A Multicultural Landscape: National Parks and the Macedonian Experience
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4. White Australia and multiculturalism

Environmental perception As someone who has studied in some detail settlers’ responses to the Australian environment,[5] I discern a resonance between the recent drowning of Koreans and more familiar narratives of disappearance, firmly ingrained in the national culture, like the many stories (actual and imagined) about White children lost in the bush.[6] Both emphasise the unforgiving, even violent, aspects of the Australian environment.

I also discern analogies between the perceptions of 20th century migrants and those of the 19th century. Born in Australia of British-Irish descent, I personally find it staggering that the majority of Macedonians who spoke to me in the course of this research insisted that the Australian bush is bereft of smell. It recalled the oft-made claim that colonial artists of the 19th century were incapable of painting gum trees. Admittedly, the point of comparison for the Macedonian informants was the overpowering aroma of a resinous pine forest. But for me, suffused with memories of damp gullies, overpowering boronia, sclerophyll and cicadas, the sweet humidity of summer before the storm, the idea of an odourless bush is frankly incredible.

Such contrasts in perception seem culturally familiar when I compare colonial accounts of the bush with my own sensory experience. When Macedonians suggest them in the year 2000, they seem initially strange. While my training as an historian undoubtedly modulates my interpretation, I suspect a more general truth is exposed by the tendency to regard a lack of familiarity with the Australian environment as a colonial rather than a contemporary phenomenon. It is indicative of the way the dominant culture in Australia situates the act of arrival and settlement as an ‘historical fact’ rather than an ongoing process.

Who do we call a migrant? White Australia’s perception of itself is fraught with contradictions. The social researchers Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis have pointed out that ‘Even eighth-generation Australians mark their origin from an arrival, so even the most continuous white lineage of belonging harks back to the fact of migrancy.’ Paradoxically, however, that sense of migration is quietly shelved in the construction of a national self. As Schech and Haggis describe it, ‘The resonance of migrancy is compounded in Australia by the twinning of the always having arrived with the wilful forgetting of the nature of that arrival...’[7] The sense of belonging is thus loaded with further contradictions. Until at least the 1950s, unquestioned claims to Australia soil could go hand in hand with the perception among White Australians who had never even been there that Britain was ‘home’.

Multiculturalism In some respects our current era is one in which the doctrine of multiculturalism has become a governmental mantra.[8] The NPWS, like all government agencies, is bound by a plethora of state and federal legislation that forbids discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, race, religion, sex, age and physical disability.[9] Such a situation, while undoubtedly a progressive move from the old ethos of assimilation or the White Australia Policy, tends to obscure the long history of racially-based conceptions of the Australian nation – notions which, as the emergence of extremist groups like the League of Rights and One Nation clearly demonstrate, continue to exert their influence. To relegate ‘White Australia’ and the Policy thereof to the realm of ‘history’ is wishful thinking. As we historians remind anyone who might listen, the legacy of the past is lived out in the present.

Problematic terminology To address this situation in its complexity is as fraught with problems as it is politically necessary. Hence the difficulties that present themselves in debating matters of cultural diversity; problems which arise now, as I attempt to find an appropriate terminology in this report.

Public discourse in Australia is full of language that marks a separation between migrants and a non-migrant mainstream. For reasons intimated above, this demarcation is ultimately unsustainable. Only Aboriginal Australians could claim non-migrant status (and indeed many of them have family connections with other parts of the world). Consequently, I have used the terms migrant and migrant heritage cautiously in this report. My usage does not seek to separate migrants from others, but rather to assert that histories of migration, whether they be manifest through lived experience or social memory, are central to the cultural experience of all non-indigenous Australians.

What do we mean by 'ethnic'? With this in mind, it is interesting to contemplate that the term ethnic is under attack at the present time. Stepan Kerkyasharian, chairman of the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW, associates it with rhetoric where ‘people in key public positions talk about the “ethnics” as being an entity outside the mainstream community.’ Complaining about references ‘to the “multicultural community”, as if multicultural meant separate and non-Anglo Saxon,’ Kerkyasharian has declared support for proposed legislation that will change the name of the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW to the Community Relations Commission.[10]

How did the term ethnic arise? While mindful of Kerkyasharian’s arguments, it seems to me that the notion of ethnicity remains useful if its meaning and etymology are better understood. To explain why, it is necessary to probe the meaning of the term. For a group of American scholars studying the influence of ethnicity on recreation in the early 1990s, ethnicity is unproblematically defined as ‘a group having a real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood.’[11]

By this definition, ethnicity should apply to anyone. But here one must add a proviso which acknowledges a social reality in which the term is deployed very readily in discussions of ‘ethnic minorities’ and rarely if at all in descriptions of ‘the mainstream’. The Macquarie Dictionary (1998 edition) reflects this actual usage, listing among definitions of ethnic: ‘of or relating to members of the community who are migrants or the descendants of migrants and whose native language is not English.’[12] Yet even this definition – which acknowledges a leaning towards stigmatisation – tends to gloss over the greater history of the term.

Originating from the Greek, the word ethnic entered English in the 15th century as a way of identifying ‘nations not Christian or Jewish; Gentile, heathen, pagan.’ Occasional appearance of the term hethnic spells out the connection between ethnic and heathen. Only in the mid-19th century did it began to refer to races, groups and nations in a more general sense, influenced by the ‘science’ known by its cognate, ethnology. Our contemporary usage is historically recent. In the USA in 1945, references to ‘ethnic minority’ began to appear.[13]

Such a history might support the view that the word ethnic is better discarded. Yet to me it remains useful: a term that allows groups of people to classify and defend their own historical and cultural distinctiveness against the homogenising tendencies of a dominant group. If we use the term with a knowledge of its complex history – a history that involves us all – it might be possible to encourage awareness that everybody is ‘ethnic’ to someone else. An accessible but highly revelatory illustration of this potential can be found in Lee Mun Wah’s documentary, The Colour of Fear (1994).[14] This film depicts a weekend discussion in which a group of American men of various ethnic backgrounds debate racism. There are two White men among a group that also included Japanese, Chinese, Latino and Black Americans. Much of the drama in this film revolves around the group’s attempts to convince one of the White men of the reality of racism. He fails to see why ethnicity is a factor in their lives, arguing constantly that they would be better off if they regarded themselves simply as ‘people’ or ‘human beings’.

The others responded by arguing that overarching categories like ‘human being’ are preferred by White people because they normalise and universalise a system that preaches egalitarianism while conferring considerable privileges on those who are White. A particularly interesting feature of the film was the loquaciousness with which the ‘men of colour’ spoke about their own ethnicity and the inability of the others, despite much prompting, to say anything whatsoever about being White. Exasperated at this lack of reflexivity, a Black man, Victor, turned to one of the White men and told him to ‘Get ethnic, man, get ethnic.’

Getting ethnic Victor’s advice that we ‘get ethnic’ explains the value of the term and informs my usage in this report. In the context of government, where White men are predominantly the decision-makers, the need to expose the ethnicity of Whiteness acquires great urgency.

Amidst such debate, it will be surprising for some in government to learn that the hallowed term multiculturalism is itself under fire. Ghassan Hage, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney, strongly argues that the establishment of multiculturalism as official doctrine should be regarded with a certain scepticism:

The spread of culturally diverse social forms and processes was happening regardless of assimilation and, if a new policy was not created to help encompass this spread, the latter would have had to remain outside the realm of policy, and as such ungovernable. That is, the recognition of diversity did not cause diversity to happen, it was precisely because diversity had already become an entrenched part of a social reality that no attempts to impose assimilation could change the fact that the government needed a policy that could recognise this diversity in order to govern it.[15]

White power Hage proposes that this managerial multiculturalism forms a vehicle for the maintenance of White power in Australian society. The argument is illustrated with a series of sometimes amusing examples. Hage describes an occasion where Phillip Ruddock, the current Minister for Immigration, addressed a meeting of Arab Australians with the statement: ‘I look around me and I see Australians.’ The crowd’s reaction suggested that Ruddock ‘was the only one who seemed unsure about it in the room, and it only had the effect of placing him in the position of the White acceptor, decreeing the Australianness of the ethnic other.’[16]

To Hage multiculturalism often works as a national mask. It presents a veneer of pluralism without the substance. He cites as another example the showmanship with which a multicultural Australia was presented to the world during Sydney’s bid for the 2000 Olympic Games.

While this presentation was crucial and even dominant, however, it was striking how White the Australian Olympic subject was. That is, while many cultures were deployed on the stage to ‘show off’ the diversity of Australia, very few non-White Australians were part of the managerial decision-making team. Multicultural Australia did not come to represent Australia, it came to be presented by White Australia. All the ‘multicultural’ performers, from the ethnic dancers to the Prime Minister’s wife’s multilingual prowess, were objects/functions that White Australian decision-makers used in presenting ‘Australia’ (themselves) to the international community.[17]

That multiculturalism is imbued with values that covertly sustain the position of White people as power-brokers and decision-makers is compelling evidence of its relative newness on the Australian scene.

For much of its history The Bulletin carried the motto ‘Australia for the White Man’ on its masthead. Only in 1965, after effective lobbying by Gough Whitlam and Don Dunstan, did the Australia Labor Party delete reference to ‘White Australia’ from the party platform.[18] The legacy of this history has been partly – but only partly – erased by the social transformation of recent decades. Although it is distinctly fashionable to say so now, very powerful institutions in this country have not moved far from the motto, ‘Australia for the White Man’.

Multiculturalism emerges in the 1970s Al Grassby, the Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam government, is considered the original champion of multiculturalism. His formative paper, A Multi-cultural Society for the Future (1973), called for an end to the old doctrine of assimilation and promoted an optimistic vision ‘of a truly just society in which all components can enjoy freedom to make their own distinctive contribution to the family of the nation.’[19]

This far more heterogenous notion of Australian society was a notable turning point in both party politics and national self-image, and demanded social and psychological adjustments that were alternatively embraced, challenged, resisted or ignored. Overtly race-based notions of Australia have been law and lore since colonial days and have been the norm for the greater part of the history of the Federation. The White Australia Policy entered the legislature in 1901 when the Immigration Restriction Act was passed.[20] Even during the considerable demand for migrant labour post-World War II, lingering ideas of racial purity, a preference for White settlers, continued to influence immigration policy. This lasted until the 1960s.

In the context of a report about multiculturalism and landscape, it seems essential to at least gloss this history. How else to understand our organisation in its historical context and how else to address the thorny issue of whether we are committed to embracing rather than purely trying to manage the reality of a multicultural society?


[5] Martin Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Reading a colonised landscape, (PhD thesis: University of Technology, Sydney, 2000).

[6] See Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[7] Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis, ‘Migrancy, Whiteness and the Settler Self in Contemporary Australia’ in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Ed.), Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), p. 232.

[8] There is some concern, however, that the Commonwealth Government is abandoning the principle of multiculturalism especially in its policies on citizenship, immigration and welfare. Kate Rea, pers. comm.

[9] NSW anti-discrimination legislation is enshrined in the following statutes: Anti-Discrimination Act 1977; Disability Services Act 1993; Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act. Related federal statutes include: Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act 1986; Disability Discrimination Act 1992; Equal Employment Opportunity (Commonwealth Authorities) Act 1987’ Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986; Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994; Privacy Act 1988; Racial Discrimination Act 1975; Racial Hatred Act 1995; Sex Discrimination Act 1984. Advice supplied by John Gibbins, NPWS Senior Legal Officer.

[10] Stepan Kerkyasharian, ‘Outgrowing the “e” word’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May, 2000, p. 19.

[11] John M. Baas, Alan Ewert and Deborah J. Chavez, ‘Influence of Ethnicity on Recreation and Natural Environment Use Patterns: Managing Recreation Sites for Ethnic and Racial Diversity’, Environmental Management, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 523.

[12] The Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd Edition.

[13] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition.

[14] Lee Mun Wah (dir.), The Colour of Fear (Oakland, CA: Stir-Fry Productions, 1994).

[15] Ghassan Hage, White Nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society, (Annandale: Pluto Press, 1998), pp. 236-7.

[16] Ibid., p. 102.

[17] Ibid., pp. 148-9.

[18] A. W. Martin, ‘The People’ in Ann Curthoys, A. W. Martin and Tim Rowse (Eds), Australians: From 1939, (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987), p. 65.

[19] A. J. Grassby, A Multi-cultural Society for the Future, (Canberra: Dept of Immigration, 1973), p. 11.

[20] The ‘act allowed the government to restrict potential settlers to Australia by requiring unwanted persons to take a dictation test of 50 words in a European language at the discretion of the immigration official.’ See Graeme Aplin, S. G. Foster and Michael McKernan, Australians: Events and Places, (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987), p. 117.

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