Page 111 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

complete and is always in a process of renegotiation. The Hanson/Howard
ascendancy is a clear indication that more than two decades of official government
policy has not led to the generation of a deep and pervasive nation-wide commit-
ment to multiculturalism. Why? It is not our intention to provide a comprehensive
analysis of this situation, which would obviously need to take the interplay of
complex economic, political, institutional, demographic and other factors into
account (see Stratton 1998). Here, we would like to single out one problem with
the discourse of multiculturalism as it has been constructed in Australia. The
problem is that this discourse is incapable of providing a convincing and effective
narrative of Australian national identity because it does not acknowledge and
engage with a crucial ideological concern in the national formation’s past and
present, namely, that of ‘race’.
In brief, we want to argue that the Australian discourse of multiculturalism does
not recognize, confront or challenge the problematic of ‘race’ but rather represses
it. In so doing a very significant province of Australian historical experience, which,
as we will show, is replete with a concern, if not obsession with ‘race’, has been
simply set aside, as if it were never of any importance. At the same time, this
repression of ‘race’ in multiculturalist discourse cannot prevent the persistence of
‘race’ as a key marker of absolute and unacceptable cultural difference in everyday
understandings, a persistence which, we will argue, resonates with common
unreflexive notions of an ‘Australian way of life’ and, a term used insistently by
John Howard, ‘mainstream Australia’. Such notions not only marginalize so-called
‘ethnic’ cultures, but also, damagingly, creates a situation in which white or ‘Anglo-
Celtic’ Australians are encouraged to construct themselves as outside ‘multicultural
Australia’. One aspect of this is the unthinking and automatic association of
multiculturalism with (non-English-speaking) migrants, as if it has nothing to do
with the ‘core culture’. What is made impossible to imagine and narrate as a result
are the very real changes in the way ordinary white, ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Australians are
positioned in the new, ‘multicultural Australia’, as well as the daily conflicts and
contradictions involved. In other words, the discourse of multiculturalism has failed
to provide ‘old’ Australians with ways of re-imagining themselves as an integral part
of the ‘new’ Australia. On the contrary, what has been constructed is a struggle
between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Australia, a divisive tug of war which John Howard
has insisted on resolving in the interest of ‘all of us’.
To understand how ‘race’ plays a central part in this discursive struggle, which,
it has to be emphasized, is part and parcel of a larger social, economic and cultural
struggle over the changing place of the Australian nation–state in the global order
(see Ang and Stratton 1996), we will give a brief historical account of the
construction of a distinctively Australian national identity from the moment that
the colonial settler society became a quasi-independent nation–state.

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