An overview of ethnic historiography’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2003, p 150.

24. Cited in Dow, op. cit., p 13.

25. Ann Curthoys, ‘Immigration and colonization: New histories’, UTS Review, vol 7, no 1, May 2001, p 170.

26. ibid., p 171. See also Ann Curthoys, ‘An uneasy conversation: The indigenous and the multicultural’ in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (eds), Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000, pp 21–36.

27. Curthoys, ‘Immigration’, op. cit., p 171.

28. ibid., p 172.

29. Teo, op. cit.

30. ibid., p 154.

31. Ouyang, Yu, Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems, Papyrus Publishing, Melbourne, 1995, pp 8–9.

32. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, op. cit., p 22.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wenche Ommundsen

This article previously appeared as a chapter in David Callahan (ed), Australia – Who Cares?, API Network, Perth, 2007, pp 41–52.