ABSTRACT

This chapter talks about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice. Community resilience is a relatively new but increasingly popular concept that has gained significant traction in recent policy and planning agendas in Australia as elsewhere, particularly in the areas of health and emergency and disaster management and response. Yet cultural diversity and the dynamics of multi-, inter- and transcultures are frequently either overlooked or only cosmetically rendered in current constructions of 'community resilience' in Australian national disaster response models. In the national policy arena relating to disasters and resilience, this is based, in large part, on the persistence of a unified national construct of 'the Australian community', one that mobilises nationally based narratives of 'community' and of 'Australian' which both supersede and also elide the cross-cutting cultural diversities of Australia's population. Other countries have attempted to come to grips with ethnocultural diversity as a feature of community resilience with varying levels of success.