ABSTRACT
Nearly thirty years after the demise of the racist White Australia policy, Sydney has become a visibly multicultural city. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 4 February 1995 entitled ‘Orient Express’ tells us that Sydney has reinvented itself as Australia’s first truly Eurasian metropolis. The United Nations conference on global diversity to be hosted in Sydney, will, it is said, be an opportunity to show off multiculturalism as practised peacefully in the city. This is a far cry from the headlines of the same newspaper commenting on Australia’s first political assassination in the most multicultural area of Sydney on 5 September 1994. Here the fear, not substantiated, was that the murder had been carried out by one of the Asian gangs:
Cabramatta is the fulfilment of our migration dream and its nightmarish conclusion… An amalgam of poverty and prosperity, marked by high rise flats with laundry-draped balconies, it is a dazzling collision between Australian suburban ugliness and South East Asian big-city garishness.2
