ABSTRACT
In presenting a new view of multicultural Australia, we have tried to go back to the very basics, to think anew about what multicultural Australia really is, and what it really does. The history of multicultural Australia in the twentieth century shows all these qualities in abundance. Out of the turbulent years of the 1970s, Australian multiculturalism was dramatically born as a policy, precipitated by one man, Al Grassby, whose taste in ties would be as amazing now as it was then, briefly minister in a government which didn’t last long. The strategy of stressing the ‘persistence of racism in multicultural Australia’ left Australia in urgent need of a companion work, on the ‘persistence of multiculture in a racist Australia’. Australian multiculturalism is usually described as a policy progression that conveniently begins in 1901. Australia’s multiculture includes all its diversities, majority and minority, of ethnicities, classes, genders, ages, sexualities and regions, dispersed across an often functional but sometimes dysfunctional whole.
