At the coal-face : experiencing multiculturalism in Australia

Multiculturalism as a contemporary policy framework and practice has been the subject of sustained criticism and debate. Our research on the resettlement experiences of newly arrived migrants and refugees shows how Australian multiculturalism has become a limited symbolic cultural space where ‘ethnic Others’ are permitted to display their minority ethnicity to the white ethnic majority group. We argue that the official and public meanings of multiculturalism today remain constrained by its past, specifically the historical legacy of White Australia and the contested but still entrenched remnants of the term ‘assimilation’. As a result, new arrivals and existing cultural ‘Others’ are expected to gradually ‘blend in’ - a euphemism that in effect, veils a form of cultural assimilation. Such a process occurs at the expense of acknowledging the everyday realities of cultural diversity, and the possibilities for a more proactive, reciprocal and ongoing cultural, political and social exchange within and between all diverse communities of Australia. Based on our recent research findings we argue that a more transformational form of multiculturalism has emerged that we term as (re)multiculturalisation. The notion of (re) multiculturalising points to a multi-layered process and seeks to encapsulate some of the ways in which multiculturalism operates within Australia today across a variety of public and private settings