Interethnic Understanding and Belonging in Suburban Melbourne

Abstract

Modelling and mapping ethnicity is a methodological approach used to understand the changing socio-spatial structure of the city. Such an approach uses a range of indicators to identify ethnic groups, map them in urban space and explain the changing nature of ethnic concentrations. The unintended consequences, however, are the labelling, marginalisation and exclusion of ethnic minorities. Critical approaches, in contrast, focus on making visible the politics of representation that mark and stereotype ethnic minorities and ethnic concentrations. Within contemporary research on ethnicity such work has drawn attention to the exercise of power in the constitution of ethnic identities, the invisibility of whiteness and the inherent tensions that are likely to arise in negotiating ethnic cultural differences in local places. Although this article draws attention to such tensions in a particular place, Dandenong, it engages in this discussion to argue that the everyday negotiation of cultural difference also provides the potential to blur fixed ethnic boundaries and contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people who live and/or work in Dandenong, suburban Melbourne, this article underlines that such positive insights from everyday multiculturalism have the potential to inform and broaden policy debates on diversity and social inclusion in the multicultural city.

Keywords:

• Ethnicity
• multiculturalism
• everyday encounters
• belonging
• Dandenong
• Melbourne

Introduction

There is a consensus within urban studies that the daily negotiation of ethnic difference has the potential to inform policy making, but the analysis of the kinds and outcomes of such engagement in multicultural cities is limited (Amin, 2002; Mavrommatis, 2006; Fincher & Iveson, 2008; Valentine, 2008). The result is policy insights to understanding intercultural encounters and social inclusion are narrowly defined and rely on statistical measures of ethnic segregation (Burnley, 1999; Poulsen et al., 2004; Johnston et al., 2007). Although the purpose is to take moral responsibility and produce socially just cities, the theoretical and methodological approach of such academic practices often have unintended effects. Widely and easily available census data on birthplace, ancestry, language and ethnic origin that is rarely acknowledged as value-laden, identifies national heritage as an indicator of ethnic difference (Phillips, 2007). The outcome is racial and/or immigrant groups in settler societies are distinguished from a dominant white population whose ethnicity is often invisible. Through the process of naming, categorising and mapping, ethnic minority groups are unintentionally marked through lenses of ethnic segregation versus integration that is limited in providing “radical new insight(s)” (Amin, 2002, p. 959) to interethnic understanding and social inclusion in the multicultural city.

Critical research, on the other hand, contributes to policy making by questioning the politics of representation that privileges a white ethnicity but marks and stigmatises ‘ethnic’ minorities and ‘ethnic’ concentrations. Such research scrutinises government responses to managing cultural diversity, and identifies local sites as spaces from where, “more progressive political discourses” (Dunn, 2005, p. 47) have the potential to emerge (Preston & Lo, 2000; Anderson & Taylor, 2005; Permezel & Duffy, 2007; Phillips, 2007). Within this literature academic practices focus on the exercise of power and interethnic tensions and there is less work that examines positive outcomes of face-to-face encounters in public spaces where ordinary people negotiate ethnic differences as part of their everyday lives. This article attempts to fill this gap in the literature by arguing that everyday encounters in the local neighbourhood provide the potential to blur fixed ethnic boundaries and contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging. Drawing on the voices of the people who live and/or work in Dandenong, such local knowledge will broaden prevalent policy understandings of cultural diversity and social inclusion in the multicultural city.

New and emerging research on interethnic understanding and belonging in the city emphasises the importance of practices of everyday life in local sites and the power of “local energies” (Amin, 2002, p. 976) in destabilising fixed ethnic identities and fostering meaningful intercultural dialogue (Mavrommatis, 2006; Fox & Miller-Idriss, 2008; Wise, 2009). Such a focus on everyday multiculturalism can complement top-down urban policies that Amin (2002) and Phillips (2007) argue focus on mixed housing and improvements in the design of public spaces to foster interethnic understanding. Reviewing the race disturbances in the UK in 2001, Amin underlines that it is evident that such policy initiatives in the UK, though commendable, have achieved little in improving race and ethnic relations, particularly in socio-economically and culturally diverse neighbourhoods. Amin and Phillips attribute the weakness of such policies to a focus on British cultural norms that privilege whiteness in understanding community cohesion, intercultural harmony and belonging, puts the onus on racialised non-white ethnic minorities to integrate, and neglects insights gained from empirical work on local sites of habitual contact.

In Australia, Wise also acknowledges that everyday intercultural contact is valuable because it can better inform policies and services, but she regrets that surprisingly little is known of “how diversity is lived on the ground” in multicultural suburbia (2009, p. 22). Given the development and implementation of the Social Inclusion Agenda by the Federal government (Australian Social Inclusion Board, 2008), the insights to everyday multiculturalism discussed in this article can broaden social policy debates on neighbourhood change and cultural diversity and contest knowledge that links increasing ethnic diversity with a decline in social cohesion (Healy, 2007). Also, such research has the potential to make a timely and important contribution to the debate over how to make Australian cities more vibrantly diverse, particularly since state-sponsored multiculturalism is recognised as faltering, in retreat, and weak in disrupting the hegemony and privilege of a core Anglo culture (Hage, 1998; Mitchell, 2004; Forrest & Dunn, 2006). Thinking about Australian multiculturalism today, Forrest and Dunn argue for a shift towards a “new cultural centre, an Australian ethnicity” (2006, p. 226) that unsettles the privileged position of the dominant Anglo culture. Acknowledging the voices and lives of ordinary people that are usually seen as “too uneventful” (Gleeson, 2006, p. 6) and of little relevance would strengthen such an Australian multiculturalism. Amin, however, underlines that caution must be exercised in drawing on such empirical work to inform national and international policies and models of best practice because the “microcultures of place” (2002, p. 975) vary and workable solutions reflect broader social contexts.

This article draws on my doctoral research that aims to provide an understanding of the constitution and negotiation of ethnic cultural difference. The primary data source is 54 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, people who live and/or work in Dandenong conducted in 2003. Local council reports, Australian Bureau of Statistics data and publications, and media reports in local and metropolitan newspapers are some of the secondary data sources used. First, the article discusses the conceptualisation of ethnicity, the methodology used and locates Dandenong, an ethnically diverse local government area in south-eastern metropolitan Melbourne, within a broader social context. Second, stories that draw on the voices of people who live and/or work in Dandenong illustrate the construction of ‘bright’ or fixed (Alba, 2005, p. 20) interethnic boundaries as well as the temporality and contingency of these boundaries. Third, the article discusses how blurred interethnic boundaries have the potential to contribute to the joy and comfort of living with cultural diversity and the implications this has for urban policy.

Conceptualising Ethnicity and Ethnic Boundaries

The focus on ethnicity within the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and more recently geography in the Anglophone world reflects the interest in understanding the constitution of ethnic boundaries and intercultural contact. Although ethnicity as a marker of social and cultural difference can be traced to social bonds among pre-modern communities, it was the emergence of the concept of race in the 19th century that was responsible for the marking and hierarchical ranking of ethnic groups; ethnicity began to be used as a term to refer to people with “racial characteristics” (Eriksen, 1997, p. 37). In the 20th century, this emphasis on race was slowly replaced by a focus on ‘culture’, ‘tribe’ and ‘society’ to mark colonised people and immigrant groups who were not white and/or of British descent (Jones, 1997).

Contemporary approaches to understanding ethnic boundaries and intercultural contact adopt different approaches. Primordial approaches conceptualise ethnicity in terms of bonds or involuntary social ties that develop as a result of birth, and stem from similarities in language, religion, territory and culture (Shils, 1957; Geertz, 1963; Isaacs, 1974; van den Berghe, 1986; Kellas, 1991). Ethnic identity is an essence that is innate, natural and an outcome of biological and psychological processes that fixes the boundaries between ethnic groups, often privileging an invisible white ethnicity. Instrumentalist approaches, on the other hand, contest such an essentialist understanding of ethnic groups as “culture-bearing units” (Barth, 1996, p. 297; Cohen, 1996). Such approaches underline the importance of social processes and structures and the access to political and economic resources in understanding interethnic boundaries. Barth, for example, adopts a subjective approach to conceptualise ethnicity as the cultural characteristics and values ascribed to other social groups or used to identify or distinguish ourselves from others. Although such an understanding perhaps recognises the visibility of whiteness and conceptualises ethnic boundaries as dynamic and contingent, the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is maintained and reproduced.

Contemporary research on ethnic diversity, ethnic segregation and the everyday negotiation of ethnicity demonstrates that the maintenance and reproduction of ethnic boundaries is particularly marked between dominant (read white) and ethnic minority groups, the latter usually defined by birthplace, religion, Anglo-ness and national heritage (Hage, 1998; Alba, 2005; Dunn et al., 2007; Vertovec, 2007; Zevallos, 2008). Alba in his discussion of interethnic boundaries between dominant and minority ethnic groups in the USA and Europe argues that it is timely to explore bright boundaries because they are institutionalised within the domains of citizenship, religion, language and race and have effects on social inclusion. In drawing attention to the fixed nature of bright boundaries and the ambiguity of blurred ethnic boundaries, however, Alba mainly focuses on examining the nature of the “fault line” (2005, p. 40) between dominant and minority ethnic groups rather than exploring interethnic understanding. Zevallos, on the other hand, in her discussion of belonging among young women of Turkish and Latin American backgrounds in Australia, adopts a social constructionist approach to demonstrate that ethnic identities are not static or monolithic, but fluid, intersecting with other aspects of identity such as gender, sexuality and national heritage, as well as temporally and spatially contingent. Mavrommatis (2006) argues that such a conceptualisation of ethnic identity as contingent and always in the process of becoming provides the potential for the self to transgress and erode perceived ethnic boundaries. In exploring interethnic understanding, this article adopts such a non-essentialist understanding of ethnicity to think of the transformative potential of everyday encounters.

Methodology

This article draws on my doctoral research that focuses on understanding how ethnicity is constituted, negotiated and contested in everyday life by long-term as well as more recent residents, past and present councillors, local and state planners, the police, community workers, business representatives and retailers. During the interviews I adopted a recursive approach to enable participants to share their views, feelings and anxieties about working and/or living in Dandenong (Minichiello et al., 2008). The interview schedule consisted of some key open-ended questions that I asked all participants. I asked questions like, “What do you like about Dandenong?” and “What do you think are the most significant changes that have occurred, with respect to housing, shopping, entertainment and the general atmosphere?” I also asked participants about their feelings about particular public places such as the Dandenong Market and the Dandenong Railway Station. The interviews were analysed using a discursive approach to critically examine cultural practices through which interethnic boundaries were constituted as well as blurred.

Contemporary studies of ethnicity and neighbourhood change demonstrate that discourse analysis has become a legitimate method within the social sciences, to highlight ambivalence and complexity in research and make meaningful political interventions (Pratt, 1999; Fincher & Costello, 2005). Fairclough defines discourse analysis as a critical understanding of “how texts work within sociocultural practice” (1995, p. 7). He observes that although meanings within texts are often multiple, contradictory and ambivalent, these meanings are often represented in normative ways, through prevalent practices that reflect the exercise of power and regulate how the text is produced, distributed and consumed. Fairclough points out that the three overlapping conceptions of discourse as text, social practice and discursive practice have the transformative potential to constitute and change knowledge, social identities and social relations. Adopting such a methodological tool in this article therefore enables the exploration of dominant institutional practices that mark ethnic boundaries and construct Otherness, as well as unsettle fixed ethnic boundaries and essentialist understandings of ethnic identity. Such analysis provides the political possibility to rethink subject formation and explore narratives of interethnic understanding in a particular place, Dandenong.

Narratives are stories of life experiences that enable people to make sense of their social world and the constitution of their social identities (Somers, 1997; McCormack, 2000; Fincher & Costello, 2005; Mavrommatis, 2006). McCormack argues that “we not only live our lives as a story, as we tell our stories we relive, reconstruct, and reinterpret our experience for later retelling and further reconstruction and reinterpretation” (2000, p. 286). It is this continuous cycle of reinterpretation and retelling that has capacity to provide new ways of talking about ethnic minorities and socio-economically and culturally diverse neighbourhoods like Dandenong. As a recent migrant and resident of Dandenong, the process by which I became conscious of these different stories, however, was through an ongoing reflection of the white/ethnic binary and the emotional dimension of the research process. The next section introduces Dandenong, a suburban area in south-eastern Melbourne where I conducted empirical work to explore everyday negotiations of ethnic difference.

Dandenong

Dandenong is a suburban area in south-eastern metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, approximately 29 km east of the City of Melbourne with a population of approximately 126 000 in 2006 (Figure 1). Historical narratives of Dandenong usually trace its growth from a squatter settlement with pastoral runs and market gardens in the 1830s, to a thriving market town with one of the largest stock and dairy markets in Victoria (Ferguson, 1986; City of Greater Dandenong, 1998). Since market gardening and dairying were important activities, factories that canned vegetables and processed butter, cheese and pork products were established in Dandenong in the early 20th century. Slowly, with the expansion of industry and improvements in the railway and road network, the Shire of Dandenong shed its rural character, and was officially proclaimed the City of Dandenong in 1959 (Ferguson, 1986).

Figure 1 Location of Dandenong.

It was during the 1950s and 1960s that Dandenong was recognised as an industrial city and a working-class suburb (Bryson & Thompson, 1972; Alves, 1992). The establishment of the ‘Big Three’, namely, General Motors Holden (GMH) involved in the manufacture of motor vehicles, International Harvester involved in the manufacture of farm machinery and H. J. Heinz, a fruit and vegetable cannery were changes that had an impact on perceptions of social class as well as the social status of residents. These factories attracted migrants from Britain, Poland, Germany, former Yugoslavia, Greece, Malta and Italy. This recruitment of ‘New Australians’ was typical of the post-war period of industrial expansion, international migration and rapid suburbanisation in Australian cities. Following the abolition of the White Australia policy in 1972, migrants from diverse countries began to settle in Dandenong. The availability of factory jobs, affordable housing and the provision of hostel accommodation by the state were some of the factors that attracted new settlers from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, who migrated to Australia, during and after the Vietnam War (Hibbins, 1984). Since then, people from Southern Asia, the Middle East and more recently Africa have settled in Dandenong.

This gradual change in the composition of the population was accompanied by significant economic shifts since the 1970s that impacted on the number and type of industrial establishments. The adoption of flexible production techniques, the emergence of a new international division of labour, new financial markets and the use of information and communication technologies, has seen some production move to low cost labour sites in the developing world. The outcome has been that within the dominant narrative of globalisation, Dandenong is represented as a place that has undergone economic and social decline since the 1970s (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, 2009).

Today Dandenong is described as a depressed working-class area and “one of the most socio-economically disadvantaged of Melbourne's municipalities” (City of Greater Dandenong, 2003; The Age, 2005; Healy, 2007, p. 63). Within this narrative of socio-economic disadvantage, Dandenong is described as an “ethni-city” (Hill, 2003, p. 1) with almost 50 per cent of residents born in non-English-speaking countries, many of whom are humanitarian migrants and refugees (Healy, 2007). Narratives of socio-economic disadvantage are paralleled by stories of crime and social disorder that mark Dandenong as “suburban crime capital” and “gangland” (The Journal, 2003, p. 1). Sometimes the ethnicity of young residents who allegedly engage in crime is made more explicit by references to phenotype, birthplace, nationality and formal citizenship status. As a result, local and state planning policies aim to “breathe new life into Dandenong” (Millar, 2005, p. 3) through community building and urban renewal projects developed within the framework of Melbourne 2030 (Department of Infrastructure, 2002).

Such popular representations of ethnicity possibly contribute to constructions of Dandenong as a place of interethnic tension. It is a former “Anglo suburb” that faces the “hazards of multiculturalism” (Bolt, 2002, p. 19), a place where ethnic “cultures crash” (Mann, 2006, p. 1), “Christianity slips, Buddhism booms” and “radical opinions undercut harmony” (The Journal, 2004, p. 10). Paradoxically, this narrative of interethnic tension is partially yet problematically offset by reports that celebrate and exoticise a non-Anglo ethnicity. Dandenong is identified as a “cultural hub” (Hill, 2004, p. 18) and an “international example of multiculturalism's success” (The Oakleigh Springvale Dandenong Times, 2000, p. 9). Maintaining interethnic harmony in a socio-economically disadvantaged and culturally diverse area is seen as a policy challenge that has to be managed by local government (City of Greater Dandenong, 2005a, b). The following section demonstrates that this is perhaps because interethnic boundaries are bright.

Marking Interethnic Boundaries

In-depth interviews with people who live and/or work in Dandenong provide an insight into underlying norms, values and attitudes in this multi-ethnic neighbourhood. Their stories of material well-being and belonging show that interethnic boundaries are bright between an Anglo-Australian/white ethnicity and a non-white ethnicity that is coterminous with a migrant and/or Muslim identity. In the following excerpt Graham, an Anglo-Australian man and a manager of a real estate agency, marks a migrant ethnicity in understanding socio-economic disadvantage in Dandenong:

Graham: Dandenong has always been a blue collar area. It's on the map because it was an industrial base and employed a lot of migrant labour building cars and making cans of beans. So I don't know that there's a significant shift in that, but there is a social element to it that comes, I suppose, from having a lot of people who are unemployed. So you get a lot of them on welfare, and those types of people don't generally help an area if they're out of work, and they're not spending. They don't have the same ability to send their kids to good schools and to buy nice motor cars, and to live in nice homes, and there's a whole range of things that go with that.

Graham recalls the establishment of large manufacturing plants in Dandenong established in the post-war period that were instrumental in defining Dandenong as an industrial city (Alves, 1992). Today both GMH and H. J. Heinz are no longer major employers in Dandenong; an outcome of the economic shifts since the 1970s, that constructs local places as sites of social decline within a dominant narrative of globalisation. As a result of this perceived economic and social decline, Graham suggests a connection between blue collar workers, migrant workers and unemployed residents, who he describes as financially dependent on social welfare payments from the state. Graham argues that their access to the material privileges of ‘nicer housing’ and a home ‘in a nicer area’ are limited, compared to employed professionals like him who have the choice to live elsewhere. The literature on socio-economic disadvantage, more specifically the work of Burnley (1999) illustrates that concentrations of socio-economic disadvantage in the city are often immigrant areas where people often experience difficult conditions of life that include unemployment, limited access to jobs and racialisation by the dominant cultural group. In this example, Graham's interpretation of material well-being and success is used to racialise and mark migrants and even perhaps demonstrate a degree of indifference in the face of Otherness. Such marking of residents in Dandenong, a place that Graham describes as having a ‘fairly high’ as well as ‘strong migrant population’ can have effects and create interethnic tensions because Graham works in Dandenong, and regularly interacts with residents, new settlers who approach him to lease residential property when they arrive in Australia. This normative understanding of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods appears more complex in stories of belonging told by residents who have lived several years in Dandenong.

Ralph, an Anglo-Australian resident, for example, is upset and anxious about the visible changes in the street where he lives. In the following excerpt he protests against mosque development in Dandenong and emphasises interethnic boundaries between Anglo-Australians and Muslims:

Ralph: I've noticed is there's a lot more Muslims in the area. There was a church at the end of our street that was an old church, and is now a mosque sort of thing. Personally, I think it's sad that there's a stronger Muslim presence in this country, because I think they're very intolerant. I think the more enlightened Muslims are quite good and okay, but unfortunately it's a religion that can breed a lot of intolerance. My hope is that they will learn to be tolerant in this country.

Ralph practises Christianity and associates intolerance with the act of constructing a mosque on a site that he thinks was formerly occupied by a church. Paradoxically, however, it is Ralph who appears to be intolerant as he takes ownership of the neighbourhood as well as the nation through his protest against mosque development and marks Muslims as ‘outsiders’ in a country where they have chosen to live, possibly for the rest of their lives. Dunn (2005) in his discussion of the politics of mosque development in Sydney draws attention to such right-wing approaches that assert the dominance of whiteness, Anglo-ness and a Judaeo-Christian belief system in understanding belonging in local places. Ralph, however, has nothing against some “enlightened Muslims” who assimilate into Australian society and suppress their difference in the public sphere. In underlining the binary of the ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ also noted by Dunn (2001), Ralph constructs and maintains interethnic boundaries to affirm his privileged access to the nation. He makes a concession by suggesting that such privileged access is also available to Muslims, but only those who conform to a dominant cultural and moral order regulated by Australian values. In discussing core Australian values, Hage points out that a conservative approach associates the possession of these values with “cultural tradition, habits and customs” (2006, p. 34) of Anglo-Australians. On the other hand, a progressive approach associates values with ideals and aspirations that are pursued to bring betterment to society. Listening to Ralph, it can be argued that he adopts a conservative approach in upholding Australian values that perhaps stem from the insecurity he experiences as an Anglo-Australian who cannot always determine the future of public space in Dandenong. Ralph's insecurity and naiveté have unintended consequences because he excludes Muslim-Australians and is unaware that core values such as the respect for difference is a condition of our humanity that blurs ethnic boundaries and creates the potential for interethnic understanding.

Blurring Interethnic Boundaries

This section shows that cultural difference can be negotiated in ways that contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging. The following narratives of face-to-face encounters in the neighbourhood demonstrate that although residents of Dandenong use cultural signifiers to mark ethnic difference, this initial marking of difference also enables them to blur interethnic boundaries and include rather than exclude others. For example, relationships with neighbours are often brief and casual encounters, but also convivial experiences that satisfy curiosity, create surprise and provide feelings of security and comfort. Fincher and Iveson (2008) argue that conviviality is a feature of neighbourly greetings that are fleeting and non-intrusive, but enable the development of small connections with strangers that stimulate feelings of happiness among citizens. Justine draws attention to these small connections that enable her to develop friendships with her neighbours.

Justine is an Anglo-Australian mother, a mature-aged woman whose parents migrated from Britain. She remembers that when she was a child during the post-war period, everyone in the neighbourhood was Anglo-Australian and worked in factories established by the ‘Big Three’. Justine recalls that at that time Dandenong was popularly referred to as “the gateway to Gippsland”. She regrets that today “outsiders” who rarely visit Dandenong refer to it as “a terrible place, a very unsafe place, that's got a lot of drug and other problems”. Justine does not agree and describes Dandenong as a place with “a broad racial mix where everyone gets along”. I asked Justine whether she knew her neighbours well and this was her response:

Justine: Yes I know all the neighbours. Like well my dad lives there and my cousin lives there. So we've lived here for three generations but then, immediately across the road is Sue, who's English, and then Tan, whose Southeast Asian, and then Maria and Marcello, who are Italian, and then Richard and his wife, who—she's from New Zealand and he's from Australia. Ann has just bought, she's Australian, she's just moved from Richmond to Dandenong, so you sort of know [everyone].

Even though Justine identifies neighbours who live on her street based on their national heritage and distinguishes them from Anglo-Australians, she greets and speaks to them nearly every day. She sees the ability to develop relationships with people who may be ethnically different as part of living in Dandenong. Justine goes on to explain that it is by virtue of ethnic difference and the vulnerability experienced as a result of migrating, that friendship with others in Dandenong becomes very important and material wealth is not valued:

Justine: It's a starting place for a lot of new arrivals, so the refugees and migrants would come with very little money, but then work very hard and make a good life. So I suppose too, your value as a person to me is not how much money you've got or what your worldly goods are. It's what you are. Whereas in some communities, it's what sort of house you live in, or what sort of car you drive, or what sort of job you've got, or what school your children go to.

This ability to value the humanity of others enables Justine to encourage her children to welcome friends to their home whether they are migrants or refugees, or anyone else:

Justine: Liandra, my daughter, she's got one friend here today who's Mauritian and one is a migrant from Romania. He was born in Romania, so he's a new arrival. And I suppose just in any group of young people, that's what you find these days.

Justine had been a local councillor, was a member of a resident action group, an active member in the local church, as well as a prominent member in the local netball association, and had developed a strong network of friends that included people who had arrived in Dandenong several years ago. Justine is still open to surprise and making new connections through her children's friends as well as new settlers in the street where she lives. When Justine thinks of the positive images of Dandenong, she thinks of the humanity of residents that cannot be defined merely in terms of their ethnicity:

Justine: The positives are the people, the people that have been able to establish themselves and lead good and decent lives here.

It is this appreciation of the goodness of others that enables her to destabilise bright interethnic boundaries defined in terms of national heritage and demonstrate openness toward others. The outcomes of such openness were evident when new settlers felt very welcome and made comments like, “Dandenong for me you know it's pretty good. Dandenong is the best place to live”, “I love this town.” Wise in her study of Ashfield, a suburb of Sydney, argues that intercultural encounters with neighbours, though fleeting and often not very intimate, are nevertheless important because they are expressions of “micro moments of hope” (2005, p. 183), trust and belonging that exist in local places. Such encounters are also moments of curiosity, joy and laughter.

Habitual encounters in public spaces like the Dandenong Market demonstrate that laughter and irreverent humour destabilises interethnic boundaries. Gordon has been managing a greengrocer shop at Dandenong Market for the last five years and enjoys talking and bargaining with customers. He has several regular customers, who he says visit his shop because of the excellent quality, as well as the affordable price of the fruit and vegetables that he sells. Gordon enjoys the busy market environment where shoppers are free to walk in, touch the produce, bargain and sometimes just talk to him. Although Gordon had delegated the responsibility to deal with customers to another person because of his interview with me, he continued to respond to queries from customers such as “Are your veggies fresh?” and queries about prices he might respond to with “Five dollars for you!” After saying this he would turn to me and say, “He [the customer] is going away from here, he's getting married.” Gordon and his customers often engaged in banter that depended on cultural and ethnic identifiers but which was playful and irreverent:

Gordon: [addressing a customer] You Albanian, what are ya?

Customer: Think a bit.

Gordon: Asian?

Customer: No, Macedonian. From next door to you [they laugh].

Me: Next door to you?

Gordon: I'm from Greece. He's next door, next door.

Me: Why do you shop here?

Customer: I come to see Gordon.

Gordon: He comes to see me. I'm very well liked. Isn't that right?

Customer: He's the best in the market.

Gordon: [addressing the customer] We've got the best quality, haven't we man?

Customer: [points to a box of celery] Good stuff. Five dollars a kilo this one?

Gordon: Here mate how many kids you got? I'll tell you how many I got, yeah. I got two kids and I've got nine men here, and I've got to feed them as well. For you five dollars.

In this exchange, Gordon and a customer demonstrate curiosity when they initially identify each other by national heritage, and this seems to help them communicate and experience a shared sense of belonging to Dandenong rather than create cultural barriers. Social interaction that stems from curiosity produces laughter, surprise and joy. Therefore, although the market is a place where new faces and new customs are sometimes confronting, customers and shopkeepers learn to live with difference in an environment where social connection rather than anonymity is valued. The customer visits Gordon's shop not merely because the produce he sells is of a good quality and inexpensive, but also because he enjoys talking and bargaining with Gordon. Gordon interprets these regular visits and conversations as an expression of a caring attitude that instils a sense of pride as a resident and shopkeeper in the Market. Gordon later described the Market as “the heart of Dandenong” and “the place to be” in our interview. Fincher and Iveson (2008) argue that such places of disorder that create conviviality are important when policy makers are considering urban renewal. It is evident that the old and busy market is a welcoming and homely place where irreverent humour and laughter enables people to blur interethnic boundaries.

‘At Home’ with Ethnic Diversity

The stories of encounters in the local neighbourhood in Dandenong demonstrate that welcoming moments enable us to see local places as sites of interdependence, joy, hope and belonging, where ethnic difference is not merely marked but also valued. Hage in a conversation with Zournazi (Zournazi & Hage, 2002) underlines that negative hope defers joy and gratification, whereas positive hope gives life meaning and provides positive energy that makes life worth living. It is this latter conceptualisation of hope that has the capacity to provide a joyous state of being and a sense of belonging because “one's eyes are open to what is outside oneself” (Zournazi & Lingis, 2002, p. 25). Lingis argues that such experiences of joy in everyday life occur through moments when we “speak the language of hospitality” (2002, p. 32) and spread warmth by welcoming the presence of difference. The joy that is produced through our relationships with others, produces a critical “interactional space” (Massey, 2005, p. 11) that is open and always in the process of becoming. Therefore, although residents initially use national heritage to mark interethnic boundaries, this enables them to include rather than exclude others. Such moments when difference rather than sameness is welcomed rather than stereotyped and stigmatised, destabilise essentialist understandings of ethnicity, reify understanding of culture and contribute to feelings of being ‘at home’. This is evident when Daisy an elderly long-term Anglo-Australian resident says, “It's home really to me” or Franny a new settler says, “It's like a home type of feeling.”

Hooks argues that home is a place that “promotes varied and ever-changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, (and) frontiers of difference” (1991, p. 148). Therefore, although the presence of difference may sometimes produce feelings of alienation, isolation, threat, suspicion and a yearning to belong, it is the temporal moments of curiosity, surprise, joy and laughter that contribute to feelings of being ‘at home’. Such positive feelings have the potential to radiate to the wider neighbourhood through gestures of care. Hage (2003) argues that the level of care we give to one another is an expression of the intensity of our relation to the society within which we live. Recalling moments when residents showed or received care enables them to develop or maintain a strong emotional attachment to Dandenong even though the neighbourhood is constantly changing with the arrival of new settlers. For example, Malcolm, an elderly Anglo-Australian resident describes Dandenong as “a place with people from all over the world” and attributes his continued love for Dandenong to his willingness to accept change:

Malcolm: I've changed with the changing times and that's not easy to do, always. It's not always easy, but I think it's good when you can. You've got to change with the changing times.

Malcolm concluded by saying that as a resident of Dandenong he received much more than he gave. The love he received from others was the greatest reward and perhaps it is this love that continues to provide him with a sense of belonging to Dandenong. Such feelings of love, comfort, security, contentment and happiness constitute the affective dimension of living with cultural diversity (Hage, 2003; Ahmed, 2008; Leeuwen, 2008; Wise, 2009, 2010). Such feelings have the capacity to displace a paranoid mode of belonging that is built on worry, suspicion, threat and a lack of trust (Hage, 2003). Home becomes a transformative space, a place of hope and joy where bright interethnic boundaries are inadequate to understand encounters across difference.

Conclusion

The stories discussed in this article show that chance encounters as well as more regular interactions in the local neighbourhood produce interethnic tensions, indifference and insecurity, but also curiosity, surprise, joy and laughter. Residents overcome the tensions of negotiating and living with difference, through practices of welcoming and even joking about difference. Such chance encounters and brief affective moments are easy to dismiss as inconsequential. This article, however, has elevated such encounters because they draw attention to moments and places in the neighbourhood when interethnic boundaries get blurred and interethnic understanding becomes visible. In drawing attention to positive outcomes of interactions between urban residents, this article makes a modest contribution to broaden academic and policy debates on interethnic understanding and social inclusion that are often informed by census data and statistical measures of ethnic segregation. Gibson-Graham argues that academic practices that are exploratory and focus on “modest beginnings and small achievements” (2006, p. 196) have the potential to motivate social change. Fincher and Iveson (2008) in thinking about the planners’ role in effecting this change and moving towards a goal of just diversity in the city underline the importance of planning practices that preserve places of disorder that facilitate such fleeting encounters. Perhaps, this is because in unobtrusive ways, urban policy making and practice can facilitate interethnic engagement in ways that are less paternalistic and affirmative of ethnic difference. Policy making that focuses on social inclusion is value-laden, but if informed by local intercultural encounters, such policies may be more effective in displacing official and popular representations of ethnically diverse suburbs as places of poverty, crime and interethnic tension, and contribute to building hope, joy and belonging.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the people of Dandenong who participated in this research. The author is grateful for the support received from doctoral supervisors, Lauren Costello and Elissa Sutherland and friends at Monash and Deakin University. The author would like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their time and excellent suggestions/comments which have been incorporated in this article.