ABSTRACT
Feminism must stop conceiving itself as a nation, a 'natural' political destination for all women, no matter how multicultural. In the early days of the second wave, feminist theory and practice were predicated on the assumptions of women's common identity as women, and of a united global sisterhood. In acknowledgment of the need to deconstruct such universalising assumptions of white/Western feminism, feminist theorists have begun to concern themselves with the issue of representation, of 'who is permitted to speak on behalf of whom'. Australian feminism has to take into account this two-sided antagonism, in which white Australia constitutes and asserts itself by demarcating itself from the immigrant on the one hand and the indigene on the other by racialising and/or ethnicising both, naturalising its own claim to nativeness in the process. Australian women of colour, the rainbow spectrum of ethnic identities resulting from a long process of migration.
