Page 118 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS

for generations conceived of themselves as a nation. As Peter Lawrence (1983)
remarks, the admittance of thousands of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ from the mid-
1970s onwards ‘forced many [Australians] to accept that the days of Australia as
a purely white European outpost were finally over’.
What we are arguing here is this. Giving up an idea which for generations has
been a key element of the meaning of Australian nationhood – the idea of Australia
as a ‘white nation’ – requires the development of a new national narrative which
can account for the change, and gives the people a new, livable sense of national
identity. The discourse of multiculturalism does attempt to provide Australians
with such a narrative through the constant confirmation and reiteration of
the success, cultural richness and tolerance of ‘multicultural Australia’. But it has
failed to offer white Australians, especially, the discursive means to articulate
their experience of the tensions and contradictions associated with the loss of their
racial monopoly. One reason for this failure, we have argued, lies precisely in
the repression of the discourse of ‘race’. Given that ‘race’ has been so formative
to the Australian national imaginary, it cannot be erased from that imaginary
simply by making it disappear from the textual surface of respectable discourse.
In other words, for all of the state’s efforts to re-imagine the nation in the image
of a non-racial paradise of ‘cultural diversity’, the trace of ‘race’ continues to lead
a subterranean life which remains effective in people’s everyday understandings of
what’s happening in their country.

‘Race’: return of the repressed
As we have noted, today ‘race’ has returned from the repressed with a vengeance
in Australian political discourse, especially in relation to the issue of indigenous
rights. A second key index for the continued effectivity of racial discourse is the
connotative loading accrued by the term ‘Asian’, particularly, in the context of
multiculturalism, ‘Asian’ immigration. As we have remarked, ‘Asian’ immigration
has been one of Pauline Hanson’s main political targets. As she puts it: ‘I and
most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of
multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’
(Hanson 1996). Clearly, ‘Asians’ and ‘Australians’ are mutually exclusive categories
for Hanson, as they have been for a long and formative period in Australian history.
When Hanson speaks about ‘Asians’, she clearly transgresses the preferred,
‘colour-blind’ framework of the discourse of multiculturalism. To put it differently,
in using the term ‘Asian’ she invokes a racial discourse which was supposed to
have been banished from the Australian cultural imaginary with the introduction
of an officially non-racial immigration policy. While Chinese, Vietnamese,
Malaysian, Singaporean and other migrants from the geographical region called
‘Asia’ are now considered an integral part of Australia’s multicultural ethnic mix,
these groups are collectively racialized by Hanson in order to single them out and
amass them as the Other that threatens the national Self. This signals the continued
operation of racial thinking in the minds of many Australians in articulating their

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