What does it mean to be un-Australian? : views of Australian Muslim students in 2006

Recent political and media debates have focused on Australian values, Australianness and being un-Australian. The current war on terror and the Cronulla riots in December 2005 have raised the question of whether Muslim Australians are willing to adopt Australian values. This paper reports on sixty in-depth face-to-face interviews with Muslim students in Sydney and Perth. The main topic of the interviews was: what it means to be ‘Australian’ and ‘un-Australian’. The study focuses on the students’ outlook. It concludes that these youthful participants hold very positive views about Australian values, but most of them were very distressed by the Cronulla riots