Messages from the Inside?

: Multiculturalism in Contemporary
Australian Children’s Literature
Pearce, Sharyn.

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 27, Number 2, April 2003, pp.
235-250 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/uni.2003.0022

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/uni/summary/v027/27.2pearce.html

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 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 235

Messages from the Inside?:

Multiculturalism in Contemporary
Australian Children’s Literature
Sharyn Pearce

The Beginnings

At the start of the 1950s, a massive intake of one and a half million
European migrants was assimilated into the Australian community,
effectively and permanently eroding Australia’s Anglo-Saxon–Celtic
composition. (To gain some sense of the enormousness of the changed
demographics, it is salutary to note that at the end of the Second World
War the population of Australia was only seven and a half million, and
over ninety-five percent of Australians came from British or Irish stock
[McGregor 323]. By the late 1980s, after further waves of immigration,
only 47% of the population was British and “Old Australian,” 23% was
composed of non-English-speaking migrants and children, while 30%
was a mixture and “growing” [Hirst 228].) In the 1950s many Australians
were firmly convinced that their way of life was unique because it was
based upon the mores of a homogenous community, and they were
determined to prevent these norms from being broken down by the
admission of large numbers of unassailable elements. And so these lucky
immigrants were tolerated if they embraced the Australian way of life as
enthusiastically as the author of They’re A Weird Mob, a book of such
immense popularity that it was reprinted thirteen times in its second year
of publication, and was later made into a highly successful family film
(the novel was originally written for adults, but many children and
teenagers also read it, and it subsequently became a favorite text in the
secondary school English curriculum). The fervently nationalistic bra-
vado of these mid-century times is reflected in the words of the narrator
Nino Culotta, one-time Italian journalist and now a successful “New
Australian” (in reality an Anglo-Australian writer called John O’Grady):

The Lion and the Unicorn 27 (2003) 235–250 © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
236 Sharyn Pearce

There are too many New Australians in this country who are still living in
their homelands, who mix with people of their own nationality, and try to
retain their own language and customs. Who even try to persuade
Australians to adopt their customs and manners. Cut it out. There is no
better way of life than that of the Australian. I firmly believe this. The
grumbling, growling, cursing, profane, laughing, beer-drinking, abusive,
loyal-to-his-mates Australian is one of the few free men left on this earth.
He fears no one, crawls to no one, bludges to no one, and acknowledges
no master. Learn his way. Learn his language. Get yourself accepted as
one of him; and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed.
And once you have entered it, you will never leave it. (204)

The novel concludes with Nino’s recognition that Australia is really

God’s Own Country, and that God himself is the biggest “Ocker” (that is,
stereotyped beer-bellied Australian male, usually in blue singlet, shorts
and rubber sandals) of them all:
There are hundreds of ways we could spend this sunny Sunday afternoon.
Or we could just stay at home and do nothing, and perhaps that would be
best of all. To rest on the seventh day. To thank God for letting us be here.
To thank Him for letting me be an Australian. Sometimes I think that if I
am ever fortunate enough to reach Heaven, I will know I am there when
I hear Him say “Howyergoin’mate, orright?” (204)

Now, at the beginning of the third millennium, this evangelizing

assimilationist (and masculinist!) zealotry would thankfully seem to be
no more: relegated, together with the paternalistic and patronizing
attitudes so popular half a century ago, to the realms of the quaint past.
Australia is now one of the most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse
countries in the world, and for nearly three decades multiculturalism has
been its officially dominant discourse. Multiculturalism is part of the
everyday currency of Australian life, where tolerance of cultural differ-
ences and respect and understanding in crosscultural contacts are pro-
moted as ideal civic virtues, and migrants and their children are ideally
integrated into an effectively harmonious society without alienating them
by unreal assimilationist expectations. Because for the most part Old
World disputes have not been seen to be transferred to the New Land, and
a large number of differing cultures have been accommodated without
overt conflict and because, also, of the immense economic advantages
which have ensued, immigration and the subsequent adoption of
multiculturalism as public policy have been hailed by many commenta-
tors as Australia’s greatest post-World War Two policies and achieve-
ments (Patience 34).1
It is usually argued that multiculturalism was eventually welcomed
and celebrated largely because it appealed to traditional Australian
values such as easygoing tolerance, and egalitarian informality; in short,
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 237

the tendency of the locals to defend everyone’s right to have “a fair go”
(Hirst 228). Recent developments, have, however, tended to dim the
picture of a people triumphing over their tribulations and prejudices to
embrace diversity and tolerance with an egalitarian generosity, and to
confirm instead the pessimistic view that the never entirely dormant
nostalgic hankering for a pre-1950s monocultural, assimilationist lifestyle
has of late been gaining crucial momentum. The view from what social
commentator Hugh Mackay calls the “rose-colored rear-window” (qtd.
in Dale 316) currently seems attractive to a significant number of
Australians who apparently have reached saturation point with the
narratives of difference, and yearn instead to return to Nino’s Australia to
a world which reflects the cultural homogeneity of the past rather than
the enriched cultural diversity and hybridity of the present. Yet the
impatience with multiculturalism appears to have specific, highly visible
and highly “different” targets within its sights: Central European mi-
grants are accepted, mostly without question, but Asian and Middle
Eastern ones often face a different reception, for reasons which are
deeply embedded in the national psyche. Rich, empty Australia, tantaliz-
ingly close to some of the most populous nations in the world, has, over
the last century or so, seen adroit political manipulation of the old
anxieties and fears about being overrun by nonwhites, but few have been
more recent or more breathtakingly cynical than in the 2001 Federal
Election, when the ruling Conservative Coalition parties, which had
previously been languishing in the polls, retained power via a campaign
which presented them as the stout defenders of Australia against a deluge
of invading Asian hordes—in this case, desperate Afghan asylum-
seekers, fleeing to Australia in scrappy, makeshift boats, who were
successfully demonized as threats to the nation’s wellbeing. Moreover,
since the attacks upon the World Trade Center in New York on September
11, 2001 and the repercussions which have reverberated about the globe,
intakes of non-Europeans, nonwhites and non-Christians have tested
community tolerance, and multiculturalism is on uneasy ground, with a
raft of right-wing commentators calling for an end to that bedrock
achievement of the last forty years, the racially and religiously nondis-
criminatory immigration program (Sheridan 11). It could be argued, as
the country bunkers down once more into Fortress Australia mode, that
some migrants are now more equal than others.2
Nonetheless, despite the swirling tides of White Australia revisionism
fuelled by vociferous media commentators and paranoid “shock jocks,”
multiculturalism still retains, for the moment at least, the status of a
desirable social value to be inculcated in child readers. It is, in fact, a
238 Sharyn Pearce

judicious exercise to examine the progress of multiculturalism in books

for children and young adults, for while it may be seen that literature
rarely initiates trends, it certainly responds to societal changes, and
books can legitimately be viewed as crucial agents of socialization of the
young into appropriate channels of behavior and deportment, or as
valuable conduits of altered or enlightened governmental policies. Over
ten years ago, in a germinal article entitled “Advocating Multiculturalism:
Migrants in Australian Children’s Literature after 1972,” John Stephens
demonstrated that as the complexion of Australian society was changing,
the inclusion of themes of migration, identity and cultural differences
into literature for children became more relevant and necessary. Just as
Australia’s political and educational institutions adopted multiculturalism,
he argues, so did Australian children’s literature. Yet Stephens also
contends that while the texts of the 1970s and 1980s reveal an increasing
acceptance of “difference” and heterogeneity, they were still, in the main,
written by Anglo-Celtic authors, few of whom were actually of the
classes, races or even demographic areas represented in their stories.
Stephens also wryly observes that the focalizers in these “multicultural”
narratives are overwhelmingly members of the majority culture, that “the
privilege of narrative subjectivity is rarely bestowed upon minority
groups” (181), and that the usual plotline is that of a person from
mainstream society being influenced, in some positive way, by the exotic
Other. Moreover, he notes that novels tend “to rewrite social and cultural
history for the purpose of shaping the present” (181):
The books certainly recognize that racism has been deeply ingrained in
Australian culture, but construct situations in which it is invariably
physically or morally defeated. In addition, the books characteristically
generate motifs or significant objects or incidents that function as symbols
or metaphors for the ideology of multiculturalism, usually standing for
some way in which the coexistence of cultural difference offers mutual
enrichment. (181)

In summary, he concludes that despite the fact that there is a significant

corollary between the development of a personal identity and that of a
national (that is, multicultural) identity, multiculturalism in texts of the
1970s and 1980s is rarely treated in a radical way, but is invariably
presented in a superficial or cosmetic fashion.3
Revisiting this topic some five years further on, Stephens once again
notes a continuation of this tendency for more recent texts to disclose
inherent multicultural tendencies in earlier Australian history, particu-
larly in periods prior to the era of mass-migration. He also detects a
significant shift in the treatment of positionality: now the experiences of
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 239

members of minority communities are more frequently depicted from an

insider perspective, with a significant number of texts being narrated, or
focalized, by a member of a cultural minority (“(re)-connecting” 3–4).
Yet, as Stephens is also aware, while first-person narration by a member
of a minority community is indeed a very powerful method of expressing
subjectivity, this achievement is nonetheless a limited one when in many
instances the representation of people from other cultures continues to be
mediated by British-Australian authors. Benign or commendable though
their intentions might be, mainstream dominant-majority writers can still
legitimately be accused of appropriating other cultures and silencing or
erasing them by speaking in their place. By imposing their own
interpretations, mainstream authors can have the effect of being oppres-
sive, and of reinscribing the marginalization of minorities through
overwriting according to their own forms and norms. Bearing this in
mind, what I propose to do in this paper is firstly to examine two texts
which illustrate that even today Stephens’s findings remain apposite;
then, in the final part of this paper, I propose to add a third stage to
Stephens’s closely-argued multicultural progression. In particular I will
disagree with another critic in this field who contends that:
we are still a long way from a realistic portrayal in children’s literature of
Australian multicultural society. . . Most writers are Anglo-Australian and
their books make only small tokenistic gestures towards multiculturalism.
You have to wait for the authentic voice to come from the cultures
themselves. (Starke 24)

A Tale of Two Histories

Whether for children or for adults, Australian writing has traditionally

been predicated upon the perpetual themes of displacement and disloca-
tion, the reconciliation of personal and national identity, and the estab-
lishment of a sense of belonging. It comes as no surprise, then, that the
end of the second millennium (a thoughtful time, one could say) has
witnessed, in Australia, the publication of a welter of historical texts for
children and young people, which focus particularly upon these themes.
To celebrate the 2001 Centenary of Federation,4 Scholastic Press pro-
duced a new series of historical fictions presumably designed primarily
for school classrooms. This series explores seminal periods of history
through the observant jottings of young female authors, and one of these
texts, Nadia Wheatley’s A Banner Bold (2000), is an exemplary instance
of the anachronistic approach described by Stephens in his two analyses.
Set in the turbulent and colorful times of mid-nineteenth-century Austra-
240 Sharyn Pearce

lia, this piece of engagingly blatant proselytizing endeavors to demon-

strate that Australia has always been a multicultural society. The novel is
based upon actual historical events; during the days of the Gold Rushes
in the colony of Victoria, miners had to pay a monthly license fee of
thirty shillings for the right to dig for their fortunes. This fee was
enormously resented, particularly because it was so rigorously enforced
by the police and governmental authorities. In December 1854 men from
a range of countries including Ireland, America, Canada, France, Italy,
Germany and England refused to pay the miners’ fees, and in an act of
rebellion against the repressive colonial government flew their own flag,
the Southern Cross (so-called after a constellation of stars seen only in
the Southern hemisphere) above the Eureka gold diggings. Although this
revolt was quickly suppressed, it has subsequently garnered hugely
symbolic significance in Australian history, as an iconic moment linked
in the minds of many with the beginnings of republicanism, with
egalitarianism, and with the rejection of Empire.
The hero of Wheatley’s tale is Rosa Aarons, a secular German Jew,
who writes a journal for her friend Jenny Marx (daughter of the more
famous Karl, who had some connection with the events depicted in the
novel in that in 1855 he actually wrote an account of this riot for a
German newspaper called the Neu Oder-Zeitung). Freedom-loving Rosa
is already multicultural or at least a citizen of the world as she is of
German birth, yet speaks English fluently, together with a number of
other European languages, including Yiddish. Moreover Rosa is, like her
father, a committed republican and a staunch anti-imperialist. When the
new governor of the colony of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, arrives from
England, Rosa disapproves of the “Royalist circus” that accompanies
him, echoing her father’s question, “When will these people demand the
right to elect their own rulers?” (22). Like her parents, she abstains from
singing “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia,” and while at
school, much to her teacher’s chagrin, she sews “All Power Proceeds
from the People,” rather than the usual Biblical or patriotic text, onto her
needlework sampler. Rosa quickly makes friends with children from a
range of nationalities, and together they form a theatrical group which
originally intends to perform a play written by Rosa, about Judith, the
Jewish heroine who rescues her people from tyranny. Following the
incendiary political events, however, they perform the story of the valiant
Eureka uprising instead. Moreover, the children are not merely witnesses
to “History in the making” (122), and they do have a real part to play:
Rosa suggests the Southern Cross design for the rebels’ flag, while she
and her friends are also responsible for helping the leader of the uprising,
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 241

Peter Lalor (later to become a respected member of the Victorian

Parliament), to escape from the soldiers.
In some ways A Banner Bold is situated neatly within the social and
cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Australia. Wheatley adroitly pre-
sents the radical-nationalist nineteenth-century longing for the country to
be the earthly equivalent of the Promised Land, a utopian world freed
from the deformation of class exploitation, a haven from the Old World
hatreds, tensions and prejudices, a “working man’s paradise”5 where all
men can prosper in egalitarian harmony. She harnesses the Legend of
Eureka to the distinctively Australian ethos of mateship, born in that
same century of the need for a cultural hero in a newly evolving society,
and developed and extended by first-generation Australian authors and
critics anxious to stress a new national identity. Yet in an Historical Note
at the end of the novel, Wheatley deliberately creates a multicultural
Australian history, linking migration from its beginnings with the
indigenous Kulin people settling in what was later to be called the
Ballarat Goldfields, to the miners with their polyglot backgrounds. This
“melting pot” version of the past, complete with its romanticized,
eulogized and totally partisan account of Eureka’s place in the national
identity, appears to be designed to prove attractive to a modern-day
generation, particularly one currently weaned upon contemporary de-
bates about Australia’s future in terms of the hotly-argued republicanism
versus monarchist debates of the 1990s.6
In some important respects, then, Wheatley’s story amounts to a
revisionist chronicling and whitewashing of the past. Against much
evidence to the contrary, for example, she paints a picture of nineteenth-
century Australian life where the much-vaunted egalitarianism and
mateship includes all races, even Dr. Wong, whose Chinese medicine
cures Rosa’s critically ill baby brother. Wheatley ignores the overriding
concern for racial purity at this time, the prevalence of the notion of
“race-suicide” (that is, that the Anglo-Saxon race was being outbred by
Asian races), the fears of and the consequent paranoia about miscegena-
tion, or, as one contemporary put it, the “unnatural mongrelizing” of
races (Gilmore 9), which would inevitably lead to Australia’s decay.
There is no indication at all that this was a time in which the stereotyped
apparition of the rapacious Asian (seen perhaps most clearly in the
cartoon depiction of the coolie-hatted Mongolian Octopus, its tentacles
reaching out to ensnare all that defenseless, innocent White Australia
held dear), was regularly invoked in the magazines of the day. The
goldfields witnessed ugly outbreaks of racial violence, notably the
Buckland River and Lambing Flats riots in 1857 and 1861, where the
242 Sharyn Pearce

Chinese, the largest non-European group in Australia, and distinctive in

their appearance, language, religion and customs, encountered great
hostility. They were condemned as a social and economic threat (as
sweat workers and debauchers of white women) and had to pay special
entry taxes that applied solely to them. The recent Australian unease
about nonwhite boat people has its historical roots, after all, but
Wheatley chooses to erase this unpalatable fact in her desire to inculcate
the “right” values in her young audience.
Garry Disher’s The Divine Wind (1998) is another fascinating text, if
for different reasons. Like A Banner Bold, this less polemical novel
adheres to Stephens’s schema by advocating an ideology pertinent to
contemporary Australia but generally anachronistic for the earlier histori-
cal periods. Yet instead of glossing over Australia’s awkward racist
history, The Divine Wind confronts it more or less directly. Disher’s
novel is set in the pearling town of Broome, in the northwest of Western
Australia, against the backdrop of the Second World War, and, in keeping
with another of Stephens’s observations (namely that multiculturalism is
often advocated through harnessing the forms of a popular genre [16]), it
is primarily a love story about an interracial relationship between Hart
Penrose, the white son of a pearling boat captain, and Mitsy Sennosuke,
the daughter of a Japanese diver employed by Hart’s father. In 1941
Broome was a unique and exotic racial mix, as a result of the generations
of Japanese, Aboriginal, Malay, Chinese and Indonesian workers who
flocked to the hot, balmy tropical town to work for the pearling masters
(interestingly, it is now a major tourist destination, where foreigners and
other Australians alike come to marvel at its robust fusion of races and
ethnic identities, as well as its beautiful beaches and idyllic scenery).
Disher writes about a unique pre-1950s experience of different cul-
tures, yet he does not offer an idealized picture of a community in
harmony. He successfully recreates the character of Broome, with its
steamy heat, long white beaches and swampy mudflats, and its bunga-
lows on stilts, their broad verandahs choked by shady creepers. He shows
that while the children have acclimatized and are “naturally” multicultural,
the adults are hampered by outmoded and Old World notions of racial
superiority (this generational device also appears in A Banner Bold,
where Rosa adapts happily to her adventurous new life, never feeling
displaced or dispossessed, while her mother is much more cautious and
apprehensive). Hart’s mother, with her English gentility and class-ridden
pretensions, is particularly out of place: “unlike the rest of us she did not
have red dirt, mangoes or pearls in her blood” (2), and “we were too
careless, too casual, too democratic for her tastes” (3). Dabbing at the
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 243

perspiration on her brow with a delicately-scented lace handkerchief,

Mrs. Penrose walks the town, parasol in hand, covering miles in her
attempt to escape (when she does manage to return to England midway
through the novel, she is shortly afterwards killed in an air-raid, proving
that you can never, ever go back home again). As part of his rite of
passage, young Hart rejects not only those colonial snobberies and
prejudices associated with an isolated colonial wife living in the tropics,
but also the overtly racist attitudes endemic among the powerful men of
the region, including their preoccupation with eugenics, with creating a
“Little England,” breeding a “superior Australian type” of “good English
stock—not your continental rubbish” (27). Hart (and the nomenclature is
scarcely accidental) rebels against the men’s prejudices and appalling
treatment of nonwhite workers, yet his liberal attitudes are sorely tested
after Japan becomes Australia’s wartime enemy and his sister Alice, now
a nurse, goes missing after Japanese planes bomb her hospital ship. In the
face of mounting war losses and enemy attacks upon undefended
Broome Harbour, Japanese like Mitsy begin to assume a kind of “shape-
shifting” (125), and even Hart starts to believe the propaganda about the
Japanese, who are demonized every evening in Department of Informa-
tion broadcasts which sound astonishing to a modern-day ear:
The Japanese violate our deepest and most fundamental instincts. The
principle of White Australia shall never be overturned by armed aggres-
sion. An enemy setting foot on Australian soil will find himself up against
a manhood of unparalleled strength and determination. Australia shall
remain forever the home of a people whose descendants came here, to
southern waters, in peace and established an outpost of the British race . . .
Japan is not interested in peaceful co-existence with Australia. We are too
valuable to them for that. In fact they hate us, vilely and savagely. But we
do not hate. We find the Japanese too loathsome for hatred, and shall not
rest until they have been cleared from the earth. (123–24)7

Given that most multicultural novels to date have dealt with far less
controversial European-Australian tensions, The Divine Wind is unusual
in focusing upon Australian and Asian relations, and it is actually rather
brave. This novel seems to be mirroring mid-1990s Australia, before the
current conservative backlash, when there was an increased political and
economic recognition of Australia’s place as part of Asia, and an
increasing presence of immigrants and refugees from Asian countries.
Yet there is also at times a discernible tentativeness about Disher’s novel,
and it is highly debatable whether Disher shows enough understanding of
Asian cultural differences. Part of the problem is that the love affair is
seen entirely from a white Australian male perspective, and because of
244 Sharyn Pearce

this limited focalization strategy, readers never really get an understand-

ing of Mitsy, or her dilemma of being caught between two worlds. Mitsy
is the classic “narrative object” to whom Hart, as a representative of the
dominant group, extends understanding, and “the privilege of narrative
subjectivity” (Stephens, “Advocating Multiculturalism” 181) never ap-
plies to her. It is significant too, that in keeping with the unfinished
colonial moment, the novel does not end with a conventional closure. In
postwar Australia Hart and Mitsy are about to meet again, after Mitsy has
been released from internment as an “enemy alien,” but future happiness
is by no means certain. The last two sentences of the novel make for
rather glum reading: “It won’t be easy. We may not make it” (151).

Moving On

While both these previous texts disseminate multiculturalism by disclos-

ing inherent multicultural tendencies in earlier Australian history, or by
attempting to delineate personal histories via transformations from an
intercultural subjectivity to a multicultural subjectivity, one final novel
deserves attention because it, far more than the previous two, demon-
strates that third stage of the multicultural progression that I indicated
earlier. At this present moment, as well as Stephens’s earlier stages (for I
would argue very strongly that these progressions are more shardlike
than seamless) some texts are being produced in which “authentic”
ethnic voices are created by authors who themselves come from minority
ethnic backgrounds (although in writing this I am also mindful of Wendy
Morgan’s warning that to authorize a story as authentic by pointing to the
(ethnic) identity or knowledge of the author behind it is to forget that the
meanings of a text are not so definitively determined, and that it is
readers who realize a particular meaning [272]). Most importantly,
instead of offering generic models of newcomers adapting to a new
society and culture or unique diasporic cultures surviving in an ersatz
Australian culture, novels such as this one reveal that what is Australian
is not the cultural purity, but the mix.
These new novels are not “ethnic” texts, but texts about a social world
(school, home life, friends and leisure pursuits) that would be recognized
by many, if not most, Australian readers. While they feature minority
groups in subject positions, multiple focalizations, and are told from an
insider perspective, above all else they are important because they
actually take their multicultural social contexts for granted as they get on
with their plots (they are, in this respect, similar to a number of
Australian films of the 1990s, like The Heartbreak Kid, in which ethnic
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 245

identity is implicit rather than explicit). The characters’ cultural heritage

is incidental rather than pivotal, one of a number of factors influencing
their subjectivity. After all, as French-Australian writer Sophie Masson
comments:
People aren’t only “nesbies” (Non English Speaking Backgrounds) or
“ethnics” or whatever: they are themselves, with their own circumstances.
My non-English speaking background and experience has been an impor-
tant catalyst in my life: but so has my interest in religion and mythology,
my love of music, my dislike of smugness and complacency. (14–15)

Matt Zurbo’s Idiot Pride is representative of this trend. It never refers

in any explicit or jarring way to the cultural backgrounds of the
characters, and it is devoid of cultural cliches or emphases upon its
characters’ exotic or alien lifestyles and behaviors. Instead, it incorpo-
rates ethnicity in a low-key manner, as a “normal” part of social life, and
presents none of that hackneyed and hoarily problematic interface
between ethnic identity and mainstream Australian life. There is a total
absence of those often-tokenistic cultural stereotypes where
multiculturalism is largely presented as a spectacular form of ethnicization
involving costumes, customs and cooking (the so-called “pasta and
polka” approach to migrant culture [Jupp 330]). Zurbo’s characters are
not alien to Australian society but feel very much a part of it. Idiot Pride
(shortlisted for the Children’s Book of the Year for Older Readers in
1997) deals with the lives of second-generation migrant families of
Hungarian, Italian, Greek and Russian extraction, and in particular a
group of seventeen-year-old boys (Gianpi, Johnny, Carlo, Serge and
Matt) living in grimy inner-city Melbourne. With its tales of “grubby
little working-class kids” (14), “scruffy mongrels in the inner-city
Commission flats” (70), “depressing, rundown, four-smelly-old shops
shopping centers” (57), broken homes, little money, and mothers on
welfare, this novel foregrounds issues of class (and hegemonic masculin-
ity) rather than ethnicity. Very much a text of its time, Idiot Pride speaks
on behalf of disillusioned and disempowered youth and emphasizes life
dominated by boredom and aimlessness, reflecting the “grunge” fad of
the mid-to-late 1990s: “we’re doing nothing, going nowhere” (64) and
“the day’s going nowhere” (111) as well.
Idiot Pride is a novel about streetwise young men searching for their
identity, about how they hate school and are bored by its sheer irrel-
evance to their lives: “We sit around each lesson, scratching our balls and
fannies, going insane, as a wog who has trouble with Aussie tries to read
some dumb-arse language that died hundreds of years ago” (123). The
novel is primarily concerned with boys’ relationships with their peers,
246 Sharyn Pearce

their casual experimentation with sex and anxieties about sexual perfor-
mance, especially for first-timers (it is especially good in indicating that
the “I-fuck-therefore-I-am” mentality of many testosterone-fuelled teen-
age boys, of whatever ethnic background, is not all-inclusive). Idiot
Pride is about camaraderie, dreams, and regrets, its rather retrospective
air reminiscent of actor Carrie Fisher’s remark that “the very best thing
about going off the rails as an adolescent is that you get over it while
you’re young, then you talk about it for the rest of your life” (qtd. in
Harlen 11).
In Zurbo’s novel the characters are not contrived to serve ethnic
stereotypes, and the lack of any patronizing generalizations leaves the
characters free to use terms such as “wog” (Australian slang for a non-
Anglo migrant) without offense or self-consciousness. Instead of being
there as devices to show foreignness or isolation, the characters reveal
the multifaceted reality, the multiethnic composition of contemporary
Australian inner-city communities. In the words of one reader, this novel
illustrates the point that:
you cannot single out one group as other or outsider, our identity as
Australians is defined by the fact that we are all other. We cannot all claim
to be white Anglo-Saxons, with similar spiritual and social beliefs. It is
our acceptance of the differences in our midst, our ability to maintain a
separate cultural identity whilst still functioning in a diverse society that
make us typically Australian. (Pase 9)

In recent novels like the one discussed above, I would argue very
strongly that the intertextuality of gender, ethnic and familial themes
resonates with readers even if they do not share those same gendered,
ethnic or family experiences. This particular point is reinforced in Pieter
Aquilia’s analysis of Head On, a recent Australian youth movie that deals
with a gay Greek-Australian boy living in Melbourne:
in working across the usual line between an “ethnic” “minority” topic and
the Anglo “mainstream” it begins to redefine what Australian national
cinema and Australian national culture are, inscribing the Greek-Austra-
lian identity as equally central to any experience and not marginal or
different. (108)

The crucial difference between these kinds of texts and those represent-
ing the earlier stages is that in texts like these, ethnicity is not a marker
of cultural difference, but an accepted part of Australian life. Instead of
crossing the boundaries between “us” and “them,” Hungarian-Australian
or Italian-Australian experiences are fully commensurate with Anglo-
Australian ones. In texts like this, where second- and third-generation
non–Anglo-Australian writers are finding their places in shaping a
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 247

national identity, we seem to have reached a point where non–Anglo-

Australians are no longer seen as in any way undesirable or suspect,
marginalized or displaced, but reveal that creolization rather than
ghettoization or assimilation is nowadays the norm. Ethnic otherness,
once implicitly depicted as “deviating from a norm and therefore
inevitably subordinate” (Stephens, “Multiculturalism” 4), has been do-
mesticated at last. Given that these multicultural texts are sites where the
meanings of a plurality of cultures are being contested, reworked and
renegotiated, one would hope that a further progression would include
Asian-Australian families in this same naturalistic, all-inclusive way.

Final Forebodings

It remains to be seen whether the events toward the end of 2001 in

Australia and elsewhere will produce a triumphant counterdiscourse of
assimilation and/or exclusion, and whether the tolerant pluralism of the
multicultural society, so comparatively recently and arduously asserted,
is exposed as fragile and illusory. In the future, Australians might
continue to accept and embrace diversity, or we might hearken back to
the hegemony of the old Anglo-Celtic order, those old stereotypes of
national identity, the insularity and xenophobia and closemindedness of a
bygone era, where migrants were tolerated as long as they merged into
society as soon as was decently proper, and where appropriately grateful,
well-educated English-speakers were cordially received, but the attitudes
towards immigrants not fitting these rigid criteria were grudging and
uncharitable. A children’s literature reflecting a society intent upon
renovating the fading picture of a homogenous Australia, one peopled by
junior Crocodile Dundees saying, like Nino’s God, “Howyergoin’mate,
orright?,” really would be a step backwards.

Sharyn Pearce is a senior lecturer in creative writing and cultural

studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She has written
extensively in the fields of children’s and adolescent literature as well as
Australian studies. Her most recent publication is Youth Culture: Texts,
Images and Identities (Greenwood, 2003), coedited with Kerry Mallan.

Notes
1
Definitions of multiculturalism are slippery, and have in fact changed in
recent years: while the term is used to imply non–Anglo-Celtic, representing
people whose first language is not English, this is no longer necessarily the case:
248 Sharyn Pearce

as Jon Stratton argues, many British migrants, eager to retain an entitlement that
was once naturally theirs, now assert that as their society and culture is not the
same as Australian society and culture, they should be treated like other migrant
groups to the country. “British self-ethnicization . . . is an attempt to gain a new
status, this time one which places British-Australians on an equivalence with
other ethnic groups in Australia, arguing for the same rights and treatment
accorded non-English speaking migrants by asserting their own ethnic back-
grounds” (23–24).

2
The movement to return to the core values of the formerly ascendant Anglo-
Celtic cultural and political past gathered great momentum from the mid-1990s
onwards. In her maiden speech in the Federal Parliament, Pauline Hanson,
leader of the ultraconservative, anti-Asian immigration One Nation Party,
declared: “a truly multicultural [country] can never be strong or united. . . . We
do not want little ethnic islands. We want migrants who can integrate, not
congregate, or the country will start falling apart because of violence, gang
warfare and ethnic separatism” (10 Sep. 1996). One in four Queenslanders voted
for Hanson’s party in the State elections in 1998, and it may be argued that the
2001 Federal election was won because the Conservative parties successfully
hijacked One Nation’s policies.

3
The distinction Stephens is making coincides with that later made in the
American context by Stanley Fish, when he distinguishes between “boutique
multiculturalism” and “strong multiculturalism.” Fish argues that, “Boutique
multiculturalism is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the
objects of its affection” (378), whereas “strong multiculturalism . . . accord[s] a
deep respect to all cultures at their core” (382).

4
Amid much celebration, Australia relinquished its colonial status in 1901 in
order to become a fully-fledged member of the British Commonwealth of
Nations.

5
This is the title of an enormously popular book published in 1892 by the
utopian socialist and editor of the Worker, William Lane.

6
In the years preceding the Centenary of Federation in 2001, the Australian
public was subjected to much (often acrimonious) debate concerning the
nation’s political future, particularly whether it should become a republic or
remain a constitutional monarchy with the English Queen as its Head of State.
Although republicans were in the slight majority, a referendum in 1998 voted to
maintain the existing arrangement, largely because the pro-republican organiza-
tions squabbled over the methods of electing the nation’s first president (who
would, if their campaign proved successful, replace the English monarch as the
leader of the people).
 Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature 249

7
Given these kinds of racist attitudes, it is not surprising that when Arthur
Caldwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, famously quipped “Two
Wongs don’t make a White” (in defense of his decision to deport Chinese
refugees in 1947), his remark was greeted with general good humor and
approbation.

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