Page 115 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

should not be underestimated. It has enabled the production of a new national
narrative which tells the reassuring story that Australia has now relinquished its
racist past, and embraced a non-racist and non-racial national identity. Raymond
Evans et al. (1997: 188), for example, remark: ‘Today, the concept of “White
Australia” is an anachronism in multicultural Australia. It is an embarrassment, and
difficult for 1990s Australians to understand’. However, embarrassment is hardly
a productive affect if one is to come to terms with what could be described as a major
change of heart in the life of the nation. It signifies a tendency to disavow, rather
than confront and come to terms with the racist past of the nation, and with the
central importance of racial differentiation in the very historical constitution of
Australia as a nation–state. Instead, this past is reduced symbolically to a childhood
sin, as it were, which doesn’t have anything to do with the mature Australia. It is
worth noting here that the embarrassment is likely to be felt most acutely by the
liberal intelligentsia, for whom anti-racism has become an article of faith. It is here
that the ideological project of multiculturalism – as an alternative and a replacement
for the narrative of ‘white Australia’ – comes into play, in a manner however which,
in our analysis, turns out to be less than effectual.

From white nation to multicultural nation:
repressing ‘race’
The assumption that the notion of a ‘white Australia’ has become an anachronism
in ‘multicultural Australia’ has been made possible by the common conflation
of multiculturalism with non-racialism. That is, the very statement that Australia
is now a ‘multicultural nation’ is often implicitly put forward as evidence that the
notion of a ‘white Australia’ is no longer current in the national imaginary, as if
the adoption of multiculturalism were by definition an act of anti-racism.
This view is extremely problematic. First of all, it is important to stress that
multiculturalism is a policy that recognizes and confirms cultural diversity, not
non-racialism. The distinction is crucial. In fact, a brief look at how and why the
policy of multiculturalism was introduced in Australia will clarify that multi-
culturalism was originally never intended to be equated with multiracialism. In the
post-World War Two period, as we have noted, Australia embarked on a
programme to build up its population rapidly. Recovering from World War Two
and in the face of an increasingly strong Asian ‘near north’, Australia, in the words
of its first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, felt it needed to ‘populate or
perish’. One consequence of the desire to increase immigration was a liberalization
of the White Australia immigration policy. As there was not enough supply of
immigrants from Britain, immigrants were recruited first in Northen Europe
(Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany), and later Southern and Eastern Europe
(Italy, Greece, Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, and so on). Importantly, this
liberalization did not overturn the racially-based two-tiered structure which
distinguished Europeans from non-Europeans, white from non-white, included
and excluded. It did, however, introduce an element of diversity within the category

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