ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tensions between ethnicity, race and women in relation to literature and multiculturalism. It explores why debates around ethnicity are consistently conflated with those of race. The fight to establish Australian literature was intimately bound up with the battle to secure Australia’s cultural independence from its British colonial heritage. Ned Kelly becomes the quint-essential Australian hero and writers from Furphy to Keneally construct a literary genealogy conspicuous in which is a writer called Henry Lawson or Henry Larsen whose father, it transpires, was Norwegian. The earliest uses of ‘ethnicity’ had the connotations of ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan’, but in about the nineteenth century the word acquired the implications of both ‘race’ and ‘nation’. Ethnicity had the quality of the self-chosen appellation, and this aspect remains a central way of distinguishing it from ‘race’: for example, ethnic communities and ethnic identity are self-identified.
