“People Have to Find Their Own Way of Making a Living”

Globalization may have reduced the significance of local marketplaces and replaced them with globalized spaces of consumption such as shopping malls, yet markets are still important spheres of exchange and interaction. This chapter considers two markets in Melbourne-Queen Victoria Market and Footscray Market-as a case study on how marketplaces retain their role as places of community interaction. There is a difference in the way nonofficial Australian languages are used in the two markets. The chapter focuses on their spatial and social location, their connection to the world 'outside', the languages used in the marketplace, and how these are framed by political and cultural discourses of multiculturalism in Australia. It draws on philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of minor and major literature, and transposes those ideas from the literary field to that of the market. Promotion of multilingualism was an important part of the politics of multiculturalism in its formative years.