Don't Go Back to Where You Came From - Softcover

Soutphommasane, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742233368 ISBN 13: 9781742233369

Publisher: University of New South Wales Press, 2013

Synopsis

Offering an unflinching and informed defense of cultural diversity, this book boldly stakes a claim for the overwhelming success of multiculturalism in Australia. Arguing against European governments that declare multiculturalism a failure, it asserts that multicultural Australia has been a national success story. Creating a solid case for why multiculturalism works, it argues against those who believe a multicultural approach to integration and diversity is detrimental to society. This is a celebration of Australia’s cultural diversity.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Soutphommasane is a lecturer at Monash University's National Center for Australian Studies and a columnist at the Age. He is a senior project leader at the Per Capita think tank and a member of the Australian Multicultural Council, which advises the Australian government on multicultural issues.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Don't Go Back to Where You Came From

Why Multiculturalism Works

By Tim Soutphommasane

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Tim Soutphommasane
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-336-9

Contents

Introduction, 
1 The life and times of multiculturalism, 
2 The Australian model, 
3 How racist is this country?, 
4 A bigger Australia, 
5 The sovereignty of fear, 
Afterword: Having a go, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The life and times of multiculturalism

The precise time of multiculturalism's birth is open to debate. Some would say that pluralism has always been present in Australia, given the original presence of some 700 indigenous nations, speaking more than 250 languages – all long before the arrival of the British. Others highlight that the First Fleet included soldiers, sailors and convicts with ancestral origins in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Others, meanwhile, note that the goldfields of the 19th century were something of a cultural laboratory, populated as they were by diggers from a multitude of nationalities. Yet few would seriously dispute that cultural diversity, at least as we know it today, is the distinctive creation of the second half of the 20th century. Our multicultural society is a product of the successive waves of mass immigration following the Second World War, which have brought more than 7 million people to settle in this country.

And if by multiculturalism we mean a form of government policy responding to ethnic and cultural minorities, there is little ambiguity about the moment of its introduction. Its arrival was modest, the details largely unknown to most Australians. But the first official use of the word 'multicultural' in August 1973 would signify the arrival of a revolution – not one of the sort identified with coups or wars, but of that species that Donald Horne called 'revolutions in consciousness'. It came in a speech delivered by Al Grassby, the then Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam Labor government. 'A multicultural society for the future', as the speech was titled, offered a contemplation of what Australia would look like by the year 2000. The composition of the Australian population, Grassby noted, would be much different as a result of mass immigration. Increasing diversity had 'gradually eroded and finally rendered untenable any prospects there might have been twenty years ago of fully assimilating newcomers to the "Australian way of life"'. It was time to enlarge our understanding of the national identity to reflect the cultural and social impact of Australia's new arrivals:

Our prime task at this point in our history must be to encourage practical forms of social interaction in our community. This implies the creation of a truly just society in which all components can enjoy freedom to make their own distinctive contribution to the family of the nation. In the interests of the Australians of the year 2000, we need to appreciate and preserve all those diverse elements which find a place in the nation today.

For Grassby, the goal was to ensure that Australians of all backgrounds would always be proud to declare, in their different accents, 'I am Australian' – just as Roman citizens in ancient times could boast 'Civis Romanus sum'.

It has often been remarked that Grassby was the father of Australian multiculturalism. Born to an Irish mother and a Spanish father, he was a man whose penchant for flamboyant ties and garish outfits seemed to symbolise the loud, unapologetic insertion of colour into a monochrome Australian society. His intervention in 1973 was certainly a seminal act. According to sociologist Jean Martin, one of the early chroniclers of 'the migrant presence', Grassby's statement was 'a comprehensive document' and 'a manifesto for the plural society' which Grassby was to promote as Minister for Immigration. At the very least, it offered a new language for discussing national identity, and a new perspective on the place of immigrants in Australian society. It acknowledged that a multicultural society was a reality that demanded a national response.

Almost four decades have since passed. What was then a fledgling reality has come to be accepted as a permanent feature of Australian life. As for the response, multiculturalism has evolved through a number of phases since 1973, reflecting not only changes in Australian society but also in political leadership. The story of Australian multiculturalism is one of champions and critics; perhaps even of heroes and villains. But in order to understand it, we must first turn to what preceded it.

After assimilation

Looking back, it isn't hard to see how large-scale assisted immigration – instigated by Ben Chifley's postwar Labor government and continued under that of his Liberal successor Robert Menzies – was bound to transform Australia. It wasn't that the country hadn't experienced waves of immigration before. The gold rush saw Australia's population double in the decade from 1850 to 1860. More than 800 000 immigrants from Britain arrived through assisted passage from 1831 to 1900, many seeking prosperity in the 'long boom' that culminated in the 1880s. But from the Depression of the 1890s through to the Second World War period, immigration was limited and the demand for labour low. When the postwar immigration program began in 1947, fewer than 10 per cent of Australians were born overseas. This would change in the decades that followed. Between 1947 and 1964, more immigrants arrived than in the 80 years from 1860. The national population from 1947 to 1973 increased by close to 6 million. Far from being overwhelmingly British in origin, immigrants came increasingly from central and southern Europe. Diversity had arrived.

The national consciousness was slow to incorporate this new development. At the time, the postwar immigration program was regarded as an imperative born of postwar reconstruction and the strategic requirement of 'populate or perish'. The Department of Immigration, established in 1945 under the watch of its inaugural Minister Arthur Calwell, began planning for the most extensive period of organised migration since convict settlement. A 'scientifically calculated' absorption rate of 70 000 per year was set, aimed at providing a mobile reserve army of labour to meet the demands of an expanding national economy. The grand Snowy Mountains Scheme, designed to generate cheap hydroelectricity for Canberra and elsewhere, captured the public imagination. Here, most literally, was mass immigration as an exercise in building the nation.

Postwar leaders and their bureaucratic planners had no intention of using immigration to remake an Australian identity. For Calwell, in 1946, the preferred source of immigrants was clear: 'Australia hopes that for every foreign migrant there will be ten people from the United Kingdom.' It was only when Britons couldn't be persuaded to come in the numbers required that Australian governments turned to recruiting immigrants from the European continent. This began in 1947 with the Displaced Persons Scheme, which would bring thousands of refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states. Even then, the non-British nature of such a program wasn't intended to weaken a white Australia. But by the mid-1960s, the mix of arriving immigrants was changing: there were fewer coming from Britain and northern Europe, and an increasing number from southern Europe. Greeks, Italians, Maltese, Lebanese, Spaniards and Yugoslavs made up two-thirds of the migrants from outside the British Isles in 1964. 'The central dilemma of Australian immigration', as immigration scholar James Jupp anticipated in 1966, 'is that the nationalities least likely to assimilate or be accepted are those most likely to come and least likely to leave'.

In theory, the path for any newly arrived immigrant was clearly paved: it was one of assimilation. Immigrants were to discard their cultural baggage – their old languages, customs, attitudes – without delay. They were 'New Australians', who were expected to become indistinguishable from the rest of the Anglo-Celtic population. In practice, assimilation was far from a smooth path. In order to foster conformity to an Australian 'way of life', immigrants were discouraged from forming clubs and organisations based around their ethnicity or cultures. Many immigrants changed their surnames to sound more 'Australian'. It was common for immigrants to be scolded by passers-by for speaking a language other than English in public; children of immigrants suffered the daily embarrassment of being teased for having strange foods for lunch. The experience of assimilation was far from pleasant for many immigrants.

Racial and cultural homogeneity remained a defining principle of nationhood well into the 1960s. The dictum of 'populate or perish' didn't extend to taking in non-Europeans, particularly Asians. Politicians such as Calwell emphasised the desirability of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon racial characteristics among new arrivals. Baltic refugees with blond hair and blue eyes would be welcomed as immigrants who were racially acceptable and ready to be assimilated. Asians and blacks were still commonly regarded as not fit to become members of the Australian nation. 'Two Wongs', as Calwell famously quipped, 'do not make a White'. While the most infamous manifestation of the White Australia policy, the dictation test, was abolished in 1958, even as late as the 1960s immigration officers enjoyed the discretion to turn back applicants for admission, based on their racial appearance.

The ideal of assimilation was accepted by both sides of politics, for it had an obvious appeal. It meant that, '[w]ith one magic stroke, as it were, Australia's economic interests would be served and the resourceful, the needy and the victims of war in Europe be given the chance for a new life, while the continuity of our cultural identity would still be guaranteed'. Certainly, assimilationist ideas helped to sooth anxieties about the destabilising effects of mass immigration. It is perhaps telling that the comic autobiography They're a Weird Mob (1957), written by Nino Culotta, proved to be one of the notable literary successes of the 1950s. Later turned into a film in 1966,They're a Weird Mob told the story of its author's attempts as a newly arrived Italian immigrant to learn the ways of Australian culture.

Part of the popular appeal of the book – which by 1971 had been reprinted in 50 editions and had sold more than 500 000 copies – no doubt lay in Nino's gradual yet earnest conversion to what he would call 'the informality of the Australian way of life, and the Australian's unquenchable energy and thirst'. The story was a celebratory tale of Australian assimilation, calming people's uncertainty or misgivings about non-Anglo immigration. The moral of the story: postwar immigration was bringing to the country people not necessarily familiar with Australian ways, but most would in time assimilate. As for what immigrants would be assimilating into, it was as much an Australian character as it was an Australian way of life. Assimilation would ensure no threat to the authentically direct, egalitarian, knockabout Australian. For Nino, 'the grumbling, growling, cursing, profane, laughing, beer drinking, abusive loyal-to-his-mates Australian is one of the few free men left on this earth'. Nino had no intention of challenging that ethos. Of course, They're a Weird Mob was a work of fiction: 'Nino Culotta' was a pseudonym for Sydney writer John O'Grady.

In reality, assimilation became harder to justify as the guiding principle of immigrant settlement. The dilemma Jupp had identified grew ever more acute during the 1960s. By 1970 an economic boom in Europe meant there were fewer new immigrants from preferred source countries, particularly in northern Europe. There were clear signs that assimilation wasn't working: the rate at which immigrants were returning home climbed sharply in the early 1960s. Those immigrants who did remain were still speaking their languages, still mixing with their old compatriots. Ethnic neighbourhoods and communities were appearing in the capital cities. With the ideal of assimilation crumbling, a new official language of 'integration' emerged. But this was only transitional. Assimilation had run its course, and it would be Grassby's multicultural approach that would take its place.

The shift from assimilation to multiculturalism wasn't peculiar to Australia. Indeed, the concept of multiculturalism had its provenance in North America, where it became Canadian government policy in 1971. Offering the first definition of multiculturalism, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stated that 'cultural pluralism is the very essence of Canadian identity'. A policy of multiculturalism would seek to secure every ethnic group 'the right to preserve and develop its own culture and values within the Canadian context'. Across the border in the United States, cultural pluralism would also become more prominent (although the US has never adopted an official multiculturalism). In both countries there was in the 1970s a departure from the assimilationist model of immigrant settlement. The cultural differences of foreign arrivals would now be tolerated – even encouraged. Governments moved to root out racial discrimination and reform educational curricula, and in many cases provided public funding of ethnic associations and festivals.

All this didn't emerge out of nowhere. There was political lobbying and pressure from immigrant groups in Australia, Canada and the US. Perhaps more decisively, demands for multicultural recognition were part of a broader rights revolution. Notions of racial or ethnic hierarchy, once widely accepted by Western nations, were thoroughly discredited in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as the full extent of Nazi Germany's program of racial purification and extermination was exposed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the rapid process of decolonisation in Africa and Asia, and the civil rights struggle to eliminate racial segregation in the US would cumulatively add momentum to multiculturalism. There was a new consciousness about rights and race, ethnicity and equality. As with the different phases of the postwar 'human rights revolution', multiculturalism rejected ethnic and racial hierarchies. The only thing different was that it sought to 'apply this commitment more effectively to the actual range of exclusions, stigmatisations, and inequalities that exist in Western democracies' – as opposed to those that existed outside them.

In its original phase, a multicultural approach to immigrant settlement was a question of social justice. Could there really be equality of opportunity, Grassby asked, if the cultural identities and heritage of citizens from immigrant backgrounds is 'denied the dignity of self-expression and self-determination'? There would be grave consequences to ignoring diversity, whether that involved 'explosive pressures' or 'naked repression'. From the outset, we can see that equity and participation were as much concerns for the likes of Grassby and Whitlam – and Trudeau – as any cultural pluralism. Multiculturalism was a response to the social and economic disadvantages immigrants were experiencing, especially in work, education and health. The landmark Henderson Poverty Inquiry conducted in the early 1970s, for example, revealed that certain immigrant groups were suffering from exceptionally high rates of poverty. It was no longer good enough, as Whitlam observed in one speech, to 'assume that mere permission to settle among us is a boon of such transcendental quality that simple gratitude and silent compliance are the sole duties of those upon whom this benefit is conferred'. In all spheres of society, 'we should no longer expect migrants to settle for the second rate, particularly when so much of what passes for our best is itself second rate by the standards of the countries with which we compare ourselves'. Multiculturalism would mean nothing if it didn't ultimately strengthen the ability of citizens to become full participants in society.

The emphasis on social justice has led some scholars to suggest that the Whitlam government never embraced multiculturalism with enthusiasm. This diagnosis doesn't seem correct. There was in the early 1970s a definitive shift from assimilationist Anglo-conformity towards a multicultural society. The White Australia policy, much of whose architecture had been slowly dismantled by Liberal governments during the 1960s, was finally being put to rest. 'It is dead', Whitlam would say in 1974, echoing earlier remarks from Grassby in 1973: 'Give me a shovel and I will bury it'. The remnants of a racially discriminatory immigration program were removed. Assisted passage, once offered only to Europeans, was offered to non-Europeans as well. Among other things, no immigration official would now have the discretionary right to determine whether an arrival was sufficiently 'European' to be allowed in. They would be gatekeepers to a White Australia no longer.

There were also important welfare and legal reforms entrenching the multicultural ideal. The Australian Assistance Plan was introduced, indirectly providing a system of welfare services for immigrants. Regional Councils of Social Development, which were responsible for the Plan, would be 'the catalyst for the first significant attempt on the part of ethnic groups to com-bine, in order to represent common ethnic interests in public affairs'. Most of the Councils included a committee devoted to issues concerning immigrants – these would become the forerunners of the state ethnic communities councils that exist today as peak representative bodies.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Don't Go Back to Where You Came From by Tim Soutphommasane. Copyright © 2012 Tim Soutphommasane. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1742233368
• ISBN 13: 9781742233369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252