"...diversity is regarded as a strength and an asset" : multiculturalism as understood, valued and lived in two regional Australian high schools

“Cultural diversity” and “multiculturalism” have become household terms in Australia and hallmarks of national identity. Not only do state and federal multicultural policies foreground diversity as a feature of contemporary Australian life, they also frame it as an unequivocal strength. However, prevailing discourses about Australia’s multicultural “character” and “success”, while having some basis in fact, also have the effect of masking the country’s continuing Anglocentrism. Whiteness – ethnic and cultural – is still dominant in political, legal, corporate and media spheres, and in many geographical areas as well. Rural and regional areas in particular have largely missed out on the everdiversifying flows of immigrants into the nation’s biggest cities in the postwar years. Historically, social relations in rural settlements have been enacted primarily within a “white/black” (Anglo/Indigenous) binary. But migration policies have brought significant demographic changes to some regional centres over the past two decades – changes that remain underrecognised and underresearched in the face of pervasive imaginaries of urban (multicultural) versus rural (mono- or bicultural) spaces. This study is located in one such centre, a mid-size town in New South Wales that since the early 2000s has become home to several hundred refugees from Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East. Using interview, observational and documentary data, the study examines how multiculturalism (as the official policy response to diversity in Australia) is understood, valued and lived in the town’s two public high schools. Schools are key sites for everyday interactions between people from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Through the force of policies, curriculum choices, pedagogical practices and so on, schools are also important sites for the production – and contestation – of social differences, identities and attitudes. Contrary to national discourses about the merits of diversity, the study found a host of anxieties in the town and its schools about the recent demographic changes, and most emphatically in relation to the refugee families from Africa. Drawing on critical theories of discourse, race and space, the thesis contends that notions of rurality steeped in colonial narratives about European settlement, productivity and racial superiority remain a powerful influence on how “difference” is perceived and experienced in regional communities. At the same time, the contemporary macro focus on celebrating difference and diversity leaves little discursive and affective space for interrogating these terms and exploring the everyday, localised challenges of living with diversity. Further, the celebratory noise can mute the more demanding ambitions of multicultural policies, such as acknowledging privilege, reducing inequality and reconciling Australia’s Indigenous and immigration histories – this last having heightened salience in rural/regional settings. The net result is that multiculturalism is not, in practice, “about all Australians and for all Australians”, but rather a policy that continues to facilitate racialised hierarchies of belonging and benefit; indeed, a policy whose “success” is largely contingent on its failure to trouble white hegemony. Most poignantly, I argue, multiculturalism’s appearance of inclusiveness and egalitarianism has helped leave many Indigenous Australians as (still) the most marginalised of all, including in the town and schools studied for this thesis