Trendyville. the battle for Australia's inner cities

Australia’s inner cities experienced an upheaval in the 1960s and 70s which left them changed forever. People from all walks of life who valued their suburbs – places like Balmain, Battery Point, Carlton, Indooropilly, North Adelaide or Subiaco – resisted large-scale development projects for freeways, ‘slum clearance’ and mass-produced high-rise. Unlikely alliances of post-war migrants, university students and staff, construction workers and their unions, long-term residents and city workers,challenged land-grabs and inappropriate development.When the dust settled, Australian cities were different. Many suburbs kept their village qualities. Shopping strips were revived and cultures celebrated. While areas like Fitzroy or Redcliff were derided as ‘Trendyville’, the fate many American cities suffered – a ‘hollow core’ – had been avoided. In the process, heritage conservation, party politics, and Australian assumptions about domestic life, education and lifestyle had all been transformed. This book is an in-depth examination of the causes and consequences of urban protest in a democracy. It shows how it changed the built environment as well as its participants, and resonated in many of our institutions including politics, media and multiculturalism.

Anti-environmentalism and the Australian culture war

As well as waging a culture war against Aboriginal self-determination, multiculturalism, postmodernism in education, and the non-nuclear family, the New Right in Australia has also sought to discredit the environmental movement. Using discourse analysis, this article examines this largely neglected dimension of the culture war. It is demonstrated that for over twenty years, the New Right has prosecuted a discursive struggle to undermine the claims of environmentalists in order to legitimise a set of ecologically and socially destructive corporate practices; and that this partly accounts for Australia's recent poor record on environmental issues. It is also shown that this campaign fits into a broader pattern of discursive conflict over issues of gender and ethnicity which have been deployed to disorganise and discredit opposition to radical neoliberalism. This analysis in turn reveals some ways in which anti-environmentalism might be countered.

Belonging and the uses of difference: young people in Australian urban multiculture

This paper examines how young people of migrant background in Australia make meaning of cultural, ethnic and racial difference to work out belonging in times of super-diversity. It asks what functions difference still has for a generation growing up within conditions of proliferating diversity that demand and accommodate competing constructions of cultural identities. It suggests that young people's narratives about difference depend on the space of belonging, and explores how young people use difference differently depending on whether they are articulating membership in the local community, the nation or youth culture.

Muslim citizenship in everyday Australian civic spaces

Questions about Muslims, multiculturalism and citizenship continue to shape the political discourse of many nations, including Australia, a nation often foregrounded as a beacon of multiculturalism in practice. The key assumption underlying these questions is that Islam constrains the full possibilities of citizenship in multicultural secular societies and that Muslims must be actively steered towards participation in civic life. By contrast, this article, based on research with 80 young Australian Muslims from migrant backgrounds reveals how Australian Muslims are enacting everyday citizenship through active, self-driven participation in multicultural civic spaces. This is a process overlooked by contemporary government approaches to the management of Muslim communities and alike. This article argues that is it access to these spaces of everyday interaction rather than an emphasis upon securitisation and civic literacy that fosters the development of citizenship and civic engagement central to the success of Australian multiculturalism. The article provides important considerations for those concerned with the future viability of multicultural policies.

“And yet we are still excluded”: reclaiming multicultural queer histories and engaging with contemporary multicultural queer realities

In this chapter, we contend that reclaiming multiculturalism entails engaging with and including sexual and gender diverse histories, heritages and contemporary realities. We explore the ongoing dilemmas, concerns and strategies in placing “multisexuality” and “multigender” on the “multicultural” agenda in Australia, particularly in relation to policy development and research. We discuss how “reclaiming multiculturalism” and the promotion of “global citizenship” requires a reclaiming of multicultural queer histories and heritages, achieved through decolonising research projects, postcolonising socio-political activist networks, and publications that engage with multiplicity in identities and communities, or “multiple lifeworlds”.

The consequences of intergroup ideologies and prejudice control for discrimination and harmony

In the present study, we investigated two literature bases by way of a community survey across Australia. We investigated four acculturation orientations (assimilation, multiculturalism, color-blind, and polyculturalism ideologies) and the motivations to respond without prejudice. We examined what predicted support for Harmony Day as well as explicit discrimination. Multiculturalism, polyculturalism, and internal motivation to respond without prejudice correlated with positive attitudes in both scenarios. External motivation to respond without prejudice was positively correlated with discrimination. Conversely, color-blind ideology had no effect, and assimilation ideology related positively to explicit discrimination and negatively with Harmony Day. Using a multiple regression analysis, there was a difference in emphasis in different contexts. Our findings provide antiprejudice practitioners with material for discussions which can promote positive intergroup relations.

Promoting cultural understandings through song across the Tasman: pre-service primary teacher education

As tertiary music educators across the Tasman we argue that music, particularly song, is an effective medium for teaching and learning about non-western music when preparing generalist primary Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs). Using ‘voice’ as a portable and accessible vehicle to transmit cultural understandings, we draw on the Zimbabwean proverb ‘if you can speak you can learn to sing and if you can walk you can learn to dance’ to foster music creativity and enhance literacy development and confidence in our PSTs. Using narrative methodology, we share our teaching and learning experience at Deakin University (Australia) and the University of Auckland (New Zealand) where we include African and Māori music respectively as effective ways to promote cultural understandings. In our experience, the teaching of song goes beyond teaching a tune or something that is ‘fun’. Rather, it is as an effective context for developing knowledge, skills and understandings about multiculturalism and the importance and need to be ‘inclusive of others’. PSTs gained socially, linguistically, cultural and emotionally, to name a few. We encourage other music educators at all education levels to be culturally and linguistically inclusive and to explore non-western music as a positive teaching and learning experience.

The multicultural experiment: premises, promises, and problems

This introductory chapter reflects on current debates about the challenges faced by multicultural societies in coming to grips with the interrelated societal tasks of facilitating migrant settlement, nurturing cultural diversity and pursuing inclusive citizenship. In doing so, the chapter will explore the development and deployment of the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ from a comparative and historical point of view and will proceed to discuss its key assumptions, achievements and challenges. The chapter will also touch upon the key theoretical paradigms debated in this book and will attempt to synthesise conceptually how its three sections interconnect dialectically and empirically.

Commemorating migrant camps: vernacular memories in official spaces

Bonegilla, Australia's largest post-war migrant processing and reception centre, re-emerged in the public sphere from the late 1980s. A reunion festival was staged on the grounds of the former centre in 1987. Widely attended by former residents, it was considered a success by its organisers, a grass-roots committee of former residents. Another reunion was held ten years later, this time by a committee led by local council members. Both these reunions are important moments in the formation of Bonegilla's public history and its orientation to a narrative of progress and Australian multiculturalism. Analysing them highlights wider changes in heritage discourses and management, and in the evolution of multiculturalism in Australia. Many recent studies of public commemorations in Australia have argued that vernacular or participatory commemorations can be, and almost inevitably are, overtaken and dominated by state-sanctioned narratives. In this article, I will focus on these two reunions in order to argue that despite the progressive dominance of official or institutional powers over Bonegilla's public history, participants’ voices endure within or alongside official frameworks. Despite the obvious differences between the 1987 and 1997 reunions, collective and individual recollections from ex-residents and their families creatively operate within established and seemingly official narrative frameworks. These are not restrictive, nor do they silence alternative articulations. Some ex-residents actively draw on the narrative frameworks available to them to attribute new significance to their experiences, whether melancholy or fond, and consequently include alternative stories that add further to Bonegilla's public multi-vocality.

Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums

 Karen studied the ways that objects have mediated relationships between people from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society. She focused on the ways museums, through their collection and display of particular objects, have played a role in supporting processes of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society over time.

At home/out of place: young people’s multicultural belongings

What does it mean to come of age in an era of anti-multiculturalism? How does such an environment shape the ways young people of diverse backgrounds come to feel “at home”-in the nation, in the city, in their neighbourhoods, and in their national identity? Discussing findings from a study of youth in the multicultural suburbs of five Australian cities, this chapter explores how the politics of belonging is lived through the spatial practices of everyday civic life for those who have grown up during the multiculturalism backlash of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines the contradictory picture that emerges of a new generation claiming a right to multicultural citizenship and forging productive diversity within the urban multiculture, and yet simultaneously positioned as “out of place” within civic life.

Australian multicultural policy: social cohesion through a political conception of autonomy

This article provides an account of the governance discourses informing Australia’s multicultural policy history. The article problematises the liberal ideologies informing these discourses – as essentialising the cultural identity of minority groups within exclusionary values about what constitutes the common good. Highlighting the ongoing imperative of questioning current frames for understanding and approaching multiculturalism, the article strengthens existing research that calls for alternative models that support a political conception of autonomy. The key argument is that social cohesion, unity and solidarity can be engendered through this conception where a situationally defined, rather than essentialised, view of culture enables recognition and legitimising of a proliferation of voices and versions of national identity and the common good.

Cultural, religious and political contestations: the multicultural challenge

This book examines the foundations of multiculturalism in the context of émigré societies and from a multi-dimensional perspective. The work considers the politics of multiculturalism and focuses on how the discourse of cultural rights and intercultural relations in western societies can and should be accounted for at a philosophical, as well as performative level. Theoretical perspectives on current debates about cultural diversity, religious minorities and minority rights emerge in this volume. The book draws our attention to the polarised nature of contemporary multicultural debates through a well-synthesised series of empirical case studies that are grounded in solid epistemological foundations and contributed by leading experts from around the world. Readers will discover a fresh re-examination of prominent multicultural settings such as Canada and Australia but also an emphasis on less examined case studies among multicultural societies, as with New Zealand and Italy. Authors engage critically and innovatively with the various ethical challenges and policy dilemmas surrounding the management of cultural and religious diversity in our contemporary societies. Comparative perspectives and a focus on core questions related to multiculturalism, not only at the level of practice but also from historical and philosophical perspectives, tie these chapters from different disciplines together. This work will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience, including scholars of political philosophy, sociology, religious studies and those with an interest in migration, culture and religion in contemporary societies.

Cultural reductionism and the media: polarising discourses around schools, violence and masculinity in an age of terror

This paper provides a media analysis of three interrelated sets of newspaper articles dealing with youth, schooling and violence. Understanding the media as a dominant and powerful cultural text that creates the realities it describes, the paper takes a critical view of the ‘standpoint’ of recent media representations of the Cronulla (Sydney, Australia) riots, gang violence in schools, and issues of education amid broader concerns with security in an ‘age of terror’. The paper draws attention to the polarising media discourses that demonise young Muslim men as the ‘other’—violent and dangerous—and advocate for ‘ethnic’ integration of this ‘other’ over ‘progressive education’ or ‘multiculturalism’. Such reductionist sociology is presented as highly problematic in its homogenising and inferiorising of minority cultures and in its silencing of particular issues imperative in understanding and addressing contemporary expressions of violence. The paper calls for a more nuanced interpretation of issues of culture and violence that, in particular, acknowledges how masculinity politics are implicated in current manifestations of violence.