‘At Least I Don't Live in Vegemite Valley’: racism and rural public housing spaces

Abstract

Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous public housing tenants in 2005, this paper investigates the way in which racialised discourses were used to construct rural public housing spaces and Indigenous tenants in the inland city of Griffith in south-western New South Wales (NSW). Informed by the literatures on ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of racism, the paper identifies three separate, yet interdependent, discursive strategies used by interviewees. These include discourses that: (1) racialised Griffith's public housing spaces; (2) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as receiving ‘unfair privileges’; and (3) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as ‘ungovernable’. Furthermore, the employment of the ‘denial’ or ‘disclaimer’ as a discursive tactic in ‘new’ forms of racism was found to be used strategically as a means of maintaining such constructions. The paper ultimately seeks to contradict arguments, made by both Australian media outlets and politicians, that racism is an irrelevant factor when more broadly considering the issues facing rural public housing estates. The paper argues instead that ‘race’ is an integral feature to how some rural public housing estates and tenants are constructed and that racism is often an ‘everyday’ aspect of many public housing tenants’ experiences.

Keywords:

• Racism
• rural spaces
• public housing
• Indigenous Australians
• Griffith

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to those respondents who volunteered to be interviewed for this research and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) for generously funding this PhD research. I would also like to thank Neil Argent, Judith Burns, Kevin Dunn, Chris Gibson, Wendy Shaw and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and advice that improved earlier drafts of this paper. Last, I would like to acknowledge the influence of Dr John Yu who quietly encouraged/lobbied me not to neglect the complex housing issues that Indigenous Australians continue to face.

Notes

1. The way in which socially constructed categories of race are used to label individuals, communities and places as a means of organising the way in which economic, social and cultural processes are rationalised and (re)produced.

2. In referring to a Pacific Islander ‘community’ it should be noted that this ‘community’ is made up of many different nationalities such as Tongan, Fijian, Samoan, Cook Islander, Niuean and so on. Therefore the use of the word ‘community’ should not be interpreted as meaning a uniformity of culture or identity amongst these people but as a means of identifying the general difference in background and experience of people from this region and other people in Griffith.

3. ‘Koori’ is a unifying term for Indigenous Australians who come from the eastern parts of the country (see Shaw et al. 2006).

4. Redfern is an inner-city suburb in Sydney, NSW. Although residents of Redfern come from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds, and despite Indigenous individuals comprising only 2.3 per cent of the population living in the suburb (ABS 2007), ‘it is widely held by White Australians that blight, crime, poverty and despair have found their natural habitat on that suburb's troubled streets’ (Anderson 1993b, p. 314; see also Shaw 2007). Such perceptions of Indigeneity and ‘lawlessness’ were reinforced through the media reportage of the ‘Redfern Riots’, a clash between residents and police on the evening of 14 February 2004 after the death of Thomas ‘TJ’ Hickey, a 17-year-old Indigenous Australian.

5. Shared Responsibility Agreements were introduced by the Howard Coalition government in 2004 as part of a broader agenda to radically reform the Indigenous affairs framework away from being based on ‘self-determination’ to one based on ‘mutual obligation’. Such changes also included the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the collapsing of the Indigenous affairs federal agency into the larger agencies of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and the Department of Family and Community Affairs, and the Northern Territory ‘Intervention’.

6. ‘Mutual obligation’ has been a central concept around which much of the reform to welfare policy has occurred in Australia over the last 12 years. Essentially it conceives society as a network of interdependent individuals and other entities (e.g. governments, businesses, community organisations, etc.). It is understood that this network operates best when individuals actively ‘participate’, thereby fulfilling their ‘obligations’ and ‘responsibilities’ to this network. It has been argued by critics of the Keynesian welfare system that ‘rights’-based welfare has the detrimental impact of creating ‘welfare dependency’, where individuals are provided with income and other forms of support from the government but are not required to undertake certain actions (e.g. looking for work, retraining, etc.) in return for this support.