ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism as a social ideology has many variants, ranging on the one hand from a proxy for parallel ghettoisations, while on the other it has been criticised as a proxy for a hierarchy of ethnicity and class power. Each social science discipline and humanities reflection carries its own weight of point of view and historical engagement with issues of difference and cohesion. The role of violence in the circulation of power elites, the tension between forms of cultural representation, the competing political economies of empire and indigeneity, together drive the synthesis proposed: namely of political geographies and the cultural adaptation to, and purchase on, those geographies. Southern Theory interprets Australia in distinction to those studies that have come from Northern metropolitan capitals. With the rise of a new wave of ethnic political leaders within the electoral political environment, the nature of the conservative weltanschauung has become inflected with cultural diversity – but this is the diversity of specific cultural conservatisms.
