Is Australia's identity changing? (Australia).(social assimilation and multiculturalism)

THE EFFECTS of "globalisation" have everywhere become a staple of debate about politics, economics and even national identity. The transmission of ideas, images and money has become easier and quicker than ever before; and ease of travel and transport permits, even encourages, the mass movement of people. It seems worth briefly exploring how, in such circumstances, Australian self perceptions may have shifted over time.

First, a word of apology may be in order. This essay focuses on matters of politics and some political and social ideas. Yet politics is, by its nature, a second-order activity, dancing on the surface of much deeper things. Questions of social identity are usually, and much more profoundly, to be addressed by artists, poets and musicians. The poetry of Banjo Paterson and the paintings of Arthur Streeton say more about what Australia is, and say it more profoundly, than half a dozen tomes of political science. But since I have no competence in such higher fields, I must try to write about these matters in political and historical terms.

RACE, CULTURE AND MULTICULTURALISM

THE PRELIMINARY ISSUE has to do with race, culture and the contemporary debate--much of it, unfortunately, mere babble--about multiculturalism. It is an obvious fact that race, ethnicity and culture have throughout history been basic to the self-perception of groups, states and nations, and closely related to one another. It is banal to point out that these phenomena do not lend themselves to tidy definitions and that no society of which we have record has ever been "purely" composed of a single racial, cultural or language grouping. Nevertheless, ethnicity and culture, however defined, have always and virtually everywhere played a central role in self-definition, whether among Japanese, or Han Chinese, or Matabele or Irish or Germans or even of the newly hyphenated population of the USA, where Hispanic-Americans regard themselves as distinct from African-Americans.

Ironically, the current fervour about multiculturalism, which is so strong not only in Australia but also in countries like Britain and the USA, merely underlines the point. It is logically impossible to have multiculturalism or multi-ethnicity unless you have fairly clearly identifiable cultures or ethnic groups to have a multiple of them. Nor does assimilation change the picture much. That point has been made by a wise man from Africa, the late and highly francophone president of Liberia, Leopold Senghor, who once remarked that the issue was not assimilation, rather it was who did the assimilating and who got assimilated.

AT FEDERATION

AGAINST THAT background, let us glance briefly at the position at the time of federation. By 1901, Australians had been on the road to self-government and nationhood for half a century. Federation itself was therefore enormously important as the culmination of a process of political self-assertion and self-government. It created a single and, ab initio, virtually independent state. But it had almost no impact on deeper perceptions of Australian identity. That was, as both Manning Clark and Keith Hancock have said, of "Australian Britons".