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Article Excerpt
Along with bedtime stories featuring trios of bears, pigs and siblings, many Australians have told and been told a neat triangular story about the three phases in the history of this country's post-war immigration--assimilation, integration, and multiculturalism. In this nicely symmetrical story, with its shape suggesting a beginning, middle and end of the subject, a trajectory towards successful multiculturalism set in a 'lucky country' and 'promised land' is mediated through a discourse of self-congratulation. In this shift from a deep bias towards an England-identified monoculture, and nostalgia for heroic images of battlers, Anzacs and the occasional drover's wife, the mainstreaming of images of multiculturalism has generally been read as heralding progress towards the celebration of difference.
Yet that progress has recently been punctuated by--and may be more perniciously related to--an increasing crisis in immigration, and a surge in the expression of racist views. Australia seems to be in the midst of a backlash against multiculturalism, for which the rise of Pauline Hanson provided something of a metonym. The irony of Hanson needing the word 'xenophobia' explained to her, when she so strikingly embodied it in her political career, is clear. And while her more overt racism might be easy to deride (and certainly has been derided, for example, by the creation of Pauline Pantsdown and the idea of the Oxley Moron), commentators such as David Marr and Marian Wilkinson note a larger current of government-sanctioned expression of racist views, dating from the time when the issue of asylum seekers gained prominence in the lead-up to the federal election of 2001: 'Critics were told that to accuse someone of racism was elitist and arrogant ... The xenophobia of Australians was to be shown democratic respect'. (1) As Marr and Wilkinson explain, the origins of this idea lay in the Howard government's anxiety that Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party (ONP), with its voters' multifarious preferences, might have the power to preclude a return of the coalition government to power, unless the Liberals could somehow recapture that portion of their vote lost to the ONP.
The combination of these two ways of narrativising multiculturalism and Immigration--on the one hand the heralding of successful multiculturalism, and, on the other, a licensing of racist views--forms a new, deeply riven story that is altogether messier, and profoundly ambivalent.
To complicate this further, alongside the plethora of images of what might be called 'acceptable multiculturalism', often produced by government and big business, has emerged a spate of new representations of immigration and its plunkett.you make me a dot.qxp 8/11/2006 17:06 Page 41 consequences. This fuller story about the experience of immigration has emerged in what have come to be positioned by this context as contestatory narratives in film, poetry and fiction, often by means of radical or avant-garde forms. It is exemplified by the wild performance poems of Ania Walwicz and [pi]O, by the passionate poetry of Ouyang Yu, by Rosa Cappiello's novel Oh Lucky Country, by Christos Tsiolkas's kinetic novel Loaded and Ana Kokkinos's film based on Loaded, Head On (2000). These texts contain fuller and unevasive stories about coming to Australia, and being in Australia. They emphasise ambivalence and contradiction, and provide an unflinching representation of the 'ontological trauma of migrating to this country' which John Conomos, in 1992, argued had then been paid scant critical attention in Australian film. (2) They actively resist and refuse the silencing effects of attitudes such as those described by Marr and Wilkinson.
This essay looks at three movements: the first, the movement towards fuller representation of the experience of immigration and biculturalism in various modes and genres; the second, the mainstreaming of a celebratory--and often unreflective and uncritical--discourse of successful multiculturalism; and the third, the recent surge in the expression of racist views exemplified by the One Nation Party, the neo-Nazi Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM), and, increasingly, the Howard federal government. Considering these shifts, this paper posits a fourth chapter in 'the story we tell ourselves' about immigration and multiculturalism, one that is in the process of being written. Though it is difficult and risky to describe the shape of a nascent and still-evolving chapter, it appears that this story has a deeply riven plot, and strains between extremes of maturity and regression. It is at once a hideous retrogressive moment and a moment of vital resistance and energy; the latter something of an 'equal and opposite reaction' to the former. If these vital, contestatory voices are able to be heard over the rush of xenophobia, perhaps a deeper, more complex and sophisticated multiculturalism may result--but that's the end of the story, which has not yet been written, and can be inscribed here only as...
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