Page 149 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

8

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

Ambivalence and the ‘Asian’ woman in
Australian multiculturalism

Throughout most of the 1990s, Australia has prided itself on being one of the
most successful and progressive multicultural nations in the world. For example,
in 1995, the year which the United Nations dubbed the International Year for
Tolerance, the Australian government hosted a lavish Global Cultural Diversity
conference in Sydney, in which distinguished international guests were invited to
take part in ‘celebrating our cultural diversity’ – one of the central mottoes of the
conference, and of the highly pro-multiculturalist Keating government of that
time. Of course, this upbeat, self-congratulatory rhetoric received a severe beating
when One-Nationist Pauline Hanson exploded onto the political stage one year
later. Hanson’s popularity, as we have seen in the previous chapters, resulted in a
period of doubt about Australia’s commitment to multiculturalism, not least
because the new Prime Minister, John Howard, has been known quite explicitly
for his scepticism about the M-word and his generally more conservative vision for
the nation, drawing as he does on images of a more uncomplicated, homogenous
past, when diversity was not yet an issue nor something to pride oneself upon
(Allon 1997). Nevertheless, by October 2000, when Sydney hosted the Olympic
Games and all the eyes of the world were upon Australia, the theme of the happy
and successful multicultural nation – as colourfully represented during the
spectacular extravaganza of the opening ceremony – was once again trumpeted as
Australia’s main selling point. And a few months later, during the festivities of the
100th anniversary of Australia’s birth as a nation on 1 January 2001, Prime Minister
Howard himself in his ceremonial speech highlighted the importance of diversity
in the story of the making of the Australian nation diversity – without, however,
mentioning the word ‘multiculturalism’ – when he boasted about ‘the remarkable
way in which this country has absorbed people from 140 nations around the world,
in a social experiment without parallel in modern history which has produced a
degree of social cohesion which is the envy of the rest of the world’. It is fair to say
that this kind of rhetoric, in which diversity is represented as a crucial building
block of national unity and prosperity, is part of the grand narrative of late
twentieth-century Australian nationalism, and in all likelihood will remain so long
into the twenty-first, as nation–states will increasingly see themselves internally
diversified by intensifying global flows of people.

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