Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia [1st ed.] 9783030500788, 9783030500795

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction: Logics of Exclusion (Jon Stratton)....Pages 1-40
Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene of the 1980s: Coauthored with Panizza Allmark (Edith Cowan University) (Jon Stratton)....Pages 41-71
With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness, Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience (Jon Stratton)....Pages 73-118
The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes: Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires (Jon Stratton)....Pages 119-143
Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in ‘My Island Home’ (Jon Stratton)....Pages 145-168
The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of Whiteness in Australia (Jon Stratton)....Pages 169-202
Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come the Habibs! Race, Identity and Representation (Jon Stratton)....Pages 203-229
Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass and Its Representation (Jon Stratton)....Pages 231-259
Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened … (Jon Stratton)....Pages 261-274
Back Matter ....Pages 275-315

Citation preview

Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia Jon Stratton

Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia

Jon Stratton

Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia

Jon Stratton UniSA Creative University of South Australia Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-50078-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50079-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

These days I am attached as an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia. I should like to thank Professor Susan Luckman for facilitating my presence there. Susan has been a thoughtful colleague helping out where possible with funding and generally making my life as an adjunct far more pleasant than is usual. My associates in Creative People, Products and Places, of which Professor Luckman is the Director, have been unfailingly supportive and friendly. A big shout out especially to Kasia/Katrina Jaworski. I should also like to thank Dr. Jessica Taylor who has functioned as my research assistant on this project. Her work has been excellent and I thank her particularly for her rapid turnarounds when I know that she has been overwhelmed with other demands on her time. Panizza Allmark, Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, has been both friend and partner through the life of this project. I thank her for her support and love, easing my anxieties and being an emotional refuge in times of need. I hope that I have reciprocated in at least some small way. I thank Panizza also for her intellectual input to this project. She is the coauthor of Chapter 2. Some of the material in this book has appeared in different, and earlier, forms in other places. Parts of Chapter 3 have been reworked from ‘With God on Our Side: Christianity, Whiteness, Islam and Otherness in the Australian Experience’ in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2016, pp. 613–626 and ‘Whiteness, Morality, and v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Christianity in Australia’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 17–43. Chapter 5 is reproduced from ‘Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in “My Island Home”’ in Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal for Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013, pp. 33–53. Much of Chapter 6 was first published in ‘The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of Whiteness in Australia’ in Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 22–41.

Contents

1

1

Introduction: Logics of Exclusion

2

Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene of the 1980s: Coauthored with Panizza Allmark (Edith Cowan University)

41

With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness, Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience

73

3

4

5

6

7

The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes: Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires

119

Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in ‘My Island Home’

145

The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of Whiteness in Australia

169

Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come the Habibs! Race, Identity and Representation

203

vii

viii

8

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CONTENTS

Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass and Its Representation

231

Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened …

261

References

275

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Logics of Exclusion

The guiding theme of this book is the importance of exclusion in the modern state. To be more specific the assumption which underlies the book is that while exclusion played a foundational role in the formation of the modern state marking borders both internal and external to the state, in the state reconstructed on neoliberal economic terms exclusion has become pervasive. It exists not only at the border and demarcating those acceptable within the state from those, the mad, the bad and the shiftless, whom the state confined but there is now a circumstance where to a lesser or greater extent anybody, but especially members of certain marginalised groups, may find themselves excluded. The focus of this book is Australia. In their discussion on the long-lasting impact of Enlightenment values on Australian society, Baden Offord and his colleagues (2014, p. 2) remark that one of the consequences of the country’s settler origins is that ‘cultural priorities that persist rest on a deep fear of the other within (the indigenous) and the other without (generic Asia, the migrant, asylum seeker)’. Here we have a way of understanding why exclusion has been such a prevalent aspect of Australia’s social history even before its reinforcement by neoliberalism. This book picks over the rubble left by official multiculturalism. As we shall see, multiculturalism in Australia functioned quite differently to the multiculturalism that is enshrined in Canadian law through an act of parliament. We can add that in both cases what has been described as

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_1

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multiculturalism is different again from what has passed for multiculturalism in Europe. Here is Alana Lentin and Gavin Tilley (2011, p. 13) writing about the turn against multiculturalism there: multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The narrative goes something like this. The ‘multicultural fantasy in Europe’ (David Rieff ‘The dream of multiculturalism is over’ New York Times 2005) valorised difference over commonality, cultural particularity over social cohesion, and an apologetic relativism at the expense of shared values and a commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual freedom.

In Europe, as Lentin and Tilley (2011, p. 13) go on to write: ‘In what would once have been read as extremist language, [multiculturalism] is regarded as cultural surrender’. Shared values were precisely the foundation of official multiculturalism in Australia and far from it being thought of as cultural surrender, multiculturalism was understood as broadening and deepening the Anglo-Australian culture which remained privileged but that, as a settler society, has always been thought of in Australia as in process. Australian multiculturalism worked to produce diversity lite, a diversity that functioned in terms of shared values. When Australia sought to increase rapidly its population after the conclusion of World War Two, and achieved this by including in its intake members of national groups not previously considered white enough to gain entry to Australia, it did so with the conviction that, in fact, all these groups were really white. Whiteness was equated with cultural similarity. Multiculturalism’s emphasis on inclusion in the first place only impacted certain groups, those already identified as white. Official multiculturalism was a backwards-looking policy at a time when Australia was being forced by the winds of global change to end its White Australia policy, or what was left of it after it had become increasingly etiolated through the 1960s. Australia in the second decade of the twenty-first century has a very different and more radically diverse population mix from that during the height of official multiculturalism in the 1980s. As a consequence of its neoliberal restructuring, Australia is now also a nation-state pervaded by exclusion and precarity. Surveillance as a population management technology has been normalised. The state has increasing power thanks to laws which in other circumstances would be

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associated with states of emergency. The border has become a site where decisions over entry are made in relation to a person’s economic usefulness in the state. Wendy Brown (2010, p. 22) has commented in general terms about the impact of neoliberalism on state governance: Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut … by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers (large and small), which displaces legal and political principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion, equality, liberty and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political sovereign to managerial status.

Within the Australian state the most excluded are those who least fit the long-established norm of Australianness, those who are identified as black, and Indigenous Australians are a special case as they always have been, and from a non-Christian religion, especially Muslims. In this neoliberal order those most excluded also include people without jobs and private sources of income, that is those reliant on the state for support. Included in this group, often lumped together as the underclass, because of their tendency to be excluded in the economic order, are many of the people identified as black, including Indigenous Australians, and Muslims.

The State and Exclusion In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (1977) wrote about the great confinement that started in the mid-seventeenth century. Foucault’s primary concern was with madness. Roy Porter (1990, p. 47) provides a brief and useful description of Foucault’s argument: Those whose lives affronted bourgeois rationality—beggars, petty criminals, layabouts, prostitutes—became liable to sequestration higgledy piggledy with the sick and the old, the lame and lunatic. Such problem people, though different from normal citizens, were identical among themselves. Their common denominator was idleness. The mad did not work; those who did not work were the essence of unreason.

We should note here the genealogy of the category Porter constructs through the early nineteenth-century idea of the dangerous class to Marx’s construction of the lumpenproletariat to the neoliberal formation of the underclass. What is confined is also excluded. The groups

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Porter, following Foucault, lists were all confined within the embryonic modern state. They were all, as Porter notes, different and as such were threatening to the homogeneity of population which characterised the ideological preoccupation with the national membership of modern states. The new states themselves were sites of confinement, albeit represented increasingly as places of national expression. The Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648. It has often been cited as the key moment of transition in the establishment of the modern state, that is the state in which authority within clear borders is absolute and cannot be legitimately challenged by forces from outside the borders. As Derek Croxton (1999, p. 570) puts it: ‘In a system of sovereign states, each recognizes the others as the final authorities within their given territories, and only they can be considered actors within the system’. Sensibly critical of any claim that change occurred as a sudden transformation expressed in the treaties associated with the Peace of Westphalia, Croxton (1999, p. 591) nevertheless concludes: ‘Although no one yet conceived of sovereignty as the recognition of the right of other states to rule their own territory, the increasingly complex diplomatic milieu shows how a multi-polar system was able to develop’. To this we can add Foucault’s insight that confinement was becoming a guiding principle of social order. In terms of the state that involved identifying a homogeneous population, a nation and establishing borders which could be patrolled to manage entry and egress. When in 1791 Jeremy Bentham compared building his new, disciplinary panoptic prison, founded on surveillance, as being preferable to the transportation of convicts to New South Wales, he was distinguishing two forms of exclusion, either confinement within the state or expulsion from the state. By the late nineteenth century, and especially in the settler colonies, the problem became one of exclusion from entering the state. Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist discuss the importance of the restrictive entry laws in the British settler colonies for the 1905 Aliens Act in Britain. The background was the immigration of large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews. As Bashford and Gilchrist (2012, p. 412) write: ‘Retaining distinctive linguistic and religious culture, East End Jewry was perceived by other Londoners as standing strangely apart from the native British population’. Here we find a theme which becomes constant through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: the fear of difference, of the immigration of individuals who identify as members of a particular group other than that dominant within that particular nation-state. These migrants are felt to threaten the homogeneity of the national population.

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In Australia one of the first acts passed by the first federal parliament in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act. This act, the foundation of what became known as the White Australia policy, included the notorious dictation test which was adopted from a similar provision in Natal and had already been utilised in Western Australia. The dictation test was instituted as a form of racial discrimination disguised as a literacy measurement. The test could be administered at the discretion of the immigration authority. Anybody entering Australia could be asked to write fifty words in a European language of the administrator’s choice, later any language of their choice. In one notorious early case in 1909 the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Clan Ranald in South Australia were made to take a dictation test which they failed: ‘The 20 lascar seamen, identified as “coloured”, were deemed illegal immigrants and sent to Melbourne to be deported to Colombo on SS Clan McLachlan’ (Tao 2018). The test was finally abolished when the migration policy was revamped in the Revised Migration Act of 1958. One of the driving concerns of Australian federation was the fear of Chinese migration. Prior to federation individual states had passed legislation specifically limiting the numbers of Chinese allowed to enter. In 1855 Victoria passed An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants with the aim of restricting Chinese immigration and in 1861 the New South Wales legislature passed the Chinese Immigration Restriction Act.1 As Wang Yu-bo (2004, p. 21) notes, ‘the exclusion movement against the Chinese immigrants in Australia formed an important part of the Federation Movement’. From its inception Australia, like the colonies which preceded the federated entity, was preoccupied with exclusion and, therefore, with the geographical border which as the limit of the state was also the site of physical exclusion. Federation allowed for a unified policy on exclusion and, therefore, gave greater clarity to the border now of a unified state. In her discussion of the border in Australia, Suvendrini Perera (2009, p. 163) writes that: The border seals, in the senses of both securing and validating, the ‘nationalist compact’ between citizen and state, as the figures it excludes— the noncitizen as foreigner or as alien within—cohere and endorse the privileged subject of the nation.

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It should come as no surprise that much of the Immigration Restriction Act was concerned with what happens at the border, from making sure that all crew members who arrive on a boat leave on it to the punishment of people who bring ‘idiots or insane persons into the Commonwealth’. Bashford and Gilchrist (2012, p. 412) go on to write that: ‘London was being “swamped”, many began to claim, borrowing the metaphor already common in anti-Chinese movements elsewhere’. Here we find the use of a term which Margaret Thatcher later used in 1978. At that time she was the leader of the Conservative Opposition, when she said in a television interview that she thought ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture’ (Thatcher 1978). In Australia it was used again by the populist, anti-multicultural politician Pauline Hanson in her maiden speech in the House of Representatives in 1996: ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’ (Hanson 2016 [1996]). Swamped is a particularly powerful metaphor because it not only carries the meaning of being overwhelmed, more literally of drowning as the result of an inundation of water, but it carries negative connotations derived from swamp as a description of an area of stagnant water and so suggests that those who are doing the swamping are disgusting or, indeed as we shall see, abject. In all these cases the fear is of national cultural dilution and the push is for an exclusionary policy. Hanson’s fear echoes that of the framers of the Immigration Restriction Act which was the cornerstone of the White Australia policy. In this context, it should not be a surprise to find that immediately before expressing her anxiety about Asians in Australia Hanson said: ‘I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished’ (2016 [1996]). The ideological foundation of official multiculturalism was inclusion while the basis of the modern state was exclusion. Hanson mixed up an internal population management policy with a policy that decided who could enter and stay in the state. This is not to say that Australian official multiculturalism was liberal, with a small l. What this misunderstands is that the purpose of its inclusivity was strategic. In the post-Second World War period and through to the 1960s the Australian definition of whiteness had been stretched to include many groups, such as Greeks and southern Italians, who had quite different cultures to the hegemonic Anglo-Celtic culture. Multiculturalism, an idea taken from Canada where its deployment was in the quite different context of a country looking for a way of managing two

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dominant, competing settler cultures in addition to the cultures of smaller migrant groups, functioned as a way of incorporating these diverse white cultures into the hegemonic order.

The State, Homogeneity and Multiculturalism In order to understand this preoccupation with inclusion we need to take a step back and think about the formation of the nation-state. The ideological basis of the nation-state was the claim of national homogeneity. Referencing Roland Robertson’s work Michael Billig (1995, pp. 129–130) explains: the heyday of the nation-state was from 1880 to 1920. Many of the states that were to enjoy sovereignty during that period had been created in the previous hundred or so years. A modernist spirit had attended their creation. One of the essential characteristics of modernity was vital to state-making: the intolerance of difference. The new states were to be centralised polities, which flattened traditional regional, cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences. As [Zygmunt] Bauman has claimed, ‘nationalism was a programme of unification, and a postulate of homogeneity’. (Bauman ‘Soil, Blood and Identity’ Sociological Review, no. 40, 1992, p. 693)

The settler states were not immune to this imperative. In Australia, as I have argued elsewhere, a key part of the creation of the Australian nation-state in the last years of the nineteenth century was the whitening of the Irish, the largest non-English group in the evolving nation-state (Stratton 2004). Whitening the Irish was a crucial move in the construction of Australia as a white, settler nation-state. However, other differences also had to be eradicated. The most important of these was the use of any language that threatened the hegemony of English. Here we need to remember the importance of language in the formation of European nation-states. Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 84) explains: The lexicographic revolution in Europe [from the second half of the eighteenth century] … created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.

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As settler colonies transformed into states so the privileging of a single language became a foundational feature of the attempt to create a nation. In Australia, as a consequence of the large number of Irish, and also Scots, in the Australian colonies Gaelic, albeit in variant forms across those two national groups, was a reasonably common language: During the 1850s, Gaelic was so prevalent in Australia that there were many Gaelic-speaking churches, at least one Gaidhlig-newspaper, and even a Gaelic-Language school in Geelong! At that point Gaidhlig was spoken most in small communities in northern New South Wales. Unfortunately, Gaidhlig didn’t survive in New South Wales much past 1890, and church services were no longer held in Gaelic after the 1890s. In Melbourne, there were quite a lot of Gaelic speakers (both Scottish and Irish) well into the mid-19th-century. (Rachel’s Ramblings 2013)

The demise of Gaelic as an everyday spoken language by around the time of federation happened in concert with the whitening of the Irish. It enabled English to be the unquestioned hegemonic language which all migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds had to learn. It was the de facto national language of the new nation-state. In the post-Second World War period there was a push to increase the population of Australia. Often justified at the time in terms of making the defence of the vast continent more feasible the real reason had more to do with the industrialisation of the country. One example was the Snowy Mountains Scheme. As Grahame Griffin (2003, p. 39) writes: ‘During the 1950s and ’60s, the Snowy Mountains Scheme played a key role in national mythmaking as an icon of technological, economic and agricultural progress, and as a place of assimilation for non-British immigrants’. Ben Chifley, who was the Labor prime minister when the building started in 1949, called it, ‘one of the greatest milestones on the march of Australia to full national development’ (Griffin 2003, p. 39). Over 100,000 people worked on the Snowy scheme, most of them migrants. The consequence of the push to increase migration numbers was that, as not enough people from Britain could be persuaded to migrate, migrants were drawn from a widened variety of sources. In addition to other Northern European countries like Germany and the Netherlands, displaced persons from eastern Europe, Maltese, southern Italians, Greeks and Christian Lebanese were allowed to migrate. Between July 1949 and June 1970 almost 2,700,000 migrants arrived in Australia helping

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to increase the total Australian population from just under 8,000,000 to around 12,500,000. This is not the place to rehearse this history in detail. What is important here is the broadening of the definition of whiteness that was entailed and the impact on Australian cultural homogeneity of large numbers of people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. At the same time, Arthur Calwell, the architect of the post-war immigration policy, remained a staunch supporter of the White Australia policy until his death in 1973. In his memoirs, published in 1972, he wrote: Those who talk about a multi-racial society are really talking about a polyglot nation. … No matter where the pressures come from, Australian people will continue to resist all attempts to destroy our white society. (Calwell 1972, p. 119)

Calwell had expanded the range of people who could migrate to Australia but he remained convinced that that range was limited by whiteness. Al Grassby, as minister for Immigration in Gough Whitlam’ s Labor government, picked up the term multiculturalism from Canada and introduced it tentatively in the title of a paper he presented at a symposium in Melbourne in August 1973, ‘A multi-cultural society for the future’. Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, had used the term in a speech in 1971. Trudeau was addressing a very different problem to Australia’s.2 When Canada was confederated in 1867 it included a large French settler population who had been conquered by the British in 1760. Unlike in Australia where Gaelic was never spoken by a large enough population to persist in the face of the hegemony of English, French could not be expected to die out. During the 1960s French Canada became increasingly vocal and assertive. In 1967 Charles de Gaulle, the nationalist French president, while visiting Quebec encouraged secession when at the end of a speech from the balcony of Montreal City Hall he included the phrase Vive le Quebec libre. In 1969 the Official Languages Act placed French on the same footing as English as a language of the state. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had been set up in 1963 by the then prime minister Lester Pearson to examine the status of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada in response to increasing agitation by Francophone Canadians. The remit of the commission referred to developing the Canadian Confederation ‘on the basis of

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an equal partnership between the two founding races’. Race here identifies linguistic groups. Eve Haque (2012, p. 17) comments that: The establishment of the link between language and race in the crucible of modernity meant that, in contemporary nation-building projects—as that of the B and B Commission—language could become the basis of the Other’s exclusion. Language could be modernity’s empty signifier of promise for a universal community, disavowing racial exclusion even as it simultaneously divides this putative universality through the deterministic and immutable origins of separate languages.

In Canada, the privileging of two languages both tied to national groups identified as races and to whiteness continued the White Canada policy covertly as multiculturalism was being introduced. In Australia, during the time of official multiculturalism there was a divide between native English speakers and those constructed as Non-English-Speaking Background (NESB) migrants. To put it differently, in Australia speaking English with an Anglo-Australian accent helped to whiten a person. The final report of the Royal Commission was presented in five volumes between 1967 and 1970. Haque (2012, p. 186) describes the commission’s ‘attempt to engineer a new white settler bi-nation’. In his speech in parliament in October 1971 responding to the report’s recommendations Trudeau said: for although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly. (Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 [undated])

Trudeau acknowledged that Canada has two languages but diminished the threat to Canadian unity by asserting the equal value of the cultures of all the ethnic groups within Canada. As Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (2008, p. 217) remark: ‘Because Australia did not have to deal with two deeply entrenched different national cultures, however, multiculturalism would never have the same traction here’. In 1988 the Canadian parliament passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act which is described in its long title as: ‘An act for the preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism in Canada’. It could be argued that multiculturalism in Canada functions as a strategy of exclusion. While Canada is officially bilingual, French-Canadian culture is placed on the same level as

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every other culture in Canada; that is, it does not have the privileged status that might be accorded it as one of the two founding, settler cultures. Neither, of course, does Anglo culture have this status but Anglo-Canadian culture, like the English language, is more pervasive across Canada. Together, as Haque argues, they privilege whiteness. In Canada multiculturalism is a way of managing the impossibility of homogeneity. In Australia multiculturalism might be understood as a way of emphasising homogeneity. In Australia multiculturalism appeared to be inclusive. It began as a strategy for supporting the diverse linguistic and cultural groups, identified in terms of national origin, members of which had migrated to Australia in that post-war period. Australian multiculturalism functioned in terms of whiteness and with an assumption of common values based on the various versions of Christianity that were a common feature of the migrants allowed into the country. It was taken for granted that whiteness, Christianity and common values were correlated. I discuss the importance of Christianity in relation to whiteness in Australia in Chapter 3. It is now generally accepted to think of Australian multiculturalism in terms of a core/periphery model where what was called Anglo-Celtic culture was the core and the minority cultures and languages of ethnic groups were the periphery. The inclusivity of Australian multiculturalism ensured that the nation-state remained homogeneous in spite of the perception of those who later would call for its dismantlement on the grounds that it encouraged a loss of Australian identity and a fragmentation of the Australian nation-state. This fear accounts for, in the years of John Howard’s prime ministership 1996–2007, the emphasis on Australian values and citizenship. In 2007, as a result of these anxieties, Howard’s government made it more difficult to gain citizenship. The residency eligibility period was increased from two years to four years, competency in English became mandatory and an Australian citizenship test was introduced. As Farida Fozdar and Brian Spittles (2009, p. 499) explain: ‘Ostensibly the Howard Government’s initiatives were designed to use citizenship as a tool of social inclusion by restricting access to it and by more clearly articulating what it means to be “Australian”’. Fozdar and Spittles note that the test became a focus for right-wing attempts to influence immigration. In 2017 the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, trying to manage the right-wing rump in the coalition party room, went further. Prospective citizens would have to sign a values statement which would indicate that they knew and accepted Australian values and the citizenship

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test would be expanded to include questions related to Australian values. After the election of 2019 these changes were set aside (see Crowe 2019). Nevertheless what they show is the renewed emphasis on shared values as the basis of the Australian community and the logic of exclusion which it enforces. Official multiculturalism, born during the last years of the White Australia policy, assumed race as a limiting factor. It may be for this reason that Indigenous Australians were not included in multiculturalism until around 1994. Anne Curthoys has explained how throughout Australia’s existence as a nation-state the discussion about immigrants has been kept quite separate from the discussion about Aborigines. She argues that: In the 1980s, as multicultural discourse became ever more powerful, parallels between indigenous and multicultural issues were at last drawn in official, intellectual and public arenas. The two sets of concerns were now seen to be connected by a national ideal of cultural diversity. (Curthoys 2000, p. 28)

In this process Aborigines lost their special status as the first people on the continent settlers call Australia. What we see here is an extreme example of what Billig calls the flattening of differences, something which characterised the practice of Australian multiculturalism. Writing in 2000 Curthoys (p. 34) notes that, ‘multicultural discourse at large remains remarkably inattentive to the colonial features of current Australian life’. That lack of attention reflects the homogenising, nation-building concern of official multiculturalism.

The Short History of Official Multiculturalism and the Persistence of White Australia We are now in the time beyond official multiculturalism. Certainly there remain elements of the policy in place. However, where once the emphasis was on diversity and a celebration of the differences that various groups brought which enriched Australia, though as we have seen this diversity functioned within a claim to shared values, now the concern is with integration. In 1987 the Labor government under Bob Hawke set up the Office of Multicultural Affairs within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Its purpose was to offer advice to the prime minister on matters relating to multiculturalism within the

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Australian community and to act as a liaison between representatives of ethnic groups and government. This time was the high point of official multiculturalism. Already in 1995, before the election of John Howard’s coalition government, the Office of Multicultural Affairs was absorbed into the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. After Howard’s election the governmental rhetoric around multiculturalism changed radically. To take one example, the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, formulated during Hawke’s prime ministership, identified the meaning of multicultural as describing ‘the cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary Australia’ and went on with the programmatic assertion: ‘We are, and will remain, a multicultural society’ (Office of Multicultural Affairs 1989, p. ix). By 2003 in Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity the basic tenets of multiculturalism, especially the recognition of the importance of diversity, were still being affirmed but, overriding this, was a new claim: ‘The freedom of all Australians to express and share their cultural values is dependent on their abiding by mutual civic obligations’ (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs 2003, p. 6). What this meant was then spelt out: ‘These civic obligations reflect the unifying values of Australian Citizenship. Australian Citizenship involves reciprocal responsibilities and privileges and enables individuals to become fully contributing members of the Australian community’ (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs 2003, p. 6). In official policy multiculturalism was now subordinate to the unifying force of state citizenship and a claim about mutual responsibility. At the same time ethnic groups were being replaced by individuals. In December 2017 Multicultural Affairs was incorporated into the new Department of Home Affairs about which more will be said later but what we can note here is that in combining the intelligence services with border security and immigration the department transformed what was left of the policy of official multiculturalism into a top-down surveillance technology for managing a population not yet fully integrated. On the webpage for Multicultural Affairs, the preoccupation is no longer with ethnic groups and with the establishment of an Australia which is stronger because of its diversity. Rather: ‘The Australian government is funding AUD$71 million package of social cohesion initiatives to create a stronger, more cohesive Australia’. This is an Australia which is the product of Howard’s neoliberal displacement of government support for diversity into a preoccupation with mutual obligation, a society based on

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contract and individual worth measured by Australia’s economic requirements. This is the substitution of an official multiculturalism established in the service of a rapidly expanding and culturally diversifying population created to reconstruct Australia as a society driven by industrial capitalism, by a neoliberal social order in which the individual’s productive relation with the state is paramount over all social differences. Official multiculturalism had been deployed in Australia as a mechanism for integrating ethnic groups which, while Christian and white, in an extended definition of that term, had ways of life that varied considerably from the Anglo-Celtic norm as that term was used to define the group that held hegemonic power. Official multiculturalism tended to group people into ethnic categories based first on national origin and then on language. English has never been the formal, legislated language of Australia, unlike the joint status of English and French in Canada, but its connection with the English as the primary historical settlers has given it a naturalised and unquestioned status relegating migrants from outside the United Kingdom to being people of Non-English-Speaking Background. Thus the linguistic distinction English/NESB parallels, and helps compose, the core/periphery divide which has organised Australian multiculturalism. Australian multiculturalism looked backwards at the time when the White Australia policy was being fully dismantled. This dismantling is often characterised as the Whitlam government recognising the inherent worth of all individuals regardless of the colour of their skin. Again though, as it happens, Australia was following the lead of Canada. As Ronald Skeldon (1996, p. 138) writes: Canada effectively removed racial discrimination as a major feature of its policy in its Immigration Regulations tabled in January 1962. The main reason for the change was not parliamentary or public demand but because some senior officials realized that Canada ‘could not operate effectively within the United Nations, or in the multiracial Commonwealth, with the millstone of a racially discriminatory immigration policy round her neck.’ [Freda Hawkins Critical Years in Immigration, p. 39]

During the 1950s and 1960s the composition of the United Nations changed radically:

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Within one generation, ninety ex-colonial states joined the United Nations. By 1961, African and Asian countries had gained a majority in the General Assembly.

With this majority these countries were able to push back against white racism: In 1963, a Declaration on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination was accepted in the General Assembly with eighty nine votes in favour and seventeen abstentions. (Reynolds and Lake 2008, p. 349)

The Declaration specifically identified apartheid as a form of racism. By the time the South African rugby union team, the Springboks, toured Australia in 1971 to a groundswell of protests, it was clear that the White Australia policy, even in the limited form in which it still existed, was no longer tenable. The Whitlam government formally ended the policy in 1973. South Africa became increasingly isolated. Sanctions that had begun in the early 1960s reached a peak in 1986 when the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. With the ending of the White Australia policy people of much more diverse backgrounds, skin colour, religious affiliation, started entering Australia. It is now that the limits of official multiculturalism’s inclusivity began to become apparent. Mandisi Manjavu, in an article published in 2016 titled ‘The Whiteness Regime of Multiculturalism’ explains: The dominant discourse portrays Africans in Australia in the context of the problems it is assumed they create for the government and ordinary Australians. In the past Africans have been spoken of as not fitting in socially, and through the media as deviant and criminogenic. Neighbourhoods that are predominantly African are characterised in the mainstream press as ‘no-go-zones’ and ‘hotspots’ for youth violence. (p. 188)

Here we see exclusion in operation. These no-go-zones and hotspots can be thought of as informal sites of confinement. Joel Windle (2008, pp. 556–557) remarks: Geographically, the suburbs where migrants live are portrayed as besieged by outsiders and cut off from the city. They are ‘no go zones’ ‘African, Asian or Polynesian strongholds’, ‘hotspots’ and ‘hotbeds’ for ‘youth violence and ethnic tensions’.

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Windle (2008, p. 557) goes on to quote from an article in the HeraldSun in 2007 where a woman described as a 75-year-old widow, a local, ‘laments that before the invasion, “the area used to be ‘lovely’”’. Invasion suggests that there is now unauthorised occupation. This occupation is a site of confinement within an Australia that for this journalist, and the widow, remains predominantly, and preferably, white. Official multiculturalism was white. It was designed to integrate the broadened category of white people into the Australian nation. Its limits became increasingly apparent after the ending of the White Australia policy. These limits were expressed geographically, in terms of particular spaces such as certain suburbs as non-white, as well as discursively. Finex Ndhlovu (2014, p. 101) theorises the way black Africans are culturally constructed in Australia: the extensive media coverage of dark-skinned Africans (particularly those originally from Sudan), typifying them as a ‘problematic’ and unwanted ‘other’, has generated stereotyped perceptions of all African people. In particular, black-African immigration to Australia appears to have brought back memories about representations of race and the social construction of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ which were popular in colonial Australia and were commonly used in oppositional relationship.

Those beyond multicultural whiteness, and now after official multiculturalism simply beyond the whiteness constructed through that multiculturalism, form the excluded Other within the border of Australia. As Ndhlovu (2014, p. 32) notes elsewhere, ‘African migrants in Australia are often seen as a homogeneous group of people with very little, if any, difference between them’. This homogenisation is a function of the Othering of black people. Muslims suffer a similar fate, that is Islam is viewed as a homogeneous entity and all people who are identified as Muslims are assumed to have the same beliefs and values. Whiteness, and Christianity, or at least the values claimed to be Christian, are constructed and affirmed against these Others. All sects of Christianity are also assumed to have the same values but in this case the homogenisation of belief functions positively for membership of the Australian nation. In 2006 Ien Ang and colleagues published the results of research they had conducted on cultural diversity on behalf of the multiculturally aligned television broadcaster, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). One of their findings concerned attitudes to reconciliation with Indigenous Australians:

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Interestingly in all five NESB samples a higher percentage … from 73% of Vietnamese to almost 93% of Somalis considered reconciliation important to very important. In addition a significantly larger percentage of the national sample deemed this issue ‘not important’ or ‘not very important’ (19%) than any of the five NESB groupings (the highest being 10% of Lebanese and 9% of Greek, and the lowest 3% of Somalis). In other words NESB migrants tend to consider reconciliation a much more important issue than the national population—a sign of strong awareness of the special place of Indigenous Australians in society. (p. 12)

Such an interpretation presumes that all ethnicised groups were equally accepted within the Australian polity. Rather, what the findings show is that the more excluded a group is the more it identifies with the issues faced by Indigenous Australians. The groups who had been whitened, the Greeks and the Lebanese, were less interested in reconciliation though the figures for these groups still signal significantly more interest in reconciliation than the national sample, for which we can read the white mainstream. Affirming the importance of reconciliation by SomaliAustralians suggests the extent to which these respondents felt similarly excluded to Indigenous Australians. In other words, in post-official multiculturalism, in an Australia dominated by neoliberalism, the limited inclusiveness of official multiculturalism has been replaced by a hierarchy of exclusion running from those identified as most white to those identified as most black, and from Church of England Christians through to Muslims. Precarity increases in concert with the experience of exclusion.

The Australian State and the State of Emergency In order to understand the functioning of exclusion in the late-modern state, in this case the Australian state in the time when neoliberal ideology has been driving policy, we need to theorise the state in the terms of the state of exception, or rather, as we shall see, the state of emergency. Giorgio Agamben (1998, p. 1) has argued that: ‘World War One (and the years following it) appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanisms and apparatuses of the state of exception as a paradigm of government’. In arguing this Agamben was following Walter Benjamin who in Theses on the Philosophy of History noted that: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule (1940, sect. VIII)’.

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Benjamin was here critiquing the ideas of Carl Schmitt. Fascism, for its apologist Schmitt, was founded on the creation of a state of exception. Benjamin’s point is that unless we understand that there is nothing exceptional about fascism we cannot successfully oppose it. In making this point Benjamin distinguished between emergency and exception. Amy O’Donoghue (2015), glossing Agamben, is more explicit than him on the historicity of the state of exception: ‘Under modern liberal democracy, the state of exception, once a temporary suspension of law, became a stable, generalised condition’. Here we need to go back to Schmitt’s discussion of the way the state of exception is produced. However, before we do this we have to recognise that Schmitt, too, thought that the political organisation of modern states, grounded in ideas that can be found in rudimentary form in the Peace of Westphalia, had broken down in World War One. For Schmitt, the ideal Westphalian war took place between friends and enemies, those within a state and those outside, in another state, and took place on the borders between the states. Such wars could be carried out according to a set of rules laid down in international law (see Schotel 2011). With the USintervention in World War One, the old European-based system was replaced by a global system in which the nature of war and the violence associated with it were fundamentally altered. Markus Gunneflo (2015, pp. 52–53) puts it like this: ‘This transformation can be seen in the guilt placed with the German Kaiser after the war for the jus ad bellum “crime of war”, as distinct from jus in bello “war crimes”’. The very nature of war was called into question in this new order, and as the new system evolved, the role of constitutional sovereignty was steadily diminished. With the decline in constitutional sovereignty the importance of exclusion as a normalised practice within the state has increased. Schmitt argued that sovereignty always exists in states, even in those where it has apparently been ceded to a constitution. Indeed, his definition of sovereignty, which he places at the beginning of his 1922 book Politische Theologoe (Political Theology), is a practical one. The sovereign is the person who can suspend the constitution in favour of a state of exception. For Schmitt the sovereign can only legitimately do this in the name of the people. From this point of view the declaration of a state of exception is fundamentally democratic. Agamben (2005, p. 1) writes at the beginning of his discussion of the state of exception that: ‘It is difficult even to arrive at a definition of the term given its position at the limit between politics and law’. The definition of the sovereign is the

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person who stands both inside the legal system and outside it, who can therefore declare the legal system in abeyance thus creating the state of exception. Agamben (2005, p. 2) develops this point with reference to Hitler’s suspension of the parts of the Weimar constitution concerned with personal liberties and elaborates: In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.

The idea of a legal civil war draws attention away from the combatants in this war; the people and the sovereign. This is, as Benjamin might have recognised, a war of oppression. As we shall see later in a discussion of Georges Bataille’s thoughts on abjection, it is also a war of exclusion. The sovereign has access to the power embedded in the forces of the state expressed ultimately in violence. This structure becomes more deeply seated in states organised along neoliberal principles. Imogen Tyler (2013, p. 6) remarks that: As governments have come to govern for the markets they have also come to govern against the people. The protections and freedoms which postSecond World War liberal democracies once ostensibly offered citizens in return for their loyalty and labour have been incrementally eroded.

Agamben writes about the physical elimination of categories of citizens, we can be more explicit and refer to the Holocaust and the destruction of German Jewry. However, more than this, Agamben’s point can be illustrated by reference to the Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge who murdered, it is estimated, almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population in the mid-1970s when they held power. The more general point is that in today’s neoliberal nation-states, while entire groups may not be murdered, life for individuals and for population groups becomes more precarious, the exclusion is more and more a possibility. In Australia we can refer to the increasing numbers of individuals who find themselves deported to countries they may not have

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lived in since they were babies. In 2018 Patrick Keyzer and Dave Martin wrote that: Deportations of foreigners on temporary visas have been on the rise in Australia since the government amended its immigration law in 2014 to give the Minister for Home Affairs the power to expel people they view as a risk to Australian society.

Kezyer and Martin inform us that in the two years prior to their article more than 1000 New Zealanders had been sent back. In 2019 Rosemary Bolger wrote that: ‘Having already deported 4700 foreign criminals from Australia in the last six years, the government wants to extend its crackdown to offenders who haven’t served jail time’. Bolger points out that Australia’s deportation laws are among the strictest in the western world. We must return to Agamben’s point in our discussion of the state of emergency. Schmitt was concerned with the legitimacy of the state of exception as a function of the political order. The implication of Benjamin’s position is that the state of exception is more fundamental. Here, the state of exception functions rather like Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, and we should remember Schmitt’s great interest in Hobbes’s theory of social order (see Schmidt 2008 [1938]), that is, the state of exception, with its lack of law, is the hypothetical primitive state out of which the modern state has evolved. The difference, and it is crucial, is the existence of the sovereign and the unfettered power the sovereign wields. For Hobbes, the sovereign is justified in using any means to preserve their power. It is the sovereign who stands between order and the chaotic state of nature. In order to clarify what is at stake here we need to distinguish between the state of emergency and the state of exception. Schmitt writes about the state of exception as the circumstance when the sovereign suspends all or part of the constitution. However, enacting the suspension brings into effect the state of emergency. It is normal for constitutions to identify under what circumstances the constitution may be suspended. Agamben traces the political idea of the state of exception back to the French Revolution, specifically to the Constituent Assembly’s decree of 8 July 1791. We can note that this was the same year that Bentham published his pamphlet arguing for a panoptic prison rather than transportation for those to be excluded from the state. Both of these developments were crucial aspects of the evolution of the Westphalian confinement state. In his brief history Agamben

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then discusses the general states of exception promulgated by the warring states in World War One. He writes that: Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is significant that military emergency now ceded its place to economic emergency (with an implicit assimilation between war and economics). (Agamben 2005, p. 13)

Agamben sees an increasing acceptance of the powers associated with the state of exception. There is, though, a terminological confusion between the state of emergency and the state of exception. The state of emergency is what can be legally prescribed by the sovereign. It is a situation in which the law of the state has been suspended. This is what Agamben is describing.3 Ellen Kennedy (2011, p. 536) notes the ‘confusion of emergency and exception in current political theory’ and argues that much of it originates in a misreading of Schmitt’s Political Theology. It is a confusion that is a consequence of conflation. Discussing Nomi Claire Lazar’s States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies Kennedy (2011, p. 538) writes that: Lazar sees a continuum in the rule of law during an emergency and in a normally functioning state, a ‘shift not a sea change’ as she puts it. ‘The goal is to normalise emergencies by refusing them the status of “exceptional” events’.

The state of emergency can be legally declared. It can, but does not have to, lead to a state of exception: Emergency, depending on its intensity, can be the precursor of exception. What begins as an exercise of legal powers can end in a chaos of a world without rules, norms and procedures. (Kennedy 2011, p. 546)

The state of emergency can be a legally declared state. It is not the same as the state of exception, but can be a precursor of it. The state of exception may perhaps be best understood as the ghostly Other, indeed a version of the Hobbesian state of nature where there might be war of all against all, where no law exists, and where the sovereign exerts unrestricted power. As is now well understood the Hobbesian state of nature can be thought of as an extrapolation of society founded on possessive individualism when regulatory power, law, is absent

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(Macpherson 1962). Similarly, the state of exception may be thought of as the philosophical, logical development when the law of the Westphalian state, based in the constitution, is suspended. Indeed, the state of exception in this sense is prior to the state founded on law. At the same time the state of emergency is declarable by the political leader of a state, the one who embodies sovereignty. In the sense that the sovereign is both governed by the laws of the state but is also external to them we may be reminded of the medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies, the one corporeal the other the body politic which incorporated God’s worldly influence (see Kantorowicz 2016 [1957]; Kahn 2009). The state of emergency suspends all or part of the constitution and introduces, for example, martial law. The point here is the state of emergency is a political move that can be understood in philosophical terms by its relation to the state of exception which is the Other of the state governed by law. Bare life is the experience of living in the state of exception. Agamben (1998, p. 4) understands the politicisation of bare life, its entry into the modern state, as ‘the decisive event of modernity’. He writes that: ‘In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men’ (Agamben 1998, p. 7). Put simply, in the modern state bare life is existence when a person is not subject to the rule of law which is the expression of state power. Bare life refers to people excluded from the state. Anthony Downey (2009, p. 109) lists examples of those forced to live as bare life: Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed—all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law.

We should note here the importance of borders. Those who are bare life are those excluded, most fundamentally, from the law of the state, either beyond the legal border within the state or outside of the state’s border. In neoliberal states such as Australia where law and economy are imbricated as the state’s foundation bare life is the experience of those who fall outside of the economic contract. It is these people who are

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identified as the underclass, remembering here the list of those confined by the state given by Porter, and who, in Australia, were portrayed in the series Housos , discussed in Chapter 8. It was Paul Keating, who followed Bob Hawke as Labor prime minister in 1991, who, in 1992 along with his immigration minister Gerry Hand, who was responsible for strengthening exclusion at the state’s border by introducing indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers. Indefinite mandatory detention, a part of the Migration Reform Bill 1992, came into effect in 1994.4 Howard, who built on Keating’s exclusionary technologies, became prime minister two years later. Perera, writing in 2002, about the onshore detention camps that held asylum seekers, argued that:

In the political and juridical order of the nation, they constitute the materialization of the state of exception that in Agamben’s words, places us ‘virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created’. (Perera 2002b, p. 113)

This was before Howard established offshore detention facilities on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru as part of the Pacific Solution in late 2001. Offshore detention decreased the rights of asylum seekers even further. Referring to Agamben’s description of the state of exception, Michelle Peterie (2018, p. 61) writes: While these facilities are funded by Australia, they are located outside of Australia’s legal system and have thus seen asylum seekers denied access to the legal rights that would be afforded to them were they processed in Australia. … [There have been high levels of physical and sexual violence] Given the limited legal recourse to those affected, Agamben’s model may well be instructive here.

For Agamben the limit case of the state of exception is the death camps established by the Nazi regime in World War Two. As Peterie signals, the offshore detention facilities are not so lawless. They are supposedly under the law of the countries in which they were established. However, the high levels of abuse and the lack of access to human rights mean that these camps, outside the border of Australia yet remaining Australia’s responsibility, approach the criteria that would make them zones of exception and those confined within them as bare life.

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Bare life is the reductio ad absurdum of life in the modern state, or life excluded from the modern state. It is an always present possibility within the state brought closer by the state of emergency. The state of emergency allows a state to operate legally outside of its own constitutional law. We have already noted Agamben remarking that after World War One the combatant states tended to preserve elements of the state of emergency, increasing the power of the executive at the cost of the legislative, and he connected this with the existence of an economic emergency. John Reynolds (2012, p. 86) has explained that: ‘The premise of an economic state of emergency is analogous to that presented to justify the invocation and entrenchment of extraordinary powers in relation to national security threats and political conflict’. Indeed increasingly, and most obviously in states that have espoused neoliberalism, issues with the capitalist economy are presented overlapping with security threats. Tyler (2013, p. 9) notes that in neoliberal states: ‘This state of insecurity is continuously fuelled and orchestrated through the proliferation of fears about border controls and terror threats, as well as economic insecurity and labour precariousness’. In the United States the Patriot Act of 2001, a reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was, as Kennedy (2011, p. 535) reminds us, ‘legislation that broadly enlarged surveillance by the Federal government, created new powers intended to foil money-laundering by foreign terrorists and their domestic partners, revised immigration procedures, and expanded police powers over immigrants’. Kennedy (2011, p. 535) remarks that: ‘Academic legal opinion now commonly regards those expanded powers and the real possibility of other attacks as having created a domestic and international state of emergency’. What we do not know is the extent to which the shocking events of 9/11 were a pretext for the expansion of state powers in the context of the American neoliberal state.5 In Australia in the wake of those attacks in the United States what became common government rhetoric united the two concerns of asylum seekers and terrorism in the suggestion that terrorists might try to enter the country disguised as asylum seekers (see Johnston and Callender 2002). This was used to support the strengthening of exclusionary border protection. The invocation of terrorism as a justification for more emergency powers to be given to the executive is also used as a means of shoring up the state’s economic infrastructure. Reynolds (2012, pp. 128–129) again:

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The overriding and inescapable conclusion, however, is the centrality of the state of emergency to the entrenchment of capitalist doctrine and institutions in modern political life. As such, emergency economic regulation is the normal and permanent state of affairs in the contemporary state.

Banks cannot fail or the state’s resources to protect its citizens will be weakened. This lesson from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 has been repeated in Australia in the outcomes of the Royal Commission into the Banking, Superannuation, and Financial Services Industry which was established in December 2017 and presented its final report in February 2019. This combination of state of emergency and economic concerns becomes most emotive in an order where the economic is worked into the very fabric of the existence of the state. In such a situation the state sacrifices its citizens to protect the economic order which has become the foundation and expression of the state itself.

Surveillance, Authoritarianism and Exclusion We need to remember that Bentham’s new prison was panoptic. Its surveillance was disciplinary. If the modern state is founded on practices of control and exclusion, these are reinforced in the state where the economic has become the organising principle of the state’s existence. It is in this context that we need to understand the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in Australia from 1983 simultaneously developing the apparently inclusive policy of official multiculturalism while restructuring the Australian economy by increasing its integration into the global order and at the same time extending control over the Australian population and reinforcing exclusionary practices at the border. It was Hawke’s government which in 1986 attempted to introduce an identity card, to be called the Australia Card. This would have been a national identification system. More, as Graham Greenleaf (1987) argued at the time, the system to be established under the Australia Card Bill 1986, will go beyond being a mere identification system, which the government claims it is, and will establish the most powerful location system in Australia, and a prototype data surveillance system.

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In the end, after much opposition, instead of the Australia Card, Keating, at that time the Treasurer, deployed an enhanced version of the Tax File Number (TFN) system used by the Australian Tax Office. Over the decades, with advances in computer systems and their increasing integration the TFN has become linked to bank accounts and the social security system, medical benefit funds and indeed it can be linked with any provider that asks for a person’s TFN. Howard replaced the idea of a social contract with the economy, placing economic contracts on the basis of the relationship between government and the people in Australia. Perhaps the best example of this was the introduction of Australian Workplace Agreements in 1996 which enabled individual workers to make employment contracts with their employers. I use the awkward phrase ‘people in Australia’ because under Howard there was a decrease in the number of people in Australia who were citizens. In raw figures: ‘The later part of the decade [the 1990s] … saw a drop in the number of those becoming citizens with only 70,836 grants of naturalisation in 1999-2000, down from 128,554 in 1992-93’ (Klapdor et al. 2009). By 2016 10.7 per cent of those living in Australia were non-citizens. In one commentary from 2020: ‘While net migration to Australia continues to increase, the numbers of people applying to become citizens has dropped to its lowest levels since at least 2014’ (Bolger 2020). There are two major implications of these figures relevant here. First, only Australian citizens, and British subjects with permanent residency before the Hawke government changed the law in 1984 (Australian Electoral Commission 2015), are allowed to vote in elections. Thus a significant percentage of residents in Australia cannot vote and are therefore outside the democratic structure. Second, the decline in the numbers taking out citizenship suggests an increasingly mobile population, people resident in Australia but prepared to move back to their country of origin, or to another country, if circumstances change, if, for example, there are better job prospects elsewhere or if they feel discriminated against. Signalling the increased connection between the economy and migration, the Howard government introduced the 457 visa in 1996. This visa category enabled close monitoring of the entry of skilled labour. Broadly, the visa enabled skilled migrants to stay in Australia for four years provided that their skill matched a skill among a long list of those considered required by the government and they were sponsored by a firm requiring their skill. There was also a pathway to permanent residency.

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In its first year of operation 25,786,457 visas were granted. By 2012– 2013 this number had increased to 126,348 visas. From the election of the Hawke government onwards the border has become simultaneously more and less permeable. Joshua Kurz (2012, p. 31) has commented that, human mobility is often perceived as a danger to states yet essential for the functioning of capital; the question has become one of modulation: how do states encourage ‘acceptable’ flows while discouraging ‘unacceptable’ ones? In other words, the target is not primarily the subject, but is instead the regulation of a flow of mobile bodies.

Kurz (2012, p. 32) goes on to suggest that these changes, ‘indicate a shifting logic of governance away from the sole provenance of the internal/external logic of border enforcement and toward the blurring of the external and the internal within a logic of population modulation’. As governments, in this case the Australian government, move to regulate not only who can and cannot enter the country but what they can do in terms of employment while they are in the country so the internal limit of the border becomes fuzzy. Perhaps the best example of this is the creation of the Department of Home Affairs in December 2017. Sometimes described as a super ministry, Spencer Zifcak (2017) tells us that, This amalgamation is huge. It will bring together in one department the following agencies: ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre and the Office of Transport Security. The Australian Border Force and Department of Immigration are rolled in on top. All these governmental agencies will report to one minister, the Minister for Home Affairs.

What we can easily see here is the combination of security services, both those concerned with goings-on within Australia and those concerned with people and events outside of Australia along with immigration and the service whose particular role is the policing of the border. The border is both a part of this system of what Kurz calls population modulation and a special instance where exclusion takes place. Those whom the state does not want are stopped at the border. In the neoliberal state such literal exclusion as broadcast in the reality television programme Border Security: Australia’s Frontline, shown on Channel Seven since 2004,

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reassuring the Australian population of the security measures being taken to keep Australia safe, disguises the complex modulations of exclusion made by decisions as to which applicants for visas would be of economic benefit to Australia. In the Department of Home Affairs we find surveillance combined with the securitisation of the border. The border is no longer simply the focus of, as Kurz puts it, the internal/external logic of border enforcement but rather a site of control and surveillance in a system that runs across the state and tapers off into the wider world. The Home Affairs department is a conclusion of the process of Australia becoming a state of emergency with a population mired to a greater or less extent in precarity. The claim, as always in modern states, is that this is about national security, about patrolling the literal and metaphorical borders of the state. It is actually about policing the population. The first minister of the Department of Home Affairs is Peter Dutton. It is revealing to look at him a little closer. It was Dutton, and his far-right faction in the Liberal Party who conspired to depose Malcolm Turnbull as leader, and therefore prime minister, in August 2018. Dutton had been a Queensland police officer for nine years from 1990 after he graduated from the Queensland Police Academy. He was born in 1970. He left St. Paul’s Anglican School in 1987 and went to the Queensland Police Academy. He was voted into parliament in 2001. Dutton’s youth was spent in Brisbane when Queensland was governed by the National Party led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Bjelke-Petersen had been elected premier in 1968. Queensland during the 1970s and early 1980s was notorious for Bjelke-Petersen’s authoritarian government (see Condon 2013, 2014; Wear 2002). To take just one example, in September 1977 the government banned all protest street marches. Surveillance of those thought to be a threat to the Queensland government was common, constant and often intrusive. During this time Queensland was well-known for having a corrupt police force. In May 1987 the ABC Four Corners programme aired an investigation by Chris Masters called ‘The Moonlight State’. The consequence was a Commission of Inquiry chaired by Tony Fitzgerald QC. Fitzgerald reported his findings in 1989. Among these was that the police Special Branch had become an arm of the state government. It was disbanded. The police commissioner, Terry Lewis, who was Bjelke-Petersen’s choice for the position, was convicted of bribery and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Bjelke-Petersen himself resigned on 1 December 1987. He was charged with perjury but there was a hung jury.

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I should emphasise that I am not suggesting that Dutton is corrupt. Rather, what is important is how in Queensland during the BjelkePetersen era the executive turned the police into an arm of government. Here we are returned to Agamben’s point about the encroachment of the executive into the legislative. For Dutton the creation of the Department of Home Affairs was not something new, it was a federal expression of a development with which he had grown up at state level. At the same time it continues the drift towards authoritarianism characteristic of democracies in neoliberal capitalism.

Social Abjection, the Border and Exclusion How can we think about those excluded in this increasingly authoritarian state? Imogen Tyler (2013, p. 4) has developed the concept of social abjection which she describes as a theoretical resource that enables us to consider states of exclusion from multiple perspectives, including those who are ‘obliged to inhabit the impossible edges of modernity,’ those border zones within the state, in which the overall imperative is not transgression, but survival. (Quoting Anne McClintock Imperial Leather, p. 72)

Here we are immediately returned to the border, both literal and metaphorical. For Anne McClintock (1995, p. 72) those impossible edges include: ‘the slum, the ghetto, the garret, the brothel, the convent, the colonial bantustan and so on’. We can think back here to Foucault’s notion of the great confinement, and to Bentham arguing that a panoptic prison would be more disciplinary than transportation to New South Wales. The abject is that which is excluded, which is forced to exist in an ambiguous relation to the border. Tyler (undated) reworks Georges Bataille’s thinking about abjection as a foundational aspect of the modern state: ‘Bataille argued that abjection is the imperative force of sovereignty, a founding exclusion which constitutes a part of the population as moral outcasts’. She expands on this: To summarise Bataille’s argument, the disciplinary forces of sovereignty, its processes of inclusion and exclusion, produce waste populations: an excess which threatens from within, but which the system cannot fully expel as it

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requires this surplus to both constitute the boundaries of the state and to legitimate the prevailing order of power. … Waste populations are in this way included through their exclusion, and it is this paradoxical logic which the concept of abjection describes. (Tyler undated)

Here is a different way of thinking about those groups within the population that Agamben discusses as being eliminated in a civil war between the sovereign and the people. We can refer to Majavu’s (2016, p. 195) point about the experience of young males of black African descent when he argues that, ‘since the image of uncommodified blackness is synonymous with crime and deviance, white racists conclude that Africans deserve to be subjected to police surveillance, racial profiling, harassment and sometimes police brutality’. For Majavu (2016, p. 190) the idea of uncommodified blackness is an image of blackness in the western imaginary that ‘equals ugliness, darkness and immorality’. Bataille’s point is that ‘waste populations’ are an inevitable result of the formation of the modern state. They are a function of the constitution of the border. Tyler expands on this argument by suggesting that neoliberal states, states organised in terms of the economic rather than the social, articulate this characteristic in an even more extreme fashion, ‘a major aspect of neoliberal “democracies” is that they function through the generation of consent via fear and anxiety, rather than fidelity to national identity’ (Tyler 2013, p. 8). This is the development we have already noticed in the drift towards authoritarianism and, specifically in relation to Australia, in the history of surveillance that has culminated in the establishment of the Department of Home Affairs. Within the Australian neoliberal state the most excluded, and most surveilled, are those identified as members of the underclass. The underclass is disproportionately composed of those I have identified as the most excluded, Indigenous Australians, people of black African descent, Muslims and, of course, the unemployed including, for example, people on various benefits such as the disabled and single mothers. We can think here of the example of what has come to be called robodebt. The official name is Online Compliance Intervention. Set up in 2017, the purpose of the computer program was to compare the information a client told Centrelink with what they told their employer and other government agencies including the Australian Tax Office. If the programme worked out that a welfare recipient was claiming more benefit than what it thought they were entitled to a letter was sent out asking for an explanation of the discrepancy. If no satisfactory explanation was forthcoming a

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further letter demanding repayment of the alleged debt was sent out (see Pett and Cosier 2017). In November 2019 the scheme was halted because of a public outcry and legal challenge over mistaken debt claims. What the robodebt program shows is the extent of government surveillance and the use of administrative power, particularly over marginalised and powerless people. The more excluded the members of a group are, the more abject they are and the more they live in fear and anxiety, precarity. Those caught in the toils of the robodebt program, asked to pay back money they often did not owe and did not have, testify to this. Julia Kristeva theorised the abject in terms of the individual. For her, the body signified the border and, in one example, ‘dung signifies the other side of the border’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 3). However, expulsion is not the end of the matter: It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. … Abjection is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter, instead of inflaming it. (Kristeva 1982, p. 4)

The experience of abjection comes from this ambiguity, the fear that the border is permeable, that what has been rejected remains a part of us. For those who are situated as abject the border extends across the national space of the country. In Australia it is the Border Force who apprehends foreigners working illegally. Kristeva links the abject with barter, the economic. In the neoliberal Australian state those who fall outside the economic order, the housos, the underclass, those exposed as bare life, are abject. McClintock (1995, p. 71) writes that: ‘This is Kristeva’s brilliant insight: the expelled abject haunts the subject as its inner constitutive boundary; that which is repudiated forms the self’s internal limit’. In a time when the inclusiveness of official multiculturalism has been eroded and the state functions through graduated exclusion, the abject is revealed as much as the founding experience of the state as is the state of exception. Commenting on the originating construction of meaning for the individual Kristeva (1982, pp. 1–2) argues that: If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me

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ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.

Meaning is legitimated by the power of the state—we should be reminded of Foucault’s argument that truth is a function of power.6 The great fear people living within the state have of the abject is that through its ambiguous status in relation to the border it can destroy the meaning on which is built the legitimacy of the state. Here we have a way of understanding the terror evoked by asylum seekers in Australia. Their presence challenges the impermeability of the border. They unsettle settler Australians. Perera recognises the pervasiveness of the arrival of boats in the Australian psyche. Having discussed a cartoon of an Indigenous man shouting a warning as the ships of the first fleet arrived off the coast, she goes on: Whether as oppositional, satiric counterpoint in indigenous retellings or in the testimony of migrant communities, the boat story, in forms as diverse as the media release, the personal essay or performance art, makes its appearance again and again as a means of reaching out to the newest asylum seekers. (Perera 2002a, p. 35)

Abject boat people, calling to mind the criminalised outcasts, those other abjects excluded from Britain, who arrived in 1788 on the landmass Matthew Flinders named Australia in 1804, threaten the meaning of settler Australia as a legitimate state. Referencing Bauman, Tyler (2013, p. 7) remarks that: ‘What characterizes neoliberal states is the creation of “wasted humans” within and at the borders of sovereign territories’. In 2001 in his election campaign launch speech John Howard asserted ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. It was meant as an expression of strength but we can now hear it better as a manifestation of fear. In May 2013 the Australian government excised the entirety of the Australian mainland including Tasmania from the migration zone having previously excised various offshore islands (Phillips 2013). After this, there was nowhere in Australia that asylum seekers could land and make a claim for a visa. At the same time the territory of settled Australia became uncanny. There was, in a legal sense, no longer a border. In

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the neoliberal state inclusion is a lost dream of modernity. Exclusion is pervasive.

Conclusion This introduction has provided a broad historical and theoretical context for the chapters that follow. Chapter 2, written with Panizza Allmark, considers how the policy of official multiculturalism worked with the pragmatics of everyday multiculturalism in the context of Perth’s nightclub scene of the 1980s, that is during the high point of official multiculturalism. Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between Christianity and race in Australia. In Australia Christianity has always meshed with whiteness producing in the twenty-first century a confusion among some Australians as to whether Islam was a religion or a race or some combination of the two. This chapter begins a consideration of the limits of official multiculturalism in an environment where the ending of the White Australia policy has brought to Australia a more diverse range of migrants both in terms of race and religion. While the ending of official multiculturalism is usually identified with John Howard’s conservative government of the 1990s it would be fair to say that by then the basis of the policy, its presumption of inclusivity founded on shared values, was already being called into question by Australia’s increasingly diverse population, diverse in race, religion, language and cultural practices. In 2007, working out of the UK, Stephen Vertovec (2007, p. 1025) coined the term superdiversity: By invoking ‘super-diversity’ I wish, firstly, to underscore the fact that in addition to more people migrating from more places, significant new conjunctions and interactions of variables have arisen through patterns of immigration to the UK over the past decade; their outcomes surpass the ways … that we usually understand diversity in Britain.

The shock of this varied migrant intake to a modern state used to seeing itself as predominantly homogeneous can be clearly felt in Vertovec’s term, and the enthusiasm with which it was taken up. In Australia by contrast, according to the 2016 census, 49 per cent of the population had either been born overseas or had one or both parents born overseas and while England and New Zealand were the most common countries for those born overseas the next three were China, India and the Philippines

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(Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). In a settler country like Australia what the British, and members of other European nation-states, worry about as superdiversity is taken for granted. It is a consequence of rapid population growth founded on immigration coupled with the ending of the White Australia policy nearly forty years ago. Having said this it is certainly the case that whiteness remains privileged in Australia and that a greater number of migrants are from England than from China, India and the Philippines combined. The remaining five chapters are all concerned in different ways with exclusion. Chapter 4 is an analysis of The Sapphires , a film about an Indigenous girl group composed of singers from a reserve who went to Vietnam to entertain the troops during the Vietnam War. Chapter 5 examines the song career of ‘My Island Home’, a track written by Neil Murray, whose ancestors migrated from Scotland, for his bandmate in the Warumpi Band George Burarrwanga, who had moved from Elcho Island off the coast of Arnhem Land to Yuendumu in central Australia. The song has subsequently been recorded by a number of artists and was sung at the 2000 Olympics by Christine Anu who has a Torres Strait background. Chapter 6 is concerned with blackface in Australia. It focuses on the reception given to a group of men in blackface who performed on a television entertainment show as the Jackson Jive. The chapter also includes a discussion of Aboriginal blackface related to the sports commentator Sam Newman on Channel Nine’s high rating Footy Show in 1999 who put on blackface to perform as the Indigenous Australian Rules football player Nicky Winmar. Chapter 7 discusses the television show Here Come the Habibs! in terms of the problematics of representation and the demise of official multiculturalism. Chapter 8 discusses the shows Pizza and Housos , both written and produced Paul Fenech, through the lens of neoliberalism and the exclusion of those people, unemployed or in dead-end cash economy jobs, and often single parents, and racially outside of whiteness, who together form the Australian version of the underclass.

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Notes 1. A useful chapter on the debates surrounding an attempt to pass legislation in 1858 in New South Wales is ‘An Act to Regulate Chinese Immigration (1858): Celestial Migrations’ (Offord et al. 2014, pp. 47–61). 2. For an historical comparison of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia see Jatinder Mann’s ‘The Introduction of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1960s-1970s’ (2012). 3. It is instructive to read part of a lecture Agamben gave in 2002 at the Centre Roland-Barthes in Universite Paris VIII. This is titled ‘The state of emergency’. Much of the lecture is similar to the early pages of the book published in 2003 as Stato di eccezione and translated as State of Exception. The difference in terminology does not appear to be an effect of translation though the French translation is titled ‘L’etat d’exception’. We find, for example, ‘if the sovereign exception is the original set-up through which law relates to life in order to include it in the very same gesture that suspends its own exercise, then a theory of the state of emergency would be a preliminary condition for an understanding of the bond between the living being and law.’ 4. Perera (2009, p. 97) notes that only those asylum seekers arriving by boat were placed into mandatory detention, not those who flew into the country. 5. Agamben (2005, p. 3) discusses the Patriot Act and the subsequent military order issued by the president in terms of the state of exception. 6. Michel Foucault (1980, p. 131) says: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And I include regular effects of power.’

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Santa Clara: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. The state of emergency. Lecture delivered at the Centre Roland-Barthes at Universite Paris VIII. http://www.generation-online.org/ p/fpagambenschmitt.htm. Accessed 6 February 2020. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Ang, Ien, Jeff Brand, Greg Noble, and Jason Sternberg. 2006. Connecting diversity: Paradoxes of multicultural Australia. Sydney: SBS.

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Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Cultural diversity in Australia: 2016 Census data summary. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20S ubject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Cultural%20Diversity%20Data%20S ummary~30. Accessed 11 February 2020. Australian Electoral Commission. 2015. British subjects eligibility, April 21. https://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/British_subjects.htm. Accessed 11 February 2020. Bashford, Alison, and Catie Gilchrist. 2012. The colonial history of the 1905 Aliens Act. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (5): 409– 437. Benjamin, Walter. 1940. On the concept of history. https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. Accessed 6 February 2020. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Bolger, Rosemary. 2019. ‘Irrationally harsh’: Australia’s deportation laws among the strictest in western world. SBS News, August 9. https://www.sbs.com. au/news/irrationally-harsh-australia-s-deportation-laws-among-strictest-inwestern-world. Accessed 6 February 2020. Bolger, Rosemary. 2020. Demand for Australian citizenship is dropping—Here’s why. SBS News, January 26. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/demand-for-aus tralian-citizenship-is-dropping-here-s-why. Accessed 11 February 2020. Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books; MIT Press. Calwell, Arthur A. 1972. Be just and fear not. Hawthorn, Victoria: Lloyd O’Neil in association with Rigby. Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Undated. Canadian Multiculturalism Policy, 1971. https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/can adian-multiculturalism-policy-1971. Accessed 3 February 2020. Condon, Matthew. 2013. Three crooked kings. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Condon, Matthew. 2014. Jacks and jokers. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Crowe, David. 2019. Whatever happened to the ‘Australian values’ citizenship bill? Sydney Morning Herald, June 20. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed eral/whatever-happened-to-the-australian-values-citizenship-bill-20190620p51zod.html. Accessed 3 February 2020. Croxton, Derek. 1999. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the origins of sovereignty. The International History Review 21 (3): 569–591. Curthoys, Anne. 2000. An uneasy conversation: The multicultural and the Indigenous. In Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer, 21–36. Sydney: UNSW Press.

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Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. 2003. Multicultural Australia, United in diversity: Updating the 1999 new agenda for multicultural Australia: Strategic directions for 2003–2006. http://www. multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/ma_1.pdf. Accessed 6 February 2020. Downey, Anthony. 2009. Zones of indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and the politics of aesthetics. Third Text 23 (2): 109–125. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Vintage Books. Fozdar, Farida, and Brian Spittles. 2009. The Australian citizenship test: Process and rhetoric. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55 (4): 496–512. Galligan, Brian, and Winsome Roberts. 2008. Multiculturalism, national identity and pluralist democracy: The Australian variant. In Political theory and Australian multiculturalism, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey, 209–224. New York: Berghah Books. Greenleaf, Graham. 1987. The Australia card: Towards a national surveillance system. Law Society Journal (NSW ) 25 (9). http://www2.austlii.edu.au/ itlaw/articles/GGozcard.html. Accessed 11 February 2020. Griffin, Grahame. 2003. Selling the snowy: The snowy mountains scheme and national mythmaking. Journal of Australian Studies 27 (79): 39–49. Gunneflo, Markus. 2015. Political community in Carl Schmitt’s international legal thinking. In The contemporary relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law, politics, theology, ed. Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström, and Panu Minkkinen, 50– 63. New York: Routledge. Hanson, Pauline. 2016 [1996]. Pauline Hanson’s 1996 maiden speech to parliament: Full transcript. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com. au/politics/federal/pauline-hansons-1996-maiden-speech-to-parliament-fulltranscript-20160915-grgjv3.html. Accessed 3 February 2020. Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Language, race, and belonging in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Johnston, Judy, and Guy Callender. 2002. One impact of 9/11 in the Australian context: Government’s public management response to asylum seekers. Administrative Theory & Praxis 24 (3): 601–606. Kahn, Victoria. 2009. Political theology and fiction in The King’s two bodies. Representations 106 (1): 77–101. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 2016 [1957]. The King’s two bodies: A study in Medieval political theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, Ellen. 2011. Emergency and exception. Political Theory 39 (4): 535– 550.

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Keyzer, Patrick, and Dave Martin. 2018. Why New Zealanders are feeling the hard edge of Australia’s deportation policy. The Conversation, July 12. http://theconversation.com/why-new-zealanders-are-feelingthe-hard-edge-of-australias-deportation-policy-99447. Accessed 6 February 2020. Klapdor, Michael, Moira Coombs, and Catherine Bohm. 2009, September 11. Australian citizenship: A chronology of major developments in policy and law. Parliament of Australia. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/ Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/AustCi tizenship. Accessed 11 February 2020. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kurz, Joshua. 2012. (Dis)locating control: Transmigration, precarity and the governmentality of control. Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation 5 (1): 30–51. Lentin, Alana, and Gavin Tilley. 2011. The crises of multiculturalism: Racism in a neoliberal age. London: Zed Books. Majavu, Mandisi. 2016. The whiteness regime of multiculturalism: The African male experience in Australia. Journal of Asian and African Studies 53 (2): 187–200. Mann, Jatinder. 2012. The introduction of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1960s–1970s. Nations and Nationalism 18 (3): 483–503. Macpherson, C.B. 1962. The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge. Ndhlovu, Finex. 2014. Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia: Language, culture, identity. London: Palgrave. O’Donoghue, Amy. 2015. Sovereign exception: Notes on the thought of Giorgio Agamben. Critical Legal Thinking, July 2. http://criticallegalth inking.com/2015/07/02/sovereign-exception-notes-on-the-thought-of-gio rgio-agamben/. Accessed 6 February 2020. Office of Multicultural Affairs. 1989. National agenda for a multicultural Australia, ix–1. http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/multoff_1.pdf. Accessed 3 February 2020. Offord, Baden, Erika Kerruish, Rob Garbutt, Adele Wessell, and Kirsten Pavlovic. 2014. Inside Australian culture: Legacies of enlightenment values. London: Anthem Press. Perera, Suvendrini. 2002a. A line in the sea. Race & Class 34 (2): 23–39. Perera, Suvendrini. 2002b. What is a camp? Borderlands E-Journal 1 (1). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html. Accessed 11 February 2020.

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Perera, Suvendrini. 2009. Australia and the insular imagination: Beaches, borders, boats and bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Peterie, Michelle. 2018. The trauma machine: Volunteer experiences in Australian immigration detention facilities. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Pett, Heidi, and Colin Cosier. 2017. We’re all talking about the Centrelink debt controversy, but what is ‘robodebt’ anyway? ABC News, March 3. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-03/centrelink-debt-controversywhat-is-robodebt/8317764. Accessed 11 February 2020. Phillips, Melissa. 2013. Out of sight, out of mind: Excising Australia from the migration zone. The Conversation, May 17. https://theconversation.com/ out-of-sight-out-of-mind-excising-australia-from-the-migration-zone-14387. Accessed 11 February 2020. Porter, Roy. 1990. Foucault’s great confinement. History of the Human Sciences 3 (1): 47–54. Rachel’s Ramblings. 2013. A brief history of Gaelic in Australia and New Zealand. Rachel’s Ramblings, May 15. https://coveredrachel.wordpress. com/2013/05/15/a-brief-history-of-gaelic-in-australia-and-new-zealand/. Accessed 3 February 2020. Reynolds, Henry, and Marilyn Lake. 2008. Drawing the global colour line. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing. Reynolds, John. 2012. The political economy of states of emergency. Oregon Review of International Law 14 (1): 85–129. Schmidt, Carl. 2008 [1938]. The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and failure of a political symbol. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schotel, Bas. 2011. Doing justice to the political: The international criminal court in Uganda and Sudan: A reply to Sarah Nouwen and Wouter Werner. The European Journal of International Law 22 (4): 1153–1160. Skeldon, Ronald. 1996. Hong Kong in an international migration system. In The Hong Kong reader: Passage to Chinese sovereignty, ed. Ming K. Chan and Gerard A. Postiglione, 133–168. New York: Routledge. Stratton, Jon. 2004. Borderline anxieties: Whitening the Irish and keeping out asylum seekers. In Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 222–238. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Tao, Kim. 2018. 60 Years since the end of the dictation test. The Australian National Maritime Museum, October 8. https://www.sea.mus eum/2018/10/08/60-years-since-the-end-of-the-dictation-test. Accessed 3 February 2020. Thatcher, Margaret. 1978. TV interview for Granada World in Action. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, January 27. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/doc ument/103485. Accessed 3 February 2020.

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Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Tyler, Imogen. Undated. What is ‘social abjection’? Social Abjection. https://soc ialabjection.wordpress.com/what-is-social-abjection/. Accessed 11 February 2020. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–1054. Wear, Rae. 2002. Johannes Bjelke-Petersen: The Lord’s Premier. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Windle, Joel. 2008. The racialisation of African youth in Australia. Social Identities 14 (5): 553–566. Yu-bo, Wang. 2004. Australian Federation Movement and the exclusion movement against the Chinese during the late 19th century. Overseas Chinese History Studies 2: 45–52. Zifcak, Spencer. 2017. What’s wrong with Peter Dutton’s new super ministry? John Menadue—Pearls and Irritations, July 31. https://johnmenadue.com/ whats-spencer-zifcak-wrong-with-peter-duttons-new-super-ministry-the-pre paration-the-institution-and-the-politician-perhaps/. Accessed 11 February 2020.

CHAPTER 2

Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene of the 1980s: Coauthored with Panizza Allmark (Edith Cowan University)

The 1980s has been described as the ‘golden age of Perth nightclubs’ in which clubbing was a key social activity for young people in the city (Foster 2016). This is a chapter about the experience of going to Perth nightclubs in this period and how this experience was impacted by multiculturalism. More specifically, the chapter discusses how official multiculturalism intersected with everyday multiculturalism and how people identified as black were situated within these different inflections of multiculturalism and fitted into the nightclub scene. The discussion in this chapter is founded on a series of interviews with people who used to attend Perth’s nightclubs during this time. The bulk of the interviewees were people from non-Anglo-Australian backgrounds and some were with people who identified as black.1 The capital of Western Australia, Perth is often inaccurately described as the most isolated capital city in the world. That title most likely goes to Honolulu. Perth sits on the west coast of Australia, over three thousand kilometres from Melbourne and Sydney. At the same time, though, Bali is only about two and half thousand kilometres away and it takes three and half hours to fly there. Flying from Perth to Europe takes less time than flying there from the eastern cities. For migrants travelling to Perth from Europe and Asia, the city offered a closer proximity to home, shorter travelling times and a lifestyle with a Mediterranean climate and increased work opportunities. In the 1980s Western Australia underwent one of its periodic mining booms with the attendant rapid increase in Perth’s © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_2

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population. By the middle of the decade Perth’s inhabitants numbered a little over a million. From around the 1950s Perth’s population became significantly more diversified. Simon D. Colquhoun (2004, p. 30) writes that: In 1947, 96.1% of the population in Western Australia was either Australian born, British or Irish or New Zealander while in 1991 the proportion of this category was 86.7%. This change is reported to be due to an increase in migrants from non-English-speaking countries particularly from Europe (Italy, Greece, former Yugoslavia, Germany and the Netherlands) in the 1950s and 1960s (it rose from 2.7% in 1947 to 7.2% in 1976).

The 1976 Census found that there were over 22,500 people in Perth who had been born in Italy. This represented the largest group of Perthians born overseas after the English. From the 1960s, as the criteria for entry to Australia were broadened with the weakening of the White Australia policy, many Anglo-Burmese and Anglo-Indians crossed the Indian Ocean and settled in the city nearest their homelands. The Burmese Association of Western Australia was formed in 1965 and the community became the largest in Australia and possibly the world outside of Burma. It numbered in the thousands, perhaps as many as 6000. The Australian Anglo-Indian Association was formed in Perth in 1988 and during the 1980s this community also numbered some thousands. Aside from the Anglo-Indians, in 1981 there were almost 10,500 people of Indian background living in Perth. Most of the non-Anglo-Australian clubbers in the 1980s were the teenage children of migrants who had settled in Perth in the 1960s and early 1970s. In Perth discos, where people listened and danced to recorded music, evolved out of nightclubs though the earlier name continued to be used. The development of nightclubs as places where recorded music predominated is usually linked to post-second world war Paris (see Shapiro 2005, pp. 3–8). The first nightclub in Perth was called Top of the Town and was opened in 1965. Bob Maher, who later became an owner of many of the best-known clubs in Perth, started his career there as a bottle collector. He remembers: ‘In those days you didn’t sell any alcohol, you brought your own. You’d pay your cover charge and go in and hand your bottles over and you’d get tickets’ (Taylor 2011). Top of the Town had live bands. Explaining the cultural shift from live bands to records for dancing to, Sarah Thornton (1996, pp. 28–29) writes that:

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Records had to undergo a complex process of assimilation or integration, which involved transformations in the circulation, structure, meaning and value of both records and music cultures. This gradual enculturation of records is signalled by the changing names of the institutions in which people danced to discs. The record hops, disc sessions, and discotheques of the 1950s and 1960s specifically refer to the recorded nature of their entertainment. In the 1970s, transition is signalled with the shortened, familiar disco. In the 1980s, with clubs and raves, enculturation is complete and it is ‘live’ venues that must announce their difference.

The owners of Top of the Town opened Pinocchio’s in 1967. Pinocchio’s became the longest-lasting nightclub on the Perth scene. Increasingly it played recorded music for dancing though it did continue to book live artists as did the other clubs that opened in the late 1960s and early 1970s—AC/DC held a six-week residency at nearby Beethoven’s between August and September 1974 where they opened for the wellknown transvestite Carlotta (Walker 1994, p. 125). In the United States dancing to records, and indeed to a specific form of recorded music, was linked to the evolving gay culture (see Lawrence 2004). Alice Echols (2010, p. 2) writes that: ‘By the time Vince Aletti wrote about what he called “party music” and “discotheque rock”, in a fall 1973 issue of Rolling Stone, gay men had been dancing in discos for three years’. Given the important cultural association of discos with the gay scene it is not a surprise that Perth’s longest-running gay club Connections started in 1975. During the 1970s the focus in Perth clubs was increasingly on recorded music. The wide-spread popularity of the film Saturday Night Fever, released in 1977, much of which was set in a fictitious Brooklyn disco called 2001 Odyssey, helped secure a cultural space for discos in practice if not in name in Perth as it did in many other cities. Thornton (1996, p. 46) explains: ‘After the non-specialist media exposure the genre received on the coat-tails of the film, discotheques were hailed as a “revolution” rather than a “fad” in entertainment for the first time’. By the 1980s, the time this chapter discusses, playing recorded music was the norm. As we shall see, in Perth what music was played varied in each club according to the clientele. Discussions of popular music scenes in Australia have concentrated on live music.2 There continues to be little work on recorded music venues utilised for dancing. Writing about the Perth dance scene in the 1990s and early 2000s Christina Lee (2005, p. 43) notes that:

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‘The burgeoning recognition of The Sleepy Jackson, The Waifs and Eskimo Joe has refocused attention upon Western Australia’s music scene, only to ignore dance culture’. As with Lee’s chapter, research on recorded music venues in Australia has concentrated on genres such as rave.3 Earlier dance culture has yet to be addressed. In this context the present chapter, which ends historically with the popularisation of rave culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a contribution to the social history of recorded music venues in Perth (see Brabazon 2005; Coughran and Lucy 2009; Stratton 2007; Trainer 2016a, pp. 248–273; 2016b, pp. 100–117). This chapter is also about the impact on these venues and the people who went to them of official multiculturalism as that was imbricated with individuals’ practice of everyday multiculturalism. The 1980s was the time of the implementation of official multiculturalism. It was also the time when the nightclub scene took off in Perth. The run-down area known as North of the Line, occupied by brothels, illegal casinos and a variety of ethnic shops, which was a consequence of its having a large working class, non-English-speaking migrant population, had been the target of urban renewal. By the late 1970s, now known as Northbridge, it had become Perth’s night-life leisure suburb with a proliferation of ethnic restaurants and nightclubs (see Jordan and Collins 2012, pp. 120–137) catering to the city’s burgeoning population. In this chapter we examine the experience of nightclubbing in Perth focusing on the importance of ethnicity and race, and on the related diversity of music preferences.4 What we will discuss are the ways in which the nightclub scene divided up into three dominant club categories: white Australian (usually just identified as Australian), wog and black. Wog started out as a derogatory term imported from Britain but was appropriated by those it had been used to denigrate as a common vernacular term to self-identify proudly members of ethnic groups. George Megalogenis (2003, p. 11), who grew up a Greek-Australian in Melbourne, commenting on his own experience, writes that ‘We called ourselves “wogs.”. It was the second phase of wogdom, and it took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when you could greet an Anglo-Celt with the putdown of “skippy” and know he wouldn’t dare call you a “wog” in return’. Where wogs had arrived with the expansion in the definition of whiteness in the post-Second World War era when the Australian government was encouraging immigration, the discursive construction of blacks referred to Indigenous Australians and to people who had come to Australia officially identified as white but

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whom in everyday life Australians considered non-white. In the general population wogs, often thought of as not quite white, were tolerated to a greater or less extent where blacks were the focus of concern and often of racism. In the Perth nightclub scene, ‘black’ did not in the first place refer to Indigenous Australians, but included Anglo-Burmese and AngloIndians whose parents had migrated from Asia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 70s. Wogs referred mainly to the Italian and Greek second generations. These ethnic/racial distinctions are reflected in music preferences. Australians and wogs both danced to Top Forty tracks, though Australians also danced to the Oz Rock of groups like Australian Crawl; those who thought of themselves as blacks danced to African-American music, disco, R&B and early hip hop. One of our informants, Donna, who had worked in Perth clubs as a manager during the 1980s, commented that it was ‘really strange’, Northbridge, and she is including the clubs outside of the entertainment district, was a ‘melting pot of ethnicities … but on the club side of things it wasn’t so representative’. She goes on, using a simile, ‘it’s like a game of billiards [she is referring to pool]; the triangle gets set up for the night. Here is Northbridge; and that ball gets to that pocket and that ball gets to that pocket, and so on’. The point Donna is making is that the members of the various ethnic, and indeed racial, groups all got on well and intermixed on the street but had specific clubs they would go to which were identifiable by ethnic groups. Many of the ethnic/racial groups held their own dances. Young people would often go to these before going to the commercial clubs. In this distinction we can see in operation the complexities of the interaction of official multiculturalism which promoted ethnic awareness and everyday multiculturalism which functioned in concert with commercialism.

Multiculturalism and Nightclubbing Multiculturalism was first promoted in Australia by Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in the early 1970s. However, it was Malcolm Fraser, whose conservative, Coalition government had supplanted Whitlam’s in November 1975, who took the most important steps in the adoption of multiculturalism as official policy. In 1977, Fraser commissioned Frank Galbally to produce a report on the needs of migrants. The following year Galbally completed The Review of Post Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants (1978). The review made fifty-seven major recommendations

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including the establishment of English language classes, the provision of grants for ethnic community organisations, that schools should foster cultural diversity and promote intercultural understanding, the provision of support for ethnic radio stations and consideration of the provision of an ethnic-oriented television channel—which became the Special Broadcasting Service, known colloquially as SBS (see Ang et al. 2008)—and, generally, a recognition of the need to provide support for the maintenance of ethnic cultures. Official multiculturalism was in many ways a reaction against the earlier policy of assimilation as well as a way of managing an increasingly diverse population which was a consequence of the push to expand rapidly the size of Australia’s population in the postwar period which, in turn, was linked to a broadening of the Australian definition of who was white. In the 1950s, as non-English-speaking migrants from southern European countries who were now identified officially as white, most importantly Greece and Italy, and also Malta and later Lebanon, had been encouraged to migrate, they had been discriminated against and generally considered to be second-class Australians as compared to the Australians of British, Irish and northern European stock—those who later would be described simply as Australians as compared to wogs. A key assumption of the multiculturalism promoted by Galbally and Fraser was that all Australians should be equal and have equal opportunities. Where assimilation had demanded that a person give up the culture of their ethnic origin, suggesting that it was not of the same quality as Australian culture, the policy of multiculturalism encouraged a recognition of the worth of diverse cultures and suggested that those cultures could add to the depth and breadth of what was identified as Australian culture (see Castles et al. 1988; Hage 1998; Lopez 2000; Mishra 2012; Stratton 1998). One of the consequences of official multiculturalism was the ongoing support for ethnic cultures which became niche subcultures within the overarching Australian culture. How this might function in practice would lead to much debate over the next twenty years or so until the conservative government of John Howard, elected in March 1996, moved to erode the policy itself. In the terms of the Perth nightclub scene, official multiculturalism legitimated a development which was itself a function of everyday cultural diversity, everyday multiculturalism; that is the split between nightclubs which catered for Australians and those which catered for wogs.

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In 1994 Sneja Gunew (p. 22) characterised official multiculturalism ‘as a celebration of costumes, customs and cooking’. Anglo-Celtic Australians would visit wog restaurants and watch displays of wog dancing. When asked how she would identify, Jane, who has an English background, says: ‘Because I went to a multicultural school I had friends from different cultures … so it depends who I was out with; so, if I went out with my Asian friend we’d go to Jules night club cause that was good fun and she was good company; and if I went out with my Croatian friend, we’d go to Hannibal’s, that was the thing to do’. While we are sure that Jane would never consider her clubbing in terms of cultural tourism, that is how it can be thought of when understood through the prism of power. Donna’s simile of the billiard/pool balls is an accurate description but also leaves out the power dynamic. The club, in fact clubs, that catered for Australians, dominated the nightclub scene. At this point the topdown ideology of official multiculturalism policy meshed with bottom-up everyday multiculturalism (see Stratton 1998). While wogs were denigrated they were also accepted under certain circumstances, but they remained wogs. The most important wog club, Hannibal’s, existed as a niche club supported by its primarily Italo-Australian patrons, and the other southern Europeans including people of Greek and Macedonian background who went there. When these left, as they did in 1990, the club went into a decline only rescued by a massive renovation, a change of name to Havana’s, and the attraction of an Australian clientele. By the time of the enactment of Harold Holt’s Migration Act in 1966 which enabled non-Europeans, that is non-white people, to apply as migrants if they had professional qualifications, many of the more draconian aspects of the White Australia policy had been abolished. In 1973 Whitlam’s government amended the Migration Act so that race was no longer a criterion of entry. James Jupp (2001, p. 68) explains: Under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Australia formally abandoned discriminatory immigration policies, substituting a points system applicable to all applicants for migration regardless of race or country of origin, as Canada had done in 1967. The former selection system, which was based on quotas by country of origin and the preservation of a perceived ‘racial homogeneity’, was replaced by the Structured Selection System. Migrants were selected who had desirable personal and social attributes and came from occupational groups where the demand for mainly unskilled labour was high.

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While official policy was transformed, whiteness remained a debatable category in everyday Australian life. Clubs were important sites of popular culture during the 1980s. Many young people negotiated their ethnic and racial identities through their decisions as to which club to visit. These decisions represent multiculturalism in practice, or what is now often called everyday multiculturalism. We will be concentrating on three clubs, with a reference to a fourth. That fourth club is Pinocchio’s. Pinocchio’s, along with Gobbles, was the dominant club, the club whose clientele was primarily Anglo-Celtic Australian. Thomas remarks that: ‘Pinocchio’s was more working class, and Gobbles was the same’ and Penny who, as we shall see, used to go to Jules, the club frequented by people identifying as black, told us that: ‘I did go to Gobbles a couple of times—but that was under the influence of alcohol; and my bogan, white Australian friends. And they liked that kind of music because it was more heavy rock’. Donna describes the clientele at Pinocchio’s: ‘At Pinocchio’s we could go blue-collar. We could say that. Trades people, shop assistants, office workers’. Pinocchio’s was the longest running nightclub in Perth, we have already noted that it opened in 1967. It finally closed in 1994. It was a racial and ethnic club in that it catered primarily for Anglo-Celtic Australians but as these people were the dominant group, the club appeared unmarked, naturalised simply as a club with a working class and lower-middle-class clientele. However, our concern in this chapter is with the experiences of those who were overtly ethnicised and racialised. The clubs we shall be concentrating on are Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules. Hannibal’s, somewhat ironically given its name, was the club most identified with Italo-Australians. David, for example, says that its patrons were ‘Italians and Europeans’. Loretta Baldassar (1999, p. 7) who conducted ethnographic research on the youth members of Perth’s Italo-Australian population in the 1980s writes that: Saturday nights were reserved for nightclubbing. Hannibals [sic], a club in Northbridge (close to the city centre), was known as the ‘home base’. It was the place most often referred to as where people joined the network. Indeed, the network was often called, ‘the Hannibals’ crowd’. One young man explained: ‘Hannibals is definitely no beer, no jeans and very few Australians’. This description is supposedly the antithesis of a pub. Pubs

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are associated with ‘Australian’ leisure and are considered by youth as ‘unItalian’ and therefore unacceptable. Youth consciously define themselves in ways that differentiate them from what they perceive to be ‘Australian’.

Baldassar captures well the sense of a community detached from white Australian life, trying to preserve what the members thought of as the values of the parental, migrant generation. She writes about the description supplied by the young man as the antithesis of a pub. Beer, jeans and Australians is a good description of the environment at Pinocchio’s. Thomas offers politely an idea of how non-Europeans felt in Hannibal’s: ‘And Hannibal’s, although they didn’t discriminate against anybody, was a little bit different; yeah’. He did not quite feel at home there although, as we shall see, he went there quite a lot. It was not a club that welcomed white Australians even if, as in Thomas’s case, he had an east European heritage which in some everyday Australian contexts called his whiteness into question. Palladium was a club frequented by a mixture of Italo-Australians who had wanted to avoid the inwardness and exclusivity of the Hannibal’s scene, and by Anglo-Celtic Australians. It was, though, still regarded as an ethnic club. Joseph, an Italo-Australian whose desire was to integrate into Australian life, remarked that he would not go to Palladium because of all the Italians there. His club of choice was Pinocchio’s. Jane compares Palladium to Hannibal’s: ‘I do recall going to the Palladium a fair bit. Once I got into the rhythm of being a regular. It wasn’t a Hannibal’s; it just had a reputation as being a cool place to go’. She goes on to elaborate her understanding of the crowd at Palladium: ‘[I] think [Palladium] was more diverse than Hannibal’s. It wasn’t defined in terms of one particular culture. It was quite blended’. As an Anglo-Celtic Australian Jane clearly felt more at ease at Palladium than among the Italian and other southern European ethnics at Hannibal’s.

Jules, Blackness and Racism We can understand the clientele for Jules, the nightclub identified with ‘black’ people that played African-American funk, disco, R&B and early rap in the context of the organisation of diversity sanctioned by official multiculturalism. Jules was located away from the heart of Northbridge on the east end of Perth’s CBD. You descended stairs to enter Jules and this literally underground club was geographically and culturally distant

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from other Perth clubs. Jules was marketed as being uptown. This was a way of distinguishing it from the other clubs which were identified as being downtown. Uptown in New York had come to be associated with black culture through its links with Harlem. In 1962 the AfricanAmerican girl group the Crystals had a top twenty hit in the United States with ‘Uptown’ in which the African-American man they sing about works downtown where ‘everyone’s his boss, and he’s lost in an angry land’ but, when he goes uptown, ‘he can hold his head up high.’ Jules, identifying itself as being in uptown Perth, implied that it was a place where there was more freedom for patrons to express themselves away from the inhibitions and discrimination they might experience elsewhere. In 1980 Prince, whose music was played a lot in Jules, released a different track titled ‘Uptown’. There, Prince sang, ‘White, black, Puerto Rican / Everybody’s just a freakin’. David, who used to go to Jules often, described the club as attracting ‘black, white, beige and the in-between’. Jules appealed to an audience that was interested in black popular culture. An example of this was the club’s marketing of Prince’s debut film Purple Rain (1984) by offering tickets to the film. The promotional flyer put out by the club emphasised that the film was a ‘story about being different, about being desired, about turning loose the music that’s burning inside’. The language of difference and empowerment that was used for the film also described the way the young people that frequented Jules wanted to be seen. Jane distinguished between people who went to Jules and those who went to Hannibal’s: Jules’ [crowd] was your coloured people, [they] would go to Jules.’ Expanding on this, she says: ‘I’d say the majority [were coloured] because culturally they were attracted to that soul, funky sort of music. I do remember that Hannibal’s was a lot of Europeans, Italians; you know we used to call them the wogs. And I went to school with wogs and they’re still my good friends today. That was more of a woggy scene.

Here we can see well the everyday understanding of the divide between ‘black’—Jane uses the term coloured which was common in both England and Australia—and wogs, that is people, usually southern European, of non-English-speaking heritage. Black, and coloured, functions as a category signifying exclusion (see Martin 2013, p. x). Asked if she thought of Jules as a black club, Penny, who is of Anglo-Burmese background,

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says, yes, and goes on: ‘Jules, Mango’s, Brannigans and Chicago. These would be identified as black clubs’. It bears repeating that these black clubs, like the other nightclubs, were not friendly towards Aborigines. The young people who went to Jules, and the other clubs mentioned by Penny, modelled themselves on the African Americans they saw in music videos. Penny says that: ‘The men wanted to be like Michael Jackson and Prince’ and ‘the girls, probably with the hair-do and the make-up, not so much with the clothes; the big perm with side combs; and the heavy eye make-up and light blue eye shadow; and the pink lipstick’ took their cues from Whitney Houston. For these young people who identified as black, blackness was materialised as African American. African-American popular culture was seen as aesthetically appealing. Ruth, who is AngloBurmese and relatively light-skinned, remembers trying to find ways of tanning herself darker, such as using coconut oil when lying in the sun, and perming her hair into an Afro so that she could appear more aligned with African Americans. African Americans were thought of as having an aura founded in an idea of black pride and as having an aesthetics of cool that was a key element of African-American identity (Walker 2012). This black aesthetic, popularised in the media, had a profound influence on second-generation migrants of colour in Perth. Jules, the most well-known black club, held around 150 punters, most but not all of them the children of Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese migrants. When asked to explain her usage of ‘black’ Penny says: ‘Well, mostly Asians—Burmese, Indian; any kind of Asian background. And American sailors’. The point here is that in everyday Australian life in the 1980s Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese were not regarded as white. Writing about this complexity Glen D’Cruz (2009, p. 205) explains: This new [Australian] category of identity [part-Europeans] was at odds with British policy which classified Anglo-Indians, like other migrant groups from the sub-continent, as ‘coloured’. For administrative purposes at least, Anglo-Indians lost their ‘colour’ upon entering Australia. This is not to say that their presence was universally accepted. As archival newspaper records indicate, Anglo-Indians were perceived as undesirable non-Europeans by various sections of the population.

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Anglo-Indians, and Anglo-Burmese, were identified as ‘coloured’ in India and Burma but Australian administrators in the 1960s and 1970s relabelled them as white. This gave these people entry to Australia during the time when the White Australia policy was still in force. However, many white Australians continued to see these people, Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, as coloured, or black. Alison Blunt (2005, pp. 84–85) writes that: ‘In the early 1970s, Anglo-Indians who had migrated to Australia became central figures in debates about a “multi-racial” society’. She goes on to tell us: In 1972, aged 75, and retiring later that year [Arthur Calwell] condemned the idea of a multiracial society, claiming that nobody wanted ‘a chocolatecoloured Australia.’ … In his vitriolic attack on Australia as a multi-racial society, Calwell described the inner suburb of Highgate in Perth as an ‘Indian ghetto in the west’ and as ‘the Durban of Australia.’ Calwell described the inhabitants as living in a state of poverty and wilfully irresponsible over-population.

As the Labor Minister for Immigration between 1945 and 1949 Calwell had laid the foundations for the post-war immigration of large numbers of southern Europeans. But, while he revised the official definition of whiteness, he supported the White Australia policy and was determined to keep out of Australia those he thought of as non-white. Penny equates ‘coloured’ with ‘black’ and links it to the AfricanAmerican sailors who visited Perth on board American warships which would berth in Perth’s port of Fremantle for R and R. These sailors would go to Jules because they enjoyed the music. It was, after all, their music in the sense that it came out of the African-American tradition. It is important to think about why these Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese took pleasure in African-American music. According to Kai Filkentscher (2000, p. 6), ‘as a musical category of the 1980s and 1990s, UDM [Urban Dance Music] developed out of the disco phenomenon of the 1970s. … Another similarity to disco lies in UDM’s core audience which is predominantly African American and Latino, male and gay’. Filkentscher (2000, p. 8) goes on: ‘In New York City, UDM is one way to express and celebrate cultural and social marginality’. Black dance music was an expression of marginality in New York. In Perth it carried a similar valence. Black American music was not mainstream in Australia in the 1980s. While Michael

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Jackson made the charts, funkier music and rap were not yet commonly acceptable forms of music among white Australians. Playing black music was a way of attracting ‘black’ Australian patronage—and also a way of keeping out unwanted (white) Australians. Thomas, of Polish heritage, says: ‘Jules played soul and R&B, a lot of it. And of course Michael Jackson’. Here is Penny describing the music at Jules: ‘It was mostly funk and disco, Michael Jackson, Prince, that sort of music’. Before Jules there was a club called Beethoven’s. Beethoven’s had started off as a mainstream club in competition with Pinocchio’s. However, in the late 1970s the music it played became blacker and it started to attract a new clientele. David, who is Anglo-Indian, tells us that: Beethoven’s was mainly funk music which was mainly rap and … [they] played eg Grace Jones ‘From the Nipple to the Bottle’ [released in 1982], ‘Atomic Dog’ was another song [George Clinton on Computer Games, 1982]. They were pretty powerful songs at the time. Had a good beat. Got everyone onto the dance floor.

David comments that: ‘Jules was more like a continuation of Beethoven’s when they closed. … Beethoven’s became something else after that. Different type of music as well. … Different type of crowd’. When Jules opened in late 1981, it took Beethoven’s ‘black’ clientele and Beethoven’s shut, possibly as a consequence. It reopened as Rumours playing Top Forty and went back to being in competition with Pinocchio’s. As Jane says: Rumours on Murray Street; ‘Aussie, white’ and they would play Top Forty. At the time I was going there [the girls would] wear faded stone wash [denim] jeans and the pastel-coloured wraparound belts and the layering of the [tops], and the permed hair and the big plastic white ear-rings.

She adds: ‘Rumours was a club I went to a fair bit’. Maria, who has an Italian background but who did not limit herself to Hannibal’s, also liked the music at Rumours: Really good music; and a really good crowd. … I remember it being quite a mix actually. All the Top Forty type things, yeah. little bit of a mix of some of the old sometimes to get people up and dancing. I think it was more Top Forty than anything else.

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Maria adds: ‘Every once in a while we’d pop across to Pinocchio’s because that was just over the road’ and when asked about any differences between the two clubs adds: ‘To me it was much of a muchness’. We have suggested that it was the music that helped bring Jules the patronage of the Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, and that it was the clientele and the music which gave Jules its identity as a black club. Jules also supported local live music by groups such as the Soul Penetrators, an eight-piece Perth band whose members were of diverse, mostly nonwhite backgrounds that specialised in dance music that appealed to Jules’ patrons. It was a place where white people were in a minority. Thomas only went there because ‘there was a particular girl at the time that I was interested in’. He goes on to explain: ‘When I went there I probably felt not uncomfortable but in the minority because there weren’t many Caucasians there’. Thomas’s group included a couple of Italian guys, himself (Polish), a couple of Australian guys, and the girls ‘a mixture of European and Australian’. He tells us that: ‘At the time one of the favourite [clubs] we used to go to was Hannibal’s quite a bit’. Thomas could feel relatively relaxed at Hannibal’s, with its predominantly Italian patrons where he could not at Jules. Italians had been incorporated into Australian whiteness even though many of the Italo-Australians preferred to keep themselves separate, to have, in the terms of official multiculturalism, their own culture. Thomas identified the identity of the people at Jules by ‘the colour of their skin. Obviously, it was a different colour’. Jules, with its coloured or black patrons, was a different experience to Hannibal’s. As Thomas says, making the official multicultural distinction within whiteness, ‘Europeans and Caucasian Australians were in the minority there [Jules]’. There was little overt racism. Rather, as Donna indicated, people went to the clubs most appropriate for them. Penny, who is dark-skinned, spent the majority of her time at Jules. However, she also went to Hannibal’s. Asked how she felt at Hannibal’s she replied: ‘I was OK with it because I was with my European friends; one was Greek, one was Italian. And I’ve got the dark hair so I passed with that’. Clearly, Penny would have felt out of place if she could not have passed, and her passing was helped by being with the Europeans who made-up the characteristic clientele of Hannibal’s. Penny does tell one story of what she considered overt racism at a club door:

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I did go to one in Northbridge. I think it might have been Nightshift. I went there with a Spanish girl, a white Spanish girl. She was 16 at the time. And I was 19. And we got to the door, and they allowed her in, and they asked me for ID and then said no you can’t come in, and they wouldn’t give a reason. And they turned us both away in the end because she wouldn’t go in without me.

The reason for mentioning the Spanish girl’s and her own age is because at the time one had to be eighteen to be allowed into a club. Age was a good reason for not letting a person in when the real reason could not be spoken. In this case the age tactic did not work so the doorkeepers ended up simply not allowing Penny in. It is possible that thought she was Indigenous. The two other most used reasons for excluding people were drunkenness or wearing the wrong clothes. Donna explained that: ‘The dress code was one of the ways you controlled things in a big way’. This was the most straightforward way Indigenous Australians were kept out of nightclubs. Donna says: Highly unlikely that [Indigenous] kids would be approached to encourage them to go to nightclubs. Unless they knew someone who was nonIndigenous who could vouch for an Indigenous person by eg having gone to school with them, but he’s not getting in at the door. So, OK, you can vouch for him. And if we denied entry we would do it on your clothes.

Not allowing Indigenous Australians into the clubs was, then, a general policy. Gino, of Italian background, took the alcohol and clothes reasons at face value. When asked about racism he told the interviewer: ‘No. I think, to be honest, we got thrown out because we didn’t look tidy, we looked drunk, or if you were rowdy. You wouldn’t get let in. But I never saw any racism’. This was precisely what Gino and others, like Penny, were supposed to think. There was more racism the more a person’s colour deviated from the white norm, and if one was Indigenous. However, there were ways of disguising that racism. Gino comes closest to recognising the racialised construction of the nightclub scene when talking about the lack of presence of Indigenous Australians. He tells this story: Yes, I can remember speaking to—because he was a footballer—an Aboriginal guy in Robbo’s nightclub which I thought was actually strange because he was the only one there, the only Aboriginal person there. But, to be

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honest, that could be the only time I saw an Aboriginal person at a place where Italians or Europeans went. Yeah, I don’t really have a memory other than that one instance. And that maybe because he was famous and we had a chat. But I do remember meeting Brad Collard at Robbo’s.

Collard was a well-known Australian Rules footballer in Perth at a time before Perth had a team in the national league—the West Coast Eagles club was founded in 1986. He played for South Fremantle. It can be assumed that his fame was why he had been allowed into the nightclub.

Dancing; Black and White Samantha says that ‘there was dancing everywhere but [at Jules] just a different kind of dancing’. She is arguing that the music at Jules, the funk, disco and hip hop, required a form of dancing different from the dancing at clubs that played Top Forty tracks. She occasionally went to Pinocchio’s but: ‘It was good but different. You were not on the dancefloor all the time because you can’t dance to Shakin’ Stevens; well you can but not the way you want to’. Not the way Samantha wanted to dance. Dancing was an important aspect of the identity of the clubbers who saw themselves as black. David remarks that at Beethoven’s: ‘There were a lot of black dudes who really knew how to dance. I would be standing on the side watching because I was nowhere as good as that’. These black dudes were African-American sailors—though David assured us that the dancers also included black South Africans. Shakin’ Stevens was a British retro rocker. He thought of himself in the tradition of the early Elvis Presley and, indeed, before his own success had played Elvis at the peak of his career in a London West End stage show called Elvis!. Stevens’ tracks such as his remake of ‘Green Door’ and his self-composed ‘Oh Julie’ were characterised by a regular rock beat with little rhythmic complexity. It was music that could be easily danced to by repetitive foot movements with little body involvement. Such dancing was not Samantha’s idea of dancing, or that of the others who frequented Jules. Samantha explains: ‘At Jules because of the hip hop there was a lot of jiving, and sexy … compared to the others. Yeah, and a salsa kind of thing as well’. Samantha is trying to say that the dancing that went on at Jules, to African-American dance music, emphasised the hips, the pelvis and the body more generally rather than just the feet. It involved the whole body. She elaborates: ‘I’ve been to bogany sort of

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pubs; and I’ve done a bit of headbanging. And a jump up and down. Just different dances for different clubs, I suppose’. But not just different clubs. The distinction here is between what might be described as white dancing and black dancing. White dancing, typified by extreme versions of ballroom dancing, emphasises foot movements while the body, and especially the hips, is kept erect; there is no movement from the hips. In 1963 John Martin, writing about the United States, put it this way: ‘The deliberately maintained erectness of the European dancer’s spine is in marked contrast to the fluidity of the Negro dancer’s’ (cited in Stearns and Stearns 1968, p. 15). In a more general context John F. Kasson (1990, p. 147) has argued that: The physical control and self-discipline demanded by nineteenth-century etiquette were supported by equally exacting standards of emotional control. These ‘feeling rules’ formed a still-deeper level of etiquette governing social relations among the middle classes.

Physical self-control was central to the bourgeois etiquette that spread from the middle classes throughout British and white American society, and European society. Letting oneself go, physically or emotionally, was frowned upon. The impact on dancing was to make it more clinical. Writing about dancing in Britain in the first half of the century James Nott tells us: ‘The English style of dancing was primarily concerned with the perfect execution of steps, rather than the expression of the dancers’ mood or emotions’ (Nott 2015, p. 227). Dancing from the hips and pelvis implies a sensuality found in salsa, which Samantha mentions, and in African-American influenced dancing, but removed from respectable white dancing.5 Marshall and Jean Stearns explain: ‘African dance is centrifugal, exploding outward from the hips’ (Stearns and Stearns 1968, p. 15). They are taking African dance as the source of African-American dance. Shakin’ Stevens’ ‘Oh Julie’ was the kind of mainstream Top Forty track played in Pinocchio’s and the clubs that catered for Australians. It reached number 3 on the Australian singles chart in 1982. You could move your feet to it but not really your body. Whereas at Jules the boys would dance as well as the girls, this was not the case in the clubs that played Top Forty tracks. This was true not just of the Australian clubs but also of Hannibal’s. Gino tells us that:

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Hannibal’s was the same [as Pinocchio’s—the guys would stand around and watch]. The girls would do the dancing, the guys would do the looking. And if you were game you’d maybe try and ask someone to dance. Everywhere the Italian boys went; I don’t think the Italian boys were known for their dancing.

Asked what clubs he avoided, Gino refers to Exit. Exit opened shortly after Jules closed. It played a lot of African-American music. Birdie, the Lebanese-background DJ who had played much of the African-American dance music at Jules, was subsequently employed at Exit. In the early 1990s Exit became the hangout for some of the people who had gone to Jules and also for the young Vietnamese and south-east Asians whose parents had arrived in the wake of the ending of the White Australia policy as refugees, in the case of the Vietnamese who arrived in Australia after the conclusion of the Vietnam War in 1975, or as migrants. These people also were not identified as white. Gino says: Not so much avoid, as just didn’t feel comfortable. I remember we went to a place on Stirling Street, there was more Asians there. Yes, Exit, I think so. We didn’t avoid, but if you went there you definitely looked out of place. Like if you walked in and there were ten of you, you’d be the only Italians or Greeks or whatever. But there was a bit more dancing. It was very dance orientated. Because we weren’t into dancing, it wasn’t our thing, you know. So, you just went to check it out and we quickly moved away from there because, I think, whereas you could still go to Hannibal’s and not dance and have a good time, there was … even the guys were dancing. So, if you were a guy and not dancing [you stood out]. So that was somewhere we wouldn’t hang out too much.

Guys dancing made Gino, and other European males of their generation, indeed in Australian terms white males in general, feel uncomfortable. Music and its corollary, dancing, were more central to the lives of Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, as it was to African Americans, than it was in the lives of white Australians. Jacqui Malone (1996, p. 1) writes this about the African-American relationship with dancing: Albert Murray [in Stomping the Blues, p. 17] calls the African American public dance a ritual of purification, affirmation, and celebration. It helps drive the blues away and provides rich opportunities to symbolically challenge societal hierarchies by offering powers and freedoms that

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are impossible in ordinary life. At a dance, anyone with the right moves may become king or queen of the floor. It is within this ritual context—and other similarly charged ones—that social vernacular dance is extraordinarily significant and influential.

African-American dance styles were very important for the clubbers who went to Jules. They listened to radio shows like Curtis J Brown’s ‘Catch the Beat’ on the public community radio station 6NR where he played disco and early hip hop. In the early 1980s they watched on television syndicated American dance shows, the dance competition show Dance Fever, and Solid Gold which played African-American music, that is disco, and also had African-American dancers. Samantha suggests that the importance of music and dancing was handed down from their parents’ generation who used to dance to rock‘n’roll records: ‘I think our generation, we did like to dance’. Asked by the Anglo-Burmese interviewer, why did we dance? Samantha replies: I think because we saw our parents dance. … I think we were brought up … our parents’ generation, they all danced. And we had music as well at the house. We didn’t watch much TV and videos weren’t around. So, I think music was a huge part in our upbringing.

She goes on: ‘We had a lot of parties where people just got up and danced’. Samantha tells us about a white friend of hers, ‘a blonde bombshell’ called Michelle: ‘She would come to Jules but didn’t really like it that much’. However: She went to Pinocchio’s a few times. Yeah, she liked a different kind of music, I suppose. She’d dance, but she didn’t enjoy her dancing. She wasn’t as comfortable in her body than myself, I suppose. … Maybe she didn’t dance around the house like we did.

Samantha’s point about feeling comfortable in her body is important and goes back to our discussion of bodily discipline and etiquette. Before Jon, this article’s co-author, came to Australia from England in 1981 he asked someone who had just returned what he needed to know. The returnee’s reply was that if Jon liked reggae he should tape his collection and bring it because reggae was practically unknown in Australia, and that people don’t dance at parties. Jon found both pieces of advice to be correct and invaluable. Not just Jamaican music but African-American music could

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not be heard on commercial radio, and in Jon’s subsequent over thirty years in Australia he remembers only one party where white Australians danced. That Samantha’s family and friends did dance at parties suggests the important difference in attitudes to music and dancing that played out in the difference between Jules, the black club and both the wog clubs and the Australian clubs.

The African-American Sailors The American warships that docked in Fremantle were integrated. White and African-American sailors would go into Fremantle and then on to Perth looking for entertainment. Donna remarks on the spending power of the Americans: When they came in, seriously, you’ve got no idea how much money we used to put through. It would be nothing to put through 20 or 30 thousand dollars a night in somewhere like Jules which is a very small club.

As we have noted, Jules attracted the African-American sailors. When the American sailors came to Perth the white and black sailors went to different clubs.6 Thomas says: The black American sailors would tend to stick together more and go to the R&B clubs whereas the white American sailors would go to the clubs that played the more contemporary Top Forty-type music. They’d go to Pinocchio’s or Gobbles, or places like that.

Given that the remnants of the White Australia policy had only been abandoned a decade earlier and there were very few people of African descent in Perth, it is understandable that the African-American sailors would stay close to each other. We have already explained that African-American music and dance styles, and indeed fashions, were of great, if not central, importance to the clubbers who went to Jules. The African-American servicemen would find their way to Beethoven’s and when Jules replaced Beethoven’s to Jules. David notes the influence of the African-American sailors: ‘I think a lot of [the dance styles] came in from the American boats that came through’. Samantha amplifies this:

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We had a lot of American black sailors coming in when the American boats; [they] used to come in quite often back then. They were in there and, it’s err, very, like black music. I suppose that’s what I was into. I liked breakdancing, and watching the guys dance as well. They just knew how to dance there compared to [Samantha pauses] … if you go over to Hannibal’s or that sort of place, they just—they danced but they didn’t have the moves as much.

Later in her interview Samantha expands on this thought: The thing is not many guys knew how to move so when the Americans came at least they had the moves so that’s why the girls wanted to, you know, dance with them. The American blacks had the moves so you’d go dance with them and they’d sort of push you to dance more different and that kind of thing. ‘Cause being a female you’d kind of follow their moves and they’d lead you into different moves. That’s why it was fun. The girls wanted to learn how to move their bodies in a different way.

We should be reminded here of Malone’s comments about the importance of vernacular dance in African-American society. The American sailors, both black and white, had a reputation for treating women well. Samantha again: ‘You saw the girls more then. The guys … didn’t want to go out so much. Yeah, I don’t think they [the local guys] were too happy when they came’. In 1981 Merrill Findley published an article about the presence of the American sailors in Perth in which she wrote, starting with a quotation from a visiting American: ‘Everyone wants to take you on, especially if you are in uniform.’ Which is probably why this particular ‘big, bad marine’ was in his civilian clothes, although they made him no less conspicuous. In a dove grey crepe suit that clung in all the right places and a delicately floral vest, he looked like a television stereotype of a Harlem spiv. He was, in fact, a married man from Hawaii with five children whom he missed desperately. But he also loved dancing and beautiful women, and at nightclubs like Pinocchio’s he had enjoyed both, despite what he called ‘harassment’ from local males whose pride was hurt to see their potential dates preferring the company of a good-looking foreigner.

This sailor was most likely a native Hawai’ian and, although darkskinned, would seem to have associated with the white American sailors. Commenting on the attraction of the American sailors for the local girls,

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Samantha says: ‘I don’t know, just being spoilt maybe. Having a guy spoil them. Buying them flowers—a lot of flowers got sold on that day [when the sailors arrived]’. The Americans were well-dressed and were known for treating women better than the Australian men. Added to these characteristics, the African Americans brought the black culture that Perth ‘blacks’ found so appealing. In addition, given that the recent ending of the White Australia policy, African Americans held a certain exoticism for Australian girls of whatever colour. Thomas suggests the local female interest in all the American sailors with the additional interest in the African Americans. Asked if the girls expressed more interest in the African-American sailors, he says: ‘Oh, absolutely. Yes. And they would draw the girls away from the local guys who would get a bit cheesed off’. He continues: ‘The girls would gravitate towards the sailors’. The white or black sailors? ‘Oh, both, yes. And the local guys always used to complain: “The sailors are in town so I’m not going out because I’m not going to get a chance to talk to any girls anyway”’. Talking about the early 1980s, Gino agrees with Thomas’s assessment: I do remember African-American sailors coming in [to Toto’s, the pizzeria he worked in when he was at school; Toto’s was opposite Beethoven’s]. Probably because at that time you didn’t see African Americans in Perth. So, you’d always know when the American sailors were in, or you’d hear it on the radio: ‘USS Enterprise is in’. You’d see them. There was always girls around them. Always dressed in their uniforms. I do remember that.

It is clear that the African-American sailors were even more desirable than the white sailors, at least among some girls. For the ‘blacks’ of Perth actual African Americans did not disappoint. Not only did they bring a lifetime’s experience of dancing in their own culture but they also brought more up-to-date black music than was available in Perth. David explains: I think when they came through the DJs used to let them take over the DJ box and play their music, you know. A lot [of what they played] was funk. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ [The Sugar Hill Gang; released in 1980]. Yes, there was a lot of funk [played by the black American sailors] that you didn’t have here [in Perth].

Donna makes a similar point:

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Oftentimes [the African-American sailors] would bring stuff [ie records] because they would have their radio stations on the boats. Those boats were cities. They were massive. … US sailors introduced a better brand of disco … definitely the funk, so Grandmaster Flash [‘The Message’ was released in 1982] not Niggers with Attitude [Straight Outta Compton was released in 1988] not to that extent, but the beginnings of what was coming out of Chicago [Chicago House]; what was coming out of New York [UDM].

The African-American sailors brought the music up-to-date and increased the quality of the dancing. No wonder the African Americans were much sought after by the girls; especially the girls who identified as black.

And Then It Ended Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules all closed in 1990 marking an important moment of transition for nightclubs that catered for an ethnic or racialised clientele in Perth. Hannibal’s owners have told this story of the club’s demise: Hannibals [sic] was a very successful nightclub playing top mainstream music by resident DJs. However, in late 1986 we lost the manager and key staff of Hannibal’s, when they left to start a new club ‘Alligators’ at a venue some six kilometres away. Even though we maintained exactly the same music format in the same premises with the same DJs, the competition caused by the defection of our management resulted in the business deteriorating rapidly. (Hardie, email correspondence, August 10, 2007, p. 14)

Having soldiered on for another two years, the club shut and after extensive renovations reopened successfully as Havana’s. In this guise the club attracted more Anglo-Celtic Australians. The question, then, is what happened to the Italo-Australians who had previously frequented the club. The club’s owners’ narrative implies that many of them moved on to Alligators and that this was the root cause of the loss of clientele. This seems unlikely. Thomas identifies the crowd at Alligators: ‘Alligators nightclub on Charles Street was a similar club to Pinocchio’s and that was more working class’. Thomas clearly did not experience Alligators as full of the Italo-Australians who had left Hannibal’s. We would argue

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that a more probable explanation is that many of the generation of ItaloAustralians who had made Hannibal’s their own club had got married and left the scene and that fewer members of the following generation were interested in going to a club dominated by their ethnic peers. Certainly some Italo-Australians still went to Havana’s as this comment on a chat site indicates: Oh, and Havana’s, famous for the big bling-wearing (before 5 kilos of gold was bling) Italians who always managed to feel every girl’s ass on their way through the crowd. My main memory (apart from the copius [sic] amount of grog drunk) was all the girls always complaining about getting felt up. But they were the ONLY mob back then, so you just went OK. (davind 2006)

However, in the new Havana’s these Italo-Australians were in the minority. The next generation had less need for a nightclub of their own to establish an Italo-Australian network. A similar argument might be made for Jules—though here the club’s demise also coincided with a change in the music scene. By 1990 an increasing number of young white Australians were appreciating R&B and hip hop. They were looking for places where that music was played. When asked if she saw many white Australians at Jules, Penny said: ‘There were a few. Towards the end, the early 90s, there were more and more. Towards the end [that is, when Jules closed] there were more’. As more Anglo-Celtic, white Australians went down the stairs into Jules so the club lost its special character as a meeting place for Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, for Perth’s ‘black’ population. Their minority music, the African-American music that signified the clubbers’ outsider status, was being taken up and mainstreamed by Anglo-Celtic Australians. At Palladium, the owners must have seen the music changes that were happening and worked to accommodate them: When 1990 began, the venue we knew as Berlin was a club called Palladium and was the Red Parrot before that. Palladium was one of the more popular clubs in Perth at the time with commercial dance music being played by resident DJs such as Rob M, Steve Spinner and the late great Mario Tavelli. A few blocks away was Network. In a venue many younger clubbers knew in recent years as Rise which is now home to Air night club. Network was

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the place to go for more underground dance music with DJs Ken Weyden & Miggy playing early techno & house. Both clubs were owned by the same company. In October 1990, the clubs swapped. (‘About Berlin Revival’, n.d.)

Palladium became Berlin and Berlin became, the same site tells us, ‘the heart and soul of the early Perth rave scene’. Network started out playing the same kind of music as Jules had done. Penny explains: ‘There was a club called Network—this was in the early 90s—which was after Jules had closed down, and basically most of the Jules crowd went to Network’. However, Network rapidly picked up on the new Electronic Dance Music (EDM) music. As Lee (2005, p. 46) writes: With the phenomenal rise of electronic music and rave culture in the United Kingdom and Europe in the late 1980s, Perth also experienced its own parallel outbreak of patrons who demanded all-nighter clubs where they could, quite simply, dance. With the death of disco, clubbing aficionados demanded spaces where they could be lost in oblivion—which was also partially due to casual use of drugs to reach altered states of (un)consciousness—and which could not be easily found in the straight ‘meat markets’.

The reference to straight meat markets is more than likely to the clubs like Pinocchio’s and Gobbles where Anglo-Celtic Australians went. DJ 2rip (2009) tells us that: ‘On October 13, 1990 the first official rave was held in Perth that was titled NRG and held at the Network Dance Club on James Street[,] Northbridge’. Palladium was transformed into a specialised music club for ravers, the clientele differentiated by music not ethnicity. The transformation in the music scene where African-American music began to be mainstreamed, shows up in the highly conservative, because it is made-up of total sales over the year, ARIA end of year charts around fifteen years later. The end of year singles chart for 2005 included six R&B and hip-hop tracks by artists such as Usher, Taio Cruz and Rhianna and a seventh track by Katy Perry on which Snoop Dogg, the rapper, featured. After 1990 the nightclubs which had become the homes for groups of ethnic and racial clubbers had served their purpose of providing a site for identity construction and reinforcement for these ethnicised and racialised, mostly second-generation migrant, young nightclubbers.

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The exception was the new nightclub Exit, where the young, secondgeneration Vietnamese and south-east Asians went. It was the exception that highlights our argument. Official multiculturalism as envisaged by Fraser, and subsequently the Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, had another decade to run (see Stratton 2011). One thing it had achieved was a revaluation of cultures constructed as ethnic which in turn had legitimated the nightclubs that flourished in Perth in the 1980s. Some of these nightclubs functioned as extensions of ethnic/racial communities. The gradual dissolution of the White Australia policy and its final abandonment in the early 1970s produced a category of people in Australia whom many white Australians, both Anglo-Celtic and ethnic, regarded as non-white and therefore as Other. The second generation of these migrants often identified as black and, as we have seen, found a reference in African Americans and their music. By the early 1990s this music was being taken up by young white Australians and the clubbers who had gone to Jules were moving on, staking a claim to a place in an Australia increasingly accepted, albeit problematically by such politicians as Pauline Hanson and those that voted for her party, as being multiracial.

Notes 1. The research used in this chapter is based on eight interviews and the personal recollections of one of the authors, Panizza Allmark. The interviewees include two white Australians, one male with a Polish background, and one female with an English background; two Italo-Australians, one male and one female; one male Anglo-Indian and two female AngloBurmese. In addition one Anglo-Australian woman who worked in the nightclub industry in the 1980s was interviewed. She provides an account counter to the masculine voices that have discussed the scene in the popular press. As the purpose of the chapter is to discuss k nightclubs in Perth, a topic not previously examined through an academic lens and specifically in relation to cultural diversity, we have interviewed people of culturally diverse backgrounds who have varying identifications in the terms of official multiculturalism and who were members of that scene. The interviewees were family, friends and colleagues of Panizza Allmark and they, in turn, recommended further possible interviewees in a version of snowball sampling.

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2. In 2003 Shane Homan published his doctoral work on the impact of government policy on live music venues in Sydney. This fine volume set the tone for much of the work that followed over the next decade or so. This has included Ian Rogers’ article (2008, pp. 639–649) on the Indie live music scene in Brisbane and Ben Gallen’s in depth study (2012, pp. 35– 50) of the Oxford Tavern, a live music venue in Wollongong. Much of this work is influenced by creative industry concerns about the importance of music production in Australia and the ways this might be protected and optimised both for artists and audiences. 3. See, for example, Ed Montano’s article (2009, pp. 81–93) on what he calls ‘post-disco dance music’ based on ethnographic work Montano carried out between 2002 and 2006, and Christine Siokou’s doctoral thesis (2010) which was based on an ethnographic account of the Melbourne rave scene around the turn of the twenty-first century. 4. Here we are using definitions of ethnicity and race that directly relate to the Australian experience. Put simply, ethnicity refers to groups identified as white who have identifiable cultures of their own; race refers to groups identified as non-white in the Australian cultural imaginary. As the category of whiteness has changed over time so those identified as racially non-white has also changed. In this account ethnicity and race are both discursive constructions. 5. Developing in New York around the 1960s, salsa itself has strong African-related dance influences including Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean (McMains 2015). 6. There is a history of American servicemen in Perth. They were present during World War II on the submarine base in Fremantle. Their impact seems to have been similar to that during the 1980s. Joseph Christiansen (2009) writes: ‘A fresh wave of excitement hit in 1942–43, when American servicemen and their admirers flocked to existing halls and hotels, and packed out fast-appearing new haunts such as the “Swan Dive” ballroom or the “Silver Dollar” cabaret bar.’ Some of the American servicemen were African-American. Stephen Kinnane (2003, p. 309) discusses their presence in Shadow Lines. They were welcomed by the local Indigenous community while, as Kinnane writes, ‘the entire population of Perth was paranoid about black American servicemen interacting with whites, and the Mirror, the scandal sheet of the day, ran stories about supposed liaisons between “Negro” servicemen and white women.’

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References 2rip. 2009. Episode #26: Deep audio release [1999]. The Oldskool series: Study of EDM from house to hardcore 1964–2003. Sdravers.net, March 19. http:// www.sdravers.net/showthread.php?t=45824. Accessed 10 September 2019. About Berlin Reunion. n.d. Oneil.com.au. http://oneil.com.au/berlin/about. html. Accessed 10 September 2019. Ang, Ien, Gay Hawkins, and Lamia Dabboussy. 2008. The SBS story: The challenge of diversity. Kensington: UNSW Press. Baldassar, Loretta. 1999. Marias and marriage: Ethnicity, gender and sexuality among Italo-Australian youth. Journal of Sociology 35 (1): 1–22. Blunt, Alison. 2005. Domicile and diaspora: Anglo-Indian women and the spatial politics of home. Malden: Blackwell. Brabazon, Tara. 2005. Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its popular music. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Castles, Stephen, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, and Michael Morrissey. 1988. Mistaken identity: Multiculturalism and the demise of nationalism in Australia. Sydney: Pluto Press. Christiansen, Joseph. 2009. Nightlife. In The historical encyclopedia of Western Australia, ed. Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Colquhoun, Simon D. 2004. Experiences of Anglo-Burmese migrants in Perth, Western Australia: A substantive of marginalisation, adaption and community. PhD Thesis, Edith Cowan University. Coughran, Chris, and Niall Lucy. 2009. Vagabond holes: David McComb & the Triffids. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. davind. 2006. Does anyone remember the good ol’ HAVANNAS. Inthemix.com.au, November 30. http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/ archive/index.php/t-184313.html. Accessed 10 September 2019. D’Cruz, Glen. 2009. The good Australians: Anglo-Indians, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. In The politics and culture of globalisation: India and Australia, ed. Hans Löfgren and Prakash Sarangi, 201–219. New Delhi: Social Science Press. Echols, Alice. 2010. Hot stuff: Disco and the remaking of American culture. New York: W. W. Norton. Filkentscher, Kai. 2000. ‘You better work’: Underground dance music in New York City. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Findlay, Merrill. 1981. Over sexed, over paid and over here: American sailors in Perth. Perth: Swan Publishing, December. http://merrillfindlay.com/non-fic tion-2/over-sexed-over-paid-and-over-here. Accessed 16 December 2019. Foster, Brendan. 2016. Golden age of Perth nightclubs kept West Coast Eagles out until all hours. WA Today, June 3. http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-

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news/golden-age-of-perth-nightclubs-kept-west-coast-eagles-out-until-allhours-20160527-gp5reb.html. Accessed 16 December 2019. Galbally, Frank. 1978. Report of the review of post arrival programs and services for migrants: Migrant services and programs. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/gal bally_1.pdf. Accessed 16 December 2019. Gallen, Ben. 2012. Gatekeeping night spaces: The role of booking agents in creating ‘local’ live music venues and scenes. Australian Geographer 43 (1): 35–50. Gunew, Sneja. 1994. Framing marginality: Multicultural literary studies. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Leichhardt: Pluto Press. Hardie, Graham. 2007. PPCA Submission. Email correspondence and attachment, 1–38, August 10. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&sou rce=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwiYy9ncyuvPAhVMy2MKHcWnCwkQFgg gMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fregisters.accc.gov.au%2Fcontent%2FtrimFile. phtml%3FtrimFileTitle%3DD07%2B76227.pdf%26trimFileFromVersionId% 3D850057%26trimFileName%3DD07%2B76227.pdf&usg=AFQjCNE8B RHl-Yt1RxFgaUhkVlTjpH6w7Q. Accessed 10 September 2019. Homan, Shane. 2003. The Mayor’s a square: Live music and law and order in Sydney. Newtown: Local Consumption Publications. Jordan, Kirrily, and Jock Collins. 2012. Symbols of ethnicity in a multiethnic precinct: Marketing Perth’s Northbridge for cultural consumption. In Selling ethnic neighborhoods: The rise of neighborhoods as places of leisure and consumption, ed. Volkan Aytar and Jan Rath, 120–137. London: Routledge. Jupp, James. 2001. The Australian people: An encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasson, John F. 1990. Rudeness and civility: Manners in nineteenth-century urban America. New York: Hill & Wang. Kinnane, Stephen. 2003. Shadow lines. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Lawrence, Tim. 2004. Love saves the day: A history of American dance music culture, 1970–1979. Durham: Duke University Press. Lee, Christina. 2005. Party people in the house(s): The hobos of history. In Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its popular music, ed. Tara Brabazon, 43–52. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Lopez, Mark. 2000. The origins of multiculturalism in Australian politics 1945– 1975. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Malone, Jacqui. 1996. Steppin’ on the blues: The visible rhythms of African American dance. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Martin, Denis-Constant. 2013. Sounding the Cape: Music, identity and politics in South Africa. South Africa: African Minds Publishers.

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McMains, Juliet E. 2015. Spinning mambo into salsa: Caribbean dance in global commerce. New York: Oxford University Press. Megalogenis, George. 2003. Faultlines: Race, work and the politics of changing Australia. Melbourne: Scribe. Mishra, Vijay. 2012. What was multiculturalism? A critical retrospect. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Montano (ed.). 2009. DJ culture in the commercial Sydney dance music scene. DanceCult 1 (1): 81–93. Nott, James. 2015. Going to the Palais: A social and cultural history of dancing and dance halls in Britain 1918–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogers, Ian. 2008. ‘You’ve got to go to gigs to get gigs’: Indie musicians, eclecticism and the Brisbane scene. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22 (5): 639–649. Shapiro, Peter. 2005. Turn the beat around: The history of disco. London: Faber & Faber. Siokou, Christine. 2010. ‘This is not a rave’: An ethnography of changes in the Melbourne rave/dance party scene, 1996–2006. PhD Thesis, Curtin University. http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jump-full&local_ base=gen01-era02&object_id=202592. Accessed 16 December 2019. Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. 1968. Jazz dance: The story of American vernacular dance. New York: Macmillan. Stratton, Jon. 1998. Race daze: Australia in identity crisis. Leichhardt: Pluto Press. Stratton, Jon. 2007. Australian rock: Essays on popular music. Perth: Network Books. Stratton, Jon. 2011. Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Taylor, Roxanne. 2011. Maher’s in a club of his own. Business News, June 2. https://www.businessnews.com.au/article/Maher-s-in-a-club-of-his-own. Accessed 16 December 2019. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Trainer, Adam. 2016a. ‘Making do in ways that we hadn’t done before’: The early popular music industry in Perth. Journal of Popular Music Studies 28 (2): 248–273. Trainer, Adam. 2016b. Perth punk and the construction of urbanity in a suburban city. Popular Music 35 (1): 100–117. Walker, Clint. 1994. Highway to Hell: The life and death of AC/DC legend Bon Scott. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Walker, Rebecca. 2012. Black cool: One thousand streams of blackness. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press.

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Panizza Allmark is the Associate Dean of Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia. She is an Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies, where she also heads the Media, Culture and Society research group. Alongside this, Panizza is the chief editor of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, published by Taylor and Francis. Panizza has published in the field of visual culture, popular music, gender and identity politics.

CHAPTER 3

With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness, Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience

In a paper I published in 1999 I made a series of connections between Christianity, shared moral values and whiteness in Australia (Stratton 1999). In 2006 Holly Randell-Moon picked up where I had left off and in a fine article pursued these ideas in the context of John Howard’s new emphasis on Australia as a Christian nation-state, a theme he developed, as Randell-Moon explains, through the early years of the 2000s, having become prime minister in 1996. Since that time, and especially with the election of the Abbott coalition government in 2013, the importance of Christianity in Australian political rhetoric has become more obvious and its use in relation to claims about Australian values more strident. For example, Farida Fozdar has shown that the Australian Citizenship Test, introduced in 2007, makes the assumption that Australian values are founded in Christianity (Fozdar 2011; see also Tate 2009). At the same time the demonisation of Islam, but by implication any other religion that appears to threaten the hegemony of Christianity in Australia, again begun by the Howard government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has become more entrenched. In 1999 I argued that:

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_3

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What Australian multiculturalism has to confront is not the challenge of racialisation and racism per se, though these are crucial problems for the national polity, but what is being played out in this racialization—that is, the fear of moral diversity and the problem of how to manage it. (p. 182)

Since I wrote that, as Randell-Moon so well illustrates in her discussion of the ways that the Howard government treated asylum seekers who converted to Christianity, there has been a retreat from any attempt to deal with the problem of moral diversity. Rather, there has been a reassertion of the moral hegemony which, with Abbott in particular, is being more and more obviously identified with Christianity. Given this conservative shift, along with the abandonment of official multiculturalism, it is time to investigate more thoroughly the links between Christianity in Australia and whiteness, and the ways in which certain moral values, asserted as Christian, became embedded in Australian society. The origin of this chapter lies in a meditation on a statement made by a protester at one of the Reclaim Australia rallies held in a number of Australian cities on 4 April 2015. Shouting directly into the microphone of a television reporter the man enunciated very clearly: ‘Jesus not Islam’. Members of Reclaim Australia describe themselves as ‘patriotic Australians’ who protest against ‘Sharia law, Halal tax, and Islam’. While appearing to be non-religiously Australian, Reclaim Australia is closely connected with a Christian organisation called Rise Up Australia which is headed by Daniel Nalliah who is also head of Catch a Fire Christian ministries. Already we can identify the slippage which will run through my discussion in this chapter between asserting the secular values of Australians and taking a Christian stand against what are claimed as key elements of Islam, the observance of Sharia and the paying of a Halal tax, and then indeed, Islam itself. As it happens, there is no such thing as a halal tax however the claim that there is, and that this might be used to fund Muslim terrorists, is an important element in the condemnation of Australian Muslims (see Hussein 2015). What statement is ‘Jesus not Islam’ trying to make? In his 2005 Christmas message, the then prime minister John Howard said: ‘Christmas of course celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, a man whose life and example has given us a value system which remains the greatest force for good in our community’ (Howard 2005a). The gospels have little to say about Jesus’s life, certainly little about his private life. What the gospels concentrate on are the main events such as Jesus’s birth, the

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miracles he performed, his parables, the Last Supper, his death and his resurrection. There is even a debate over whether Jesus married. However the life that it is claimed was lived by Jesus becomes the basis for an entire value system; ethics become translated into morality. The ‘us’ in Howard’s statement promotes another slippage. Does this ‘us’ have a global quality, a quality limited to Christians, or limited to Australians? It is an ‘us’ that is in the interpretation of the reader. What it does is allow precisely the slippage between Christians and Australians which Howard had been promoting for the previous five years. By allying Australian values to Jesus, Howard gives them an absolutist moral quality. At the same time, Howard’s Christian Jesus would seem not to have anything to do with the Jesus in the Qur’an who, for Muslims, is a version of the Christian Jesus. Howard’s statement precisely precurses the rallying cry of the unknown Reclaim Australia supporter: ‘Jesus not Islam’.

Introduction In this chapter I want to start by discussing the relationship between Christianity in modernity and race. I will argue that Christianity was renovated as a white religion, a religion that was not just deeply imbricated with the developing idea of whiteness as a racialised category but, rather, was understood as an expression of whiteness. This will include a consideration of the way the ideology of the supremacy of the white race was linked with an understanding of Christianity as legitimating that supremacy. From this position, colonialism included the giving of Christianity to the lower races as a way of elevating them. In England, the Church of England was conceived as the established religion, the official religion of the state. Its origin lay in Henry VIII’s severance of Christianity in England from Catholicism and the dominion of the pope. Over time the moral order of the Church of England became expressed in the middle-class values of the English. Stuart Hall (1992a, p. 14) offers an excellent example of this in his discussion of what he calls cultural racism. He writes: Two years ago the white parents of a school in Dewsbury withdrew their children from a predominantly black state school. One reason they gave for doing so was that they wanted their children to have a Christian education. They then added that they were not, as it happens, Christian believers at all, they simply regarded Christianity as an essential part of the English cultural

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heritage. They regarded the Anglican Church as part of the English way of life, rather like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

In this understanding of Anglicanism it is embedded in the cultural practice of English/British civilisation. What these parents wanted for their children were the values they assumed were inherent in a Christian, for which here read Anglican, education—and this was white not black. In Australia, as I shall go on to explain, and other settler colonies, Anglicanism was transferred as an integral aspect of the developing Australian culture. Anglican Christianity was understood as the foundation of the English values it communicates. It is, then, no wonder that it is linked with assimilationism. Complementing the whiteness of modern Christianity, to be an Anglican Christian meant, ideally, to be English, and white. Here we will see the foundation of the so-called common values of Australian society. It is these common values which subsequently were identified as Australian values leading to much discussion of what it meant to be unAustralian,1 that were redesignated as Christian values. This alignment of Australian values and Christian values was reaffirmed through the ideological work done by John Howard when he was prime minister during 2001, and later the work done by Peter Costello, the Treasurer, starting as it happens before either the asylum seeker affair now identified with the MV Tampa in August of that year and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the September of the same year. What I will be arguing here is that the move to identify these values as Christian was an effect of the claims made by Samuel Huntington in a much discussed article published in the American journal Foreign Affairs in 1993 on the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the subsequent book, published in 1996 titled The Clash of Civilizations and New World Order. Howard and Costello cast Australia as a Judeo-Christian country and its values as being an expression of that Christianity. The impact of this development was to marginalise members of other religions, most especially, for reasons I shall elaborate, Muslims. Howard and Costello’s strategy was to emphasise Australia as having a unitary value system. In this they criticised the claims about Australian diversity founded in the acceptance of the country as multicultural. As we shall see, importantly the governmental discussions of multiculturalism had little or nothing to say about religion, focusing rather on culture and celebrating cultural diversity. Howard and Costello, following Huntington, developed a position where values were founded in, and an expression of, religious practice. Interestingly, one

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reason for the lack of discussion of religion in multiculturalism was that the groups first identified as the target for multicultural intervention, Italians, Greeks, Maltese and other ‘white’ migrant groups from the postSecond World War period, were all Christian of various denominations, mostly Catholic and Orthodox. I will then go on to discuss how Islam and Muslims have been constructed in Australia. Using the ideas in Lynette Finch’s book, The Classing Gaze, where she works with a Foucauldian prism to write about the middle-class moralising of the working class during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I shall suggest that, similarly, there is an ongoing attempt to moralise Australian Muslims. In the early twenty-first century, Australia has been constructed as an outpost of Christian civilisation attempting to Christianise Muslim Australians to preserve what are argued to be Australian, Christian values. It is in this context we can understand Pauline Hanson’s much derided statement in an interview on ABC radio in 2007 that she had no problem with Christian Muslims, ‘But if people believe in the way of life under the Koran, that concerns me greatly’ (Packham 2007). As has often been the case with Hanson, she spelled out what Howard would rather leave implicit, here exposing the fundamental paradox of his political move. Hanson would welcome Muslims provided they had Christian, and therefore Australian, values which, of course, would mean that they were no longer Muslims. The process of moralising Muslims in Australia required them to be seen as unAustralian or, at the least, not Australian, regardless of their actual status as members of the Australian nation. This alienation slipped to include all people of Arab background regardless of their religious beliefs. The period around 2000 and 2001 saw two notorious serial gang rape episodes, the so-called Sydney gang rapes of late 2000 and the Ashfield gang rapes of late 2001 and the first half of 2002, both constructed as being between Muslim men, who were not identified as Australian, and white, Australian girls. Muslim men were stereotyped in the classic colonial way as being unable to control their desires and especially their desires for white women. This Othering of Muslim men was paralleled by an Othering of Muslim women who were constructed as passive, unequal, unable to fight for themselves and throw off the yoke of the hijab and naqib. At bottom, here was a critique of the Muslim family very similar to the critique which Finch discusses in relation to the working class, only now it was not the middle-class critique of the lower-class family

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but an Australian critique of the Muslim family in Australia. The assumption being that the Australian working class is now moralised and has the same morality as the middle class. In each case there is a claim that young people, in the earlier case examined by Finch young women, in the present case young men, are not being properly brought up which means not being morally brought up. This returns us to ‘Jesus not Islam’.

Christianity and Whiteness Christianity was not originally white. This changed in early modernity, starting around the time of the first voyages to Africa and the appropriation of the ‘New World’. At this time, actually before the deployment of the discourse of race, Christianity became understood as the religion of Europeans. Willie Jennings (2010, pp. 33–34) explains the process: European Christians reconfigured the vision of God’s attention and love for Israel, that is, they reconfigured a vision of Israel’s election. If Israel had been the visibly elect of God, then that visibility in the European imagination migrated without return to a new home shaped now by new visible markers. If Israel’s election had been the compass around which Christian identity gained its bearings and gained its trajectory, now with this reconfiguration the body of the European would be the compass marking divine election. More importantly, that new elected body, the white body, would be the discerning body, able to detect holy effects and saving grace.

Jennings dates this shift to the movement out from Europe to the New World, and to the East. We need to remember that through the Middle Ages Jerusalem continued to be thought of as the centre of the world. For example, mappae mundi, maps of the world, were circular with Jerusalem, the sacred city for Jews as well as Christians, at the centre. For Christians, as Alessandro Scafi (2015, p. 262) explains, ‘the holy city was not only the scene of the pivotal event at the centre of history but also the geographical centre of the earth, or as Jerome put it in his commentary on Ezekial, the navel of the world’. Christianity was still thought of as having originated in Judaism. As Jennings notes, where the Jews, understood in historical and religious terms as Israel, were the chosen people of God, Christians arrogated this claim for themselves. However, the reconfiguration of the

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geographical domain in what became known as the West, as the continent of Europe, coupled with the beginnings of exploration outside of this area, changed the way that Christians thought of themselves (see Hall 1992b, pp. 275–330). Pim den Boer et al. (1995, p. 34) tell us that: It was only in the course of the fifteenth century that the word Europe came to be used frequently by a large number of authors. From then on the identification of Europe with Christendom also became usual.

In 1464 ‘the Czech King George of Podˇebrady proposed to the French King Louis XI that a league of Christian nations should be formed’ (Wen 2013, p. 109). This was in reaction to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. The Ottomans were Muslims. I shall come back to the importance of this later. Here we can note that the idea of Europe evolved to a significant extent in opposition to the threat of the Muslim Other. Gerardus Mercator introduced what became known as the Mercator projection which offers a flat and rectilinear view of the world in 1569. This replaced the Jerusalem-centred mappae mundi. The new maps were not founded in a Christian understanding of the world but, rather, ultimately showed a secular world explored and conquered by Europeans. What Jennings sums up is how these and other developments translated the foundation of Christianity to the European body which, as he writes, became the white body as the discourse of race evolved. Jennings illustrates his argument using the ideas of the late sixteenth century Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano. Valignano was responsible for all the Jesuit missionary work across India, Japan and adjacent countries. Jennings writes that he developed a comparative analysis … [which] informed his classification of the people appropriate for ecclesial service. Most appropriate were pure bred Portuguese (that is, Europeans). … Clearly beyond the veil of possibility for service were those whom Valignano termed the ‘dusky races, [as they are] stupid and vicious’, and those of Jewish blood. Valignano’s analysis proved decisive, as Rome agreed with all his recommendations for recruitment and the formation of priests in and for mission lands, especially Jesuits. (Jennings 2010, p. 35)

Here we can see the racial hierarchy that was becoming normalised in Europe.

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Richard Dyer (1997, p. 17) makes a similar point about the whiteness of Christianity: ‘[N]ot only did Christianity become the religion, and religious export, of Europe, indelibly marking its culture and consciousness, it has also been thought and felt in distinctly white ways for most of its history’. Dyer (1997, p. 17) goes on to list a number of racialising aspects of Christianity including ‘the gentilising and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting’ and ‘the ready appeal to the God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism’. Ivan Hannaford (1996, pp. 4–6) argues that it was not until the late seventeenth century that the word ‘race’ began to take on the meanings we associate with it and these did not become consolidated until after the American and French revolutions. Victor Anderson (2012, p. 200) takes Jennings’ argument a step further. He suggests that: For Jennings the mimesis of supersessionism does not only reach its apex in a theological history of salvation and dissimilitude within Christian Europe and its alterns (Jews, Muslim and savages), but within its own history of mimesis, the theological doctrine recoiled into a philosophy of history in which modern Europe supersedes all prior histories of peoples and races. Supersessionism organizes the history of peoples by progressive ages and stages until arriving at civilization, which means Western European civilization and culture (whiteness). Hegel’s philosophy of history stands as a monumental achievement of this mimesis of supersessionism.

Anderson’s point here is that Christian theology combined with a new history which placed European peoples, white people, at the apex of civilisation. On the one hand, these people are not only different, they are saved. On the other hand, Jews, Muslims and savages are not only nonwhite, they represent everything antithetical to the Christian order on which civilisation is founded. They are damned. Charles Mills (1997, p. 11) spells out what this means in terms of what he calls the racial contract. He writes that: The Racial Contract is that set of formal or informal agreements or metaagreements … between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by shifting ‘racial’ … criteria C1, C2, C3 … as ‘white’, and coextensive … with the class of full persons, to categorise the remaining subset of humans as ‘non-white’ and of a different and inferior moral status.

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We need to pause here to recognise that people identified as non-white are not only Other, they have an inferior morality. This moral inferiority was thought of in the first instance in Christian terms: Initially the intellectual framework [for subjugation] was a theological one with normative inclusion and exclusion manifesting itself as the demarcation between Christians and heathens. … A Eurocentrically formed conception of rationality made it coextensive with acceptance of the Christian message, so that rejection was proof of bestial irrationality. (Mills 1997, pp. 21–22)

As a belief system, Christianity may not itself have been rational but it worked within a rational order though Stuart Hall (1992b, p. 199) notes that Max Weber describes modern, expansionary Europe as a function of the ‘rational restlessness’ to be found ‘especially in Puritanism’. Hall argues that this was not solely the province of Puritanism but could be found less overtly in medieval Christianity where it encouraged ‘a drive for moral and social improvement even against worldly authority’ (1992b, p. 199). It was considered reasonable that ‘heathens’ should become Christians once they had been offered the Christian world. While the Enlightenment pitted the reason of science against the belief of the Christian religion, belief in the Christian religion was rational as against all other belief systems. Moreover, from Aristotle onwards, reason was a characteristic of the human. Those who departed from reason were less than human. Thus, those who were offered and rejected the Christian message must be unreasonable and therefore could not be properly human. Mills (1997, p. 59) again: One early seventeenth century minister characterized Native Americans as ‘having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion, more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly [than] that unmanned wild Countrey, which they range rather than inhabite, captivated also to Satan’s tyranny.’ In later, secular versions … [there] is a raced incapacity for rationality, abstract thought, cultural development, civilization in general …

We need to remember here that Anderson listed Jews, Muslims and savages as the Others of Christianity. As we shall see, all three—though I will be concentrating on Muslims and savages—have been thought to have much in common.

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As race became the key way that Europeans distinguished and divided human beings so this categorisation was fundamentally linked with Christianity. In the second edition of On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1781) Johann Friedrich Blumenbach argued for a five-fold racial organisation. Giving us the term Caucasian, for white, he also identified Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian and American. Believing in the Biblical Genesis as being literal truth he asserted that Adam and Eve were Caucasian and that the other races were degenerated versions. The logic here is that if Genesis is the revealed truth of human origin, and Genesis is a cornerstone of Christian history, then Christianity must be the religion which best expresses the moral order of Caucasian human civilisation. Over a century later in 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century argued that, as Hannaford (1996, p. 350) writes quoting Chamberlain, while, in religion and education Christ was a Jew, Chamberlain concluded but in the narrower sense of race he was not: ‘The probability that Christ was no Jew, that He had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins, is so great that it is almost the equivalent to a certainty’.

Jesus, Chamberlain claimed, was an Amorite. The Amorites were considered to be of Indo-European origin and Chamberlain linked them to the Aryans who, it was later argued by the Nazis, were the founders of the Germanic race. Hannaford (1996, p. 353) goes on to tell us, again quoting Chamberlain, that: Chamberlain saw the great turning point in ‘our history’ as the awakening of the Teutonic spirit with the birth of Christ: ‘He won from the old human nature a new youth, and this became the God of the young vigorous Indo-Europeans, and under the sign of the cross there slowly arose upon the ruins of the old world a new culture—a culture at which we have still to toil long and laboriously until some day in the distant future it may deserve the appellation “Christ-like”’.

Here, Jesus becomes white, and his Christian ideology becomes the basis for a rejuvenated civilisation. I in no way want to suggest that John Howard was an adherent of Chamberlain’s proto-Nazi views but it is possible to see in Howard’s claim that Jesus has given us a value system a pale reflection of the argument that Jesus was white and, indeed, in giving us Christianity was the founder of Aryan, if not European, civilisation.

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Islam and Christianity We can pause here and, returning to Anderson, think about some of the more fundamental reasons that Islam became one of the crucial Others of Christianity. Lifting off from Anderson’s argument about supersession, we can acknowledge that Islam makes a claim to supersede Christianity by demoting Jesus, identified in Christian theology as the Son of God and the founder of Christianity, thus superseding Judaism, to being merely a prophet, albeit a very special prophet. In the Qur’an (3:45–47), Jesus again had a virgin birth but, the Qur’an goes on, the angels tell Mary: ‘O Mary, God gives you good news of a word from Him (God), whose name is the Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, revered in this world and the Hereafter, and one of those brought near (to God)’. The virgin birth signals Jesus’ special status as being close to God not the Son of God. It is Muhammed, coming after Jesus, who is claimed as the last of the prophets and the bringer of the word of God. Thus, in this narrative as the New Testament supersedes the Torah, so Muhammed supersedes Jesus, and the Qur’an supersedes the Bible; Islam supersedes Christianity. In addition, historically, Islam has posed the greatest threat of all other religions to white, European Christianity, and the morality associated with it. We have already seen King George of Podˇebrady proposing a union of European states to fight the Ottomans after they conquered Constantinople. Later the Ottomans were repulsed twice in sieges of Vienna in 1589 and 1683. On the other side of Europe, the Umayyad dynasty started the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 and after taking control of most of the land west of the Pyrenees, entered Frankish territory being defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732. Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Catholic Reconquista in 1492. From the sixteenth century onwards Barbary corsairs, who were Muslims and based in ports along the North African coast, attacked ships and looted and enslaved the inhabitants of Christian Mediterranean islands and coastal towns in Italy and Spain. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they raided towns in Portugal, England, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and as far north as Iceland. Linda Colley (2004, p. 101) writes that in 1751, a group of British men, freed after almost five years enslaved in Morocco, were paraded on the stage of Covent Garden wearing the rags and shackles of their captivity: ‘As represented in this pantomime version, North African Islamic society stood for tyranny, brutality, poverty and the loss of freedom, the reverse and minatory image

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of Britain’s own balanced constitution, commercial prosperity and individual freedom’. The Islamic corsair depredations finally ceased in the early nineteenth century with the increasing power of European states. The Europe of Christendom was for nearly a thousand years either conquered or under the threat of conquest by Islamic forces and endured shipborne raids by Islamic freebooters. The mark of this history remains present in fears of Europe being overwhelmed by Muslim asylum seekers, and in the anxiety over Muslim terrorists. It is seared deep into the white, European cultural imaginary. On a right-wing American website called Refugee Resettlement Watch, Ann Corcoran authored an article in August 2014 with the headline: ‘From Catalonia to Calais the Muslim invasion of Europe continues’ (Corcoran 2014). Pankaj Mishra (2009) provides this general commentary: Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that ‘a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise - the term is not too strong - a senescent Europe’. And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a ‘bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties’, Muslims are already ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’.

In 2006, Melanie Philips published Londonistan, in which she argued that ‘an alarming number of Muslims in Britain’ are being radicalised and that little was being done about this (p. xviii). These are fears carried over to Australia. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations presents a sophisticated version of this anxiety. We will come to this.

The Church of England and Australia At this point, as we move to a discussion more focussed on Australia, we need to remember that Christianity has always included alternative sects and that since the sixteenth century European Christianity has diversified from the universal, Catholic Church to include a wide variety of denominations most importantly for this discussion the Church of England. Founded after 1534, though claiming an earlier history, when Henry VIII

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ended papal authority in England, it is that country’s established religion. This, we should remember, means that the head of state of England, the monarch, is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. State and Church are intimately connected. The Church of England arrived in Australia in 1788 in the person of the Reverend Richard Johnson who, with his wife, sailed with the first fleet. Johnson held his first service at what had already been named Sydney Cove on Sunday, 3 February 1788. Samuel Marsden, whom we shall meet later, came to Sydney as Assistant Chaplain in 1794. While Australia evolved as an Anglican society the Church of England in Australia was never established. Indeed, Section 116 of the Constitution states: ‘The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth’. In this resistance to having an established Church we can see the influence of the United States where Thomas Jefferson asserted the need for, in a phrase for which he is often credited, a separation of Church from State. That there should not be an established Church in the United States is the purpose of the first phrase of the First Amendment to the American Constitution ratified in December 1791. Emphasising its ongoing links with England, until 1962 the Anglican Church in Australia remained governed from Canterbury. It is worth noting here that the shift in nomenclature from Church of England to Anglican, and its cognate the Anglican Communion, took place around the time of the first Lambeth Conference of Church of England bishops in 1867. One reason for the change was because of the spread of the Church outside of England. This dissemination was concurrent with the spread of British colonialism; the establishment of the British Empire. Glauco S. de Lima (2001, p. 2) has described the importance of Anglicanism in British colonialism: The Anglican Communion exists as a result of British colonial expansion, since the majority of the Anglican provinces are located in areas once colonized by the British. The Anglican Communion has been shaped by the old condition of “the crown next to the cross,” meaning that the imperial power and the state should be set alongside the spiritual power, the latter providing the church’s approval and justification of the mother country’s economic expansion. The symbol of imperial power wedded to the symbol

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of spiritual power reflected a policy that the submission of the colonized people must not only be economic, but also ideological.

In Australia, Brian Fletcher (1999, p. 219) tells us that, around the early years of the twentieth century, ‘most churchmen saw [the British Empire] as surpassing all others because it was founded on Christian principles rather than lust for power, or profit’. This, of course, was an ideological justification with which de Lima and others would disagree strongly. Anglicanism preserved the hierarchy of racial ordering. Fletcher (1999, p. 225) writes that: ‘Most of the [Anglican] spokesmen on White Australia before World War II believed that the policy could be justified on political and economic grounds. They argued that it was desirable to avoid threats to democratic institutions and the standard of living’. Fletcher also tells us that: Implicit in some of the statements of Anglican churchmen were suggestions that the culture of coloured races fell below that of the whites. Bishop Stephen of Newcastle [in 1926] claimed that the Oriental view of womanhood was lower than that of Australians, as was the standard of liberty, truth, and duty. (1999, p. 225)

In common with others, however, ‘he denied that the White Australia policy was racist and claimed that it rested not on notions of inferiority, but on a recognition of difference. Each race had a particular destiny and needed freedom to develop in its own way’ (Fletcher 1999, p. 224). We shall return later to the claims that Orientals have a lower standard of liberty, truth and duty and that the ‘Oriental view of womanhood’ is lower than that of Australians (see Alloula 1986). Both of these have become common claims against Muslims in Australia and are present today in debates over the Muslim family and the significance of the hijab. The argument that this racist attitude was based on a simple recognition of difference should remind us also of Pauline Hanson in her maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1996 when she asserted that Asian migrants to Australia ‘have their own culture and religion’ and that, as I quoted in Chapter 1, ‘we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’. de Lima remarks that the submission of colonised people was not only economic but ideological. He links this to the role of Christianity, and especially, because of the focus of the book for which he wrote the Preface, Anglicanism. This ideological submission involved not just the

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acceptance of Anglican teaching but also because the two have been so historically imbricated, English culture. Travis Glasson makes this point in the context of his discussion of the practices of Anglican missionaries, including the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Glasson (2011, p. 8) argues that: … a generation of influential studies has stressed the centrality of Protestantism in general and Anglican values in particular to eighteenth-century British culture … . British missionary groups, including the eighteenthcentury SPG, have also been considered as a largely autonomous force within Britain’s long-term imperial history. Together, these studies highlight the importance of the Society not just as a critical institution within transatlantic Protestantism but also as an agent for the dissemination of a robust, influential and religiously influenced British culture.

It is hard to distinguish British from English culture but as Glasson’s and my discussion focuses on Anglicanism, ‘English culture’ might be the better term. Glasson’s point is that British, for which read English, culture was spread to the Atlantic colonies, and to the empire, because it was so much a product of Anglican values. It might be preferable to understand Anglican values and English culture as melded together in a complex reciprocal relationship. We can remember Hall’s discussion of the English parents who considered a Christian, clearly Anglican, education as a central part of English culture. We should also remember the implicit racism in their desire to move their children to a white school. Truly English people are white and, again implicitly, middle class. Anderson identifies ‘savages’ as one of the Others of Christianity. The colonial focus of Christian missionary groups was the conversion and elevation of this savage. Dandeson Coates was lay secretary of the Church of England Church Missionary Society in the 1830s. He was in charge of the missionaries to Wellington Valley in New South Wales and to New Zealand. In 1837 Coates made a lengthy statement to a Select Committee of the British parliament which he subsequently published as Christianity the Means of Civilization: Shown in the Evidence Given Before a Committee of the House of Commons, on Aborigines 1837 . In this text, Coates (1837, p. 166) lays out very clearly what he, and others, considered the purpose of missionary work: ‘I would advert, in the last place, to our missionary operations in the South Seas, for the purpose of stating that we there in like manner witness civilization following in the train of Christianity’.

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Anglican Christianising precedes the civilising of savages. Coates (1837, p. 167) spells out how this works: No sooner does the gospel begin to operate upon the mind of the heathen than it leads him to the first step in civilization. It is shortly seen to be indecorous and improper for persons to meet together in a state of filthiness and comparative nudity in the public worship of Almighty God. The people themselves are soon made to feel, under the teaching of the missionaries, that a more decent exterior is necessary; and thus the first step is taken in civilization and clothing is introduced. As the next step, the gospel induces a settled course of life, and tends to promote industry.

English culture, here understood to include wearing clothes and disciplined industriousness, carries the numinous quality of Anglican Christianity. The debate was whether civilisation should come first, and Christianity after, or the other way round. Coates believed the latter. Marsden believed the former. He is writing about New Zealand: Civilization must pave the way for the conversion of the heathen. As the natives in these islands are totally unconnected with the commercial world, however friendly disposed they may be towards strangers, they are, nevertheless, in a state of gross ignorance and barbarity. (Marsden 1858, p. 42)

For many civilisations, English culture, was opposed by savage ways dominated by Satan. For example, the editor of Samuel Marsden’s Memoirs writes, arguing that only Christianity can overcome Satanic savagery, that: Had they [Dr Haweis and Mr. Marsden] been favoured with the experience we now possess, they would have felt more deeply how impotent a weapon is civilization to hew down the strongholds of Satan in a heathen land; their failures perhaps would have been fewer, and their successes more speedy if not more complete. A true Christian missionary, amongst savages, must be of necessity a civilizer. (Marsden 1858, p. 42)

If, indeed, Satan has mastery over the savage then, it seems, only Christianity can drive him out. After that, civilisation, English culture, can take hold. Either way, English culture as the expression of civilisation is a fundamental part of the Anglican missionary experience.

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In his book aptly titled White Christ, Black Cross , Noel Loos sums up the impact of missionary activity on Indigenous Australians: Modern writers often savage missionaries for being cultural imperialists attacking and destroying much of Aboriginal culture to impose their own values and beliefs upon a vulnerable, defenceless people. They have little or no sympathy with the Christian imperative at least as interpreted by these zealous advocates. There is a good deal of substance in such criticism … . Like their contemporaries, missionaries were also prisoners of their own culture. (Loos 2007, p. 10)

The Christian imperative, especially for Anglicans, was to convert and civilise those identified as savages. As savages, and heathens, these people had no culture worth saving. English culture, and the civilisation that it expressed, was also central to the colonial process in Australia. Not only was the Church of England in Australia governed from Canterbury but senior clerics came from England: The Englishness of the church, however, was reflected in more than its name. For most of the period [the article covers the first sixty years of the twentieth century] leadership came primarily from clergy who had been born, educated, and trained in England. The proportion fell over time, but the more influential dioceses remained in the hands of men who had attended English schools and universities and who ‘unselfconsciously upheld the best traditions of the British middle class.’ Their colleagues, although local-born, went to school, university, and theological college in Australia at a time when British cultural influences predominated. (Fletcher 1999, p. 217)

We should note here the emphasis on middle-class traditions. This is the English culture imported to Australia and sent to other colonial destinations with the missionaries. This was also the culture imposed on the lower classes through the moralising process. Fletcher (1999, p. 217) goes on to quote Bishop Hilliard of Sydney who in 1956, having been to a Lambeth Conference, wrote that ‘The sojourn in the enchanted island did me a tremendous amount of good, as I knew it would, for England is my second religion’. While it may have been a rhetorical flourish, Hilliard’s description of England, for which we can read English culture, as his second religion, illustrates the

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close and dynamic link between English middle-class culture and Anglican Christianity. Fletcher spends much of his article expounding the cultural links between Australian churchmen, and indeed Australian culture, and English culture. For example: Although the Anglican Church had been globalized, the creative forces that gave it life were seen as coming from England. ‘In an exceptional way’, observed Bishop Burgmann of Goulburn, the church ‘has formed the conscience of the British people, she has leavened British traditions and inspired British ideals. She has moved also with the history of England.’ The church brought to Australia not simply a particular kind of spiritual life, but a set of ideals and beliefs that drew on English tradition. (Fletcher 1999, p. 218)

Burgmann was writing in 1948. It is Fletcher’s argument that these ideals and beliefs underpinned the evolving Australian culture. It is within this context of the attempt to produce in Australia an English middle-class culture with values articulated through the Anglican Church that we can understand the morals campaigns of the late nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. Roger Thompson (1994, p. 24) writes about how, in the late nineteenth century: ‘Evangelical Christianity, especially, encouraged private virtues of thrift, hard work and individual responsibility, enabling poor immigrants to improve themselves’. These, and other English middle-class values will be what in the early twenty-first century get redefined as Australian values and then, again, returning to their Evangelical Christian take-up, as Christian values. In the early twentieth century, as Thompson recounts, the Church instigated attempts to renovate the moral order. There were campaigns to limit alcohol consumption, or, indeed, to prohibit it; a Sabbatarian movement tried to ban entertainment on Sundays; there was a movement against the use of contraception which had the support of the Catholic Church; there were even attempts to forbid mixed sea bathing. Thompson (1994, p. 139) sums up his argument: The other major influence of religion in Australian history was its contribution to moral order, initially to counter the licentiousness of the convict community and then as a crusade to create a holy nation. The Christian moral order was not achieved because of divisions within Protestant ranks and opposition by secularists and sometimes by Catholics. However, there were some successes—the quiet Sundays, sexual prudishness, reductions in the hours and outlets for selling alcohol and restrictions of public gambling facilities.

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As Thompson goes on to acknowledge, much of the successes of this time were wound back during the later twentieth century. Nevertheless, the idea of a moral order that could be striven for remained and provides the link between morality and Australian values founded in English middleclass culture and universalised as Christian. What is unstated in these connections is whiteness: white Christianity, white English culture, white middle-class morality, white Australia. Much of the moralising effort was directed at the working class. Writing in the first place about Australia, Lynette Finch (1993, p. 5) argues that: [T]he emergence of the idea, the working class … was first articulated through social and epistemological, rather than economic determinants. … The range of surveys which predated Marx’s location of the working class within the economic order of production capitalism, including Fredrick Engels’ survey, all organised the observed people through reference to morality not to political or economic order.

Finch (1993, p. 17) goes on to write that: [Morality] relied upon references to observable behaviour, and the role that behaviour played in the maintenance of social order. People engaging in forms of behaviour considered to threaten social order could not be considered moral. As the family unit was perceived as the basic unit of order, the cornerstone to social stability, those who did not marry, but were not chaste either, were immoral.

Finch explains that a major focus of this moralising was lower-class girls who were not living the chaste lives expected of their middle-class sisters. The emphasis on observable behaviour will be repeated in the excuses for increased surveillance of Muslims in the early twenty-first century. In Finch’s description we find the construction of the Australian working class through the efforts of moralising by middle-class groups, sanctioned by the Anglican, and sometimes other Churches, who were attempting to produce an Australian culture founded on English values which would be not just hegemonic but coterminous with the national entity. In other words what, again, in the early twenty-first century, would get identified as Australian values. Reciprocally, the process of objectification which produced the Australian working class helped consolidate the middle class as a self-aware entity. Again, we will see the same process occurring in the early twenty-first century as what it means to be Australian is defined against the construction of the Australian Muslim Other.

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Catholicism and Multiculturalism So far I have emphasised the importance of the Church of England in the Australian Christian moralising process and the inculcation of English middle-class values. We should not forget the importance of Catholicism. By 1901, the year of federation, the census found around forty per cent of the Australian population (1,497,579 people) identified as Anglican and a little over half that number (855,799 people) identifying as Catholic. The vast majority of the remainder were members of various other Protestant groups. Primarily because of the migration of Catholics from various countries, by the 1986 census Catholics began to outnumber Anglicans and by the 2016 census Catholics made-up twenty-two point six per cent of the Australian population while thirteen point three per cent identified as Anglican. In the 1950s and 1960s the majority of the Catholic migration was from Italy and Malta. Subsequently it has been from other non-English speaking countries—here I add predominantly countries identified as non-white such as the Philippines. Nevertheless, as Edward Campion (1992, p. 47) remarks: ‘… the identification between Irish and Catholic in Australia is so central to the experience of being Catholic in Australia that it merits reflection’. Elsewhere I have argued that until around the time of federation, the Irish in Australia were regarded as not white, as they had been in the United States and Britain (Stratton 2004, pp. 222–238). After federation, the Irish acquired an equivocal whiteness—equivocal not least because of their adherence to Catholicism. When Italians migrated in the post-Second World War period many of them were of darker complexion, coming from the south of Italy, and were only given entry to Australia because of a broadening in the definition of whiteness used by the Australian government and immigration bureaucracy as discussed in Chapter 1. It was this broadening of the definition of whiteness which in addition enabled the increase in migration of people from Malta during the 1950s and 1960s. During this time also many Greek Orthodox migrants arrived in Australia. By the late 1950s there were 170,000 Orthodox Christians in Australia including Greek Orthodox, as well as Russian, Ukrainian and Syrian Orthodox (see Tamis 2009, pp. 477–492). My point here is that while Anglicans, with their English heritage, were considered white, and therefore having a white morality, Catholics of Irish, and subsequently other backgrounds, and also Orthodox Christians, were considered as not quite white, indeed as ethnics. As Campion

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(1992, p. 13) incisively notes: ‘In Australian history Catholics were the first ethnics’. For much of Australia’s history as a nation-state, because of the impact of the White Australia policy, the divide was not between white and non-white but between Anglican and Catholic. This point has important ramifications when we think about official multiculturalism. Michelle Spuler (1999) argues that: Recognition of the role of religion in multicultural Australia is limited at the political level. Australian multicultural policies always mention religion; for example, the 1989 National Agenda on Multiculturalism identifies three fundamental dimensions of multicultural policy: cultural identity, social justice and economic efficiency. Cultural identity was defined as ‘the right of all Australians, within carefully defined limits, to express and share their individual cultural heritage, including their language and religion’; and social justice as ‘the right of all Australians to equality of treatment and opportunity, and the removal of barriers of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, gender or place of birth’. However, further details on how to apply multicultural ideals to religious issues are difficult to find.

Indeed, generally speaking even academic discussions of multiculturalism in Australia fail to give importance to religion. Sneja Gunew (1994, p. 22), in her much-quoted account of multiculturalism to which I have referred before in Chapter 2, describes it as acceptable in Australia ‘as a celebration of costumes, customs and cooking’, Religion was kept out of recommendations as to how multiculturalism should be practiced. In the core-periphery structure of Australian multiculturalism where Anglos and Celts make up the core and Italians, Greeks, Maltese and other ‘white’ groups make up the ethnic periphery, with the possible exception of the Irish, the core is Anglican and Protestant while the periphery is Catholic and Orthodox. In other words, it could, and would be argued, at least by implication by Howard, that Australia is composed of common Christian values with Anglican values and morality at its heart. In the 2016 census fifty-two point one per cent of Australians identified themselves as Christian. Catholics in general, not just Irish Catholics, are ethnics. The toleration for a variety of Christian denominations goes back to the early days of British colonial settlement. Randell-Moon (2013, p. 6) argues that: Due to the difficulty in enforcing compulsory Anglican observance among the convicts and settlers however, this policy was gradually abandoned to

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allow for the establishment of other Christian churches for Presbyterians, Catholics and Methodists, which in some cases were sponsored by the colonial governments, along with the endorsement of some non-Christian religions such as Judaism. Religious toleration and non-establishment were practised in the colonies primarily as a way to protect the religious freedom of Christian settlers.

It was this toleration, a practice which implies a power relation in this case with Anglicanism doing the tolerating, which much later would enable politicians such as Howard to talk about Australia’s Christian values without identifying them as specifically Anglican. There is a further implication here. As I have argued in Chapter 1, Australian multiculturalism was put in place to manage the migrants who arrived in Australia as a consequence of the broadening of the category of whiteness that I have already mentioned (Stratton 1998). These people were white, but not quite as white as people from the United Kingdom and northern Europeans, and possibly the Irish—there remains, as I have signalled, a certain ambiguousness about the status of Irish whiteness in Australia. With the ending of the White Australia policy, migrants who would have been described as non-white, as coloured in 1950s terminology, started to be allowed into Australia. There are now questions as to whether these people should be described in terms of ethnicity or race. An equivalent problem arises with religion. The dominant and hegemonic thinking in Australia is that what binds the country together is a shared morality. As we have seen this morality, and the culture linked to it, is claimed as Christian and Anglican, and includes the Protestant denominations. The post-Second World War ethnics of the expanded definition of whiteness were Christian and mostly Catholic and Orthodox but included, for example, Catholic Maronites from Lebanon. The moral order of Australia was stretched but remained in place. Allowing in migrants from diverse religions, and especially Islam—one of the Others of Christianity that Anderson identifies—was therefore thought by people like Hanson and Howard to begin establishing Other moral communities which would be a threat to an Australia based on common values. In her book Muslims in Australia, Nahid Kabir (2004, p. 275) quotes from an interview she conducted: ‘The young woman’s final comment was, “The Australian immigration policies are tolerant of culture and traditions but not tolerant of religion”’. The young woman was right. Australia

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has reasserted itself as a society founded on Christian values. In multiculturalism, non-Christian religions equate with non-whiteness producing a slippage between the two terms which was exemplified when, as I have already quoted, Hanson said in her maiden speech that Asians have their own culture and religion. In his 1995 discussion of ‘Religious Plurality in Australia’ Gary Bouma elaborates on a vision of society developed by the British sociologist John Rex. Bouma (1995, p. 294) writes: The multicultural postmodern society is held together by bonds of interdependence, not by cultural similarity. In postmodernity, subsocietal groups and increasingly societies agree to relate peaceably, although expressing great differences in their public lives, because none is self-sufficient and exists as a subgroup within a larger interdependent ecological whole.

This is how Bouma saw Australia developing. Bouma’s article was published the year before Howard became prime minister. At the time the Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, was emphasising the importance of diversity for the development of the Australian nation. Bouma’s espousal of Rex’s description of the new multicultural societies founded on what Emile Durkheim called, in his The Division of Labour in Society in 1893, organic solidarity reflected the type of society that Keating was envisaging. As Randell-Moon (2006) explains: ‘Howard’s 1996 Federal Election campaign was premised on an aim to re-centre the notion of a unified Australia in comparison to a perceived privileging of diversity under the Keating Government’. Central to Howard’s thinking was the notion of ‘common values’. Randell-Moon’s (2006) project was to show how, ‘the reproduction of a racialized construction of Christianity (as an abstracted signifier of whiteness) is obscured within a language of national values as “common values”’. It is a good argument. She goes on: When launching the National Multicultural Advisory Council Report in 1999, Australian Prime Minister John Howard argued that ‘what holds a nation together more than anything else are its common values’ (Howard 1999). Elsewhere Howard has argued that ‘we are a society that respects all religions, but we should respect our own history and our own traditions’, naming specifically ‘our’ Judeo-Christian foundations (Howard 2004: 119). The ostensibly inclusive common values’ Howard speaks of in the context of multiculturalism, are associated in another context with one specific set of values, Christianity. (Randell-Moon 2006)

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What Randell-Moon is showing here is Howard’s movement away from accepting Australia as a secular state where the shared morality is simply evolved common values, as it happens from English middle-class culture, to an assertion of Australia as a Christian nation-state founded on Christian morality and values or, as Randell-Moon writes, for Howard founded on Judeo-Christian values. The formulation Judeo-Christian is itself an interesting one. One site on the web suggests that the only country to describe itself as Judeo-Christian has been the United States. This, the site claims, was a consequence of the early English settlers in America, the Puritans, giving great importance to the Hebrew Bible, in Christian terms the Old Testament (see Prager 2004). It is certain that the term has an American origin. What Howard’s use of it suggests is that at least by 2004 Howard was being influenced by American ideas (see Maddox 2005). This is borne out by Howard’s Treasurer, Peter Costello’s remarkable speech at the National Day of Thanksgiving Commemoration, Scots Church in 2004. Here Costello informed his audience that: I am not sure this is well understood in Australia today. It may be that a majority of Australians no longer believes the orthodox Christian faith. But whether they believe it or not, the society they share is one founded on that faith and one that draws on the Judeo-Christian tradition. The foundation of that tradition is, of course, The Ten Commandments. How many Australians today could recite them? Perhaps very few. But they are the foundation of our law and our society, whether we know them or not. (Costello 2008)

Costello goes on to elaborate a number of these Commandments showing how, in his view, they provide the basis for the common values drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition of which Howard had spoken, or, in Costello’s (2008) own words: ‘These are the great principles of our society. On them hang all of the laws and institutions that make our society what it is’. Thus, for example, honouring thy father and mother, and not committing adultery, are, for Costello the ‘foundation of marriage and the family’. It goes without saying, and Costello does not say, that he is thinking of the privatised nuclear family of modern Australia, the family form that Finch tells us was central to the middleclass moralising campaign around the turn of the twentieth century. For Costello, then, his preferred pattern of life in Australia can be traced

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back to Judaic origins as formulated in Exodus. But what he thinks of as the result of two Commandments in the Old Testament is actually the normative English middle-class family that was transferred to Australia in the nineteenth century. What is also implicit here, as Randell-Moon indicates, is the whiteness of Costello’s argument. By taking the pattern of life of modern Australia derived from white, English middle-class culture as his starting point and linking it with a Christianity which, as we have seen, is profoundly white in its modern form, Costello was able to make a statement about Australia as white and Christian without ever mentioning whiteness.

Christianity and the Stigmatisation of Islam It would seem that sometime after the re-election of the Coalition to government in 1998, Howard started looking for ways to stigmatise asylum seekers as a pretext for the so-called Pacific Solution that he wanted to put in place to resolve the problem of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by boat. At a speech to the Melbourne Press Club on 22 November 2000, Howard spent much time talking about Australian values. Here we see the shift from common values to claiming these as national values. Carol Johnson (2007, p. 199) argues that: Howard’s religious references have become more common since 11 September 2001. They evoke a socially conservative version of Christianity (Maddox 2005a) and are often tied to arguments that Anglo and Western values are under threat (Howard 2003; Megalogenis 2006),

and Sophie Sunderland (2007, p. 62) suggests that, it would appear that the privileging and naturalisation of JudaeoChristianity … can be seen to be mobilised in the active marginalisation of particular groups within Australian society and ideology; thus emphasising the multiple exclusions that underpin the structure and function of the ‘secular’ in this instance.

Indeed, the effect of mobilising white Judeo-Christianity was the Othering of all non-white groups, and especially those of religions other than Christianity, most importantly Islam.

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The new, stern approach to asylum seekers was first manifested in the so-called Tampa affair when in August 2001 the federal government refused to allow the MV Tampa, which had picked up from a sinking boat 438 mostly Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan, to land them on Christmas Island. Without media reports clarifying the nature of these asylum seekers it was not clear that they were Muslim. However, this was implied. In October of the same year, a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Howard and other ministers started to claim that asylum seekers on a boat trying to reach Australian waters had been threatening to throw their children overboard if Australia did not allow them sanctuary. These asylum seekers happened to be predominantly Iraqi Muslims. By this time there had developed a common perception in Australia that equated asylum seekers coming by boat with Muslims. Consequently, although it was later proved that no asylum seeker had thrown, or even threatened to throw, their children over the side of the boat, Howard’s criticism of the kind of family morality that would allow such an event to take place became a part of the rhetoric validating what were claimed to be Australian family values as against Muslim family values; it became an instance in the Othering of Muslims in Australia, the construction of the Australian Muslim. Simultaneously, it was during the first six months of 2001 that Howard began to reconstruct himself as a practicing Christian. Marion Maddox (2011), who wrote a book on Howard’s affinity with Christianity, writes that he ‘spoke repeatedly of Australia as a Christian nation founded on Christian values, while priming the electorate to respond to an antiMuslim fear campaign well in advance of the September 2001 terrorist attacks’. Maddox (2011) further notes that overall: ‘Howard’s descriptions while in office of his religious practice seem to suggest less devotion than do his recollections at the end of his time in office, looking back over that same period’. To put it bluntly, Howard remade his biography to show himself as an observant Christian. However, even while in office Howard’s description of his religious practice became more assertive in the years between 1998 and 2004. In April 2001, in a clear statement of his new aggressive belief that Australia was a Christian, perhaps JudeoChristian, nation, Howard appointed Peter Hollingworth, the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, to the post of Governor-General in the process calling into question the separation of church and state in Australia by creating a direct Anglican link between the British monarch and the

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monarch’s representative in Australia. What the Hollingworth appointment showed is the lack of safeguards for the separation of church and state in Australia. I have already discussed Section 116 of the Constitution which ensures that no religion can be established. However, as Randell-Moon (2013, p. 6) points out, Australia’s colonial and religious history is implicated in the ways that section 116 can be interpreted and applied by the Australian High Court to an ostensibly secular and neutral Australian law whilst at other times, the section is viewed as compatible with the institutional privileging of Christianity.

The Howard and Costello moves to Christianise the Australian state were possible because of this ambiguity in the way that Section 116 can be interpreted. Howard’s new, assertive, and of course white, Christianity came just over four years after the publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. Huntington’s book was the elaboration of an article he had published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993. Both received an inordinate amount of coverage. Huntington’s thesis was that in the post-Cold War world it was no longer ideology that separated peoples but culture and religion. For Huntington religion informed culture. One of the great faultlines he identified was between the western countries dominated by the Christian religion, including the United States, Canada and Europe and, importantly for my argument here, Australia, whose cultures were informed by Christianity, and the Muslim countries of the Middle East and also including, among others, Indonesia and Malaysia. While Huntington was not directly concerned with race it is clear from an Australian perspective that in the particular binary elaborated here, there is a division between white Christian civilisation and a non-white Muslim world. The term ‘clash of civilisations’ had been previously used by the highly respected orientalist Bernard Lewis in an article from 1990 titled ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified’. Here, Lewis (1990) wrote that: It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps

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irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our JudeoChristian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.

We should note Lewis’ the use of Judeo-Christian, and of ‘irrational’. As I have explained earlier, in the modern world of white Christianity the Euro-American west is rational and human, other peoples with their religions and cultures are irrational, and indeed by implication not fully human. In Covering Islam, Edward Said (1981, p. xxi) writes of: ‘Lewis’ quaint formulation that Muslims are enraged at Western “modernity”’. As Said implies, Lewis’ ideas form a continuum with nineteenth-century orientalism. Huntington (1996, p. 207) remarks that ‘many saw a “civilizational cold war” again developing between Islam and the West’. He explains that: For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other. (Huntington 1996, p. 28)

The division identified by Huntington between the Christian west and what Anderson identifies as the Muslim Other functions, of course, at the level of values. Huntington (1996, pp. 152–153) writes that: As Mahathir [the then prime minister of Malaysia] stated, culture and values are the basic obstacle to Australia’s joining Asia. Clashes regularly occur over the Australians’ commitment to democracy, human rights, a free press, and its protests over the violations of those rights by the governments of virtually all its neighbors.

It becomes clear where Howard, directly or more likely indirectly, got his ideas from for re-establishing Australia as a country embedded in Christian morality and asserting the virtues of Christianity over Islam. Once more, Australia is alone in an Asian world only now the fundamental Australian anxiety over race is disguised by a new anxiety over religion and associated morality and values, indeed Hanson’s preoccupation with culture. It would seem that Huntington’s work, or at the least the atmosphere created by it, gave Howard and his colleagues the opportunity to assert Australia as a Christian nation-state in Asia and identify more clearly

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Muslims as the Other against which Australian culture defined itself. In doing so, race once again became a key sub-text in the formation of the Australian culture, this time in the guise of religion.

The Production of the ‘Australian Muslim’ We should now revisit Finch’s argument about the production of the Australian working class through the process of its moralisation. What I am suggesting here is that an analogous process has been taking place in the production of the ‘Australian Muslim’. However, this time the moralising process is not founded on class but on religion and on race as, as we have seen, modern Christianity is white and Islam is constructed in western modernity as the religion of non-white people. It is also based on the assumption that Australia now functions with a single moral order; indeed, that what binds Australia together is a shared moral order, the basis of what has been called Australian values. The equation here is shared values, Christianity, whiteness. The corollary is those who are not white are likely to be not Christian and will not share Australian values. One place where we can see this moralising taking place is in the Cronulla riots of 2005. In a statement at a press conference in the days after the riots Howard (2005b) said: It’s important … that we reaffirm our respect for freedom of religion in this country, but it’s also important that we place greater emphasis on integration of people into the broader community and the avoidance of tribalism within our midst. I don’t think Australians want tribalism. They want us all to be Australians. And that should be the dominant driving force of all post-settlement policies that apply after people have come to this country. And there should be a constant exhortation of all people irrespective of their background to absorb the fundamental values of the Australian community. And they are good values. They’re time honoured values.

Howard went on to list these values as equality before the law, equal rights for men and women, and the respect of the right of people to practice their own religion. These are, it seems, Australian values. A year earlier, in his Scots Church speech that was discussed earlier, Costello had identified similar values as derived from the Ten Commandments.

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Making explicit that the (common) values that Howard was talking about are Australian, Clemence Due and Damien Riggs (2008, p. 214) note that: The currency of ‘Australian values’ used in an attempt to define ‘home’ has increased since the Cronulla riots, where, for instance, we have seen politicians make a wide range of claims in regards to who is deemed to be a desirable Australian citizen.

The commentary on the riots was a turning point in the rhetorical shift from Australian values to Christian values. The identification of the rioters as Muslims was a key element in this process. Discussing the riots, Clifton Evers (2008, p. 414) writes about the increasing middle classness of Cronulla and adds: Rather than class, in December 2005 ethnic and cultural differences became the dominant markers of who the outsiders were. Cronulla is considered an Anglo-Celtic, Christian heartland.

Christianity is rarely written about as being important in the context of the riots. Evers (2008, p. 414) explains that: ‘Many of the Lebanese Australian men who go to Cronulla are Christian. But this does not seem to matter’. It was in relation to the production of the not fully white, Lebanese-Australian rioters as Muslims, and therefore non-white, that the claimed Christianity of the white, Anglo-Australian rioters could be legitimated. Amelia Johns conducted interviews with some of the white rioters. When asked whether Muslims can integrate into Australian society—integrate being Howard’s term—one ‘young male’ answered: The problem is the ones who keep to themselves and don’t try to adapt to our country, I think that maybe they need to come here and fit in a bit better, or there’ll be a greater divide between Australians and Muslims, or Christians and Muslims … depending on how you want to look at it. (Johns 2008, p. 10)

As Johns notes, the equation made by the young man marks Muslims as not Australian, while Australians are equated with Christians. Johns found the reference to Christianity surprising as it was made by more than a couple of her interviewees. What we see here is one moment in the process of the production of the non-white Australian Muslim as Other,

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and as Other to Australia as a country of Christians, that is, a Christian country. The main elements in the production of the non-white Australian Muslim relate to cultural practices. Finch makes the point, as I have already noted, that in the moralising moral panic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘observable behaviour’ played a crucial role. In the Australian production of the Australian Muslim it is likewise behaviour, and behaviour claimed to be rooted in the family, that has been crucial. I have already mentioned that in 2000 there were a number of gang rapes in Sydney carried out by up to fourteen young men of Lebanese descent. In late 2001 and during the first half of 2002 there was another series of gang rapes by four brothers born in Pakistan and a student from Nepal. What was emphasised about all these perpetrators was that they were Muslims. In their book on what they describe as the Criminalising [ of] the Arab Other, Scott Poynting and his co-authors write that the gang rapists, and other groups such as asylum seekers, are talked about ‘as though there is a natural link in that they share what is perceived as a common ancestry’ (2004, p. 33). They go on rightly to point out that: ‘Many of the terms used to describe this background—Middle Eastern, Muslim, Arab—are deeply problematic terms’ (Poynting et al. 2004, p. 33). Not all people from that area designated Eurocentrically as the Middle East—the term has its origins in the deployment of British imperial interests in the very early twentieth century—are either Arab or Muslim, not all Muslims are Arabs or from the Middle East, and not all Arabs are Muslim or from the Middle East (see Adelson 1995). As importantly, many of the people so identified in Australia have either been born here or grew up here. However, these terms are sliding signifiers for a group of people Othered against the people identified as Australian. Poynting and his co-authors (2004, p. 179) describe how the process of Othering ‘involved not just the conflation of diverse groups into a homogeneous category, but also the racialization of crime and the criminalisation of the various cultures described by that category’. At the same time, Australian is a term now equated with Christian and with whiteness. At its most basic, Muslim is equated with non-white. This is why there is always anxiety and surprise when a man or woman who appears to be a white Australian tells a story about how they have converted to Islam (see News.com.au 2014). It causes a category problem; white and Muslim occupy different categorical groupings. Conversely, the whiteness of Christianity, and its thorough

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imbrication with colonialism, and the non-whiteness of Islam, makes it easier to understand why Aborigines might convert to Islam.2 The gang rapes generated a high point in anxiety over the behaviour of men identified as having a Muslim background. Miranda Devine, the right-wing newspaper columnist, wrote in 2002: ‘So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture’ (Devine 2002). Poynting and his co-authors spend time analysing media reports of the sexual assaults. They sum up this way: Two converse interesting ideological manoeuvres being effected here are the ‘othering’ of the perpetrators and the ‘whitening’ of the victims. The suspected and later convicted rapists were often referred to as ‘Muslims’ in contexts where this identity was contrasted with Australianness. … By contrast, the seven victims of the [Sydney] rapes, invariably described as ‘Australian’, included two girls of Italian and one of Greek background. The victims were often designated as ‘Caucasian’, and sometimes as ‘white’, despite the fact that one was of Aboriginal parentage. (Poynting et al. 2004, p. 124)

In this nomination of the victims, we can see how the association of Italians and Greeks with Christianity whitens these victims by contrast to the construction of the Australian Muslim Other. The need to be able to identify all the victims collectively as white overdetermines the racial identification of the Indigenous victim and, indeed, she may well have been assumed to be of Christian background—and certainly not Muslim. We can set this racialised identification of Muslim men attacking white women in the context of a long history of colonial anxiety about what Anderson calls the savage Other, and indeed the Muslim Other, of white Christianity. Outlining Edward Lane’s 1836 book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians , Edward Said (1978, p. 162) tells us that it includes, in part, ‘the blending of religion with licentiousness among Muslims, the excess of libidinous passions, and so on’. Ania Loomba (1998, p. 158) describes how: ‘For most European travellers and colonialists … the promise of sexual pleasure rested on the assumption that the darker races or non-Europeans were immoral, promiscuous, libidinous and always desired white people’. Such a view legitimated the white male taking of dark women for sexual purposes.

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This fantasy of bestial sexual desire had the equal effect of making white men, and women, fear the possibility of white women being assaulted by non-white men. As Loomba (1998, p. 158) goes on: ‘Women on both sides of the colonial divide demarcate both the innermost sanctums of race, culture and nation, as well as the porous frontiers through which these are penetrated’. In this description we can recognise the connection between the violation of white women and the violation of the Australian nation; we can see how the gang rapes came to carry an overloading of meaning beyond the horror of the rapes themselves. The gang rapes became a key moment in the non-white production of, and Othering of, Australian Muslims. Hanson made the links between Australians as Christians and the rapists as Muslims explicit when in 2001 she ‘blamed the problem on a lack of respect for Australian culture’, saying, ‘A lot of these people are Muslims, and they have no respect for the Christian way of life this country’s based on’ (Poynting and Mason 2007, p. 77). Kiran Grewal (2007) explains that some white participants in the Cronulla riots made a connection with the rapes: ‘Interestingly, in interviews conducted by the ABC programme, Four Corners with rioters, Islam’s “lack of respect for women” and the gang rapes were cited as motivating factors for their participation’. The implication is that white, Christian men would never descend to such barbarity and Muslim men should all be held accountable, no doubt because all non-white Muslim men have inherently the possibility of committing such crimes. Helen Carr (1985, pp. 159–160) has argued that: [I]n the language of colonialism, non-Europeans occupy the same symbolic space as women. Both are seen as part of nature, not culture, and with the same ambivalence: either they are ripe for government, passive, childlike, unsophisticated, needing leadership and guidance, described always in terms of lack—no initiative, no intellectual powers, no perseverance; or on the other hand, they are outside society, dangerous, treacherous, emotional, inconstant, wild, threatening, fickle, sexually aberrant, irrational, near animal, lascivious, disruptive, evil, unpredictable.

The male Australian Muslim Other has been produced as the second of these possibilities. The female Muslim Other has been produced as the first. Muslim women have been constructed as passive and as unequal to Muslim men. They are unable to stand up for themselves and argue

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for the abandonment of the hijab and niqab. In their Introduction to a 2007 special issue of Transforming Cultures eJournal titled ‘Not Another Hijab Row’, Tanja Dreher and Christina Ho remind us that: ‘the veiled woman has been the key symbol of the anxiety over Islam’s “oppression of women”’. Muslim women are thought to require white Australians to make the arguments against that oppression on their behalf. There is an echo here of the sentence Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, p. 296) constructs in her discussion of the colonial subject: ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’. Women wearing hijabs and niqabs are identified as not properly Australian. To take just one example, in October 2014: ‘Canberra Muslim woman Nurcan Baran says she has stopped wearing her hijab for fear of being attacked’ (Francis 2014). Here we see the vigilante policing of Australianness. Elsewhere in the article: ‘The self-proclaimed “proud Muslim feminist” emphasised she chose to wear the hijab and was not forced’ (Francis 2014). Feminists who are Christian are rarely identified as such. That Baran feels it necessary to point out that wearing the hijab is her choice signals how the Australian Muslim woman has been produced, in Carr’s terms, as needing leadership and guidance. Finch argued that for the turn of the twentieth-century middle classes it was the moralising of the working-class family that was the key to producing respectable, moral children. In the production of the Muslim Australian it is, again, the family that has been targeted for moralisation. Not only is the mother in the family considered weak and unequal because she wears a hijab but she allows her husband to take other wives. From a different perspective polygamy highlights for white Australians the licentious nature of the Australian Muslim male, as did the gang rapes—carried out, it would seem by implication, by those amoral sons of dysfunctional Muslim families. The Muslim male’s libido is such that, unlike a civilised white, Christian male, he is only able to control his sexual urges legitimately if he has more than one wife. In a society where the success of turn of the twentieth-century moralising was located in the spread of marriage and the nuclear family to the white, Australian lower classes, the idea of polygamous marriage is understood as a threat to Christian, Australian values. One of the demands of Reclaim Australia is: ‘Stop Centrelink recognising polygamy and only recognise the first marriage for benefits’.3 The myth of Muslim polygamy is central to the claim that the Muslim family is in need of moralising. Yet:

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Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad said he believed ‘not many more than 50’ Muslim families in Australia were polygamist. But he said he also knew of non-Muslim men who had more than one de facto wife who claimed Centrelink payments. (Dunn 2010)

Trad’s statement comes in a 2010 ‘shock-horror’ article about how polygamous Muslim families were exploiting Centrelink. His point about those he terms ‘non-Muslim’ men having more than one de facto wife is a good one. It is only marriage to more than one female partner that is illegal in Australia. Marriage is the rite which connects Christianity with the Australian state. In England, Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753 regularised what was considered to be marriage and ordered that it take place in a church of the Church of England, the only exceptions being Quakers and Jews. The 1836 Act for Marriages in England confirmed the importance of the state in the practice of marriage by establishing that marriages could take place outside of Anglican churches but had to have civil registration. These laws were central in the state’s intervention in the organisation and legitimation of the nuclear family. As Finch (1993, p. 26) writes: ‘The key measuring gauge of morality as a way of understanding the nature of the population under observation, refers back to the central location of the family within the social order’. Finch (1993, p. 27) tells us that: In the interests of social order, and in keeping with the general notion of population management, from the end of the eighteenth century the British Colonial Office commenced a series of orders to Australian governors, that legal marriage was to be promoted among all levels of society.

That is, before the 1836 Act, marriage in Australia was enforced as an Anglican ceremony. During this period and later, marriage was a core battleground in the moralising of the Australian population. For example, while confirming marriage as the basis of the family, the 1961 Federal Marriage Act voids marriages where one partner is already married and between certain categories of people such as siblings— some states and territories had earlier required legal permission for marriage between settler Australians and Indigenous Australians. The 2004 Marriage Amendment Act clarified who could marry by inserting into Subsection 5(1) that: ‘marriage means the union of a man and a

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woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life’. In the twenty-first century marriage, and its links with Christian morality, has been highlighted again in the white Australian anxiety over polygamy as well as in the campaign to allow same-sex marriage. It needs to be pointed out that the Marriage Amendment Act was passed by parliament in the same year that Costello gave his Thanksgiving Commemoration speech asserting that the modern family was founded in the Ten Commandments.4 While marriage became secularised as an instrument of state moral regulation, it retained key markers of its Christian history in its association with monogamy and morality. Laura Betzig (1995, p. 182) remarks that: Modern societies—those that have grown out of the Christian Middle Ages—are remarkably monogamous. They seem, in fact, so consistently monogamous that what was once the rule [polygamy] looks like an exotic exception.

Modern societies are historically Christian and, as we have seen, also white. In Australia that apparent exotic exception alluded to by Betzig is associated with Islam which, it now should go without saying, is associated with non-whiteness. The link between polygamy and government welfare payments trades on an Australian anxiety that people not properly Australian, for which read in this instance having more than one wife and therefore not adhering to white, Christian Australian values, are exploiting the Australian welfare system. Such behaviour is considered to be unAustralian. Centrelink is an agency of the federal Department of Human Services. There is a further question here about the status of Centrelink in a racialised society. Fiona Nicoll discusses the video for the Basics Card. This card was introduced in 2007 as part of the Northern Territory Intervention (see Stringer 2007). The card was primarily developed with the object of ensuring that Indigenous Australians living on out-stations in the north of the country spend their welfare payments on food rather than alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and pornography. Nicoll (2014) writes that: The official Centrelink video depicts a Basics Card user as a well-dressed and apparently white Australian woman compliantly availing herself of its

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‘protections’ against dangerous or excessive consumptions. She is shown purchasing groceries at the supermarket and making inquiries on the telephone.

Nicoll argues that Centrelink constructs itself in terms of colour-blind racism, that is, a racism that appears not to take account of skin colour when skin colour is precisely the issue. In this instance the targeted recipients of the Basics Card are elided by the portrayal of a ‘white’ woman using it. Nicoll (2014) argues that: ‘It is through the figure of an apparently middle-class white woman that the Centrelink video appears to speak to a subject imagined as an individual, rather than to a subject classified as part of a specific racial population’. White people, identifiable as Australians, have the privileged status of being individuals. It is they, who occupy the social sites of power, who classify racial groupings while their own whiteness is ex-nominated. At the same time that Centrelink makes efforts to erase its participation in a racialised attack on Indigenous freedoms for, the Howard government claimed, those people’s own good, Centrelink has become the object of Islamophobic attacks related to claims not only about its acceptance of polygamy but also, for example, that Centrelink too easily gives welfare payments to Muslims. Here, to take one instance, is the caption of a photograph of asylum seekers on board a boat on a website held by the Shoebat Foundation which carries a great deal of Christian advertising and includes an organisation called Rescue Christians, the declared purpose of which is to save Christians in the Middle East from the depredations of Muslims. The caption reads: ‘Big strapping Muslim illegal aliens arriving in Australia head straight for the Centrelink office’ (Shoebat Foundation 2015). Thus, Centrelink is constructed by an explicitly Christian blogger as an arm of government that exhibits tolerance and welfare where it should not be offered; to apparently undeserving Muslims. We should place this kind of populist Christian attack on Muslims in the context of the Howard government’s Christianising of social welfare. Through 1996 and 1997 the government restructured the Commonwealth Employment Service and the Department of Social Security. The end result was the creation of Centrelink to administer government welfare payments and a privatised organisation called Job Network the purpose of which was to help individuals find employment. The government’s intent was that the jobs programmes should be run mainly by

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Christian charities. As Randell-Moon (2011, p. 204) argues, ‘the Howard government’s integration of church agencies into privatized welfare was used to privilege “Christian values” as the “correct” way for welfare subjects to govern themselves’. This enabled the government ‘to promote its version of “Christian values” but located these values in the private sphere and as something individuals could freely “choose” as part of their welfare services’ (Randell-Moon 2006, p. 204). With an echo of Finch’s work, the unemployed tend to be identified as working class and, indeed, in the neoliberal society that was being created by the Howard government, as outside of the normative order of Australian society by virtue of their unemployment. In this order, the unemployed are not those who have lost their jobs or been unable to find work because of the vagaries of the capitalist system. Rather, unemployment is stigmatised; it is a consequence of moral lack, of a disinterest in finding work or a preference for living off state welfare hand-outs offered through Centrelink. John Tomlinson (2001, p. 238) has noted that Jocelyn Newman, who in 1999 was the minister responsible for income support, ‘was obsessed with the alleged propensity of poor people to become “dependent” on the State’ and in 2001 Tony Abbott, who was then the Employment Minister, ‘suggested that the “mutual obligation” requirements are placed on the unemployed to give them a little nudge, to get them out of a sense of complacency about their “dependency” on welfare and to assist them to find paid work’ (Tomlinson 2001, p. 241). A large proportion of the unemployed tend to be the most marginal in Australian society, those who are racialised as nonwhite including Indigenous Australians and, as we have seen, Muslims, and including groups who tend not to be either white or Christian such as refugees and asylum seekers. Employers tend to privilege whites who are at least implicitly Christian over non-white Muslims. In a study of Muslim jobseekers published in 2011, Terry Lovat and his co-researchers (2011, p. 8) found that: While the general effects of having a non-English speaking background, being immigrant, refugee, ethnic, female, old, etc. showed up as barriers to employment wellbeing in the ways one would expect, the effects on the Muslim who fitted these categories were more exaggerated than one would expect in the general population.

Lovat and his colleagues (p. 14) further argue that:

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Specific issues faced by Muslims in a labour market context are associated with being viewed as ‘other’ by employers, fellow workers or customers, resulting in discrimination either in relation to securing employment, or for taking advantage of opportunities for career advancement.

Thus the Christianising of welfare functioned as a moralising force on those who were thought not to have the white Christian, and Australian, values being naturalised by the Howard government. This includes members of religions other than Christianity. The discursive forces established by the Howard government remain in place almost ten years after it lost power.

Conclusion We can now understand how the production of Muslim Australians as Other both constructs them as non-white and not properly Australian and also as non-Christian in what has been increasingly identified as a society with Christian values. Indeed, it is because of the discursive reconstruction of Australia as a Christian, and therefore white, country, that the production of the Australian Muslim Other has been so meaningful. While attempting to Christianise Muslims through the pressure of a moralising of their values, the Christianising of Australia becomes more consolidated. What the process has also done is legitimate Huntington’s claim that Australia is a Christian, and indeed white, country in Asia. It should be clear that to the extent that Australia has been shaped by Christianity that is profoundly white. However, the claims that Australian values are Christian values are very problematic. Australian culture has been shaped by a tradition that combines predominantly Anglican Christianity with English middle-class values. Indeed, contrary to the claims made by Howard, Costello and others, the origins of what are claimed as Australian values do not lie in Christianity, and certainly not in the Ten Commandments, but in the English culture imported to Australia in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the claim that those values are Christian in origin has generated a moral absolutism which has helped define what is considered Australian as against the moral systems of other religions, most importantly Islam. By linking Australian values with Christianity there has been an assertion of what is meant by Australian values which has been set in opposition to what have been constructed as competing moral orders.

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The claim to Christian values is a way of privileging a white Australian moral order in contrast to any argument that Australia could be composed of diverse communities sharing and enriching each other. Rather, since Howard and Costello, Australia has been reconstructed as having a Christian moral order, where there is assumed to be some consensus across Anglican, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox versions of Christianity, set in opposition to other religious moral orders. From this perspective race is imbricated with religion where Christians are white, sometimes honorary white, and members of other religions are non-white. The consequence, as we have seen, is a denigration of Muslim values and an assertion that for Muslims in Australia to become Australian they must take on board Christian values. A paradox indeed. We can now see the full force of the ‘Jesus or Islam’ cry. Australia has been reconstructed so that it must be one or the other, Christian or Muslim. It cannot be Christian and Muslim, and for that matter, Buddhist and Jewish. Within this model of social order, Australian society is understood as de facto Christian. And, as importantly, as white. Members of other religions, and racial groupings associated with them, become second-class citizens. They are tolerated within certain limits, including the numbers of adherents to Other faiths and providing aspects of their morality that do not differ too radically from Australian values. As with Australian values and Christianity, the cultural practices of other social groups slide into assumptions that are made about the morality of those groups and its basis in their religion and its practice. There is constant pressure on the moralising of the members of those faiths to make them more ‘Australian’.

Notes 1. In December 2006 the theme for the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia was ‘UnAustralia’. 2. In Islam dreaming: Indigenous Muslims in Australia, Peta Stephenson tells the story of Bilal ‘a black Abyssinian (Ethiopian) former slave chosen by the Prophet Muhammed to be the first Muslim muezzin (the person who leads the adhan or call to prayer). One of the Prophet’s closest companions, Bilal is revered by Muslims today as a symbol of the racial plurality and equality that characterise Islam’ (Stephenson 2010, p. 12).

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3. See the ‘Reclaim Australia’ group on Facebook at: https://www.facebook. com/ReclaimAustraliaADL/posts/318738025001572 . 4. In December 2017 the 1961 Marriage Act was further amended to allow same sex marriages.

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Randell-Moon, Holly. 2009. Tolerating religious ‘Others’: Some thoughts on secular neutrality and religious tolerance in Australia. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 22 (3): 324–344. Randell-Moon, Holly. 2011. Social security with a Christian twist in John Howard’s Australia. In Mediating faiths: Religion and socio-cultural change in the twenty-first century, ed. Michael Bailey and Guy Redden, 203–215. Farnham: Ashgate. Randell-Moon, Holly. 2013. The secular contract: Sovereignty, secularism and law in Australia. Social Semiotics 23 (3): 352–367. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, Edward W. 1981. Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scafi, Alessandro. 2015. Coping with Muslim Jerusalem between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Islam and the Holy City on world maps. In Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in honour of Bianca Kühnel, ed. Renana Bartal and Hanna Vorholt, 257–279. Leiden: Brill. Shoebat Foundation. 2015. Australia: Afghani Muslim misogynist and welfare leech claims ‘racial’ abuse after calling Centrelink worker an ‘Aussie bitch’. http://shoebat.com/2015/06/13/australia-afghani-muslim-misogynistandwelfare-leech-claims-racial-abuse-after-calling-Centrelink-worker-an-aussiebitch/. Accessed 11 April 2016. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spuler, Michelle. 1999. The impact of multiculturalism on Australian religious traditions. Diskus 5. Available from: http://basr.ac.uk/diskus_old/diskus16/SPULER.txt. Accessed 10 May 2015. Stephenson, Peta. 2010. Islam dreaming: Indigenous Muslims in Australia. Randwick: University of New South Wales Press. Stratton, Jon. 1998. Race Daze: Australian in identity crisis. Sydney: Pluto Press. Stratton, Jon. 1999. Multiculturalism and the whitening machine, or how Australians become white. In The future of Australian multiculturalism: Reflections on the twentieth anniversary of Jean Martin’s The Migrant Presence, ed. Ghassan Hage and Rowanne Couch, 163–188. Sydney: Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney. Stratton, Jon. 2004. Borderline anxieties: whitening the Irish and keeping out asylum seekers. In Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 222–238. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Stringer, Rebecca. 2007. A nightmare of the neocolonial kind: Politics of suffering in Howard’s Northern Territory Intervention. Borderlands e-Journal 6 (2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention. htm.

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Sunderland, Sophie. 2007. Post-secular nation; or how ‘Australian spirituality’ privileges a secular, white. Judeo-Christian Culture. Transforming Cultures 2 (1): 55–77. Tamis, Anastasios. 2009. Greek orthodoxy in Australia. In The encyclopedia of religion in Australia, ed. James Jupp, 477–492. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Tate, John William. 2009. John Howard’s ‘Nation’: multiculturalism, citizenship, and identity. Australian Journal of Politics and History 55: 97–120. Thompson, Roger C. 1994. Religion in Australia: A history. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, John. 2001. The basic solution to unemployment. Australian Journal of Social Issues 36 (3): 237–247. Wen, Shuangge. 2013. Shareholder primacy and corporate governance: Legal aspects, practices and future directions. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes: Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires

What I want to do in this chapter is unpick some of the complex interweaving of history and ideology which pervades The Sapphires. What is it that makes this film so satisfying to Australian audiences? John McDonald (2012) in The Australian Financial Review headed his review: ‘The Sapphires—a brilliant story, joyously told’ and Leigh Paatsch (2012) in the Herald Sun wrote that: ‘It is all too easy for a homegrown, unashamedly feelgood affair like The Sapphires to be damned with faint praise’, going on: ‘A crowd-pleaser that hits every audience demographic with effortless efficiency is not to be underestimated’. The film won six awards at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards and was the most popular local film of 2012 (Bodey 2013). What I will argue is that the film reproduces key aspects of the neoliberal ideology that has become naturalised since at least the era of John Howard’s government starting in 1996 (see Stratton 2011, pp. 1–28). David Harvey (2007, p. 2) has defined neoliberalism as in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.

Elsewhere I have argued that:

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It was the Howard governments that made neoliberalism personal [in Australia] in the sense that they progressively undermined the idea that the state had a responsibility to all who lived within its borders, replacing this with the claim that their is a reciprocal relationship, founded ultimately on the market, between the state and the people who live within it. (Stratton 2011, pp. 2–3)

Narratively, the film begins in 1958 and ends in 1968 after Martin Luther King’s death. The death of the well-known American civil rights leader is used in the film as a marker for the end, in Australia, of a particular relationship of assimilation and paternalism between white and Indigenous Australians. After 1968, and especially with the advent of Gough Whitlam’s government in 1972, Indigenous Australians were increasingly empowered and given rights. The Howard government moved away from such empowerment to effect a conservative transformation to a form of claimed self-empowerment which, in effect, entailed a loss of agency for Aboriginal people. The play of the same name on which the film is based was first produced in 2004, eight years into the Howard government’s period in office which lasted until 2007. The film was released in 2012 at the end of the period of the Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard Labour governments, just before the return of a Liberal-dominated government under Tony Abbott even more ideologically preoccupied with the ideas of neoliberalism than that of Howard. The film revises the era of assimilation offering a history more in line with the conservative position in the so-called History Wars that were a feature of the Howard years (see Veracini 2006; MoretonRobinson 2004). Rosanne Kennedy has published an article about the role of memory in The Sapphires. She contrasts memory with history and argues that: What positions the film as memory rather than history, however, is its mythopoeic representations of Cummeragunja. In contrast to history, which attempts to reconstruct ‘what the event was’ for the society in which it occurred, memory remembers the past for the present. The film remembers the spirit, resilience and achievements of residents of Cummeragunja, while representing none of the vicissitudes of its history. (Kennedy 2013, p. 335)

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What underlies this memory work? Kennedy’s definition of memory work evacuates power and ideology. What we need to examine is what ideological work the film does, and in whose interest. The Sapphires is more than a feelgood film. It is a nostalgia film—but not nostalgia for a real past, rather, for an ideologically driven, sanitised past. It is this tailored nostalgia that underpins the film’s popularity in Australia. It is a nostalgia for a time generated and naturalised during the period of Howard’s government. Svetlana Boym (2001, p. xiii) writes that: Nostalgia … is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.

In the case of The Sapphires, it is a romance with a cultural fantasy; a past which combines white paternalism with Aboriginal acceptance and passivity. The Sapphires remakes the past for a particular, neoliberal present.

Rewriting the Past This past is one where conservatism and its associated racism are legitimated; there are mistreatments of Aborigines but where these mistreatments never end up being tragic. Kay, the cousin taken away and part of the Stolen Generations, survives the home she is sent to—which we do not see; no physical or mental abuse is apparent—so successfully that she is able to pass as white and even hold Tupperware parties for her white neighbours. Keith Windschuttle is one historian who believes that the depredations visited upon Aborigines have been exaggerated. He was on Howard’s side during the History Wars. In his critique of Keith Windschuttle’s position on the Stolen Generations as expressed in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Robert Manne (2010) writes: Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and communities during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers have been wildly exaggerated by the ‘orthodox’ historians and by the authors of the 1997 Human Rights and Equal

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Opportunity Commission’s report Bringing Them Home. More importantly, the Aboriginal children removed by force were not ‘stolen’. They were removed for the same welfare reasons neglected white children were. While some of the compounds or ‘half-caste’ institutions to which the children were removed were not ideal, others were no worse and indeed often better than the equivalent institutions that housed white children at the same time. Anti-Aboriginal racism played virtually no part in the removal process.

In The Sapphires, Kay has successfully learnt settler manners and passes for white, leading it would seem, a solidly respectable lower-middle-class white life; until her cousins come knocking at her door.1 While racism is shown in the early part of the film when the sisters are still living on the Cummeragunja reserve, there is no actual aggression or abuse. The sisters try to hitch to the town, Shepparton, but are not picked up. Gail suggests it is because of racism. Cynthia makes light of this saying it is because Gail is ugly. The sisters are allowed to perform at the talent contest in the pub even if their performance is met with stony silence and a white person wins the competition (with the worst cover of the Seekers’ reworking of ‘Morningtown Ride’ you could ever have the misfortune to hear). The primary problem here would seem to be race mixing. Aborigines should stick to their reserve and not get involved in town events; the town is white. The reserve itself is shown as the site for happy Aboriginal families to live together; no alcohol abuse here and no abuse because of alcohol. If, as we know because of a signpost and because the duo are introduced as the Cummeragunja Songbirds, this reserve is Cummeragunja then there is no hint of its political history. Cummeragunja was founded in 1881 on the New South Wales side of the Murray River. Its first residents had moved from the Maloga Mission escaping the religious life imposed there (see McLisky 2010). As the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board increased control over Cummeragunja the quality of life for the people living there decreased. Heather Goodall (1996, p. 247) describes the situation in the late 1930s: The new manager, A. J. McQuiggan, had arrived at Cummeragunja in 1937, transferred to cover up his cruelty to the boys at Kinchela Home. McQuiggan brought to Cummeragunja only arrogance, threats and violence. The new ‘houses’, rather than an improvement on the old

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four-roomed cottages, were found to be two-roomed slums, built of millrubbish, with tin rather than brick chimneys and wooden shutters instead of windows. There had been no improvements to either the water supply or the sanitation and not the slightest indication of a renewal of farming.

By 1939 the Cummeragunja community had enough. They walked off the reserve into Victoria. Wayne Atkinson (n.d.) writes that: The 1939 ‘Walk Off’ when hundreds of residents walked off Cummeragunja in protest of the oppressive conditions and management of A. J. McQuiggan and camped on the Victorian side of the Murray River is still a focal memory point in the Yorta Yorta community. It is still seen as a defining moment in our people’s ongoing struggle for self-determination, civil rights and rights to traditional lands.

Goodall (1996, p. 303) tells us that: The strike was finally broken in October 1939, when the NSW Protection Board convinced the Victorian government to withhold food relief to strikers and to deny their children access to the Barmah public school. Even this, however, did not force the strikers to return to the station, where McQuiggan still held control. Instead, they moved to surrounding areas in New South Wales or Victoria, very bitter and highly politicised people.

If the eldest of the young women who formed the Sapphires was around twenty in 1968, she would have been born less than ten years after this example of political activism when the memory was still fresh in the Cummeragunja community. McQuiggan had finally been sacked in 1940.

Who Likes Motown Soul? The film plays to a white audience which imagines that Motown songs were popular in Australia’s past. They weren’t. To take the most relevant example, the Supremes, their 1964 track, ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ was number 1 on the American Billboard pop chart but only climbed to number 16 in Australia; the same year’s ‘Baby Love’ was also number 1 in the United States but only reached number 26 in Australia. There is a consistent pattern of tracks achieving lower chart placings in Australia as compared to the United States. Marvin Gaye’s 1968 hit, ‘I Heard

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It Through the Grapevine’, which topped the pop charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and which is one of the tracks included in The Sapphires in Jessica Mauboy’s version, only got to number 40 in Australia. Another track included in the film, this time in its original version by Sam and Dave, ‘Soul Man’, climbed to number 2 in the United States but did not chart at all in Australia. The present-day white, Australian mainstream acceptance of 1960s soul music has come about through films like The Blues Brothers (1981) which gave white viewers a soul experience inflected with a rock aesthetic, and the American television series about the Vietnam War China Beach (1988–1991) whose producers had a contract with Motown to use their music (Shwiff 2013). Indeed, the theme track for the show was the Supremes ‘Reflections’. It is no coincidence that Jimmy Barnes, singer with Oz rock group Cold Chisel, released Soul Deep, the first of his soul covers albums, in 1991. Barnes even included a cover of ‘Reflections’ on this album. So popular was 1960s soul by this time that Soul Deep made number 1 on the Australian album chart in November 1991 and again in January 1992. The Sapphires plays to a white, liberal audience who want to believe that black American music was popular during the White Australia policy era. Using now familiar African-American music the film constructs a nostalgic past for white Australians in which music transcended the colour bar. The film also addresses a young audience that often doesn’t even know there was a White Australia policy and which is used now to African-American music stylings. It is not for nothing that the most popular present-day Indigenous purveyor of American-style R&B is also the lead singer of the Sapphires in the film and that the soundtrack has been recorded with Jessica Mauboy singing most of the Motown songs. Mauboy has had twelve singles in the Australian top twenty between 2008 and 2014. Mauboy comes from Darwin and is of West Timorese and Indigenous heritage. She has remarked that: ‘The Motown music in this movie is what I grew up listening to’ (Evans 2012). Motown was the music which her non-white parents played in their home. The soundtrack is essentially a Mauboy album, she sings on ten of the fifteen tracks—made obvious in the deluxe release where Mauboy sings a further five tracks three of which, ‘Tracks Of My Tears’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)’ by the Temptations and ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ by the Supremes, are all classic Motown tracks. It topped the Australian album chart for two weeks in 2012. Mauboy sings the tracks with few of the stylings that are

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now typical of rhythm and blues such as the extreme use of melisma but retaining her own characteristic vocal grain in this way bridging the gap between the familiar, and now nostalgic, Motown versions and a presentday sensibility. She began her career singing country and western songs and even performed at Tamworth in the Country Music Festival in 2004 when she was fourteen, winning the Road to Tamworth competition.

What Happened to Self-Determination By eliding the period between around 1970 and a present that starts in the mid-1990s, The Sapphires suggests an historical continuity in which the present situation of Indigenous Australia is constructed as the consequence of the success of the kinds of policies in place during the 1950s and 1960s. As I noted earlier, the film is often described as a feelgood film, one in which drama and indeed politics are supplanted by humour and romance. It is mostly set in 1968, around five years before the final ending of the White Australia policy by Whitlam and the changes to the treatment of Aborigines that characterised the Whitlam government. In 1972 Whitlam established the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and during his time in government worked towards a land rights act for the federally controlled Northern Territory, presaging this with the handover of land to the Gurindji people in August 1975. These developments mark the beginning of the era in which the film does not acknowledge. The shift to this time in the film is displaced onto African Americans and is shown by the Aboriginal community watching reports of Martin Luther King’s assassination on television. Traditionally, King’s murder signalled the end of peaceful protest for civil rights in the United States and the beginning of violent confrontation. Kennedy argues that: The Sapphires locates its story in 1968—a year that began, in Vietnam, with the Tet offensive and the attack on the American embassy in Saigon. That year witnessed widespread student riots and anti-war protests in the United States, Europe and Japan, and saw dashed hopes for civil rights in America with the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. In Australia, however, 1968 was not a particularly significant year in terms either of Aboriginal rights or anti-war protests. (Kennedy 2013, p. 334)

The beginning of the film refers to the 1967 referendum. While this is commonly thought to have given Indigenous Australians the right

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to vote, its actual purpose was to end the discrimination in treatment vested in the Constitution between settler Australians and Indigenous Australians. The Constitution had given power over Aborigines to the states. The 90 per cent ‘yes’ vote placed Indigenous Australians on the same constitutional footing as settler Australians by erasing any special treatment for them. The 1967 referendum and its overwhelming affirmation was the beginning of a fundamental change in settler and Aboriginal relations. On Australia Day in 1972 Indigenous activists set up a Tent Embassy on the grounds of Parliament House in Canberra. This was a part of a highly visible campaign for Indigenous rights, including land rights. Over the next twenty years, there was an increasing acceptance of Indigenous self-determination from Whitlam’s handing back land title to the Gurindji people in 1975 to the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report and the 1992 Mabo decision in a court case started in 1982 which recognised native title in the land and led to the 1993 Native Title Act. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was founded in 1990 as the peak body for Indigenous self-government. The 1997 seven-hundred-page report on the Stolen Generations, Bringing Them Home, was, perhaps, the last major instalment in the revision of Australian perceptions of the Indigenous experience in settler Australia. The enquiry had been set up in 1995 under the Keating government. The report detailed the century-long practice of taking Indigenous children from their parents and placing them in homes and orphanages where they were often told that their parents were dead and where the children would be given training to work as servants for settler families. In The Sapphires, Kay was a product of this regime. By the time the Bringing them Home report was released the Howard government was unwinding the advances made in the previous twenty years. In 2005 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which in 1990 had replaced the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Development Commission, was dissolved. Virginia Watson (2009, pp. 91–92) has described this change: When John Howard came to power in 1996, the new political leadership began—slowly at first, and then with increased vigour—to develop a narrative about the ‘failure’ of national policy and administration in Indigenous affairs over the previous two decades. As is well known, that policy period, and the administrative and representative structures and

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processes they spawned, were organised around the principles of ‘selfdetermination’/’self-management’ and a bipartisan commitment to the elimination of racial discrimination and the protection of human rights. … During this twenty-year period, ‘self-determination’ was represented by both supporters and critics alike as signifying a clear ‘break’ from the era of administration which had preceded it, that of ‘assimilation’.

Watson (2009, p. 90) explains how a shift to a rhetoric of crisis became a turning point at which the discourse of government responsibility for citizens was overtaken and replaced by that of citizens’ responsibility to government, namely that Indigenous people and communities themselves are now equally responsible for (governmental) failure in Indigenous affairs.

It is that twenty-year period, the time of self-determination which the Howard government identified in terms of failure, which is elided in The Sapphires. The Sapphires recuperates everything that has happened between the early 1970s and the Howard/Abbot governments making the, may I say appalling, treatment of Aborigines their own responsibility. For settler Australian audiences there is a reassurance in the film that the situation of Aborigines is not as parlous as some on the left of politics would suggest, and that the Howard government’s policies have not made that situation worse. Unlike Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film, Samson and Delilah, which portrayed the brutality of Indigenous life in an isolated community, The Sapphires offers a past, and by implication a present, in which Indigenous Australians live a life of ease in the bush, where the women sit on the verandas of their houses watching over their children and the men fish. Entertainment is at least sometimes provided by children singing hymns at outdoor concerts.

Narrative in the Sapphires The bulk of the action of The Sapphires is set in 1968. The story arc is of three Indigenous sisters joined later by their Melbourne-based cousin who start out on a reserve singing country and western and are discovered by Dave Lovelace, an Irishman who, down on his luck, is running talent shows in a small-town hotel. He moulds them into a soul group and they land a job entertaining the American troops in Vietnam. On their return,

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the group go back to the reserve, Dave and Gail, the eldest of the sisters, ask permission from her parents to marry, and the group play a concert. Indeed, the concert at the end of the film pairs with a concert shown at the beginning of the film when, in a prologue set ten years earlier in 1958, we see two of the girls running through the summer crops to return to the reserve where they join their sisters in a concert singing a hymn in the Yorta Yorta language, ‘Ngarra Burra Ferra’. This hymn is reprised later in the film when the girls sing it down the phone from Saigon to their mother. In the 1958 sequence, as we see the girls running, as it turns out, towards the reserve, the soundtrack plays Credence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Run Through The Jungle’. This track was released in 1970 and, in Australia, was a double-sided hit, along with ‘Up Around The Bend’, reaching number 8 in the year-end accumulated figures on the singles chart. ‘Run Through The Jungle’ is often taken to be an anti-Vietnam War song, which is doubtless one of the reasons it was chosen and one of the ways it is read by Australian audiences watching The Sapphires.2 In the context of The Sapphires, where the track is used while the girls are shown running in the distance against the horizon, it also can be read as calling to mind the panicked attempt at escape that many Indigenous children suffered when the police came to take children away from their mothers—the story of the Stolen Generations, and of the sisters’ cousin Kay. However, at the same time, the Credence Clearwater Revival track is very much in the white American rock tradition. In Australia, the yearend figures show the group had four double-sided singles in the top thirty for 1970. Credence Clearwater Revival was clearly very popular in mainstream, white Australia and their tracks remain a staple of radio stations playing hits of that era. Placing ‘Run Through The Jungle’ in the film’s narrative prologue, before the girls sing ‘Ngarra Burra Ferra’, overdetermines not just this segment but the entire film with a nostalgic white rock sensibility. It makes the film safe for audiences for whom white rock music is their primary popular music identification. The narrative arc suggests the overwhelming conservatism of the film in that by the end, after their adventure in Vietnam, the girls return to the reserve. Certainly, where previously they were singing hymns and country and western they are now singing soul music but both their music and their sparkly, sexy blue dresses look out of place on the reserve in spite of the rousing reception they are given. Marriage as a romantic resolution has a long history in the nineteenth-century novel, as well of course

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as in romantic comedies, as a way of establishing closure. In this case Gail and Dave’s marriage also suggests a racial resolution to the problem of the effects of the racialisation of Indigenous Australians. It was, as it happens, one of the solutions offered in the 1950s and 1960s to the ‘problem’ of the continued existence of Aborigines in Australia—it was hoped that the girls of the Stolen Generations would marry suitable white men thus breeding out their own Aboriginality (Ellinghaus 2003). This brief outline does no justice to the ideological complexity of the film which I shall go on to unpack. What I want to suggest here is that it is this conservative portrayal of Indigenous life which offers especially settler viewers a reassurance and pleasurable affirmation that life for Indigenous Australians was not as bad as they had been led to believe since the 1970s. At the core of the film is the remaking of the girls, the Cummeragunja Songbirds as they call themselves, as the Sapphires. As I have already indicated, the film makes a connection between the Sapphires and the Supremes. A 2011 press release from Goalpost Film encourages this comparison: ‘Plucked from obscurity and branded as Australia’s answer to The Supremes, The Sapphires grasp the chance of a lifetime when they’re offered their first real gig - entertaining the troops in Vietnam’ (Mair 2011). The first thing that needs stating here is that the comparison of the Sapphires with the Supremes, an African-American girl group, complicates the positioning of the young women in the Sapphires. Aborigines are not the equivalent of African Americans. African Americans were taken to the country that became the United States as slaves. Slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865. Aborigines are the indigenous people of the continent identified in colonial language as Australia and are the equivalent in American terms to Native Americans, those historically called Indians. While African Americans have much visibility, Native Americans were as oppressed and silenced, and indeed displaced, as Aborigines. By making no mention of Native Americans in The Sapphires they are, once more, silenced. As it happens, the first major development in the popular acknowledgement of the oppression and genocide of Native Americans was the publishing success of Dee Brown’s book, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, in 1970, two years after the events of The Sapphires and the same year that ‘Run Through The Jungle’ was released. Wounded Knee was the site of an 1890 massacre of members of the Sioux tribe. In 1973 around 200 Native Americans were involved in the occupation of Wounded Knee for seventy-one days as a protest to highlight the treatment of Native Americans by the American government.

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The American film reviewer Nell Minow, on the well-known reviewer Roger Ebert’s website, typifies the elisions and confusions that can be caused by equating the Sapphires with the Supremes: What if the Supremes had been born Down Under? A very conventional story of a ’60s Australian girl group gains extra power from its context and setting in this fact-based story set to the beat of Motown soul. (Minow 2013)

The Supremes, of course, could not have been born in Australia because Africans were not brought to the continent as slaves and, indeed, the White Australia policy would have made the presence of Africans here, other than those who had arrived before federation in 1901, all but impossible. In passing we should note that there was a not insignificant presence in pre-federation Australia of people of African descent (see Pybus 2006; Duffield 1986; Waterhouse 1990). Many arrived as convicts and some were sailors, others were entertainers. By linking the women in the Sapphires to the Supremes, a certain undermining of their claim to indigeneity takes place. There was, of course, no equivalent Native American girl group to the Supremes.3 Having said all this, there is a history of the impact of African-American song styles on Indigenous Australians that goes back to the nineteenth century. While this is not the place to detail this, some key moments can be identified. The Fisk Jubilee Singers toured Australia in 1886. One of the places they performed was the Maloga Aboriginal Mission. One of the hymns they sang there was ‘Turn Back Pharaoh’s Army’. Translated into the Yorta Yorta language this became ‘Ngarra Burra Ferra’, the hymn sung in The Sapphires by the girls in the 1958 concert and then again in 1968 on the phone from Saigon.4 During the Second World War, when the American armed forces were still segregated, African-American troops in Australia were often stationed where possible away from white habitation which could mean closer to where Aborigines lived. In addition, it was considered shocking if white women had to dance with African Americans so Indigenous women, and white working-class women, often prostitutes, provided partners. In Brisbane, for example: James Currie, an Aborigine, organized a club at the Protestant Alliance Friendly Society hall in Red Hill, a working-class inner-city Brisbane suburb. It was patronized by Black Americans, Aborigines, and a small

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number of White women. Australian men were banned by order of the US military authorities. (Saunders and Taylor 1995, pp. 344–345)

Precursing the Sapphires, in Cairns the three Pitt sisters called themselves the Harmony Sisters and during the war sang on the American bases. David Salisbury (2006, p. 5) tells us that ‘they were often featured regularly on the radio in the 1930s and early 1940s and performed a song T.I. (Thursday Island) that was recently re-recorded by Seaman Dan in 2000’. After the war, Dulcie Pitt used the stage name of Georgia Lee and became a jazz and blues singer. She travelled to England and worked with Geraldo’s dance band in 1954. Returning to Australia she toured with Nat King Cole on his 1956 tour. In 1962 Lee recorded what was in all likelihood the first album by an Indigenous woman, Georgia Lee Sings the Blues . In Melbourne African-American artists used to visit Pastor Doug Nicholls where they were assured of a welcome. Nicholls, who was later knighted, came from Cummeragunja. Naomi Mayers, one of the actual Sapphires on whom the film is based, explains that: During this time, it was the ‘White Australia Policy’. So black performers would come to Uncle Doug’s church: Winifred Atwell, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte. There weren’t that many black fellas in Melbourne at that time. A lot of the black visitors were scared to come. (Nunn 2012)

The father of Lois Peeler, who went to Vietnam as one of the original Sapphires, was Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls’ cousin (Peeler, n.d.). Peeler emphasises the continuing division in Australia between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the late 1960s: Back in Australia it was also difficult. At the time the White Australia policy was in force and Aboriginal people had just become citizens of this country. As a result, we took our music to the underground clubs, where black people would gather and listen to their own music and dance their own dances. (Saluting the Sapphires 2012)

African-American music, from gospel to the blues, provided a continuous source for Indigenous musical reference. Indeed, it offered a key distinction from white, mainstream popular music. The Sapphires did not need an Irishman to explain the soul to them.

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Rural and Urban: Country and Western, and Soul In the film, Pastor Doug’s religious open house is secularised as Uncle Ed’s. It is here that the girls come to stay in the city when they leave Cummeragunja. In order to understand the importance of Uncle Ed’s we need to think about the rural/urban binary that the film constructs. I have already outlined the film’s version of Cummeragunja. It is pastoral; an innocent place where people live relaxed lives in bright sunlight and even pregnancy outside of marriage is looked upon with tolerance. Its music is Country and Western.5 From his point of view that soul music is the more positive genre, Dave tells the girls that ‘in country and western music, they’ve lost, they’ve given up and they are just all whining about it’. The song the Cummeragunja Songbirds sing in the pub talent contest where they first meet Dave is Merle Haggard’s ‘Today I Started Loving You Again’, a song about heartbreak. However, it is unfair to say that the singer has given up.6 Rather, he is struggling to get over the loss of his loved one. As it happens, there are a number of soul versions of the song including one by Bettye Swan released in 1972. Dave’s broader point is that Country and Western songs are backward looking, or at least founded in stasis, rather than forward looking. As it happens, in this interpretation they fit well with the image of rural Indigenous life offered in The Sapphires. It would be better to say that in The Sapphires Country and Western emphasises continuity with tradition. We see little of city life outside of Uncle Ed’s home. Uncle Ed, was not based on Pastor Uncle Doug Nicholls but, rather, on one of Tony’s [Briggs] uncles who had one of the first pubs – I think it was in Port Melbourne – him and one of Tony’s aunts, him and this Aboriginal woman managing a pub in one of the roughest places in Port Melbourne back in the 60’s and 70’s. (Tynan 2012)

Tony Briggs was the author of the play version of The Sapphires and the screenwriter for the film. His mother, Laurel Robinson, was one of the original Sapphires. What is at stake in the film’s secular shift? First of all, Uncle Ed turns out to be Irish. When they arrive, Dave turns to Gail and says: ‘You didn’t tell me that your Uncle Ed is Irish’ to which Gail replies: ‘We try to hide it’. Elsewhere I have discussed how the nineteenth-century English colonial construction of the Irish as black was

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imported to Australia along with Irish convicts (Stratton 2004, pp. 222– 238). As a consequence there is a long history of close contact including intermarriage between the Irish and Aborigines in Australia. While the Irish had been whitened around the time of federation, the memory of that contact remained. The result is that in the film Dave and Ed are mediators. They are white, they come from white society, but they also have the connotation of blackness. It is this connotation that links both Dave and Ed to soul music—a link that, it must be said immediately, is both essentialist and spurious. In a number of interviews Wayne Blair, the film’s Indigenous director, has remarked that he knew that one of the films to which The Sapphires would be compared was The Commitments , a film directed by Alan Parker and released in 1991 based on a novel by Roddy Doyle. The narrative is concerned with the making of a soul band out of a group of working-class Dublin youths, and the band’s rapid unravelling. In one notorious scene in the book Jimmy Rabbitte spurs on the group by telling them that: --The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads. They nearly gasped: it was so true. --An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies [rural people] have fuckin’ everythin’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. --Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud. He grinned. He’d impressed himself again. He’d won them. They couldn’t say anything. (Doyle 1987, pp. 13–14)

In the film Parker tones down the rhetoric by substituting ‘black’ for ‘nigger’. Rabbitte’s mates are from the working-class Dublin northside. In both films soul music connotes urban dislocation. Timothy D. Taylor (1998, p. 293) argues that: ‘Jimmy tropes their [the members of the group] working-class postcolonial status with the situation of African Americans’. However, what is going on is more complicated. Lisa McGonigle (2005) argues that Jimmy’s speech here is insincere, that it is simply a rhetorical move. Doyle has answered such a suggestion: It is a joke. He is motivating his band, he is motivating everybody he hopes to be his band and in the absence of talent he is giving them the purpose. There is also a certain truth as Ireland, and all its members, represents a country that was a colony and it shares many worlds history (like Africa, Latin America). (Stella 1997)

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Doyle is here signalling the colonial history that founded the English idea of the Irish as black. At the same time, in Jimmy Rabbitte’s speech we have the suggestion of a similar rural/urban musical divide that we find in The Sapphires. The ‘culchies’, rural people, Jimmy says, ‘have fuckin’ everything. By the end of the book Jimmy has a new idea, to form a band like the Byrds playing country rock. He tells his mates: But yeh know, Joey said when he left tha’ he didn’t think soul was righ’ for Ireland. This stuff [country music] is though. You’ve got to remember that half the country is fuckin’ farmers. This is the type o’ stuff they all listen to. (Doyle 1987, p. 139)

The Irish version of Country and Western, sometimes called Country and Irish, became very popular from around the mid-1960s with artists like Larry Cunningham (see Connor 1991). Dave, and Ed, reject rural Ireland, and rural Australia, for the urban future. Where Cummeragunja is brightly lit and the shots external, we only see the inside of Ed’s house, shot at night when the girls and Dave arrive. The house is in semi-darkness, a black band who might be African American or Aboriginal or both is loudly belting out the Sam and Dave track ‘Soul Sister, Brown Sugar’. In the half-light we see African-American sailors in uniform, Aborigines, women, both black and white, dancing and drinking, a group of men, mostly probably white, playing cards, most likely gambling. Ed is clearly drunk, as are many of the guests. The scene is one of excess. It is both Bacchanalian and a fearful image of the future when Indigenous Australians have self-determination. The scene compiles race mixing, disorder and possible illegality, and implies the drunkenness that has plagued Indigenous communities here suggested as personal choice rather than a way of escaping trauma. Pastor Uncle Doug Nicholls’ respectable home has been transformed. The pleasure the film audience has in the music overlays the ideological critique of the effects of self-determination. It is the Irish, now the emissaries of urban life, who are leading the country Aborigines astray. In an unpublished version of an article on ‘The Black Pacific’, Gabriel Solis (2014, pp. 22–23) argues that the introduction into the film of the character of Dave Lovelace

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dramatically revises the women’s actual agency and identifications in order to serve the narrative imperatives of romantic comedy. … the effect is to create a Pygmalion-esque situation in which Dave, the hipster Henry Higgins, winds up teaching the Sapphires to be (or at least to sound) authentically black.

In the film the women are tutored by Dave to become soul singers. This loss of agency is marked even in the selling of the DVD. Notoriously, in the United States, Chris O’Dowd was given pride of place on the box cover (Douglas 2013). The girls on whom the Sapphires as a girl group are based had sung at Cummeragunja. They moved to Melbourne where they sang in Pastor Uncle Doug Nicholls’ church: ‘We used to sing in family groups,’ Mayers says. ‘We were in the Harold Blair choir, singing was always a part of our lives. We sang in the church with Uncle Doug [Pastor Doug Nicholls] raising funds for his church’. (Hawker 2012)

Then, Beverly Briggs tells us: I was 19 when we sang professionally as a group. It all started one night when we were coming home from a late shift at the Postmaster General. We got off the train at 11 pm at St Kilda. We were going past a nightclub when these young Maori gentlemen out the front said: ‘Hello girls, come in, come in, come into see the show!’ They said they were looking for a girl to do the hula in their show, which had a South Pacific flavour. So the next day we ended up performing with these guys because their dancer didn’t show up. They said ‘Can you sing?’ and we said ‘we can harmonise’. That’s how it all started. (Nunn 2012)

Beverly and Laurel Robinson worked as telephonists, Naomi was a nurse. In the film only Kay’s day job as a nurse is shown—and Kay was the Stolen Generation cousin—suggesting the girls from Cummeragunja, having no employment in the urban world, didn’t really belong there. Here, also, we find that the girls were not a group in their own right. The ‘Maori gentlemen’ were members of the Maori Tiki Showband which performed at the Tiki Village club in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. Maori showbands evolved in New Zealand in the mid-1950s. Many of them played in Australia. As Chris Bourke (2010, p. 330) describes it, their formula was ‘skilled

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musicianship, multi-instrumental abilities, a broad range of pop tunes, parodies, impersonations, nutty comedy routines, a dash of kapa haka, and slick choreography and stage chat’. Maori showbands, unlike Irish showbands from whom their generic identity may well derive, were primarily cabaret acts. This is why the Maori Tiki band had a hula dancer. At the very end of The Sapphires there is a montage of photographs. One of them shows two girls wearing leotards, doubtless Beverly and Naomi, on stage with what must be the Maori Tiki showband. They are a very long way from being Australia’s Supremes. As performers working with Maoris their Aboriginality was not obvious: They were sometimes introduced as American or Tahitian, because that went across better. ‘As soon as the word Aboriginal came up, no one was interested,’ Robinson says. There was an event at Puckapunyal army base that is still fresh in their minds, when slights about Aboriginal people were bandied around. (Hawker 2012)

Australian racism was pervasive. Tahitians were exotic, African Americans were acceptable as entertainers. In 1955 the Harlem Blackbirds, a thirty-two person African-American show, was originally booked to tour Australia for eight weeks but were so successful they stayed for nearly nine months (see Stratton 2007). In The Sapphires, while racism exists in the rural environment where the Cummeragunja Songbirds fail to win the talent competition in the pub despite being demonstrably the best act we see, there would seem to be no racism in the city. We never see the girls, as the Sapphires, perform before a white audience so urban racism of the kind mentioned by Laurel Robinson is elided. One thing this disavowal of urban racism enables is the ‘happy ever after’ feelgood feeling we get from the marriage plans of Dave and Gail. Here, Dave is constituted as white but his Irishness includes an echo of the history of the Irish as being black and, in Australia, as associating with Aborigines. At one point when Gail’s father is joking about how Dave will have to be initiated, Dave asks Gail in a whisper if they can please live in the city. She agrees. The suggestion is not so much that Dave will therefore be able to avoid being initiated but that in the city the couple will be able to live without any racial baggage. A version, perhaps, of the mediaeval European idea of Stadtluft macht frei, city air makes you free.

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This heartening understanding of the lack of racism in the city is far from accurate. Katherine Ellinghaus (2003, p. 202) writes that: As late as the 1960s … [JW] Bleakley [The Aborigines of Australia: their history, their habits, their assimilation (1961)] was still arguing that, because of the inferior natures of white people willing to engage in interracial sexual relationships and: ‘the present half-civilised state of the aborigines, the process of absorption would be through the least desirable channels on both sides’.

John Bleakley had been Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland in the early part of the century. Unlike those who saw intermarriage as a way of breeding out Aboriginal characteristics, Bleakley advocated against miscegenation. In a book working over census figures, Genevieve Heard, Siew-Ean Khoo and Bob Birrell (2009, p. 3) sum up the situation: ‘As late as the 1960s, only a small minority of non-indigenous Australians were prepared to say that they would accept a full-blood or part-Aboriginal person as a relative by marriage into their family’. Dave and Gail would have had a far from easy time living in the city. However, the myth of the lack of racism reinforces a neoliberal idea that people as individuals can make successful lives for themselves in all circumstances. Given this belief, laws against racism are unnecessary. Here is Angela Davis (2009), the highly respected African-American activist on this matter: The path toward the complete elimination of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of “colour-blindness” and the assertion that equality can only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race. This approach, however, fails to apprehend the material and ideological work that race continues to do.

The Sapphires acts out this neoliberal maxim in the guise of a romantic resolution to the film’s narrative. We, the audience, connive with the neoliberal ideology of the film to ensure our pleasure. It was the showband that got itself on the Vietnam and Philippines entertainment circuit, the girls went with them. However, again unlike the film, it was not all three historical girls who went to Vietnam. Beverly and Naomi were protesting against the Vietnam War and felt it wrong to tour with the showband. Consequently, Lois Peeler went in their stead. Only two girls went on tour. The Sapphires makes no political comment on the Vietnam War. Indeed, the film gives the impression that there was

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no politics in Australia surrounding the war. Yet, in Melbourne around 100,000 people took to the streets in the first national moratorium rally in 1970. In disavowing this politics, the film suppresses the activism of Beverly and Naomi which, as we have seen, was part of the heritage of growing up in Cummeragunja. While the African-American serviceman who asks the Sapphires to sing for the troops in the wake of the shock of Martin Luther King’s assassination makes a clear point about what kind of country African Americans might be fighting on behalf of, this displaces again any politics about Indigenous entertainers in Vietnam, the Australian military presence in Vietnam, and, indeed, the Indigenous experience in Australia. Beverly and Naomi’s political position, and the recognition that Indigenous Australians had an activist involvement in the campaign against the war and Australia’s involvement in it, is erased from the film.

Conclusion The Sapphires is an example of the naturalisation of neoliberal ideology. Audiences’ pleasure comes from the acceptance of many of neoliberalism’s tenets. The girls’ loss of agency is disguised in the celebration of their individualism. Their success as the Sapphires is overdetermined by their return, including Kay, to Cummeragunja. Only Gail escapes, and that is by her marrying an Irishman, in other words not by her own agency. The couple will leave for the city. The film denies the girls’ agency which the original Sapphires displayed in their involvement with the showband, in their activism against the Vietnam War and, most generally, as singers of soul music. This loss of agency, as I have already suggested, replicates the shift away from an ideology of self-determination. The film’s minimisation of racism allows for a less-confronting, more heartwarming audience experience while reproducing the Howard government’s argument that the increasingly accepted claims made in the 1970s and 1980s for the terrible colonial treatment of Aborigines have been very much overstated. Indeed, and perhaps most importantly, the film offers a continuity between the assimilationist policies of the pre-1960s era and the policies of the Howard government. Those earlier policies and practices, such as the removal of Indigenous children, are either downplayed or, as in the case of pastoral Cummeragunja, offered in the film as the justificatory basis for the present-day neoliberal approach which suggests that any individual can succeed on by their own efforts. Indigenous people are now

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responsible for their own success or failure. The ongoing effects of colonialism are disavowed. As Prime Minister Tony Abbot’s government’s first budget showed, it has continued in the footsteps of the Howard governments. Commenting on the changes to social and welfare policy measures embedded in that budget, Jon Altman (2014) writes that: The 2014-2015 Federal Budget is a horror budget for Indigenous Australians because many Indigenous people are especially vulnerable residing in communities that are neglected, still facing barriers of racial discrimination and exclusion, and living in deep poverty.

In August 2014, at the launch of the Defining Moments in Australian History project at the National Museum of Australia, Abbott minimised the contribution of Indigenous Australians to the Australian nation-state by identifying the arrival of the First Fleet as the defining moment in the history of the Australian continent (Hurst 2014). The audience’s pleasure at the success of the Sapphires obscures the ways that the film reproduces neoliberal assumptions and downplays the achievements of the era of selfdetermination; indeed quite literally sending three of the four women who make up the Sapphires back to the past.

Notes 1. It is ironic that Margate Tucker was the aunt of Lois Peeler, one of the women on whom the girls in The Sapphires is based. Tucker was raised on Cummeragunja until at thirteen she was taken away by the authorities and placed in the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls. Tucker’s autobiography, If everyone cared, published in 1977, was one of the first first-hand accounts by a member of the Stolen Generations. Tucker also appeared in the documentary on Indigenous oppression, Lousy Little Sixpence (1983). 2. John Fogerty, who wrote ‘Run Through The Jungle’, has said that he intended the lyrics to reflect concern about the spread of gun ownership in the United States. See the Wikipedia page for ‘Run Through The Jungle’ at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Through_the_Jungle. 3. The most well-known Native American performer of that era was Buffy Saint Marie who is of Cree heritage. Her first album, It’s My Way!, was released in 1964. 4. This information on ‘Ngarra Burra Ferra’ comes from ‘The Lyrics to Bura Fera’ on the website We want to walk with you: Australia’s untold stories of black and white partnerships, at: http://wewanttowalkwithyou.com.au/ tag/bura-fera/.

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5. Country and Western has a lengthy history in Indigenous Australia. See Clinton Walker’s Buried country (2000). 6. The best account of the ideology of country and western is Geoff Mann’s ‘Why does country music sound white?’ (2008).

References Altman, Jon. 2014. Abbott’s back to the future policy for aboriginal advancement. newmatilda.com, June 17. https://newmatilda.com/2014/06/17/ abbotts-back-future-policy-aboriginal-advancement/. Accessed 19 December 2019. Atkinson, Wayne. n.d. The Cummera Walk off and the return to base camp politics. http://waynera.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/cummer awalkoff-doc.pdf. Accessed 19 December 2019. Bodey, Michael. 2013. Six awards make the Sapphires the jewel of 2nd AACTA ceremony. The Australian, January 31. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ arts/six-awards-makes-the-sapphiresthe-jewel-of-2nd-aacta-ceremony/storye6frg8n6-1226565345131. Accessed 8 September 2013. Bourke, Chris. 2010. Blue smoke: The lost dawn of New Zealand popular music 1918–1964. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Connor, Nuala. 1991. Bringing it all back home: Influence of Irish music. London: BBC Books. Davis, Angela. 2009. Locked up: Racism in the era of neoliberalism. The Drum ABC, March 19. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-03-19/locked-up-rac ism-in-the-era-of-neoliberalism/1077518. Accessed 19 December 2019. Douglas, Tim. 2013. The Sapphires US DVD cover ‘vile’ says Chris O’Dowd. The Australian, August 2. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/film/ the-sapphires-us-dvd-cover-vile-sayschris-odowd/story-e6frg8pf-122669026 2756?nk¼c4b56691904874fd2d1bb14e60625cf3. Accessed 8 September 2013. Doyle, Roddy. 1987. The Commitments. Dublin: King Farouk Publishing. Duffield, Ian. 1986. From slave colonies to penal colonies: The West Indian convict transporters to Australia. Slavery & Abolition 7 (1): 24–45. Ellinghaus, Katherine. 2003. Absorbing the ‘Aboriginal problem’: Controlling interracial marriage in Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Aboriginal History 27: 183–207. Evans, Mel. 2012. Some Aussie razzle dazzle like Deborah Mailman and Jessica Mauboy. The Sunday Telegraph, July 15. https://www.dailytelegraph.com. au/lifestyle/some-aussie-razzle-dazzle/news-story/9f55dd7b55d436ad5d1f6 fdca69e6c04. Accessed 19 December 2019.

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Goodall, Heather. 1996. Invasion to embassy: Land in Aboriginal politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Harvey, David. 2007. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawker, Philippa. 2012. Reel deal: Singing Sapphires shine in the afterglow. Sydney Morning Herald, August 4. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ reel-deal-singing-sapphires-shine-inthe-afterglow-20120803-23ksm.html. Accessed 19 December 2019. Heard, Genevieve, Siew-Ean Khoo, and Bob Birrell. 2009. Intermarriage by birthplace and ancestry in Australia. People and Place 17 (1): 15–28. Hurst, Daniel. 2014. Tony Abbott says First Fleet arrival is the defining moment in Australian history. The Guardian, August 29. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/29/tony-abbott-says-first-fleet-arrival-isthe-defining-moment-in-australian-history. Accessed 19 December 2019. Kennedy, Rosanne. 2013. Soul music dreaming: The Sapphires, the 1960s and transnational memory. Memory Studies 6 (3): 331–344. Mair, Tracy. 2011. Chris O’Dowd joins the cast of the Sapphires. Goalpost Film Press Release, August 15. https://www.screendaily.com/production/ chris-odowd-joins-cast-of-goalposts-the-sapphires/5030847.article. Accessed 19 December 2019. Mann, Geoff. 2008. Why does country music sound white?: Race and the voice of nostalgia. Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (8): 73–100. Manne, Robert. 2010. Comment: Keith Windshuttle. The Monthly, February. https://www.themonthly.com.au/nation-reviewed-robert-manne-commentkeith-windschuttle-2256. Accessed 19 December 2019. McDonald, John. 2012. The Sapphires—A brilliant story, joyously told. The Australian Financial Review, August 11. https://www.johnmcdonald.net. au/2012/the-sapphires/. Accessed 19 December 2019. McGonigle, Lisa. 2005. Rednecks and Southsiders need not apply: Subalternity and soul in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Irish Studies Review 13 (2): 163–173. McLisky, Claire. 2010. The location of faith?: Power, agency and spirituality on Maloga Mission, 1874–1888. History Australia 7 (1): 1–24. Minow, Nell. 2013. The Sapphires. RogerEbert.com, March 27. https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sapphires-2013. Accessed 19 December 2019. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2004. Indigenous history wars and the virtue of the white nation. In The ideas market: An alternative take on Australia’s intellectual life, ed. David Carter, 219–235. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Morgan, Alec, and Gerry Bostock. 1983. Lousy Little Sixpence. Directed by Alec Morgan and Gerry Bostock. Canberra: Sixpence Productions.

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Nunn, Gary. 2012. The Sapphires: Where are they now? Australian Geographic, September 5. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cul ture/2012/09/the-sapphires-where-are-they-now/. Accessed 19 December 2019. Paatsch, Leigh. 2012. The Sapphires. The Herald Sun, August 8. http:// www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/movies/movie-review-the-sapphires/ story-e6frf8r6-1226446859046?nk¼c4b56691904874fd2d1bb14e60625cf3. Accessed 8 September 2013. Peeler, Lois. n.d. Strength in numbers. Museum Victoria. http://museumvic toria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/discoverycentre/identity/videos/jointhe-club-videos/strength-in-numbers/. Accessed 8 September 2013. Pybus, Cassandra. 2006. Black founders: The unknown story of Australia’s first black settlers. Kensington: UNSW Press. Salisbury, David. 2006. Mapping the cultural atlas of North Queensland: Ronald ‘Tonky’ Logan, a case study. Paper presented at the 29th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia: Music as local tradition and regional practice, Armidale, NSW, Australia, Sept 27–Oct 1. http://researchonline.jcu. edu.au/21985/1/MSA_2006_Paper.pdf. Accessed 19 December 2019. Saluting the Sapphires. 2012. Deadly Vibe, November 4. https://www.dea dlyvibe.com.au/2012/11/saluting-the-sapphires/. Accessed 19 December 2019. Saunders, Kay, and Helen Taylor. 1995. The reception of Black American servicemen in Australia during World War II: The resilience of ‘White Australia’. Journal of Black Studies 25 (3): 331–348. Shwiff, Kathy. 2013. After rights delay, ‘China Beach’ DVD soundtrack nearly complete. The Wall Street Journal, September 14. https://blogs.wsj.com/ speakeasy/2013/09/14/after-rights-delay-china-beach-dvd-soundtrack-nea rly-complete/. Accessed 19 December 2019. Solis, Gabriel. 2014. The black pacific: Music and racialization in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Critical Sociology 40 (3): 1–16. Stella, Laura. 1997. Interview with Roddy Doyle, May 12. https://dinamico2. unibg.it/fa/fa_stel.html. Accessed 19 December 2019. Stratton, Jon. 2004. Borderline anxieties: Whitening the Irish and keeping out asylum seekers. In Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 222–238. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Stratton, Jon. 2007. ‘All rock and rhythm and jazz’: Rock ‘n’ roll origin stories and race in Australia. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (3): 379–392. Stratton, Jon. 2011. Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Taylor, Timothy. 1998. Living in a postcolonial world: Class and soul in The Commitments. Irish Studies Review 6 (3): 291–302.

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Tucker, Margaret. 1977. If everyone cared: Autobiography of Margaret Tucker M.B.E. Sydney: Ure Smith. Tynan, Alice. 2012. The Sapphires’ Wayne Blair: ‘It was very ambitious’. The Vine, August 22. http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment/movies/ the-sapphires-wayne-blair-it-was-veryambitious-20120822-259322. Accessed 8 September 2013. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2006. A prehistory of Australia’s history wars: The evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s. Australian Journal of Politics and History 52 (3): 439–454. Walker, Clinton. 2000. Buried country: The story of Aboriginal country music. Sydney: Pluto Press. Waterhouse, Richard. 1990. From minstrel show to vaudeville: The Australian popular stage 1788-1914. Kensington: UNSW Press. Watson, Virginia. 2009. From the ‘quiet revolution’ to ‘crisis’ in Australian Indigenous affairs. Cultural Studies Review 15 (1): 88–109. Wikipedia. 2020. Run Through the Jungle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Run_Through_the_Jungle. Accessed 6 March 2020. Windschuttle, Keith. 2009. The Stolen Generations 1881–2008: Vol. 3 of the fabrication of Aboriginal history. Paddington: Macleay Press.

CHAPTER 5

Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in ‘My Island Home’

‘My Island Home’ was written by Neil Murray in 1985 when he was the only ‘white’ member of the Warumpi Band, one of the first Indigenous rock groups to become known among non-Indigenous Australians. The song was played on the Blackfella-Whitefella tour of Indigenous communities in which the Warumpis and Midnight Oil performed across the Northern Territory.1 It subsequently appeared on the Warumpis’ second album, Go Bush, in 1987. Released as the first single off that album, ‘My Island Home’ failed to make the chart. Murray recounts that he wrote the song for George Rrurrumbu, known since his death in 2007 as George Burarrwanga. Burarrwanga was from Elcho Island, an island in the Arafura Sea off the Arnhem Land coast in the Northern Territory. He had married the Warumpis’ guitarist Sammy Butcher Tjapanangka’s sister and moved to the settlement of Papunya in the central desert. It was there that he met Murray and became the charismatic singer for the Warumpi Band.2 The most well-known version of ‘My Island Home’ is that by Christine Anu. In fact, she recorded two versions. The first, released in 1995, reached 67 on the singles chart. The same year, signalling the track’s popularity with a younger listenership, it was number 47 on the national youth-oriented radio station Triple J’s audience-voted Hot One Hundred. More importantly in terms of the growing respect being accorded the song, also in 1995 Anu’s version won the prestigious Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA) award for Song of the © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_5

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Year, with Murray acknowledged as the composer. Stylin’ Up, Anu’s first album which was released in May of the same year and which contained ‘My Island Home’, climbed to number 21 on the album chart. As well as giving the track a dance rhythm rather than the Warumpis rock-based ballad style, Anu had altered the lyrics. Where the Warumpis’ version was said to describe George Burarrwanga’s situation—his move from his island home to the desert and, at least in Murray’s mind, his wish to be back on the island—Anu’s version could be read as expressing her own circumstance as a Torres Strait Island woman who has moved to Sydney. I shall say more about this change in the lyrics later. Anu released her second version of the track in September 2000, coinciding with her performance of it at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Now with a further, added verse, and a less dance-based and more melodic backing, the track reached number 58 on the singles chart and the album which included it, Come My Way, got to number 18 on the album chart. Coinciding with the new verse, which, as we shall see, generalised the lyrics, the personal pronoun had been dropped from the track’s title and it was now called ‘Island Home’ suggesting the availability of a more general experience of being at home on an island. Recognising the song’s new status, in 2001 it was included in APRA’s list of the thirty Australian ‘best and most significant songs of the past 75 years’. One hundred Australian music personalities had been asked to choose their personal Top Ten. While the compilers identified the first ten in a ranked order, the following twenty were simply listed. ‘My Island Home’ did not make the top ten. By this time, then, ‘My Island Home’ was being viewed as an Australian institution—though not as accepted as the Easybeats’ ‘Friday On My Mind’ (number 1), Slim Dusty’s ‘A Pub With No Beer’ (number 5) and Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ (number 8). As we shall see, much of the wariness about ‘My Island Home’ can be traced to the exclusivity associated with that personal pronoun and the track’s subaltern connections with Australia’s Indigenous population, both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. This history remained in spite of the lyrical reinvention for the Olympics’ Closing Ceremony on the ‘Island Home (Earthbeat)’ version.

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‘My Island Home’ and Land Rights This chapter argues that underlying much of the emotional force of ‘My Island Home’ is the transformation in settler Australians’ experience of the country through the 1980s and 1990s brought about by the legal recognition of the indigenous people as having a claim to the land. In June 1992 the long-running Mabo v Queensland (no. 2) case was finally decided in the High Court, finding in favour of the Mer islanders of the Torres Strait who had brought the action. This case established the presence in Australia of Native Title, sometimes called Aboriginal Title. This decision was followed a year later by the Labour government’s Native Title Act 1993 (Cth), the purpose of which was to provide an apparatus for operationalising the consequences of the Mabo decision. The Wik decision, handed down by the High Court in December 1996, provided further clarification on the indigenous rights to land established by Mabo, in particular to land claims made on pastoral leases. It is no exaggeration to say that these developments became deeply traumatising to Australia’s settler community and much of this trauma and anxiety was caused by the mining lobby and the pastoral lobby attempting to force reversals in the law through scare campaigns aimed at the general population. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis (2004, p. 112) write that: Home as the place of belonging of white settlers in Australia was put to the torch by the shock reminder from the High Court in 1992 that terra nullius was achieved at the cost of dispossession of Indigenous people from their land, language and culture after 40,000 years of continuous possession.

In the wake of Mabo the large mining companies began by striving to depict the decision as creating uncertainty and being detrimental to the national interest. This was followed up by suggesting that much of Australian land was under threat. Ian McLachlan, the Shadow Minister for National Development and Infrastructure, told an audience at the rightwing Harvey Nicholls society in 1993 that the Mabo decision had, ‘left great tracks of Australia in turmoil as to title and therefore in those areas, risks the stability and future development of the nation’ (quoted in Short 2008, p. 75). This campaign flowed almost without interruption into the campaign run by the National Farmers Federation after the Wik decision. As Damien Short (2008, p. 75) writes:

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Following Wik the National Farmers Federation built on the post-Mabo mining industry tactics and set about constructing their own ‘national crisis of uncertainty.’ A significant element of their campaign was a crossnetwork television advertisement, filmed in monochrome, which depicted the Australian land tenure system as a somewhat ugly version of the 1970s party game of Twister. It involved a battle between two children one black (Aboriginal) one white, with the black child winning the contest.

This apparent threat was brought directly to the homes of city dwellers. As Collins and Davis (2004, p. 112) explain: The purported threat to people’s backyards was just one of the more extreme responses to the High Court’s Wik decision in 1996. This unfounded fear troubled a nation of property owners.

Through the 1990s, as Australia’s Indigenous population was increasingly acknowledged as having rights in the Australian land, settler Australians, in large part as a consequence of the scare tactics of the mining and pastoral lobbies, began to feel more and more uneasy. The Mabo case began in 1982. However, it was not the first land rights case based on a claim to native title. In 1971, the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land took the mining company Nabalco to court. The federal government had granted Nabalco a twelve-year mining lease for the extraction of bauxite on the Gove Peninsula. In Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, Justice Blackburn found against the Yolngu finding that Native Title did not apply in Australia and that, indeed, even if there had been something that might be called Native Title this had been extinguished by the establishment of British sovereignty. As we begin to think about home and land in relation to ‘My Island Home’ we can remember that George Burarrwanga was a Yolngu man and a member of the Gumatj clan. Born in 1957 he would have grown up knowing the loss of the Milirrpum case and its consequence for Yolngu identity in the Australian nation-state. In this regard it is worth noting that the translator for the Yolngu claimants in that case was Galarrwuy Yunupingu, whose father, Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, was a Gumatj elder and one of the claimants. Galarrwuy has been a life-long fighter in the cause of Indigenous land rights. His younger brother is Mandawuy Yunupingu, the co-founder in 1987 of the Indigenous rock group, Yothu Yindi. In 1991 their track ‘Treaty’, demanding a treaty between black and white Australia in the wake of an assertion to this effect by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke,

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reached number 1 on the singles chart. Mandawuy formed Yothu Yindi while teaching in Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island. The island, home to Burarrwanga and inspiration for ‘My Island Home’, is also home to a number of members of Yothu Yindi including Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu who went on to have a high-profile solo career. Anu, as I have remarked, is a Torres Strait Islander. Her mother is from Sabai and her father from Mabuiag islands. Anu was born in Cairns in 1970 and lived there until she was ten. Then, after her father was injured, the family moved to Mabuiag. She recalls that ‘it was bliss’ living on the island (quoted in Connell 1999, p. 206). She then finished her high schooling in Southern Queensland and moved to Sydney to study with the National Aboriginal/Islander Dance Theatre. In 2012 Anu visited Thursday Island for the Queensland Music Festival. Singing with the Ailan Kores Choir, she performed a version of ‘My Island Home’ with lyrics translated into Sabai and Mabuiag dialects (see Anu 2012). In a medium that depends on sound, the language used in the singing is an important marker of identity. When the Tahitian duo Bobby & Angelo recorded the song they had, as I will discuss shortly, translated some of the lyrics into Tahitian (reo tahiti). Singing in Tahitian is an important statement in a place of French colonialism where French remains the official language and Tahitian has only been allowed to be used in schools since 1982. When George Burarrwanga (as George Rrurrambu) recorded his solo album Nerbu Message, released in 2000, he included a version of ‘My Island Home’ translated into Gamatj as ‘Ronu Wanga’. He dedicated it to ‘the mothers on my island home’ expressing the intertwining of lineage, heritage and place in the formation of his identity (Rrurrambu 2004: liner notes). These direct geographical links between the two most important singers of ‘My Island Home’ and legal cases related to land rights and Native Title suggest the power of ‘My Island Home’ as an Australian subaltern statement of identity. One element in this statement is the link between the lyrics and the singers. More than is the case with most songs, singers of ‘My Island Home’ assert a connection through the song’s lyrics. In part this is a consequence of the use of the personal pronoun—which, as I have mentioned, is dropped in Anu’s second version of the song. With ‘My Island Home’ the lyrics established the identification of the song with George Burarrwanga and with Christine Anu. The islands are different, the statement of belonging is the same.

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The strength of the song as a subaltern statement of belonging can be exemplified by looking at another version of the song. In 1988 the Tahitian duo Bobby & Angelo recorded it, as I have already mentioned.3 Bobby Holcomb, whose heritage was Hawai’ian and African American, revised and translated some of the lyrics into Tahitian.4 Angélo Neuffer, both with Bobby and on his own, has been one of the most popular singers in Tahiti for a generation. In the hands of Bobby & Angelo, ‘My Island Home’ could be read as a statement of Tahitian identity as against French sovereignty over what is called Polynésie Française. Starting in 1974, and much to the anger of the Tahitians and other islanders, the French conducted underground nuclear tests on Maruroa atoll. There has been a long-standing movement for Tahitian independence. In 1984, ‘French Polynesia’s organic law, approved by the French Parliament, took effect, giving the overseas community, formerly known as a territory, greater internal autonomy while remaining as part of the French Republic’ (see Holidays Around the World, n.d.). In 1992 President Mitterand stopped the nuclear testing. When it was started again three years later by President Chirac: Peaceful protests continued over the next few months as did the testing. Songs, prayers, and silences were used to try to persuade the government to stop. In late September, Jacques Ihorai and Ralph Teinaore, the president and the secretary general of l’Église Évangélique de Polynésie Française, went to France to try to convince President Chirac to end the testing. In pleading with him, Ihorai referred to Tahitian understandings of land, explaining that Tahitians consider the land to be their mother who nourishes them and that the bomb is like a missile of death in ‘the nourishing womb of the motherland’. (Kahn 2011, p. 91)

With such an understanding of the role of the land in Tahitian life, we can appreciate the power of the yearning in ‘My Island Home’, a longing for a home free of French imposed destruction. Bobby Holcomb always refused to take out French citizenship as a protest against the nuclear tests and French colonialism (see ‘Bobby Holcomb’ 2009). Angélo wrote a protest song in Tahitian after the resumption of nuclear testing titled ‘Taero atomi’ (Nuclear Poison). It concludes, in translation, ‘Atomic bomb,/We don’t want you/On our land’ (Kahn 2011, p. 92). This land is the land of our island home.

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Home is a complex term. In Home Territories, David Morley (2000, p. 6) argues that home has, ‘its own internally coherent self-identity’. It offers, perhaps, a feeling of wholeness, then; of being at one with the world. In his discussion of ‘My Island Home’, Phillip Mar (1997, p. 198) suggests that home is a fantasy and ‘is the most fundamental of myths, the fantasy of origins’. This home can never really exist but Mar’s description is, again, an assertion of a prelapsarian completeness, a claim to know from where one comes. Home, it seems, includes ideas of certainty and unity. Seamus O’Hanlon argues that, in colonial Australia, home ‘was a symbol of the freedoms and opportunities available, at least theoretically, to the colonist’ (2002, quoted in Craven 2008). Here we find home in Australia limited to the settler colonists. Perhaps this is because the Indigenous Australians have been displaced from their homes. When land rights became available for contestation after the Mabo ruling, the Native Title Act determined that if land is unalienated (i.e. no one else has taken legal ownership) it can be claimed by native title claimants who can demonstrate continuity of rights and interests under traditional laws acknowledged and traditional customs observed and can demonstrate maintenance of connection since colonisation. (‘Aboriginal Land Rights Q&A’ 2009)

So, only those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who have not been displaced from their home can claim their home. Given the song’s emphasis on longing for the home we now have one reason why, as Tony Mitchell (1996, p. 176) describes it, ‘My Island Home’ is an ‘Aboriginal anthem’. It is only relatively recently that a distinction has been made between colonialism and settler colonialism. Now, as Lorenzo Veracini noted in 2007: ‘There is a growing historical literature dealing with settler colonialism as separate from other colonial phenomena (i.e. a circumstance where outsiders come to stay and establish territorialised sovereign political orders)’. Veracini (2007) goes on to explain that: Broadly speaking, one can detect three general experiences of settler decolonisation: settler evacuation, the promotion of various processes of indigenous reconciliation, and denial associated with an explicit rejection of the possibility of reforming the settler body politic.

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The process of decolonisation, by definition, is related to an increasing realisation of the indigenous population. To put this differently. Sir William Blackstone, the celebrated eighteenth-century British jurist, distinguished between two types of colony: Plantations or colonies, in distant countries, are either such where the lands are claimed by right of occupancy only, by finding them desert and uncultivated, and peopling them from the mother-country, or where, when already cultivated, they have been either gained by conquest, or ceded to us by treaties. (1869, p. 106)

Settler colonies such as the United States and Australia fall into the former category. While common use of the term may only go back to the early years of the twentieth century (Fitzmaurice 2007), the idea informing terra nullius can be found in Blackstone’s description of a land as ‘desert and uncultivated’. This was how the colonists understood the land that became Australia and, as late as Blackburn’s judgement in Millirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, it formed the basis for legal judgement and the denial of the existence of Native Title (see Partington 2007). The construction of the land as ‘desert’ or terra nullius denied the existence of an indigenous population or, at the least, of an indigenous population that was in any sense ‘civilised’—cultivation of the soil being the key element. What, then, happened to the people thus erased from colonial reality? Situated as unreal, the indigenous population of Australia became narrativised in Gothic terms. As Penny van Toorn (1992, pp. 87–88) writes: By the process of projection, Australian frontier Gothic conscripts Aboriginal people into the role of white society’s ‘darker self.’ The Aborigine is made to stand for all that lies outside, or stands against, or is suppressed within the civilized world: sexuality, violence, unreason, malevolent supernatural power, even the mythic figure of death itself.

The settlers are at home, and real—or have internally coherent selfidentity, to the extent that the indigenous population remains unreal, Other. The process of decolonisation in a settler colony entails, then, the realisation of the indigenous population. At the same time, it unsettles the settler population. In Uncanny Australia, Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs consider the role of the Aboriginal sacred. They explain that their book ‘is … concerned with another consequence of Aboriginal claims

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for sacredness which we can note here: to turn what seems like “home” into something else, something less familiar and less settled’ (1998, p. xiv). This, they go on to write, ‘is one meaning of the term “uncanny”’. Following Sigmund Freud in his essay on the uncanny, Gelder and Jacobs (1998, p. 23) argue that: An ‘uncanny’ experience may occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This simultaneity is important to stress since, in Freud’s terms, it is not simply the unfamiliar in itself which generates the anxiety of the uncanny; it is specifically the combination of the familiar and unfamiliar—the way they inhabit each other.

Freud (1953 [1919], p. 232) argues that in cases of morbid anxiety ‘there must be a class in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs. This class of morbid anxiety would then be no other than what is uncanny’. He explains that, ‘this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression’ (Freud 1953 [1919], p. 232). This is an excellent way of describing the settler perception of the indigenous people in a country like Australia where that population has been legally, and indeed culturally, disappeared but has continued to be present. In such a situation one construction of the indigenous population is as ghosts. Gelder and Jacobs (1998, p. 31) write that: The Australian ghost story … works by dramatically extending the influence or reach of its haunted site. It produces a site-based impression which spirals out of itself to affect others elsewhere, perhaps even influencing a nation’s sense of its own well-being.

Writing about the United States in The National Uncanny, Renée Bergland (2000, p. 4) asks: ‘Why must America write itself as haunted?’ Her answer is that ‘the interior logic of the modern nation requires that citizens be haunted, and that American nationalism is sustained by writings that conjure forth spectral Native Americans’ (Bergland 2000, p. 4). Rather than any modern nation we can specify settler states. Jodey Castricano (2001, p. 61) comments that Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, the central theme of which is the return of the dead buried in

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a make-shift cemetery on a native American burial ground, ‘demonstrates how the notion of the American dream … is predicated upon the violence of colonial appropriation of indigenous lands’. In relation to another formation of the uncanny, Freud (1953 [1919], p. 236) notes that, in a certain situation, a person might think: ‘Then the dead do continue to live and appear before our eyes on the scene of their former activities’. This describes well the settler colonial experience of the indigenous population. The ghosts have been transformed into living people. The land rights cases from Millirrpum onwards, and especially since the watershed of Mabo, have problematised home for settler Australians, making Australia uncanny.

My Island Home Neil Murray has told the story of the writing of ‘My Island Home’ in a number of places. Here is the version from his Preface to the illustrated children’s book of the song: I had to head south to Melbourne and Sydney to do some promotional work for [The Warumpi Band]. It was in the wee hours of Saturday the 15th of June 1985, on a coach bound for Sydney: I was suffering an exceptional longing to be back on a boat on a tropical sea. In my head I could hear singing: ‘my island home, my island home, my island home is a waiting for me. (Murray 2010, n.p.)

Murray had taken a break at the end of a Warumpi band tour and spent four days with George Burarrwanga and his family on Elcho Island. Murray (‘My Island Home’, n.d.b.) tells how: ‘I knew I would write the song for George to sing’. Conventionally the song is described as being Murray putting himself in Burarrwanga’s place. In the Foreward to My Island Home, Martin Flanagan (2010, n.p.) writes: ‘The story behind ‘My Island Home’ is that it was written by a white man for a black man and the black man sang it like it was his own’. In this interpretation we would have a straightforward displacement. The lyrics could be understood as Murray’s idea of how Burarrwanga experienced his life in the desert and his wish to be home on Elcho Island. However, immediately the lyrics complicate this reading. The song’s first line tells us that ‘I’ have been in desert for six years. Murray tells us that both Burarrwanga and himself arrived in Papunya in 1980 so ‘I’ could be either of them. And, Murray (2010, n.p.) is clear that the song also refers to his own longing for home:

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The antecedents were clear. I had by that time been living in Central Australia for almost six years. I was missing the region of my birth and upbringing; the freshwater country of inland western Victoria. There was something in ‘My Island Home’ that expressed my heartfelt connection to my homeland as well. It was an idea of a place where you truly belonged— it always knows you and waits for you to return.

However, Murray’s relationship with his birthplace is more complicated than this. Larry Schwartz writes that Murray’s ‘paternal great-greatgrandfather came to Australia from the north of Scotland in 1848. He was among the many driven out by unscrupulous landlords in the notorious Highland Clearances of that period’ (2010). Murray was born and raised near Lake Bolac. He remembers: As a small boy my grandfather had shown me axe heads and grindstones he’d picked up in the paddocks of his farm. He’d explained to me that they were stone tools that belonged to people who’d lived there before. I’d asked where those people were. He said they had all gone, but he thought they’d gone down Framlingham way. (Murray, n.d.a., p. 1)

Framlingham, Murray explains, was an Aboriginal reserve. It would seem that there was a disturbing repetition: where Murray’s ancestors were cleared off the highlands to make way for sheep, so Aborigines had been moved off the land which his grandfather farmed. No matter how much Murray asserts an identification with the area around Lake Bolac, he knows that settling there displaced Aborigines. Murray’s links with Burarrwanga become more complicated. It would seem that he is identifying his home with Burarrwanga’s home. In 1863 Dr. De Witt C. Peters defined nostalgia as ‘a species of melancholia, or a mild type of insanity, caused by disappointment and a continuous longing for home’ (quoted in Wilson 2005, p. 21). We should be reminded of the exceptional longing that Murray felt which precipitated the writing of ‘My Island Home’. Bearing in mind what I have said about Aborigines and ghosts, we can note that Svetlana Boym tells us that: ‘One of the early symptoms of nostalgia was an ability to hear voices or see ghosts’ (2001, p. 3). She also writes that: Nostalgia … is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. (2001, p. xiii)

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We can wonder about Murray’s displacement of his desire for his own home, which is increasingly unsettled as the land rights claims make Aborigines real, onto the increasing certainty of Burarrwanga’s home and what Murray sees as Burarrwanga’s connection with it. ‘My Island Home’ is written more like a type of folk song than a rock song.5 By this I mean that the lyrics include an amount of detail unusual in traditional pop and rock songs. It is this detail that leads other singers to change the lyrics to reflect their own situations. In Murray’s original version, in addition to telling us that the singer has been six years in the desert we are also told that the singer comes from the saltwater people who have always lived by the sea. The basic division here is between two different Indigenous groups. Andrew McMillan (1988, p. 188) writes about this distinction: To the Top Enders, the desert is a wild, tough place that breeds wild, tough people. The tribesmen of Arnhem Land have a certain fear of the men from the desert. … To the desert people, the Top Enders are merely ‘fish eaters’, an inherently different, softer mob.

However, it is easy to understand how this division might be a displacement for the division between settler Australians and the Indigenous people. Murray’s lyrics here can be read as a meditation on his own circumstances—a white man coming from urban Victoria to work at the Indigenous community of Papunya. The lyrics ask if he can ever feel satisfied in this place where he is now living. A key detail is Murray’s mentioning of Alice Springs, the nearest urban centre to Papunya. The reference to the Alice would, one would think, mark the song as indubitably Australian; even internationally Alice Springs is known as the gateway for Uluru. Yet, in Bobby & Angelo’s version, Alice Springs remains in the English lyrics while being replaced in the Tahitian lyrics with the idea of living on a mountain. What seems to make Bobby & Angelo’s version work is the sense of overwhelming longing that pervades all versions of the song to a greater or less degree. The biggest change in the Bobby & Angelo version is the removal of a verse, central to the nostalgic effect of Murray’s original, which tells of remembering standing in a boat holding a spear used for killing turtles. This is a strong image founded in detail of men’s hunting on the islands around northern Australia. Interestingly, Anu retains the image in her version of the song. The cultural dislocation caused by her description

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of herself as wielding a turtle spear is mostly lost on settler Australians while the nostalgic impact remains. I understand from Professor Jane Freeman Moulin (University of Hawai’i) that hunting turtles are not part of Tahitian life. Bobby & Angelo replace this with the image of taking up the omore, the traditional Tahitian lance or pike. Professor Moulin has suggested to me that this has the effect of invoking the idea of traditional Tahitian culture.6 In this way, the new image retains the sense of a connection with the local culture while also emphasising its strength and persistence. Indeed, as the final verse of the Bobby & Angelo version and sung in Tahitian, the image could be read as a statement of opposition to French cultural imperialism. When the Warumpi Band went into a lengthy hiatus after releasing their second album, Murray formed Neil Murray and the Rainmakers. During tours in 1989 and 1992–1993, Christine Anu was employed as a backing singer. One of the songs she sang on was ‘My Island Home’. In her words: I was quite happy as a backing singer but Neil would always say, ‘C’mon, you’re the only chick in the band, we’ve gotta get your face out front. Surely you can sing a couple of songs to give me a break’. I started singing one line of My Island Home, then a verse, then it ended up becoming the song that I sang. (Quoted in ‘My Island Home’ 2013)

‘My Island Home’ became Anu’s third single. As I have remarked, Anu made the song her own in the most literal sense by revising the lyrics to reflect her personal situation as an Islander living in Sydney.7 The lines referring to the desert and to Alice Springs have been rewritten to refer to living in the city. John Connell comments that, for Anu, ‘“My Island Home” captured a sense of loss: nostalgia and desire for an island she had barely known’ (2003, p. 554). With Anu singing it, the song became an expression of longing for Torres Strait Islanders many of whom had moved from the islands to cities down the east coast of Australia. The shift from the desert to the city had another consequence. It became easier for urban, settler Australians to identify with the song. The city is unnamed and though they might not come from an island where turtle are hunted settler Australians could identify with the terrible yearning for home. As I have remarked, through the 1990s settler Australians were feeling increasingly unsettled. The Mabo decision came three years before Anu’s version of ‘My Island Home’ and it is very

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likely that the mainstream popularity of Anu’s version was aided by settler Australians’ longing for a home which was not uncanny. At the same time, David Bridie produced the track in a dance rhythm. This increase in tempo made the song appear less elegiac and more celebratory of the island home. In his 1997 discussion of the song Phillip Mar writes that, on being in the audience at different gigs in 1995 when the Warumpis and Anu played their versions of the song, the closest word he could find for the feeling the song gave him was ‘longing—a longing for home. In this case, however, I long for a home I have never known and cannot know’ (1997, p. 145). He is right, not only because the two islands referenced in the two versions are home to Aborigines and Islanders, respectively but because, as a settler Australian, regardless of his ethnicity, Mar could never, and certainly can never after Mabo, feel that he has a home which, in Morley’s term, has an internally coherent self-identity; that is, a home that is not uncanny. Anu performed the song at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Now, as I have remarked, the song had a new verse and a new title. Aided by the television coverage, this version of the song has become the one most settler Australians recognise. The performance, as Liz Reed (2000) explains, involved an appropriation of imagery and performances, whereby a ‘new’ reconciled national identity was presented to ourselves and to the world. As she performed ‘My Island Home’ [sic], the stage became Anu’s island home, and the thirty-one Torres Strait Islander dancers—white turtles painted on the bare backs of the men—were presumably intended to signify her identity.

Katelyn Barney expands on this idea. Quoting Tony Mitchell, Barney argues that, Anu’s performance at the closing ceremony celebrated what has become an ‘increasingly hyphenated and hybridised Australian national identity’, yet at the same time worked to conceal the complex history of race relations and contemporary political debates about social justice and human rights for Indigenous Australians. (2005, p. 141)

Barney’s point here is that it could be possible to acknowledge this new, hybridised national identity and also recognise the injustices that have been imposed on Australia’s indigenous population over 200 years

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of dispossession. Rather, Anu’s performance only emphasised diversity and harmony. The events that led to Mabo and had shaped relations between settler and Indigenous Australians in the eight years since the High Court’s decision were elided. Suvendrini Perera writes that in the spectacle of the Olympics: ‘Sportspeople, musicians, artists, and dancers together enacted an allegory of nation that countered the souring of the official reconciliation process and the collapse of hopes for a republic’ (2009, p. 15). She notes that Anu’s performance offered reassurance after Midnight Oil had performed ‘Beds Are Burning’, their statement about land rights in which the Oils sing that the time has come to pay the rent. ‘Beds Are Burning’ is the first track off the Oils’ Diesel and Dust album, released in 1987 which was inspired by the group’s experiences on the Blackfella-Whitefella tour across the Northern Territory with the Warumpis mentioned earlier. Its political assertion of rights for Indigenous Australians counterpoints Murray’s aching personal statement about wanting a return to an island home, in the first place an individual desire but, also, an avowal that can be read in terms of the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Perera (2009, p. 16) suggests that the appeal of ‘My Island Home’ ‘is [its] ability to contain contradictory meanings and absorb tensions between them, even as it provides space for hidden stories of displacement and upheaval to emerge’. ‘My Island Home’ is not an overtly political song like ‘Beds Are Burning’ and its theme of yearning for an island home overlays any specific politics that can be read into the lyrics but, for similar reasons, as Perera writes, stories of displacement and upheaval can also be found there but, by the time Anu’s Olympics version, these were well-hidden. Nevertheless, the trace of settler anxiety appears in the song’s new, final verse. In this we are told that Australia is the narrator’s home and then, collapsing the inhabitants into the country, that we are a land surrounded by sea. This line rewrites the fourth line of the national anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, in which ‘Our home is girt by sea’. The displacement of ‘home’ in the new verse is occasioned by its assertive juxtaposition in the first line where ‘Australia’ with the variety of meanings associated with the term, most especially land mass and people, are morphed together. It is this conflation of signifieds which produces the odd locution in the second line where ‘we are a land’: we, the members of the nation, are equated with the geographic extensiveness of the Australian state. Hinted at, most likely unintentionally, is the Aboriginal relationship with the land where, as Richard Broome puts it, ‘the land not only gave life, it was life’

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(Broome 2002, p. 18). The third and fourth lines of the verse, echo the sentiments of Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ by suggesting that even though I may travel across the sea, Australia will always remember me. Allen composed his song in 1980. The lyrics tell of the singer, and other expatriates, who travel the world yet ‘my heart lies waiting over the foam’ and no matter how far away I travel, I’ll continue to think of Australia as home. Here, as in Murray’s lyrics, there is a yearning for home but it is not so pronounced. Allen enjoys his travelling, it is just that nowhere gives him such a feeling of homeliness, of being at ease, perhaps of not feeling unsettled, as Australia. Qantas started using the song in its advertisements in 1997, interestingly at the time when settler Australians were feeling unsettled. The new verse for ‘My Island Home’ performs a reversal. Where, in Murray’s original, the island that is home is elsewhere in Australia, now my home that is an island in Australia. The reversal works by, as in Allen’s song, having Australians travel away from the country/land mass/nation-state. In Murray’s version, and in Anu’s previous version, it was Indigenous Australians who yearned for their island home. Now, the singer’s ‘My home’ is counterpointed by the more general ‘We are a land’. The song becomes more accessible to non-Indigenous Australians. Indeed, what was an Indigenous anthem is now an anthem for all Australians asserting, against the evidence, that Australia is, indeed, home to Indigenous and settler Australians alike. It is this assertion in particular that performs the function of concealment about which Barney writes. Australia, these new lyrics tell us, ‘will never forget me’. The irony here is that forgetting is precisely what settler Australians have had to do to feel at home in Australia—forget, and indeed deny, the existence of the indigenous people. Repressed in this lyric about not forgetting is a plea for Australia to remember ‘us’ who live here so that ‘we all’, both Indigenous and settler, can feel at home. At the heart of Murray’s lyric is a small word, ‘it’. As the verse about imagining being in a boat and holding a turtle spear progresses there is a kind of commentary where the singer tells us that s/he is close to ‘it’ and that their island home is waiting for them. Mar (1997, p. 146) writes that: On paper these look like weaker lines … But in the performance of the song this is a climax—‘Where it must be …’ The ‘it’ which cannot be named. You can come close but you can never actually locate ‘it’.

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At the same time, this ‘it’ is a foreshadowing of my island home identified in the next line. Mar references Slavoj Zizek at this point and suggests that the ‘it’ refers to what Zizek calls ‘the national thing’, in Mar’s description, ‘that something unique to “our” way of life, the elusive core of “our” authenticity’ (1997, p. 146). The ‘it’ in this interpretation refers to the fantastic desire for home, and especially for a national home. Much of Zizek’s analyses are built on his reading of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s work and there is a more foundational idea, the objet petit a. David C. L. Lim (2005, p. 67) explains that: [T]he Lacanian subject is by definition an empty nothing with an infinite craving for something. The subject believes that by possessing the lost object of his desire, his emptiness will be filled and a state of ontological plenitude will be attained. What he fails to see is that no positive object is ever ‘it’, which is the same as saying that desire is inherently inextinguishable. ‘It’ which does not exist in materiality is designated as the objet petit a in Lacan: that is, the non-symbolizable surplus that sets the subject’s desire in motion.

Zizek calls the objet petit a, ‘the chimerical object of fantasy’ (1989, p. 69). In the case of Neil Murray, settler Australian, we can see how his exceptional longing can be thought of in relation to the desire for the objet petit a which, in this case, would be what would make him feel at home—or, perhaps, for the home that would make him feel complete, settled, self-identical. For Murray, the objet petit a is identified with Elcho Island. Murray writes that when he spent those few days with Burarrwanga there: ‘It seemed like paradise at the time’ (Murray 2010, n.p.). As it happens, Andrew McMillan has a similar relationship with Elcho Island. He describes it as ‘delightful; a chunk of paradise adrift in the Arafura Sea’ (1988, p. 196). This identification of Elcho Island with paradise is an overdetermination that signals the freight of fantasy it carries. John Connell has written at length about the European construction of the Pacific islands, mostly Polynesian but including Melanesian, as utopian. ‘Utopia’, he explains, ‘alongside Eden and paradise, has had an extraordinary pervasiveness through time’ (Connell 2003, p. 554). When the Comte de Bougainville visited Tahiti in 1768 he claimed it for France and called it Nouvelle Cythera [New Cythera]. In Greek mythology Cythera was the paradisiacal island on which Aphrodite, the goddess of love,

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was reputedly born. Connell writes of European notions of ‘an Arcadian and pacific Pacific, young, feminine, desirable and vulnerable, an ocean of desire’ (2003, p. 556). Over two hundred years later this imagery continues to pervade Western thinking about the Pacific islands. We can remember the song ‘Bali Ha‘i’ in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (first performed 1949). The island of Bali Ha‘i is celebrated as a paradise off limits to all except officers. The song, sung by the islander trader Bloody Mary, describes the desire and longing that the troops feel for the island.8 We have noted Connell’s comment about Anu’s version of ‘My Island Home’. The paradisiacal connotations of the Pacific islands extend to those of the Torres Strait, and also, it would seem, further west to Elcho Island. For Murray, the paradisiacal qualities that signal the fantastical realisation of the objet petit a reside in his desire not for sexual pleasure but for home. In the lyrics, Murray is close to ‘it’, his island home, but, as an object informed by, and informing, his desire it will remain unreachable. We can now understand the yearning that informs ‘My Island Home’. For the settler Australian it is for a place that they can never know, a place with which they have a relationship undifferentiated by prior occupancy; for the Indigenous people it is a yearning for a holistic return to their lands from which they have been dispossessed by the settlers.

Conclusion: Tiddas---Still Longing for That Island Home Radiance began as a play written by Louis Nowra and first performed in 1993, the year after the Mabo decision and the year the Native Title Act was passed. Rachel Perkins directed the film of the same title and based on the play. Perkins is Indigenous and the daughter of Charles Perkins an Indigenous activist and onetime Permanent Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The film was released in 1998. Radiance centres on three Indigenous women, apparently sisters, who gather, after their mother’s death, in the Queensland house where she had lived and in which each had been born. The action is character-driven and is punctuated by revelations about the actual status of the house and the true relationship between the women.9 Music is central to both the play and the film. One of the women, Cressy, has become an opera singer and is famous for her performance in Madame Butterfly. In the film, more than the play, Madame Butterfly becomes a site of commentary on the impact

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of colonialism on the lives of the three women. As Sue Gillett remarks in her important article on the role of music in the film of Radiance: [Madame Butterfly’s] romantic and colonialist story of a young geisha’s sexual and emotional betrayal by her American ‘husband’ and her subsequent suicide provides a strong historical reference point for Radiance’s tale of sexual exploitation, violence and family breakdown in the Australian inter-racial context. (Gillett 2008, p. 87. See also Brown 2006)

The central importance of this opera aside, where the play has a strong Irish influence reflected in the use of the folk song ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’, which we are told, the mother used to sing when she was happy, the film makes increased use of Indigenous, and Indigenous-related, music, including a version of ‘My Island Home’ sung by Tiddas, a group composed of two Indigenous women and one ‘white’ woman.10 In the first use of ‘My Island Home’, Nona, the youngest of the three women and who now lives in Sydney, stands on the beach with Cressy and suggests that they both have inherited their mother’s voice, exemplifying this by singing a couple of lines from Anu’s lyrics to ‘My Island Home’. Singing here is suggested as an expression of heritage, what Cressy and Nona, who it turns out is Cressy’s daughter from her rape by one of the mother’s lovers, have inherited from the mother. The content of the singing, here, as we know, is about the longing for an island home. The mother comes from Nora Island, an island which sits off the shore and which can be seen from the house. We are told that the mother’s ancestors were moved off the island but we are never told, in either play or film, why. It stands as an example of the Indigenous experience of settler colonialism. What we are told is that the mother used to sit in a chair and look out over the island and that, when she became senile, Mae, the sister who looked after her in her final months, had to strap her into that chair. When she died, it had been in that chair gazing, longingly it must be assumed, at Nora Island. And, folding into the political complexity of displacement, that longing, as Lacan and Boym indicate, would be coloured and qualified by fantasy. The film ends differently to the play. In the play the two sisters burning down the house which was never really a home for them, or for that matter for their mother, ends an excoriating analysis of colonial relations and the destruction of Indigenous family life. But, Nowra has commented:

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When Rachel and I got together, she said ‘you imagine there is something missing from the play that you always wanted to see?’ I said, ‘I always imagined that part two would be all the girls together heading on down the road.’ And that became the end of the film. (Nowra and Perkins 2003, p. 38)

Tiddas singing Anu’s first version of ‘My Island Home’ soundtracks the three women driving off into the distance through the cane fields. Gillett (2008, p. 91) suggests that the use of ‘My Island Home’, which she argues functions as Nona’s song in the film, ‘underlies and amplifies the triumphant and harmonious resolution: the homecoming and the resolution between the sisters’. However, as we have seen, there is nothing resolving about ‘My Island Home’, let alone anything triumphant. In another reading I would argue that ‘My Island Home’ is the song of the displaced and unhomed mother—even the house she lived in, and which she thought she had been given by her lover, Harry Wells, was taken back by him immediately after she died; this is the immediate motive for the sisters burning it down. While the film seemingly ends as a road movie with the women driving in a carefree manner off, as Perkins puts it, ‘into the sunset’ (Nowra and Perkins 2003, p. 38) the use of ‘My Island Home’ sung by a predominantly Indigenous group suggests otherwise. The women leave behind the incinerated house, the only ‘home’ they have ever shared. Nona has spread the mother’s ashes on Nora Island but this island, their ancestral home, the site of a fantasy of return and of identity, we are told now has a Japanese-run tourist resort. There is now no home for the women there and any hypothetical land rights claim would fail because of a lack of ongoing connection. Far from setting out from home on a road trip, the film’s ending offers us three displaced Indigenous women driving into an unhomed future while ‘My Island Home’ suggests the loss and the yearning which continues to shape their lives—in spite, we might add, of the Mabo decision. Across the thirteen years that spans the time between Neil Murray writing the song and it being performed by the Warumpi Band to Tiddas recording it for Radiance, ‘My Island Home’ has become intimately imbricated with both settler and Indigenous experiences of land rights and home.11 The song’s theme of nostalgic longing became as applicable to settler Australians feeling displaced and uncanny as Indigenous

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Australians became more real, acquiring land rights and the right to negotiate in limited circumstances for access to land they had lived on for countless generations. At the same time, that nostalgic longing also signals the fantasy of home that informs the experience of displacement for both settler Australians and Indigenous Australians.

Notes 1. Andrew McMillan mentions the Warumpi band playing the song in Strict Rules, his account of the tour. 2. By all accounts, Burarrwanga was an extraordinary performer. Indeed, he was often compared to Mick Jagger in his ability to hold an audience. Lisa Slater (2007) describes Burarrwanga’s performance of ‘My Island Home’ with the Warumpi Band at the 2006 Dreaming Festival in Queensland. She suggests that: ‘In a sense, Burarrwanga’s performance demonstrates how to create something new from the complexity and heterogeneity of identity, place and belonging’ (2007, p. 579). 3. In 1995 a Hawai’ian group Brothers & Sisters released their interpretation of the Bobby & Angelo version on their first album, Dreams. 4. Somewhat surprisingly, the track’s composing credit is given as Traditional adapted Bobby Holcomb and Angelo Neuffer. 5. Murray has never recorded a studio version of ‘My Island Home’ outside of the Warumpi Band. However, there is a live version by Murray and Shane Howard, founding member of Goanna and composer of ‘Solid Rock’ (released October 1981; number 2 on the singles chart). This version of ‘My Island Home’ is best described as electric folk. It can be found on Murray and Howard’s 2 Songmen; Shane Howard and Neil Murray Live in Concert (ABC; 2006), recorded at the Darwin Festival, 22 August 2006 and also on Neil Murray Sing the Song: The Essential Neil Murray. 6. I am very grateful to Dr. Jane Freeman Moulin, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai‘i, for her translation of the Tahitian lyrics and for her insights into the song’s context in Tahiti. Professor Moulin may not agree with my reading. 7. Anu’s ‘My Island Home’ could fit into the genre discussed by Karl Neuenfeldt in ‘Torres Strait Maritime Songs of Longing and Belonging’ (2002). 8. The feeling of overwhelming longing for an island which drives ‘Bali Ha‘i’ makes it an interesting song to compare with ‘My Island Home’. 9. One significant discussion of the film is Craven (2008). The film is also discussed in Collins and Davis (2004) and by Benjamin Miller (2008).

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10. In both the play and the film the mother is portrayed as having Irish links and as being a Catholic. In the film the mother is named as Mary McKenna. I have discussed the historical connections between the Irish and Aborigines in Stratton (2004). 11. Tiddas’ version of ‘My Island Home’ is unavailable on CD and can only be found as part of the film. What makes this particularly unfortunate is that Tiddas, along with Radiance’s musical director Alistair Jones, won a Deadly award in 1999 for Excellence in Film or Theatrical Score for this version of ‘My Island Home’. Jones’ own account of putting together the music for the film can be found on the web here: http://www.alistairj ones.com.au/Alistair_Jones/Radiance.html.

References Aboriginal Land Rights Q&A. 2009. Reconciliation Australia, December 21. http://www.reconciliation.org.au/home/resources/factsheets/q-a-factsh eets/aboriginal-land-rights. Accessed 22 June 2013. Anu, Christine. 2012. QMF returns to Thursday island with Christine Anu and the Winds of Zenadth Cultural Festival. Facebook, September 5. https:// www.facebook.com/OfficialChristineAnu/photos/qmf-returns-to-thursdayisland-with-christine-anuthe-winds-of-zenadth-cultural-f/101511698909 84113/. Accessed 27 December 2019. Barney, Katelyn. 2005. Celebration or cover up: ‘My Island Home’, Australian national identity and the spectacle of Sydney 2000. In Aesthetics and experience in music performance, ed. Elizabeth MacKinley, Denis Collins, and Samantha Owens, 141–150. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bergland, Renée L. 2000. The national uncanny: Indian ghosts and American subjects. Hanover: University Press of New England. Blackstone, William. 1869. Commentaries on the laws of England, vol. 1. London: W. Maxwell & Son. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Broome, Richard. 2002. Aboriginal Australians: Black responses to white domination 1788–2001, 3rd ed. Crow’s Nest: Allen and Unwin. Brown, Peter. 2006. Australia as an ‘Island Home’ on stage and screen: Radiance as intertextual metaphor. In Reading images, viewing texts: Crossdisciplinary perspectives, ed. Louise Maurer and Roger Hillman, 183–202. New York: Peter Lang. Castricano, Jodey. 2001. Cryptomimesis: The gothic and Jacques Derrida’s ghost writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Collins, Felicity, and Therese Davis. 2004. Australian cinema after Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Connell, John. 1999. ‘My Island Home’: The politics and poetics of the Torres Strait. In Small worlds, global lives: Islands and migration, ed. Russell King and John Connell, 195–212. London: Pinter. Connell, John. 2003. Island dreaming: The contemplation of Polynesian paradise. Journal of Historical Geography 39 (4): 554–581. Craven, Allison. 2008. Tropical gothic: Radiance revisited. Etropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 7. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/art icle/view/3431/3369. Accessed 19 December 2019. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. 2007. The genealogy of Terra Nullius. Australian Historical Studies 38 (129): 1–15. Flanagan, Martin. 2010. Foreword. In My Island Home, Neil Murray [author]. Collingwood: One Day Hill. Freud, Sigmund. 1953 [1919]. The uncanny. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey, 219–52. London: Hogarth. Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Gillett, Sue. 2008. Through song to belonging: Music finds its place in Rachel Perkins Radiance and One Night the Moon. Metro 159: 87. Holidays Around the World. n.d. Tahiti observes internal Autonomy Day. http://aglobalworld.com/holidays-around-the-world/tahiti-observes-int ernal-autonomy-day/. Accessed 22 June 2013. Jones, Alistair. Undated. Radiance: Feature film. Alistairjones.com.au. http:// www.alistairjones.com.au/Alistair_Jones/Radiance.html. Accessed 6 March 2020. Kahn, Miriam. 2011. Tahiti beyond the postcard: Power, place and everyday life. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lim, David C.L. 2005. The infinite longing for home: Desire and the nation in selected writings of Ben Okri and K.S. Maniam. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mabo and Others v Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1. Mar, Phillip. 1997. Island home: Cover versions. Communal/Plural 5: 198. McMillan, Andrew. 1988. Strict rules. Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton. Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (1971) 17 FLR 141. Miller, Benjamin. 2008. Australians in a vacuum: The socio-political ‘stuff’ in Rachel Perkins’ Radiance. Studies in Australasian Cinema 2 (1): 61–71. Mitchell, Tony. 1996. Popular music and local identity: Rock, pop, and rap in Europe and Oceania. London: Leicester University Press. MonTahiti.com. 2009. Bobby Holcomb. http://www.montahiti.com/bob by.php. Accessed 22 June 2013. Morley, David. 2000. Home territories: Media, mobility and identity. London: Routledge. Murray, Neil. 2010. My Island Home. Camberwell: One Day Hill.

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Murray, Neil. n.d.a. A healing walk, 1–12. http://www.eelfestival.org.au/assets/ healingwalkessay.pdf. Accessed 19 December 2019. Murray, Neil. n.d.b. My Island Home. Neil Murray.com.au. http://www.neilmu rray.com.au/pages/song_islandhome.html. Accessed 22 June 2013. Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2002. Torres Strait maritime songs of longing and belonging. Journal of Australian Studies 75: 111–116. Nowra, Louis, and Rachel Perkins. 2003. ‘Let the turtle live!’: A discussion on adapting ‘Radiance’ for the big screen. Metro 135: 38. O’Hanlon, Seamus. 2002. Together apart: Boarding house, hostel and flat life in pre-war Melbourne. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Partington, Geoffrey. 2007. Thoughts on Terra Nullius. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference of the Samuel Griffiths Society 19. http://www.samuel griffith.org.au/papers/html/volume19/v19chap11.html. Accessed 22 June 2013. Perera, Suvendrini. 2009. Australia and the insular imagination: Beaches, borders, boats and bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reed, Liz. 2000. The complexities of performance and presence at the Olympics closing ceremony. Arena. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/RED+ HEADBAND+HISTORY.-a068645106. Accessed 22 June 2013. Rrurrambu, George. 2004. Nerbu Message. Schwartz, Larry. 2010. A true fella. The Big Issue 367. http://www.neilmurray. com.au/media/true_fella.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2013. Short, Damien. 2008. Reconciliation and colonial power: Indigenous rights in Australia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Slater, Lisa. 2007. My Island Home is waiting for me: The Dreaming Festival and archipelago Australia. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (4): 571–581. Stratton, Jon. 2004. Borderline anxieties: Whitening the Irish and keeping out asylum seekers. In Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 222–238. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. van Toorn, Penny. 1992. The terrors of Terra Nullius: Gothicising and degothicising aboriginality. World Literature Written in English 32 (2): 87–88. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2007. Settler colonialism and decolonisation. Borderlands 6 (2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/veracini_settler.htm. Accessed 22 June 2013. Wikipedia. 2013. My Island Home. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Island_ Home. Accessed 22 June 2013. Wilson, Janelle. 2005. Nostalgia: Sanctuary of memory. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 6

The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of Whiteness in Australia

Blackface developed in the United States as an important form of commercial entertainment throughout the nineteenth century. Imported into Australia, it became again a central element in popular entertainment. During the twentieth century blackface declined in importance, not least because of the claim that racism underlay the portrayals of African Americans and, in Australia, also of Aborigines. However, it never disappeared. In recent years blackface has made a comeback in the United States where it now has a postmodern, self-knowing quality. In Australia, that parodic attribute is less apparent. Blackface versions of both African Americans and Aborigines have appeared on television. What sense can we make of this renaissance of blackface in Australia? This chapter focuses on, but does not limit itself to, the most notorious recent example of blackface on Australian television, the Jackson Jive skit on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday, in 2009. It’s 7th October 2009. On Channel 9 there is a reunion episode of a series that ran for twenty-seven years between 1971 and 1999. Hey Hey It’s Saturday, a variety show with elements of vaudeville and light entertainment, had been highly successful. It won a Logie for Most Popular Light Entertainment Program nine times, including in the year the show finished. The TV Week Logie Awards provide popular recognition for the Australian television industry. The presenter for the life of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Darryl Somers, won the Logie for Most Popular Light Entertainment Personality five times and the coveted Gold Logie for Most © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_6

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Popular Personality, three times. Now there is a reunion show, actually the second of two. Essentially, these are to test the waters to see if a new series of the show would be popular. The two reunion shows are broadcast on Wednesday evenings but the title remained the same. One of the segments that defined the original show, and which is reprised in these reunion shows, is called Red Faces. This was always one of the most popular segments. In it, ordinary people perform often unusual acts. This is not a talent competition. Nobody expects these acts to be discovered and go on to make the performers’ fortunes. Red Faces epitomises the ethos of the show: average people performing often bizarre acts, and often ineptly, but enjoying their moment in front of the camera. There are three judges. One of them is Red Symons. Symons, who trained as an actor, used to be best known as the guitarist in the 1970s rock group, Skyhooks, who had seven top thirty hits between 1974 and 1978. Now he has a reputation as the sarcastic and highly critical judge who holds the participants to standards far higher than the segment warrants. He is the voice of middle class, commercial professionalism trespassing on a working-class convivial good time. A second judge in this reunion series is Jackie MacDonald. MacDonald had been a regular on the original series, playing the ditzy, high-spirited foil to Somers until she left the show in 1988. She had missed the first reunion episode because of illness. The third judge is a guest. It is Harry Connick Jr., the American actor and mainstream, adult-oriented singer. Connick comes from a middle-class background. His Irish-American father had been a lawyer and a judge in Louisiana. He himself had studied at both Loyola University and Hunter College but dropped out to pursue his career. Somers introduces the act, ‘these boys’ will perform ‘a song and dance tribute to Michael Jackson’. He announces them as the Jackson Jive. Five men appear in blackface. All are wearing white jackets and trousers with cheap afro wigs and with one, white glove on their right hand. They kneel with their backs to the camera. Then one of them gets up, points to another and says: ‘Yo, it’s me, my main man’. Another replies, ‘You’re rendang’. The two then sing Sister Sledge’s ‘We are family’ signalling the act’s disco reference. The prior banter, in a mock African-American accent, both situates the performers as ‘black’, as if the blackface hadn’t already done this, and with what some might consider humour, generates a parodic distance from the African Americans they are performing as. Rendang is a spicy meat dish from Indonesia. The reference suggests the apparently arcane nature of African-American

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slang. At this point, Somers’ introductory description of the Jackson Jive as ‘these boys’ becomes disturbing with its allusion, intended or not, to the way white Americans used to address African Americans. The parodic banter is followed by the five dancing to the Jackson Five’s ‘Can You Feel It’ until another person in blackface enters and, clearly impersonating Michael Jackson, starts singing. Only this blackface performer, in another cheap afro wig, actually has a heavily made-up whiteface—an allusion to Jackson’s increasingly lighter skin through the later part of his career. After one verse and a chorus Symons gets up and hits the gong, which is a signal that the act needs to cease. Being gonged is a sign of the judge’s displeasure for some reason with the act. Symons has always gonged a lot of acts. Somers then asks Harry Connick Jr. what he thinks, and what score out of ten he would give the act. Connick, is caught between being the polite guest and his obvious outrage at the blackface. He says that he will give the act zero and then starts a sentence about what would have happened if these men had performed the act in the United States. He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he just shakes his head. Jackie, as everybody knows her, says that she thinks the act is cute and has great choreography. She gives the Jackson Jive seven. She appears to have no problem with the blackface. Symons asks the audience what they think. They call out, ten. He gives the act one. Later, Connick forces a surprised and rather bemused Somers to apologise on air for the act’s racist blackface. In the wake of the performance, Australia became divided over whether the act was just good fun, a humorous take-off of an iconic AfricanAmerican star, or whether it was a deeply offensive slice of racism that brought back to the surface the long history of blackface, and the oppression associated with it, in the United States and, indeed, in Australia. At the same time, newspapers, television shows and internet sites in both the United Kingdom and the United States professed their shock that such a racist entertainment practice could be resurrected on Australian television. It so happens that this was not the first time that this group of men had performed on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday in blackface as the Jackson Jive. Twenty years earlier, in 1989, they had presented pretty much the same act on Red Faces, using the same Jackson Five song. Then, the five backing dancers had worn grey jackets and trousers and the man playing Michael Jackson had also been in blackface rather than whiteface. His change to whiteface was intended as a humorous commentary on Jackson’s own transformation. Their appearance on the reunion show

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was, in part, an element of the programme’s nostalgia. Indeed, Somers played a clip from the earlier show after the performance. That first presentation of the act had garnered no critical publicity. Later, we must think about what had changed in the intervening twenty years.

Recent Blackface in Australia and the United States Given the furore that it caused, it may come as a surprise to find that the Jackson Jive performance was by no means the only recent example of blackface in Australia. Indeed, between the two Jackson Jive performances, a group of comedians who call themselves the Chaser Team, who had two humorous political commentary programmes focusing on the November 2007 federal election called The Chaser Decides , performed in blackface as the Jackson Five to a version of that group’s ‘ABC’ with new lyrics about the political similarities between the two major parties.1 There was little, if any, critical response to this blackface. These three performances appear to be the only high-profile examples of blackface minstrelising of African Americans in recent years. That only the Jackson Jive sketch provoked such a high level of response may be linked to a visiting American, Harry Connick Jr., expressing his horror at the Jackson Jive performance. This helped sanction the critical Australian reaction and, because both the act being parodied and Connick are American, this helped to raise the profile of the incident outside Australia. The lack of critical response only two years earlier suggests the silencing of progressive leadership in Australia which had occurred during the years that John Howard was prime minister under the guise of a continuing attack on political correctness. Connick’s criticism provided the opportunity for that leadership. The other recent blackface acts have all involved the performance of Aboriginality.2 Since the 1970s, a white comedian called Louis Beers has performed in blackface as the Indigenous character, King Billy Cokebottle. In March 1999, Sam Newman, on The Footy Show, blacked up and pretended to be the Indigenous Australian Rules football star, Nicky Winmar. In 2005, the comedian Chris Lilley ran a mockumentary series on ABC television called We Can Be Heroes. During this show, Lilley acted as a number of characters who had all been nominated to be Australian of the Year. These included the self-righteous and obnoxious sixteen-year-old girl, Ja’mie King and the ex-policeman, Phil Olivetti, who

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had nominated himself after he had saved nine children from an out-ofcontrol bouncy castle. Another character Lilley played was Ricky Wong, a Chinese-Australian physics student at Melbourne University who really wanted to be an actor. Wong is a member of his university’s Chinese Musical Theatre Group. In his section of the series, Wong is rehearsing a musical homage to Indigenous Australians called Indigeridoo. Lilley plays the Chinese-Australian Wong and then blacks up as Wong playing an Aboriginal character with the generic name of Walkabout Man. The other members of the Chinese Musical Theatre Group are of Asian descent and they more straightforwardly perform in Indigeridoo in blackface. Later, at the 2006 Logie awards, the group reprised Indigeridoo joined by Cathy Freeman, the Indigenous athlete who won a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and became a role model for her people, who played herself (for analysis on Ricky Wong/Walkabout Man yellowface/blackface in the series, see Bode 2010). Finally, in this list, I will include a little-known video clip of a rap song called ‘Out Da Front’ made by a white, Perth man, Simon Barker, and placed on the YouTube in 2010. The song is performed in blackface by someone claiming to be Ricky C as Flubba Bubba Wurra Jurra Noongyar. Noongyar is the term used by the Indigenous people of southern Western Australia to identify themselves. The song, sung in first person, portrays Flubba Bubba as a foul-mouthed dope-smoking, drunken, glue-sniffer who has sex with his sisters, children and cousins. The West Australian police took Barker to court for racial vilification and lost on the grounds of artistic licence. Barker claimed he was parodying negative attitudes towards Aborigines rather than repeating them. This predominance of Indigenous blackface is intriguing given that, historically in Australia, blackface has been dominated by African-American performance. Most recently, before the Jackson Jive blackface, the British Black and White Minstrel Show ran on the ABC until the late 1970s. Starting in 1958 the show had broadcast in Britain with great popularity until it was finally taken off air in 1978. In 1961 the programme won the Golden Rose at the Montreux festival for television. The programme seems to have been just as popular in Australia. The Black and White Minstrel Show was the British inheritor of the African-American minstrel blackface tradition. As Michael Pickering (2008, p. 191) writes:

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While the elements of cultural parody and burlesque were lost in the transfer of minstrelsy to radio, the spectacular was … [the] aspect of minstrelsy which was then harked back to in the televised ‘candy-floss’ world of The Black and White Minstrel Show.

In 1963/1964 a travelling version of the show had performed in Sydney and Melbourne. Richard Waterhouse tells us that ‘almost 150,000 Sydneysiders’ went to see it (1990, p. 135). At this time, Sydney’s population was around two million. To some extent, it appears that Connick was mistaken when he claimed that blackface would not anymore be acceptable in the United States. Certainly, in 1993 when Ted Danson went in blackface to a roast for his then partner the African-American film star Whoopi Goldberg at the Friars Club in New York there was outrage. However, since then there has been a limited amount of blackface which has often been understood as pushing the boundaries of taste. As John Strausbaugh puts it, since the Danson misstep, ‘blackface, unconditionally banned for decades […], has crept back into the public arena’ (2006, p. 14). Indeed, in 2002: ‘A group of blackfaced University of Tennessee students went to a party as the Jackson Five’ (p. 20). However, it should be noted that this did not go unpunished. After complaints were filed the fraternity from which the students came was suspended. Nevertheless, in the United States blackface has made a public reappearance, often in the form of a knowing self-awareness. In Australia, as I will argue, opinion over the acceptability of blackface divides roughly along cultural lines that are linked with class. In order to understand this we need to examine the history of blackface and the way it was, and is, positioned in Australian society. As in both the United States and Britain blackface minstrelsy was immensely popular in Australia during the nineteenth century. Waterhouse, whose book on the social history of minstrelsy and vaudeville remains the keystone for work on blackface in Australia, tells us that: Between 1838, when ‘Jim Crow’ was first danced at the Royal Victoria and the end of the century, the Australian colonists seemed to find minstrel songs, jokes and sketches endlessly amusing. Not only did British and American troupes enjoy extended and profitable tours but the influence of minstrelsy extended far beyond the professional stage. (1990, p. 98)

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Blackface, with or without the minstrelsy aspect, was a core element in public entertainment until the early years of the twentieth century and, as I have indicated with the example of The Black and White Minstrel Show, remained an element in commercial entertainment until much later. To take other examples, Benjamin Miller has discussed Charles Chauvel’s silent film, The Moth of Moonbi, made in 1925, in which he appears in a cameo role—as the Aboriginal stockman. His performance, and especially that of his on-screen wife, falls within the genre of an Australian blackface minstrelsy. The female Aboriginal is a drunken, blundering fool […]. (2007, p. 145)

Miller also discusses the rather more sophisticated use of blackface in Chauvel’s most renowned film, Jedda, released in 1955. In Jedda the two key Indigenous characters are played by Indigenous actors but the narrator, an assimilated Aboriginal stockman, who mediates between the Indigenous characters and the white film audience, is played by a white actor in blackface. These films form part of the tradition of Indigenous Australian blackface. The blackface image of Aboriginal drunkenness and stupidity returns in 2010 in the Barker ‘Out Da Front’ video. My point here is that, while the popularity of blackface minstrelsy, and blackface on its own, decreased from the early part of the twentieth century, it did not disappear and, in Australia, the apparent increase in blackface over the last decade or so may well be only an illusion that disguises the continuity of the form, though a continuity that has generally speaking shifted its focus from African American to Indigenous blackface. In an American context, and working off an argument from W. T. Lhamon Jr’s Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Strausbaugh argues that: Lore recycles if it continues to serve some function in the culture. Blackface and other forms of ethnic humor persist because they continue to say something to us about relations among us below the polite surface of today’s multicultural discourse. (2006, p. 26)

We must think about what that function might be in Australia.

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Blackface History Blackface minstrelsy is usually considered to have originated in the United States sometime in the early years of the nineteenth century. One key date is 1832 when T. D. Rice performed his blackface dance ‘Jim Crow’ on the New York stage.3 Waterhouse, as I have noted, informs us that ‘Jim Crow’ was danced in Australia in 1838, a mere six years later. However, Rice and the new blackface minstrels did not invent blackface. Dale Cockrell has researched its earlier history and argues that blackface was a common feature of premodern European festivals: Although the whole notion of blackface masquerade among the common people of northern Europe might have first followed from direct contact with dark-skinned Moors (but probably did not), the facts seem to be that the rituals using chimney sweep soot soon lost much if not all of the racial association, and blackface masking became a means of expressing removal from time and place through disguise. (1997, p. 52)

Cockrell adds that: ‘Nonracial folk blackface masking was common in nineteenth-century America too, and strove to achieve similar ends’ (1997, p. 52). His point is that before blackface became linked with a kind of parodic representation of African Americans it had a long history as a marker of carnivalesque inversion. As he writes: ‘To black up was a way of assuming “the Other”, in the cant of this day, a central aspect of the inversion ritual’ (p. 53). In the premodern world carnival, when the world was turned upside down, was a time of release when peasants were able mockingly to ape the world of their betters (see for example Stallybrass and White 1986). It is said that at the British surrender at Yorktown, a defining moment in the American War of Independence, the ballad ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, which had been written in 1645 as a commentary on Parliament’s success in the English civil war, was played by the British army band where it served as an observation on the consequence of the British defeat. If, as was the case, this use of blackface had been taken to the American colonies, then it was also without doubt a part of early vernacular Australian experience and was an element in the association of blackface with larrikins which will be discussed below. And, I will argue, it remains a way that many people today understand blackface in Australia—albeit with the important difference that, as in the United States, while carnival remains, inversion, which was a key carnivalesque element in premodern

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societies with a fixed hierarchical structure, is no longer present. That is to say, those people who do not see the racism in the Australian use of blackface often understand it in terms that relate to carnival. Indeed, this can be a way that we can make sense of the claim that, as Somers put it distinguishing the positive Australian reaction from Connick’s response: ‘The Jackson Jive was just a bit of fun — it was a tribute to Michael Jackson and from an Australian audience point of view they’d see the lightness of it’ (quoted in Bachl 2009). Indeed, the pre-history of the Jackson Jive sketch can also be located in carnival. In 1989, the members of the Jackson Jive were medical students. They first performed the sketch at the University of Sydney Medical Revue, a theatrical revue that specialises in contemporary popular cultural parody. In 2010 their show, called Cadavatar, riffed off of the massively successful film, Avatar. I will come back to Cockrell’s remark about the importance of the Other, later. In the United States, the revisioning of blackface to refer directly to African Americans was a consequence of the presence of the large population of Africans in the American national order. In Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (2013), Eric Lott draws out the dichotomous attitudes to African Americans that underlay blackface, attitudes that included desire and repulsion, fascination and revulsion. David Roediger has argued that the American blackface helped to define what whiteness was in the United States. Writing that blackface ‘usually involved a conscious declaration of whiteness and white supremacy’ (1991, p. 104), he goes to explain that the hugely popular cult of blackface … developed by counterpoint. Whatever his attraction, the performers and audiences knew that they were not the Black dandy personified by Zip Coon. Nor were they the sentimentalised and appealing preindustrial slave Jim Crow. (1991, p. 116, emphasis in original)

Here we have an appreciation of blackface as both an expression of dominance and a way that the disparate migrant groups came to see themselves as ‘white’ in contrast to African Americans as mediated by blackface.

The Meanings of Blackface We need to remember that these arguments are being made in the context of a society which contains a large number of African-originated people, many of whom, in the early days of American minstrel blackface, were

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still slaves. In Britain and Australia there was no such large population— though there was a small population of African blacks in Britain and there were significantly more in Australia than the conventional histories suggest.4 The starting point here is to understand that while blackface has some common meanings, especially for societies with a European heritage, it develops different meanings as it becomes incorporated into diverse societies. In South Africa, in Cape Town, for example, as part of the New Year’s festival there continues to be what is called Coon Carnival. Denis-Constant Martin, who has written a book about it, argues that the anti-authoritarianism, working-class rebellion, music and dancing, all of which in American blackface minstrelsy were present in a mixed African American and white, European culture, appealed to a Cape South African audience. As Martin explains: ‘These qualities seem indeed extremely relevant to the social, economic and racial situation at the Cape and in the whole of South Africa in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s’ (2000, p. 79). Giving examples of the relevance of the performances for each of the Cape’s major racial groups, Martin writes that: ‘Coloured Capetonians were fascinated to the extent that the aesthetic of the New Year festivals was going to be deeply transformed by the infusion of minstrelsy’ (p. 79). In Britain, as Simon Featherstone has argued: The absence of a numerically significant black population […] was only the most obvious contrast between an imperialism defined by distanced power and knowledge, and a society whose racial conflict, material and ideological, were ones of proximity within the borders of a federal state. (1998, p. 236)

He goes on to quote Michael Pickering on the meaning of blackface: Blackface entertainers in Britain have … to be understood as providing examples of ‘natives’ who as ‘half devils’ and ‘half children’ were in need of colonial subjection, but at the same time also offering a taste of what was repressed in the name of civilisation and the imperial endeavour, respectability and middle-class cultural norms, and John Bull’s nationalist pride of place in the world. (As cited in Featherstone 1998, p. 237)

In Australia, the Indigenous population were among those ‘natives’ in need of colonial subjection. In this sense, then, they could not be considered a part of the Australian society even in the complex ways that African Americans were part of American society in the nineteenth

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century. At the same time, nineteenth-century blackface in Australia was dominated by African-American blackface. So much so, in fact, that Aborigines were, at least to some extent, understood in terms associated with the minstrel black. Miller remarks on the number of early Australian plays, such as Henry Melville’s The Bushrangers , first performed in 1834, in which Indigenous characters appear. Often there are excuses for these characters to sing a little, or perform dances that are sometimes described as corroborees. Miller suggests that it is likely that these characters would have been played by whites in blackface and that the songs and dances would have been in the minstrel genre (2007, pp. 142–144). Waterhouse writes about ‘the Aborigine as stage negro’, notes that a similar rendering of Aborigines can be found in literary works, and suggests that, ‘to some extent, at least, the prism through which Australians viewed Aborigines was one which was cut by the minstrels’ (1990, p. 100). In this context, it is tempting to read Lilley’s Indigeridoo musical as an updated version of a minstrelised corroboree. However, at some point settler Australians stopped thinking of Aborigines as their own version of African Americans. An important moment was most probably when actual African Americans, playing blackface, started to become common visitors to Australia. Waterhouse tells us that in 1876, and 1877, two troupes of African-American blackface minstrels both calling themselves the Georgia Minstrels arrived in the country. The second group, who had most claim to the name, ‘enjoyed’, we are told, ‘a level of popularity unmatched by the white companies’ (1990, p. 64). Given the popularity of those white groups, the Georgia Minstrels success must have been quite extraordinary. In 1888 another group of African-American minstrels, including many of the 1877 Georgia Minstrels, entered Australia. One of the new members was Irving Sayles. In common with most of the African-American minstrels who came to Australia he opted to stay. Waterhouse recounts that in performance Sayles made ‘allusions to an imaginary wife at the La Perouse Aboriginal camp, allusions which he knew his audience understood to be absurd’ (p. 149). So, it seems, African Americans in Australia, whom Waterhouse tells us were to a significant degree accepted in Australian society, worked hard to ensure that they were not confused with Aborigines. The distinction between African Americans and Aborigines helped found the general understanding of blackface in Australia, producing an Aboriginal blackface that was grounded in the British understanding of the colonial native that

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I have discussed above but, it would seem, lacking any positive features— at least until Lilley’s Ricky Wong’s sentimentalised Indigenous blackface, and this as a kind of reworking of the similarly sentimentalised blackface plantation negro. Barker’s Flubba Bubba blackface resumes the traditional rendering.

Thinking About Blackface in Australia How, then, can we think about blackface in Australia? As with Britain, the most significant contextual difference between Australia and the United States has been the lack of a large number of introduced people who were perceived to be racially distinct and homogeneous and, importantly, separate from and subordinate to the dominant, racially defined group. In addition, unlike the United States that had been independent since 1776, Australia remained a set of colonies until the establishment of the Australian state in 1901 and continues to hold the British monarch as Head of State. In relation to this second point, I have already argued that Aboriginal blackface can be read in terms of the colonial construction of the native, and more, to echo Cockrell, as the native Other. At the same time, like the United States, post-1788 Australia has always been a country of immigrants which has been very preoccupied with whiteness. We need to remember that having a unified border policy for whom could enter the country was one of the driving forces behind federation and that one of the first acts passed by the new parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act which functioned as the cornerstone of the White Australia policy until that was gradually dismantled through the late 1960s and early 1970s with the coup de grâce during Gough Whitlam’s government in 1974. If, then, we think about the application of Roediger’s ideas to the Australian situation we can begin to understand blackface in Australia in terms of the establishment of whiteness against an excluded Other, an absent Other who has been excluded from Australia as well from Australian society. To put it differently, blackface in Australia constructs an Other against which Australians identify their whiteness. Aborigines are historically a special case of the excluded Other because of their presence within Australia. In her discussion of Sam Newman’s blackface of Nicky Winmar, Karen Brooks notes that, when The Herald Sun conducted a poll to determine whether Newman should apologise: ‘Of the voters, 1445 people did not believe Newman need apologise and 465 believed that he

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should’ (2000, p. 38). Brooks comments that: ‘Once again, the marginal status of indigenous people in Australian society was reaffirmed’ (p. 38). Central to Indigenous blackface, as to all blackface, is the matter of power. In order to understand this we can examine the Newman blackface in more detail. In 1999 Winmar was a highly respected footballer. But he was more than this. In 1993 he had become a symbol of the Indigenous fight against racism in Australian Rules. Winmar played for St. Kilda. On Saturday, 17th April of that year St. Kilda played against a much more heavily fancied Collingwood team at the Collingwood homeground of Victoria Park. At the end of a very tight match, St. Kilda ran out the winners by twenty-two points. Their best players on the day, and the ones that saved the match, were both Indigenous, Gilbert McAdam and Winmar. In the face of a torrent of racial abuse from the Collingwood supporters which continued after the final siren, Winmar pulled up his guernsey, pointed to his torso and is said to have said, ‘I’m proud to be black’.5 The action was captured by a photographer called Wayne Ludbey. The image became iconic in the fight against racism in Australian Rules. So, by the time of Newman’s blackface, Winmar was far more than a great Indigenous footballer. Winmar had been invited to appear on The Footy Show. What happened next is unclear. Either he turned down the invitation or, in the version suggested by Newman in blackface, Winmar agreed to appear but then didn’t show up. Either way, his lack of presence gave Newman the opportunity for his blackface of Winmar. In blackface, Newman apologised for the mix-up and said how happy he was to be on the show. Thus, through the very act of blacking up as Winmar, Newman helped perpetuate the myth of the unreliability of Aborigines—here, Winmar apparently saying that he would be on the show and then not appearing. Further, in presenting Winmar as blackface, he became a figure of fun thus undermining his status as a fighter against racism. In other words, Newman’s blackface can be read as a power ploy, an attack on an Indigenous footballer highly regarded for his actions both on and off the field. The uncritical acceptance of the blackface by a large proportion of the Australian population signals the continued Othering of Aborigines. However, as I have noted, unlike the United States, Australia has had no large non-indigenous population of non-white people. Historically, non-Aboriginal blackface has referred to people excluded from Australia. This should not just be understood as people of African background, or more specifically African Americans. Waterhouse has described how the

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American shift from the dominant blackface image of the sentimentalised rural Jim Crow to the urban, and aggressive, Zip Coon had been accepted by Australians towards the end of the nineteenth century. Waterhouse links this change in Australia to the increasing stridency of debates over limiting non-white migration which, as I have noted, was linked to the movement for federation. He writes: These new racial images were both mirrored and fortified by the changing character of the Australian minstrel stage Negro. For, as the minstrels abandoned slavery themes the stage Negro was no longer specifically identified with Afro-American character and culture but stood as a symbol of all allegedly inferior ethnic groups. At the same time the growing popularity of ‘coon songs’ in the 1890s was a further indication that Australians viewed not only Afro-Americans but all ‘non-whites’ not only as culturally inferior, but also as violent and threatening. (Waterhouse 1990, p. 106)

This anxiety towards the racial Other has continued to play an important role in white Australian attitudes. Quoting Phillip Adams and Patrice Newell from their 1996 book of Australian jokes, Jessica Milner Davis writes that: Even Adams and Newell were surprised by the absence of reader-outrage at the many offensive (and racist) jokes they printed, concluding that Australians ‘fear the “other”, what they deem to be foreign or alien, and so tell savage, uncivilised jokes about Aborigines, Jews, migrants … Jokes that are bigoted, blasphemous or phobic outnumber all other categories’. (2009, p. 37)

Australian blackface, then, can be understood as a way of managing anxiety about those identified as non-white, historically those not allowed to migrate to Australia. As I have explained, the majority of recent blackface in Australia has related to Aborigines. We can correlate this development with the increase in anxiety over land rights during the 1990s, something discussed in Chapter 5 in connection with the song ‘My Island Home’. Blackface such as The Black and White Minstrel Show, which we need to remember was a British production, broadcast in Australia at a time when, because of the White Australia policy, very few Australians would have seen a person of African descent in their daily lives, offered the older, sentimentalised image of the happy-go-lucky plantation Negro.6 In the main, though,

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there was little recent non-Aboriginal blackface until the Jackson Jive portrayal of the Jackson Five in 1989. The first thing to note about this performance, and the 2009 one by the same men, is that there were actually six of them. This excess suggests the historical excess of carnival, here refigured in Hey Hey’s vaudevillian heritage. We should also note that the purpose of Waterhouse’s book was to show how vaudeville in Australia evolved out of the minstrel shows and that blackface acts continued to perform in vaudeville until well into the twentieth century. Indeed, as Waterhouse points out, when the travelling production of The Black and White Minstrels performed in Sydney and Melbourne, it did so in the Tivoli theatres which had been home to Australian vaudeville. Having blackface on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday was in keeping with the show’s background. What might underlie the members of Jackson Jive’s decision to perform in blackface, and to perform as the Jackson Five? Certainly at that time the Jackson Five, and Michael Jackson as a solo artist, were extremely popular. Indeed, Michael Jackson was at the peak of his popularity and, also, his celebrity power. His album Thriller had been released in 1982 and Bad had followed in 1987. With sales of over 100 million copies, Thriller is the biggest selling album of all time. A blackface Jackson Five sketch on Red Faces, and indeed a sketch that played to the ‘happy Negro’ image rather than the threatening Zip Coon image, reduced the Jackson Five to a joke—made them safe, we could say, for white Australians. We need to remember that the White Australia policy had only been fully discarded fifteen years earlier. In 1989 race became a significant issue again in Australian politics when the Prime Minster, Bob Hawke, announced in response to the Chinese crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square that Australia would give residence visas to Chinese living in Australia. Asylum applications from Chinese subsequently increased by about 10,000 in 1990 from a figure of 1260. In 1991, applications increased again to 16,740. Also in 1989, changes to the Immigration Act introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers and other illegal entrants.7 The first boat carrying asylum seekers since 1981 arrived in November. Within this frame the ‘joke’ of the Jackson Jive 1989 blackface functioned to deflate white Australian anxieties over Michael Jackson’s success and express tensions related to the non-white Other’s increasing, and seemingly threatening, presence in Australia. In addition, the blackface reinforced the whiteness of the audience. We now need to think about this audience. As I have noted, there were

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no complaints about the Jackson Jive’s blackface in 1989 and, in 1999, negative responses were heavily outweighed by people who thought that Sam Newman had nothing to apologise for after his blackface of Nicky Winmar. Similarly, the Jackson Jive’s reprise of their act in 2009, while producing outrage outside of Australia, had very many supporters within the country. I have described Hey Hey, It’s Saturday as being in the Australian vaudeville tradition. So is The Footy Show. Brooks explains that in this programme: ‘For the audience, [football] the primary locus of desire is displaced from the centre to the periphery—to the “outer” as event, entertainment and spectacle’ (2000, p. 28). She tells us that this supposed sports programme ‘has become one of the highest rating comedy programs in Australia’ (p. 28, emphasis in original). This entertainment programme, in which footballers dress in drag, play musical instruments badly, play practical jokes on each other, and so forth, is clearly in the same, do-it-yourself vaudeville tradition as Hey Hey.

Blackface and Bogans So, who has been, and is, the audience for this tradition? On the website, ‘Things Bogans Like’, a satirical look at bogan culture, Hey Hey, It’s Saturday is number 126 on a listing that is in no particular order. In its discussion of Hey Hey, the site remarks on the Jackson Jive sketch: In the Red Faces segment of the show, the bogan applauded a Jackson 5 ‘blackface’ skit, and Harry Connick Jr did not. The bogan later learned that it had something to do with history or slavery, and bellowed that political correctness had indeed gone mad. The debate died a natural death within a week or so. (#126 Hey Hey It’s Saturday, 2010)

In this sardonically humorous analysis bogans are uneducated and lack a sense of morality, placing enjoyment above a concern for giving offense. Jonathan Bradley (2009) also links Hey Hey, and the Jackson Jive sketch, with bogans. In addition, he offers a more detailed explanation of what a bogan is: There are, naturally, cultural associations that accompany being a member of the various classes. The term largely used to refer to that working class culture, ‘bogan’, is both derogatory and celebratory. We have a strange habit of celebrating this culture- which is part of the reason ‘Kath and

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Kim’ was a cultural phenomenon here, while it didn’t last past a season in the US. So a show like Hey Hey it’s Saturday (or Today Tonight, or a considerable number of other Australian-produced shows) is designed to appeal to this sensibility and this audience. It’s part of ‘bogan culture’. When it was on in the 1980s, it was part of bogan culture, and now it’s back, a kind of naff bogan nostalgia. Consequently, when the show is criticized for being racist - which it definitely was, make no mistake about it - it can feel like a criticism not just of the skit, but of working class culture more broadly. (2009)

For Bradley, then, a bogan is a member of the working class and bogan culture is working-class culture. There is little published academic work on bogans. Kay Frances Bartolo, a linguist, claims that the term ‘has circulated in mainstream society since the 1980s’ (2008, pp. 8–9). Wikipedia is more specific, arguing in its entry for ‘Bogan’ that: ‘The term’s popular usage emerged in Melbourne’s outer-western and -eastern suburbs in the late 1970s and early 1980s’. Wikipedia goes on to argue that the term was popularised through its use by Mary-Anne Fahey’s character, Kylie Mole, on the television comedy show, The Comedy Company, in the late 1980s. There would seem to be general agreement that the term gained popular currency during that decade. ‘Bogan’ is most often used to describe a way of life, an attitude towards the world, and is best understood as describing people who are claimed to have a common culture, in the broadest use of that word. While the term originally had negative associations, and still does for many people, many of those who self-identify as bogans use it positively. If we think of bogan as describing a culture it is inevitable that the cluster of attributes linked to people identified as bogans will vary. In her article in The Age, published in 2002, Michelle Griffin quoted Angela on her days as a bogan: Back in the early ‘80s I was a true bogan. I drank Jim Beam and Coke or wine from a glass flagon. I owned and wore flannos and ugg boots. (I still have them in my cupboard - can’t bear to throw them out!) On the weekends we would go and see bands - all over the place! We would venture out of Cabramatta to Maroubra, Manly, to see INXS, Dragon, Divinyls, Jimmy & the Boys, Dragon [sic], Rose Tattoo - too many to mention, all in a beautiful [Holden] HR station wagon! During the day on the weekends we would hang around and watch a friend rebuild his [Holden] EH and drink beer, oh and wash the HR of course! Aaah, those were the days. (Angela as cited in Griffin 2002, para. 12)

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Angela’s description of her time as a bogan relates closely to the list created by Bartolo drawing on her interviews and other sources: the term describes a person of unspecified gender who can be associated with the following list of personal qualities: enthusiasm for cars and ‘hooning’; drinking alcohol (specifically a cheap beer like Victorian Bitter); a lack of education; dirty personal hygiene habits; and low dress standards such as thongs, flannel shirts, wife beaters (singlets); smoking; lack of money; loud rock or heavy metal music; the ‘mullet’ hair style; petty crime; free-loading; reckless behaviour; and Australia. (Bartolo 2008, p. 8)

If we can assume that, at the least, the characteristics of petty crime, freeloading and reckless behaviour are not equatable with all members of the Australian working class, however one wants to use this definition, then what we can say is that bogans are members of a particular sub-group within the working class. Indeed, these characteristics are not limiting, many of them, such as the liking for hard rock music, are common across the class. Like many classificatory terms, bogan needs to be understood heuristically. While the specific commodities listed by Angela, and by Bartolo’s informants, give the impression that this is a new cultural entity, the life ways Bartolo isolates enable us to begin to see a history. Melissa Bellanta writes about those people known as larrikins in the late nineteenth century. They were ‘street-youths given to anti-social hijinks, and often violent crime as well’ (Bellanta 2009, p. 677). Bellanta tells us that: ‘Larrikins whirling about al fresco dance floors by the harbour were a regular sight in Sydney, soiling their tweed suits with sweat and drunken excess’ (p. 684). She quotes a Melbourne journalist in a book from 1888 describing the ‘full-blown larrikin’ as having ‘a hangdog look and careless in attire’ (p. 685) and she writes that: ‘Still others described larrikins’ adversarial stance towards those with more wealth and status than themselves. They were described laughing at affluent fops in the street, and ridiculing boys in grammar school uniforms’ (p. 685). Many of the behaviours associated with larrikins, including crime, the liking for energetic music, drunkenness and reckless behaviour are, allowing for social changes, those identified with bogans. This includes a disdain for the middle classes and their beliefs. There is here a cultural continuity in aspects of predominantly lower working-class life between the nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century.8

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However, it is important to remember that we are talking about a way of life and that this is not limited to people in a particular class position. Bellanta writes about the larrikin experience in the economic boom of the 1880s: ‘On the one hand they participated in the expanded emphasis on self-display and leisure during the boom. On the other hand, they were excluded from the best of the boom’s spoils and felt resentful about it’ (2009, p. 677). In 2006, Mel Campbell was writing in The Sydney Morning Herald about the term being used for bogans who had made large amounts of money during the mining boom and were being identified as ‘cashed-up bogans’. She tells us that: ‘The social analyst David Chalke recently described cubs [cashed-up bogans] as being “well-heeled, skilled blue-collar workers” in their 30s and 40s. “Executive plumbers,” he called them. “On over $100,000 a year”’ (para. 3). Campbell goes on to explain that: ‘Cubs have money, and they want to spend it on flash stuff. Like cars, boats and motorbikes, luxury clothing and expensive home entertainment systems’ (para. 4). Campbell’s argument is that we all consume but that we tend to feel a little guilty about our consumption so we scapegoat a particular group. However, as we can see now with the example offered by Bellanta, larrikins also enjoyed spectacular consumption. Both larrikins and bogans tended to keep their cultural beliefs and practices, for example attitudes towards authority, as they enjoyed their financially based upward social mobility. To put this a different way, lovers of The Footy Show and Hey Hey, It’s Saturday can be found across the class spectrum. What might be missing now is the resentment that Bellanta found in the 1880s’ larrikins. In the 1970s, before these people were identified as bogans, they were called ockers. At that time, films like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Alvin Purple (1973) reflected their beliefs, as did television programmes like The Paul Hogan Show (1973–1984).9 In 1998, using literary sources, John Rickard wrote about the ways that the ideas associated with larrikinism were reworked in understandings of the ocker. He notes that over the twentieth century, ‘larrikin’ stopped being a negative term and began to be used with some affection. Rickard argues that, ‘the ocker might well be characterised as the larrikin who, bloated by affluence, has lost the sense of class deprivation which had conditioned his performance’ (1998, p. 82). What we might say, leaving aside Rickard’s negative language, is that the ocker and the cashed-up bogan—that is, the bogan who has made money from his/her employment in an industry such as mining where wages can be very high—are

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both terms that identify people who have a cultural repertoire which, as these people have become more spread through society, includes a righteous and confident assertion of their beliefs in the face of what they see as middle-class weakness rather than having a resentment against the middle class. It is these beliefs that inform the cultural logic of shows discussed above. Larrikins, Bellanta writes, ‘were avid consumers of minstrel shows, and also of blackface acts in other entertainment forms’ (2009, p. 681). They took pleasure in the racist logic of what Bellanta calls the ‘white superiority that ran through blackface minstrelsy’ (p. 688). They often lived in the same inner-city, slum neighbourhoods as the Chinese and, Bellanta suggests, were also aware that Chinese workers were vilified as a key threat to white Australian jobs and prosperity by trade unionists and in the mainstream press. […] No doubt, given this, they were gratified by the logic of white superiority which ran through blackface minstrelsy, particularly when it led to the contemptuous characterisation of Asian people. (2009, p. 688)

Bearing in mind Lilley’s yellowface Ricky Wong, we can note that there were, also, people who performed in yellowface. In his thesis, Matthew W. Wittmann combines reports from the Ballarat Star and the Honolulu Polynesian to tell us about the reception of the American Charles Backus’ yellowface: Perhaps the most remarked upon part of the show was the ‘Burlesque Chinese’ or ‘John Chinaman’ act performed by Backus, which elicited ‘roars of laughter’ and ‘shouts of applause’ from the miners of Ballarat and moved the Polynesian to state that ‘people who have not seen his Chinese personation are to be pitied’. (Wittman 2010, p. 65)

This was in 1856. Lilley’s Wong was the stereotypical Chinese-Australian nerd. Complicating the larrikin pleasure in the racism of blackface was that larrikins themselves were sometimes portrayed in blackface. Bellanta introduces us to Will Whitburn who used to play a larrikin in blackface in the late nineteenth century: ‘He followed [the song] “The Larrikins’ Hop” with other blackface larrikin-acts, some with touring American companies. One of these acts was called “Parody of Molly Riley O”, a spoof on a well-known Irish song’ (2009, pp. 679–680). Elsewhere in her article

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Bellanta explains that many larrikins had Irish backgrounds. This should not surprise us given that the Irish in Australia were mostly working class. So, it seems that Whitburn played an Irish larrikin in blackface. Yet, at the same time, Bellanta tells us that larrikins themselves enjoyed blacking up. How to understand this. As in the United States, in nineteenth-century Australia, as I have argued in another place, the Irish were thought of as black (Stratton 2004).10 In the racist logic of blackface, as I have discussed Roediger explaining, when larrikins blacked up, they whitened themselves. Blackface, then, played a part in the whitening of the Irish in Australia. And it did this through the racial logic of white superiority that organised Australian blackface and which was at the heart of the pleasure that larrikins found in it. Long-standing racial views inform the production and consumption of blackface in Australia today and it is out of those attitudes and practices that run from larrikins through ockers to bogans that we find the defence of Sam Newman for his blackface Nicky Winmar, the defence of the Jackson Jive sketch, and the claim that the ‘Out Da Front’ video is not racist. Here, we need to remember that when Symons asked the Hey Hey audience what number they would give the Jackson Jive they shouted ‘ten’, the highest. In the brief visual overview of the audience we are given after Symons asked his question, we can see that it was quite young, many appear to be in their late teens and twenties, and very white. It is impossible to say how many could be identified as bogans.

Michael Jackson’s Australian Audience At this point we should ask to whom Michael Jackson appealed most in Australia. Now, little work has been done in Australia on the audience breakdown for different kinds of popular music. However, Kirsten Zemke-White has written about the audience for black American music in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She informs us that: ‘It has been shown that Pacific and Maori people in Aotearoa have heartily embraced hip hop culture in all its social, cultural and musical characteristics’ (2003, p. 98). And she goes to explain that: the localised manifestations of hip hop are also matched by a love for and expression of R’n’B styles. Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu, Destiny’s Child, Ashanti, Aaliyah, Brandy, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, have arguably generated as much meaning and emulation for young Pacific

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people as Dr Dre, KRS-One, 2Pac or Chuck D. For every young Maori or Pacific youth writing rap in their bedroom, there is an R’n’B fan practising the vocal aerobatics of Mariah Carey and R Kelly. This is evidenced in the sales charts, where American and local R’n’B vie equally with pop, rock and hip hop. (2003, p. 98)

She adds: ‘Pacific young people auditioning for both the Australian and New Zealand Idol shows highlighted an overwhelming partiality for R’n’B, soul and gospel singing styles and covers’ (2003, p. 98). ZemkeWhite argues that, ‘while R’n’B may not often explore black history or themes, it nevertheless reflects historical black experiences’, and she quotes from an interview she conducted with BBoy Raw Styles: I think it relates to the environment people are in, islanders are migrants trying to relate; there is a history of brown/Maori vs white/pakeha, so music or rhythm being a medium of effective communication is the connection, to express or stories and journeys be told. (as cited in Zemke-White 2003, p. 108)

In Australia, what we do know is that many hip hop artists are from nonwhite backgrounds. Commenting on this, Tony Mitchell writes that: On the one hand, culturally diverse hip-hop crews in Australia such as Downsyde, South West Syndicate, TZU and Curse ov Dialect – with their wildly surreal ‘rainbow hip-hop’ – embody multiply ethnicised speaking positions which express Australian multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity. On the other, individual MCs from non-Anglo-Australian backgrounds such as MC Trey, Hau of the 2004 Aria Award-winning group Koolism, Maya Jupiter, Sleek the Elite and Comrade Kos of Third Estate, who all speak from varied positions of ‘in-betweenness’ … bring a unique sense of hybridity and musical syncretism to Australian hip-hop which contributes to a highly original and distinctive view of the world and participates in an expressive form of ‘transborder citizenry’. (2011, para. 6)

Artists start as fans and we can see that the kinds of reasons these young people became hip hop artists are similar to those that Zemke-White outlines for Aotearoa/New Zealand. In an email interview with Tara Brabazon, Pete Carroll, an English migrant to Perth who has, at various times, been station manager for the

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Perth community music station RTR and the founder of two specialists, local record labels, writes: [Perth] would be in grave danger of being bland if it wasn’t for the diversity. You can begin to see the influence in music—the Asian community have helped to grow R&B and hip hop. Australia has always been predominantly a rock and roll kind of a place, soul music and reggae don’t seem to have a strong tradition here, whereas now we are beginning to see black influence emerge. (As cited in Brabazon 2005, p. 184)

What both Mitchell and Carroll identify, reinforcing Zemke-White’s argument drawn from Aotearoa/New Zealand, is that black American music has become the music of choice for those in Australia identified as nonwhite. In Chapter 2 we saw that during the 1980s in Perth those young people who identified as black preferred African-American music and went to clubs that played this music. While this preference was the case in 1989 when Jackson Jive first performed their blackface sketch, it was even more the case in 2009 when there is now a larger number of people identifying, and identified, as non-white in Australia and when many of those are now Australian born. Now we can see that the Jackson Jive sketch, seen by Connick as so demeaning to African Americans, and claimed to be just a piece of good fun by white, bogan Australians, including the white studio audience, also served to undermine the legitimacy of the music liked by those described as non-white, or black, in Australia. These, remember, are the people historically excluded from Australia, the Other represented in blackface. Performing a blackface of an artist beloved by non-white Australians marginalised those people even more.

The Final Twist There is one more twist in this story. After the broadcast, amidst the uproar about the racism, or not, of the Jackson Jive blackface, a member of Jackson Jive spoke out, apologising for any offence that had been taken. It turned out that these six men were now all highly respected members of the medical profession and that, as Suresh da Silva puts it: Out of the six of us, only one is Anglo-Celtic Australian. I’m Sri LankanAustralian, there’s an Indian-Australian, a Greek Australian, an Irish-Italian Australian and a Lebanese Australian. We’re all Australians. (2009)

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The ‘Michael Jackson’ blackface was played by the man of Indian background, Anand Deva, who works as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales. Here, in the guise of nationally identified backgrounds we have an inventory of Australian non-whiteness, including, interestingly, the identification of an Irish background when the Irish have been considered white in Australia since around the time of federation. da Silva makes the point that: ‘Apart from the odd joke when I was at school, I’ve never been subject to racism in Australia. In other countries, certainly, but never here’ (2009). I have discussed elsewhere how honorary whiteness functions in Australia to enable people identified as non-white, as Other, to be accepted into the middle class as long as they behave like whites and occupy the social roles expected of them (see Stratton 2009). The success of the five non-whites in the Jackson Jive indicates that they have done this. But, why does da Silva tell us their backgrounds? Well, one presumes to assure us that, since they are non-white themselves they couldn’t be racist. However, ironically, they were behaving precisely as honorary whites—or, more, as honorary bogans. Indeed, here we must remember Roediger’s point that blackface was a means by which those who blacked up came to be identified as white. We have already seen how this worked in Australia for the Irish larrikins. In the uproar over the Jackson Jive blackface, the assumption in the responses, both positive and negative, was that the members of the Jackson Jive were white, in the Australian usage of this term. Here, indeed, blackface whitened those who practised it. Remarkably, for all the furore, hardly any reports picked up on da Silva’s identification of all but one of the Jackson Jive as being non-white. The members of the Jackson Jive retained their honorary whiteness and, indeed, actually increased their whiteness by behaving in a way that placed them fully within the racialised, and racist, belief system that stretches from larrikins to bogans.

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II

Addendum Haunted by Images of Blackness The republication of this essay affords me the opportunity to discuss a more recent well-known case of blackface use in Australia. In 2013 a Melbourne student, Olivia Mahon, held a 21st birthday party. As she was enamoured of Africa she themed the party as ‘This is Africa’ and asked her guests to come in costume. Some came as African animals, there were a gorilla and an elephant for example, and some blacked up as ‘Africans’. The world found out about the party from photographs that Mahon placed on her Facebook page which were then copied to many different sites. When challenged about the blackface and the outrageous costumes Mahon responded online, signalling her complete lack of sensitivity about issues related to race: ‘People wear oktoberfest [sic] costumes to parties and no one cracks it that they are not German?’ I want to place Mahon’s party in the context of two recent Australian advertisements. These do not use blackface but, rather, have people who are identifiably black in situations which are stereotypical for African Americans in the Deep South. In a cricket-themed advertisement for KFC from late 2009/early 2010 a white man eating KFC finds that the best way to soothe over-excited West Indian cricket fans is to hand round a container of KFC fried chicken. In another advertisement, in 2013 Best & Less, an Australian fashion retailer at the lower end of the market which has around 180 stores across Australia, published its latest catalogue. On the front were two young black women and a child. The two women are eating slices of watermelon and the child is sitting on one. In Australia these three females would be read as Pacific Islanders or, more generally, people of Polynesian descent. In both these cases the spokespeople for the companies claimed, like Mahon, to have no knowledge of the history of the stereotypes they were utilising. What is important here is the pattern. There is a consistent use of historically offensive imagery by people who claim that there is nothing offensive in what they have done because no offence was intended and, in the case of the ‘This Is Africa’ party and the Best & Less advertisement, the offenders apparently had no knowledge of the background that made their usages offensive. While we may believe that Mahon and her guests, and the two companies that produced

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the advertising material I have identified, did indeed either not know what they were doing was offensive or did not intend to be offensive, we nevertheless have a pattern. It cannot be coincidental that in three very diverse portrayals of people identified as black there is a use of historically highly offensive African-American stereotypes. One way of thinking about my three examples is that they are all cases of everyday racism. Elsewhere, referring to the work of Philomena Essed (1991), I have utilised this term to discuss attitudes and understandings that are so deeply embedded in a culture that the dominant members of that culture don’t recognise their thinking and behaviour as racist (see Stratton 2006). To put this more specifically, in Australia what we are confronted with is an effect of white privilege. The white Australia policy was gradually phased out by the early 1970s, however the entrenchment of people identifiable as white in positions of power remains considerably unchallenged. Indeed, structurally, whiteness continues to coincide with power. Thus, the use of the negative stereotypes I have outlined function not only to Other people of colour but, in addition, to diminish them in relation to dominant whiteness. To understand how this works we can examine Mahon’s party in more detail. As I have noted, the party was called ‘This is Africa’. The reason for this, as Mahon explained in her response to accusations of racism, was that ‘it was honestly made that theme because I have always wanted to go to Africa (to teach english [sic]) but haven’t made it there yet’ (Fox 2013, para. 3). Therefore, she brought Africa home. This Africa had, as Mahon tells us, African animals such as a gorilla and an elephant, animals that, in the wild, occupy very different environments but which in zoos can be found adjacent. It is a colonial fantasy. In the photographs there are men in dashikis and also, in one, a man in blackface wearing what appears to be a mock leopard-skin tunic. In her explanatory posting Mahon writes that: In fact as you can tell from the photos I dressed up as cleopatra [sic], whilst MAJORITY of my guests came as animals, that can be found in africa [sic] or wore common african [sic] garments or even dressed up as famous men and women who appear from africa [sic]. If anything this [party] was to celebrate the amazing country and people. (para. 3)

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If this was not a mental slip then Mahon’s lack of geographical knowledge matches her lack of historical knowledge. For Mahon Africa is not a continent but a country. Dashikis are worn in West Africa, Cleopatra was the last Egyptian pharaoh and, as we shall see below, there was also a young woman wearing what appears to be an oversize Masai-style necklace. As exemplified in her party, Mahon thinks of Africa through a massive condensation that reduces the vastness and complexity of the continent to somewhere that she can go and teach English—to the natives, one supposes, as part of their civilising process. Mahon captioned one of the photographs: ‘Though now in Africa you also have people who live in modern day houses like us. The woman [sic] tend to dress more traditionally and the children play outside and go to school’. Most of the men in the photographs are blacked up. Interestingly, they have faces often daubed with other colours in a practice reminiscent of the so-called war-paint that film versions of native Americans, so-called Indians, often used to wear. We have, then, cartoon Africans, their subjectivity undermined by the addition of face-paint taken from the colonial construction of the indigenous people of another continent. Indeed, as other commentators have pointed out, Mahon’s friends appear to have a rather peculiar understanding of Africa. One person went to the party in a Ku Klux Klan outfit! This, of course, is American rather than African and a signifier of white supremacy. In 2007 there was an investigation in the Australian army when a video was posted on YouTube showing army recruits binge drinking in uniform with one of their number wearing Ku Klux Klan attire (Edivision 2007). A commentary on this video notes that: The filming of a person in a white-hooded klan outfit in the ‘Block 651’ video recalls the notorious 2004 photograph of Australian soldiers in KKK regalia standing in front of black recruits at Townsville’s Lavarack Barracks. Black soldiers at Lavarack told investigators that their equipment had been defaced with graffiti and they had been given racist nicknames. (Edivision 2007)

There is a history of Australians dressing up as members of the Ku Klux Klan. As the 2004 example indicates, in Australia such clothing signals a continuity of white power. At Mahon’s party the presence of someone in Klan dress suggests, again, the exercise of white privilege. While it is easy to laugh at the guests’ seeming lack of knowledge about Africa, we also

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must appreciate the implicit assumption that people identified as black from diverse places can easily be lumped together as a single homogeneous group, as an Othered out-group. This has already been discussed in Chapter 1. The presence of somebody looking like a member of the Ku Klux Klan serves as a reminder of where the power lies. In her response Mahon writes that, ‘one of my friends who is Mauritian painted himself white’ (para. 3). We can only wonder what this man thought of a party with so many white people enjoying blacking up as Africans. Mahon appears to believe that Mauritians are African. Around three-quarters of the population of Mauritius are of Indian origin. Mauritius has no indigenous population. The ancestors of people of African descent on the island were brought there as slaves. Those of Indian descent were brought as indentured labour. Whatever his background, Mahon’s friend did not remain his natural colour. According to Mahon he whitened himself. Without wanting to over-read, this whitening might be the, possibly unconscious, expression of a desire to be white, to be accepted into white privilege. This would not be surprising given Mauritius’ history. In the context of this very colonial party it could express the man’s wish to be the coloniser rather than the colonised. To the best of our limited knowledge of the party nobody turned up dressed as a colonial explorer or settler, this might have made the colonial fantasy too obvious, though there was, as we have seen, a person dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In the photograph that includes her and an older couple blacked up who are probably her parents, Mahon, and her friend wearing what looks to be an exaggerated Masai necklace, both appear to have skin darkener on. It is as if, even though she claims no knowledge of blackface, Mahon is aware that wearing skin darkener will make her look more ‘normal’ than her blacked-up friends with their war-paint. Where her guests look like caricatures, Mahon and her friend, setting aside the oversized necklace, look like attractive young women wearing slightly unusual fashions—which was, no doubt, the idea. At the same time, darkening their skins suggests that Mahon, at least, thinks that all people who live in Africa are black. However, and this is crucial, Mahon is not alone in her and her guests’ acceptance of stereotypes of people identified as black. The KFC advertisement was pulled by KFC not because of Australian complaints but because the advertisement had been put onto YouTube and watched by Americans. In an article on the American NBC News we find:

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KFC, which is a sponsor of cricket in Australia, said in a statement on Thursday the ad was meant to be ‘tongue-in-check [sic].’ ‘We have been made aware that a KFC commercial being shown on Australian television has apparently caused offense, particularly in the United States, after a copy of the commercial was reproduced online without KFC’s permission,’ the Louisville, Ky.-based company said. (KFC pulls fried chicken ad, 2010)

If the advertisement was meant to be tongue-in-cheek then clearly Australian KFC were well-aware of the content’s racist connotations for Americans. What we don’t know is why there seems to have been few Australian complaints—though we can compare this to the audience enjoyment of the Jackson Jive sketch. Indeed, many Australians defended the advertisement as an example of Australian humour (KFC pulls cricket ad amid racism claims, 2010). The lone white man surrounded by celebrating, over-excited blacks suggests the classic colonial image of the white explorer captured by African cannibals and waiting to be cooked and eaten. This time, though, using an African-American stereotype, the white male survives.11 The advertisement plays to white privilege and reduces the West Indian cricket fans to black Others, their Caribbean specificity lost to American cultural imperialism. Much the same can be said about the Best & Less advertisement. The three females are most likely Pacific Islanders but the image on the cover has them semiotically linked to an African-American stereotype. In response to criticism: Best & Less marketing director Jee Moon told Fairfax Media her team were unaware of the American stereotype when they designed the cover, which was meant to ‘celebrate summer,’ using a diverse range of models to reflect its broad customer base. ‘I genuinely was unaware of [the stereotype] until yesterday, it’s not from a point in time and a culture that I’m familiar with - if we had known we wouldn’t have done it,’ she said. ‘It really was not the intention to offend anyone. That said, I’m not apologising for including different women and in breaking the mould’. (Spooner 2013)

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This time the image was not pulled. Once more, through an association with African-American stereotypes, a minority group of colour in Australia has been Othered and demeaned, and this while Best & Less’ marketing director, who is herself of an east Asian heritage and part of a model minority in Australia, distracts the critics by making a politically correct point about diversity. What is going on when a party can use blackface as the pretext for so many racist costumes while the host clearly has no idea of the history of blackface either in the United States or in Australia; and when an advertisement and a catalogue cover can utilise African-American stereotypes while portraying black people from other places? In a country where race was the dominant determinant of entry for around seventy years, racial stereotypes, albeit those identified with a black minority from another country, are deeply sedimented in the cultural imaginary. It is not necessary for Australians consciously to be aware of blackface and of negative African-American stereotypes. In part because of American cultural colonialism that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, blackface, which was popular in Australia when performed by Americans and Australians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and negative African-American stereotypes, are accepted in Australian culture. They are aspects in the negative (white) Australian cultural construction of people identified as black regardless of whether they are African American. Such usages reaffirm white privilege while reinforcing the marginal status of Australia’s increasingly diverse black communities.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Melissa Bellanta for pointing me to this episode. 2. There is one exception. In 2009, the Australian comedian John Safran had a segment in his television series Race Relations (episode 2) in which he went to the United States and put on blackface in order to pass as an African American. This enterprise was based on John Howard Griffin’s passing as an African American which he wrote about in Black Like Me (1964). As the intent was quite different—passing rather than blackface minstrelsy—and as the location was the United States rather than Australia, even though the series was developed for an Australian audience, I shall not discuss this example in this chapter. 3. There is now a considerable literature on blackface and minstrelsy in the United States.

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4. On Britain, see, for example, Peter Fryer, Staying power: The history of black people in Britain (1984). On Australia, see, for example, Cassandra Pybus, Black founders: The unknown story of Australia’s first black settlers (2006); see also Ian Duffield, ‘Martin Beck and Afro-Blacks in colonial Australia’ (1985). 5. One account of this incident can be found in Matthew Klugman and Gary Osmond, ‘That picture—Nicky Winmar and the history of an image’ (2009). 6. For an account of the fascination with, and racism towards, African Americans in Australia during the early 1970s see the African-American singer Marcia Hines’ biography, Karen Dewey, Diva: The life of Marcia Hines (2001). 7. These figures come from Barry York, ‘Australia and refugees, 1901–2002: An annotated chronology based on official sources’ (2003). 8. I have discussed some aspects of this life in my discussion of bodgies and widgies in Jon Stratton The young ones: Working-class culture, consumption and the category of youth (1992). 9. A discussion of the ocker films can be found by Tom O’Regan, ‘Cinema Oz: The Ocker Films’ (1989). 10. On the whitening of the Irish in the United States, see Noel Ignatiev How the Irish became White (1995). 11. It should be acknowledged that fried chicken is also a much-loved Jamaican food.

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Miller, Benjamin. 2007. The mirror of whiteness: Blackface in Charles Chauvel’s Jedda. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. 140–156. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/ article/view/320/465. Accessed 27 December 2019. Milner Davis, Jessica. 2009. ‘Aussie’ humour and laughter: Joking as an acculturating ritual. In Serious frolic: Essays on Australian humour, ed. Frances De Groen and Peter Kirkpatrick, 31–47. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Mitchell, Tony. 2011. 2nd generation migrant expression in Australian hip-hop. Local Noise. http://www.localnoise.net.au/site-directory/papers/2nd-genera tion-migrant-expression-in-australian-hip-hop/. NBC News. 2010. KFC pulls fried chicken ad after racism outcry, January 8. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34767362/#.VGQiNJOUe6c. Accessed 27 December 2019. O’Regan, Tom. 1989. Cinema Oz: The ocker films. In The Australian screen, ed. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, 75–98. Ringwood: Penguin Books. Pickering, Michael. 2008. Blackface minstrelsy in Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pybus, Cassandra. 2006. Black founders: The unknown story of Australia’s first black settlers. Sydney: UNSW Press. Rickard, John. 1998. Lovable larrikins and awful ockers. Journal of Australian Studies 56: 78–85. Roediger, David. 1991. The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. London: Verso. Spooner, Rania. 2013. Retailer apologises after catalogue slammed for ‘racial overtones’. Sydney Morning Herald, October 22. http://www.smh.com.au/ lifestyle/fashion/retailer-apologises-after-catalogue-slammed-for-racial-overto nes-20131022-2vyso.html. Accessed 27 December 2019. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stratton, Jon. 1992. The young ones: Working class culture, consumption and the category of youth. Perth: Black Swan Press. Stratton, Jon. 2004. Borderline anxieties: Whitening the Irish and keeping out asylum seekers. In Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 222–238. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Stratton, Jon. 2006. Two rescues, one history: Everyday racism in Australia. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12: 657– 681. Stratton, Jon. 2009. Preserving white hegemony: Skilled migration, ‘Asians’ and middle-class assimilation. borderlands 8 (3): 1–28. http://www.borderlands. net.au/vol8no3_2009/stratton_hegemony.htm. Strausbaugh, John. 2006. Black like you: Blackface, whiteface, insult & imitation in American popular culture. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

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Things Bogans Like. 2010. #126 Hey Hey It’s Saturday, April 14. http:// thingsboganslike.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/126-hey-hey-its-saturday/. Accessed 27 December 2019. Waterhouse, Richard. 1990. From minstrel show to vaudeville: The Australian popular stage 1788–1914. Kensington: UNSW Press. Wikipedia. 2011. Bogan. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogan. Accessed 27 December 2019. Wittman, Matthew W. 2010. Empire of culture: U.S. entertainers and the making of the Pacific circuit, 1850–1890. PhD Thesis, The University of Michigan. York, Barry. 2003. Australia and refugees, 1901–2002: An annotated chronology based on official sources. Parliament of Australia: Parliamentary Library. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/ Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/online/Refugeescontents. Accessed 27 December 2019. Zemke-White, Kirsten. 2003. Nesian styles (re)present R’n’B: The appropriation, transformation and realization of contemporary R’n’B with hip hop by urban Pasifika groups in Aotearoa. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 2: 94–123.

CHAPTER 7

Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come the Habibs! Race, Identity and Representation

When Here Come the Habibs! was first broadcast on Channel Nine in February 2016 it was described as the first locally made ethnic sitcom since Acropolis Now on Channel Seven. Acropolis Now had ended its run in November 1992. The 1980s and early 1990s, under the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, were the high point of official multiculturalism. By the later 1990s and onwards, especially under the coalition government of John Howard (1996–2007) and, later, that of Tony Abbott (2013–2015), official multiculturalism was wound back and supplanted by neoliberal practices. The two shows were broadcast into quite different Australian social contexts. This chapter examines the transformations in representation of ethnicised Australians as a consequence of these changes through a discussion of Here Come the Habibs! Where the characters of Acropolis Now were second-generation GreekAustralians, the Habib family are Lebanese-Australians. The parents, Fou Fou and Mariam, we are told migrated to Australia during the civil war in Lebanon. This ran from 1975 to 1990. They have three children, Toufic, the eldest who is an entrepreneur with outlandish money-making schemes (the humorous irony here is that the Arabic ‘toufic’ when used as a name translates as success), Elias who is starting a university degree in Chemistry and Layla, who is still at school. Much controversy was generated for the show by the promo which portrayed the Habib family not only as stereotypes but as caricatures.1 Interestingly, a number of the shots of the family appear to have been taken specifically for the promo as they © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_7

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did not appear in the episodes of the series. Such was the alarm caused by the promo that Candy Royalle (2016a), who described herself as the Australian daughter of Lebanese parents, started a petition to stop the show going to air calling it ‘racist’. The show ran for six episodes. During this time the characters became less caricatured. There is a customer review on the JB HiFi (Home Entertainment Retailer) site by Hssk (2016) which possibly reflects the shift from caricature to stereotype: ‘Bad Start… But Gets Better: The Habibs was boring in the first half of the season, but in part 2, it was hilarious and funny. Couldn’t stop laughing and was so entertaining’. Here, it would seem, is somebody who finds greater humour in social interaction than caricature. Perhaps at least partly because of the furore drummed up by the promo, the first episode had 1.4 million viewers across Australia, only beaten by Channel Seven’s cooking show, My Kitchen Rules. This number declined over the first four weeks and plateaued for weeks five and six at 830,000 and 840,000 viewers respectively, placing Here Come the Habibs! as the eleventh and tenth most watched show on those evenings (Wikipedia 2016). These viewer figures were strong enough for Channel Nine to commission a second series. In this chapter I will argue that Here Come the Habibs! is nostalgic for a form of multiculturalism historically identified as official multiculturalism which is no longer central, indeed hardly relevant, to Australian life. The bulk of the series’ episodes focus on the tensions between the Lebanese-origin Habibs and the Anglo-Celtic O’Neills. This encounter exhibits anxieties that last surfaced dramatically in the so-called Cronulla riots of 2005 though they remain apparent in the presence of far-right political parties including the renaissance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in the federal election of 2016. In the late 2010s Australian society is more diverse than was envisaged or manageable by official multiculturalism and, as portrayed by the final episode of Here Come the Habibs! Australia is now one site in a globalised order organised through the ideological prism of neoliberal individualism.

Situating the Habibs The show isn’t just about the Habib family. They win 22 million dollars in the lottery and move from the working-class, migrant Sydney suburb of Lakemba, where according to the 2001 census almost fifteen per cent of

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the population claims Lebanese heritage, to the harbour-side of the upperclass, Anglo-dominated suburb of Vaucluse where they have bought a house next to the O’Neill family of Jack, Olivia and daughter Madison. Olivia is the heiress of a biscuit fortune, Bonza Biscuits, and Jack, having married her, is now the company director—though it turns out, in episode 5, that he is hamstrung by the requirement that all major decisions have to be approved by Olivia’s dissipated brother, Bobby. It is Jack’s family name that is O’Neill. This suggests he is of Irish stock. Olivia and Jack give embodied meaning to that Australian description of the dominant, white, group whose power is naturalised in Australia who are conventionally identified as Anglo-Celtic—that is, of British background signalling the Irish as a separate group who have achieved a possibly tolerated equality. In Here Come the Habibs! Olivia constantly makes clear to Jack that he owes his position to her decision to marry him. Throughout the run of the show much of the tension, and the humour, comes from the cultural clash between the two families. Andy Ryan, the Nine Network Co-Head of Drama, has said that: When it was pitched to us, we knew it was topical and spoke to something that was going on in Australian society that was bigger than just the comedy of the show. It had something to say that reflected upon the Australian experience and not specifically the multi-cultural aspect, although that’s obviously there. When you boil it right down, it’s about family and it’s about neighbours. It’s about outsiders moving into a strange environment and getting resistance from the Old Guard. That’s a pretty bankable comedy concept. (Gunn 2016)

Here, Ryan acknowledges that Here Come the Habibs! is embedded in the discourse of multiculturalism. However, he understands this as having a limited appeal. Rather, he suggests that what interested Channel Nine was that they considered the show as having a more universally Australian concern: neighbours. It is not coincidental that this is the title of the longest-ever running Australian soap opera which started in 1985 and is still being broadcast. Since at least the period of great suburban expansion in the post-Second World War period white Australians have understood the Australian experience in terms of neighbourliness. Jennifer Rutherford (2000, p. 7) argues that:

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[The] code of neighbourliness is immediately recognisable; it is the touchstone of Australianness as it has been imagined traditionally by the white Australian community. It is what has been called upon in both real and fictional dramas to distinguish Australians from other nationalities.

The discourse of neighbourliness is so dominant that it even pervades the way Australians see Australia in relation to the other countries in the region. Thus, for example, the standard textbook on Australia’s relationship with these countries, first published in 2000, subsequently reprinted three times and with a second edition in 2011, is titled Understanding Australia’s Neighbours: An Introduction to East and Southeast Asia (Knight and Heazle 2011 [2000]). This, then, is what sold Channel Nine on Here Come the Habibs! that it can be read aside from its multicultural aspect as a show about two families with different cultures who become neighbours. It is, to use a different expression, a show about fish-out-of-water. The reference point for reading Here Come the Habibs! as a fish-outof-water show is the American sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies which ran in the United States from 1962 to 1971.2 In this show the Clampett family who, it would seem, lived in the Appalachian backwoods though we are never told precisely where, discover oil on their property. The family subsequently move to the wealthy suburb of Beverly Hills, California. The humour comes from the clash of cultures between their backwoods ways and the cultured, upper-class customs of their new neighbours. The show can be read in terms of the gaucheness of the nouveau riche but it can also function as a metaphor for the experience of American migrants striving to adapt to their new, American environment. Conversely, Here Come the Habibs! which is most obviously a show about race and identity, can also be read as a show about class and class difference. It is, though, as a show about race and identity that we need to begin a discussion of Here Come the Habibs! This is because, in spite of Ryan’s insight that the narrative organisation of the show situates it as about outsiders and the Old Guard, the outsiders here are presented as Lebanese-Australians and the Old Guard as, literally as we have seen, Anglo-Celts. When we meet Fou Fou he is being rowed ashore by his faithful friend, the taxi driver Mustafa. Fou Fou is crouched in the front of the boat. On reaching the shore, which is the beginning of the garden of his newly acquired property, Fou Fou disembarks and kneels on the ground. The scene has a double resonance. First, it reminds Australian

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viewers of the asylum seeker ‘boat people’ who have striven to reach the Australian coast. This connotation is reprised in a more obvious manner in episode 2 when, after a deal with the elite local yacht club which is fighting a racial discrimination case, many of Fou Fou’s relatives and friends pack into a small boat and head for the club having been offered memberships. At the same time, the original scene is reminiscent of paintings and Hollywood film shots of a captain being rowed ashore to visit and sometimes take possession of the land (see, for example, William Hodges ‘The Landing at Tanna’ (1775) showing Captain Cook being rowed ashore). Fou Fou here becomes a parody of Captain Cook. He is the colonial invader who has usurped the attempt by Olivia O’Neill to buy the next-door property which, she tells us, used to belong to her family until her grandfather subdivided and sold off the adjoining block. However, this colonial invader is not English but Lebanese. In the structure of the scene the original owners of the land, the Indigenous Birrabirragal people, are elided. The dynamic of the show does not include the people who lived on the land before the settlers’ arrival. This is not surprising when it is remembered that Aborigines and Indigenous culture were not a part of the original rubric of official multiculturalism. Aborigines were only added in 1989 (Jupp 2002, p. 101) and through the early 1990s. The reasoning for this was discussed in Chapter 1. As the people who were forcibly displaced by ‘migrants’ their inclusion in official multiculturalism remains problematic.

Everyday Multiculturalism, Official Multiculturalism and Their Representational Forms It is common these days to think about multiculturalism in terms of a binary distinction between everyday multiculturalism and official multiculturalism.3 Before continuing a discussion of Here Come the Habibs! we need to consider if there is a representational form appropriate for each of these ideological constructions of multiculturalism. Everyday multiculturalism is used to refer to the ways people from diverse cultures interact on a daily basis. It is not concerned with groups so much as with the immediate relations of quotidian life, and with the syncretic products of those relations whether they be interethnic intimacy or newly developed foods that merge aspects of different cuisines.

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As Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham put it: ‘The everyday multiculturalism perspective… explores how cultural diversity is experienced and negotiated on the ground in everyday situations’ (2009, p. 2). This kind of multiculturalism has no need of being called multiculturalism. It is thought of as individuals from diverse backgrounds making sense of their interactions and creating culture as they do so. At the same time as I give this description we do need to remember that the idea of everyday multiculturalism which informs this understanding is an ideology. At the core of this ideological construction is an emphasis on the person as an individual actively making sense of their life-world with the aid of their cultural capital, and in ‘real life’—that is defined here as life as the individual lives it—as the foundation and expression of their lived experience. With its emphasis on the individual everyday multiculturalism can easily be imbricated with neoliberal values that also focus on the importance of the individual. In January 2016, less than a month before Here Come the Habibs! aired, SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), known as the multicultural television channel, broadcast the first episode of The Family Law. Co-written by Benjamin Law, and roughly based on his book with the same title of short stories about his family, the show was a comedy with a tragic foundation in the breakdown of the marriage between Benjamin’s parents, in the series named Jenny and Danny. It happens that the parents are Cantonese-speaking Chinese from Malaysia and Hong Kong. Law is very clear that what he wanted was a show about divorce not about race: the main pitch of the show is that it’s essentially a comedy about divorce … The family just happened to be Chinese-Australian. (Bellette 2016)

Law makes plain that he did not want a series that expressed the preoccupations of official multiculturalism. In another interview he says: ‘We weren’t trying to tell the story of a family trying to find their identity in Australia even though that’s a perfectly valid story to tell’ (Taylor 2016). For Law, The Family Law was primarily about marital breakdown and the ways each member of the family dealt with this. Law’s concern (Bellette 2016) was literally to show that Australia includes Asians: ‘Roughly 90% of the characters are Asian-Australian, and for a long time, Asian-Australian faces have been absent from Australian screens (even though they roughly account for 1 in 10 Australian citizens)’. Law wanted them to be visible on television not as a special

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category, a group of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Asians’ in the sense of official multiculturalism, but as ordinary members of Australian society. Marital breakdown is an event that is not specific to any one ethnic group. It is a part of everyday life in Australia. How could this experience be represented? Law says that: ‘We strongly believe that there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy. But there was a mantra in the writer’s [sic] room: “What does the truth look like?”’ (Bellette 2016). Truth, here, suggests accuracy of representation. This is a traditional understanding of realism. In a published discussion between Benjamin Law and his sister Michelle Law (2016), she says: ‘There’s a behind the scenes video of the casting agents for The Family Law discussing the challenge of casting a Chinese Australian family who spoke Cantonese, but THEY DID IT’. Law strove to find Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Australian actors who, in his mind, could realistically portray his family. Now, realism is a fraught ideological category. Matthew Pateman (2006, p. 24) comments: Realism is, of course, no more than a technique. It is a technique that may well have political and philosophical implications, but it is a technique first and foremost. As a technique it aims to represent its object in a fashion that means that a viewer or reader will be as little distracted as possible by the act of representation so that the world offered will be as unmediated and, therefore, as real-seeming as possible. Realism is not a representation of the real but a technique for the greatest possible level of real-seeming-ness.

Real-seemingness is a consequence of shared fundamental cultural assumptions. The evolution of generic realism was underpinned by the ideological development in the seventeenth century of possessive individualism, a term which describes the claim that the desire for possession of objects is integral to human life and that the person is in the first place an individual apart from the world. Realism is based on a number of technical practices. In his foundational discussion of literary realism, Ian Watt (2001 [1957], p. 11) argued that, ‘the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’. Watt (2001 [1957], p. 17) went on to remark, mentioning two early English examples of the novel, that, ‘particularity of description has always been considered typical of the narrative manner of Robinson Crusoe and Pamela’. What Watt is arguing is that realism is

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based on the specificity of the (apparent) representation. Echoing Watt’s explanation of realism, when writing about The Family Law Andrew Taylor (2016) paraphrases Law saying that, ‘each family is unique, yet aspects of his story – the wallpaper, the frank discussions about bodies, the hardworking, absent father – will be familiar to Chinese-Australians’. Nicole Lee (2016) makes this same point about The Family Law in a critical comparison with the similarly themed American show Fresh Off the Boat : Law and [Tony] Ayres [the director and producer] have filled those gaps [of cultural and individual specificity], imbuing The Family Law with lashings of specificity; in fact, there’s so much detail, warmth and gentle humour to the script, direction and production design that the characters and settings are relatable for anyone who grew up – or is growing up – in Australia.

It is, then, precisely this particularity which individualises the family in The Family Law, but in a way which enables any viewer, not just a ChineseAustralian one, to be able to relate to the characters. The trick with realism is to generate particularity in a way that allows for identification. Watt (2001 [1957], pp. 17–18) sums up his argument, writing that: Two such aspects [of realistic particularity] suggest themselves as of especial importance in the novel—characterisation and presentation of background: the novel is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment.

Characterisation, the construction of unique characters, but, again, characters who are also universal enough for viewer identification, is the other key to realism; characters who appear as individuals. Each family may be unique, as Law asserts, but the function of realism is to generate individuals with whom viewers can identify. The family in The Family Law is Chinese-Australian and also, if Law has been successful, typically Australian. Here we come back to the ideological nub of everyday multiculturalism; that this form of multiculturalism is concerned with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds relating in their day-to-day lives. The commonness is provided by the idea of the individual and the

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familiarity of the detailing of the material context—even if the specific material context is unfamiliar. Here we can see why realism functions so well as the mode of representation of everyday multiculturalism. The persuasiveness of the real-seemingness of realism, located in its ideological assumptions, reproduces the assumptions which underpin the claims of everyday multiculturalism. Official multiculturalism refers to the kind of multiculturalism identified with and historically encouraged by the Australian government. This kind of multiculturalism identifies people as members of groups. The focus, then, is on the group not the individual. Thus, for example, official multiculturalism is concerned with Italians as Australian migrants, and their descendants, not with any individual Italo-Australian and their everyday interactions with other Italo-Australians, the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture or members of other ethnic groups. Official multiculturalism was established in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Gough Whitlam’s government and subsequently by the government of Malcolm Fraser as a way of managing the European migrants, identified within the policy as people from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds, who had arrived before the end of the White Australia policy. It has since been adapted to include people who are identified as non-white but it was established, as we shall see, on the claim to a shared morality underlying any diversity of cultural practices. Official multiculturalism is often concerned with the preservation of cultural identity. How, then, to best represent official multiculturalism if it is founded in groups rather than individuals? One answer can be found in stereotypes. There is a history of understanding stereotypes negatively. Indeed, the basis of the critical argument is that stereotypes are the opposite of ‘truthful’, to use Law’s term, representation. Individualised characters are preferable to the group stigmatising of stereotypes. In her online review of the first episode of Here Come the Habibs ! Royalle (2016b), who had set up the petition to stop the show being broadcast, suggested that the Lebanese in the show are stereotyped as goat-loving, aggressive, corrupt and stupid. Steve Neale (1993, p. 41) made an important contribution to the discussion of the stereotype when he argued that: As a critical concept, stereotyping is applicable almost solely to the analysis of character and characterisation; to the extent that it is concerned with only one set of elements within the structure and functioning of a text. In addition, the characters and characterisation within any one text

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are treated as exemplary of a process of repetition which links the specific text (and the characterisation within it) to other texts and other discursive forms. According to this problematic, a stereotype is a stable and repetitive structure of character traits. (italics in original)

Neale does not claim that stereotypes are inevitably negative. Rather, he explains that they utilise, and indeed are characterised by, the identification of certain traits, to which we can add that these are claimed as common to members of a particular group. Following on this train of thought Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994, p. 210) note that: ‘The critique-of-stereotypes approach is implicitly premised on the desirability of “rounded” three-dimensional characters within a realist-dramatic esthetic’. Realist characterisation is considered preferable to stereotyping because possessive individualism is a key ideological characteristic of modern Western society. At the same time, stereotyping functions within a structure of power. Homi Bhabha (1994, pp. 94–95) argues that the stereotype is a characteristic of colonial discourse. It is a way that the coloniser produces the Other: Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: … Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification which vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated.

The stereotype helps to reinforce the colonial order by imposing on the colonised a set of traits which portray the colonised in negative ways. In order to do this the traits must be repeated to become taken-for-granted. In official multiculturalism stereotyping gave ethnic groups traits which were often then internalised by those groups. Acropolis Now was made by second-generation Greek-Australians. Yet, as Tony Mitchell (1992, p. 125) writes: The Greek protagonists of Acropolis Now, despite being portrayed as young NESB [Non-English Speaking Background] migrants rejecting both the cultural pressures of their parents and the dominant trends of AngloAustralian ‘skip’ culture, are caricatured and stereotyped to a degree which makes them almost indistinguishable from Con the Fruiterer.

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Con the Fruiterer was a character developed by the Anglo actor Mark Mitchell. He appeared in a comedy sketch television show called The Comedy Company in the mid-1980s and was both loved and vilified as a stereotype of the Greek-Australian. The form of official multiculturalism which had, at its heart, the power of Anglo-Celt Australia organising the system of ethnic minorities, the core/periphery structure as it is often called, functioned analogously to a colonial order. As with colonial systems, over time the powerless internalise the traits attributed to them by the powerful, the coloniser. As Bhabha (1994, p. 95) continues, it is the force of colonial discourse that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed.

It is this necessary excess which allows for the possibility of the ‘writing back’ of the colonised, in this case of Australia’s ethnicised groups. In official multiculturalism ethnic characteristics became stereotypical tropes. Thus, for example in food, pizza is an Italian dish and it is assumed that it should be made by Italians. In Paul Fenech’s film Fat Pizza, released in 2003, a war occurs between Bobo Gigliotti, who runs Fat Pizza delivery pizzeria, and the Indians who run their own pizzeria called Phat Pizza as revenge for one of them being fired by Bobo after telling Bobo he, the Indian, cannot deliver pizzas with beef on them because he is a Hindu. Bobo’s pizzas may be unhygienic and poorly made but those who eat them do not generally complain. However, when one of the Indians has a white prostitute at Phat Pizza and asks her to eat pizza while he watches, a fetishistic behaviour that reinforces that pizza is not an authentic Indian food, she gets terrible belly ache and farts disgusting-smelling smoke. Indians cannot make edible pizza. According to stereotype they should be making curry. The use of stereotypes produces a kind of hyper-realism. Writing about the French film La vie est un long fleuve tranquille directed by Étienne Chatiliez and released in 1988, Phil Powrie (1997, p. 160) tells us that some critics considered that ‘one of the film’s weaknesses is its dependence on stereotype’. He explains (p. 160) that:

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Only one or two reviewers saw that the realism was in fact hyper-realism, and that Chatiliez had persuaded ‘the spectator that his caricatures, by their very excess, become real’ (Benoist). Alain Schifres, who writes for Le Nouvel Observateur, pointed out, with his usual penchant for paradox, that the film’s hyper-realism and its ‘hallucinatory precision’ meant that ‘the characters aren’t characters that remind you of real people, they are people who remind you of characters … His characters aren’t caricatures but types’.

The characters are actually stereotypes. It is the stereotyping, indeed the excess inherent in the stereotyping, that generates the hyper-realism. The same argument can be applied to Here Come the Habibs! It is the excess of the stereotypes, referring to Bhabha’s usage, in the show that produces the viewing experience of hyper-realism. Chatiliez had worked making advertisements before he started directing films. La vie est un long fleuve tranquille was his directorial debut. In Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, Michael Schudson (1984, p. 217) writes that: Of course the ‘real’ is a cultural construct. The makers of commercials do not want what is real but what will seem real on film. … Seeking sites for the filming of the ‘Reach Out and Touch Someone’ commercials, N.W. Ayer’s staff sought not just actual homes but homes that would look real. By that, they meant homes that would look stereotypical, homes that would look consistent with a type they sought to picture as representative.

Here we can see how advertising’s need to target specific groups of people leads to stereotyping. Stereotypes are related to the construction of individuals as members of groups. The concern is not with people as individuals but with the group of which they are members. Official multiculturalism was focused on groups. Stereotypes, then, are a logical way of representing the members of the groups as constructed by official multiculturalism. Here Come the Habibs! was concerned with the tension between the Lebanese-Australian Habibs and the Anglo-Celt Australian O’Neills. The influence of official multiculturalism meant that both families were stereotyped. The members of each family acted in terms of stereotypes. The result was a show that was not realistic in the sense that The Family Law was realist but, rather, hyper-real. The experience of the show as being more than real is a consequence of the excess that is inherent in stereotypes.

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Greeks, Lebanese and Whiteness in Australia The Greek-Australians of Acropolis Now fitted securely into Australian official multiculturalism. They were identified as white—not quite as white as the Anglo-Celts but nevertheless white. The importance of their intervention was to give media visibility to an ethnic group. The echo of the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the VietNam War Apocalypse Now (1979) was ironic. Acropolis Now was not earth-shattering. Rather, it made the connection between the acceptance of ethnicised groups in terms of performance—in terms of costumes, customs and cooking to refer back to Gunew’s description of official multiculturalism quoted in Chapter 2—and media presentation. However, suggesting the conservatism of Australian television producers, it did not lead to an increase in television shows about ethnics on the commercial channels. That was left to the multicultural channel, SBS. As we have seen, when Here Come the Habibs! was pitched to Channel Nine, Ryan tells us that what appealed was not its multicultural element but its fish-out-of-water aspect, the humour that comes from disturbing neighbourliness (Gunn 2016). This focus on neighbourliness disguised another difference from Acropolis Now. Where Greeks were accepted into official multiculturalism from the start, and indeed along with Italians were one of the ethnicised groups whose presence was behind the establishment of official multiculturalism, the Lebanese have always occupied a much more ambivalent position. The anxious question that has run through Australian migration policy has been whether Lebanese are white in any Australian definition of that term. After all, for one thing, Lebanon is not in Europe. One solution to this problem which was utilised up until the 1970s was to allow into Australia Lebanese Christians but not Lebanese Muslims. In Australian terms, as we saw in Chapter 3, being Christian whitens people. To put this differently, Australians understand their society as being based on a shared moral consensus. This moral order is claimed to have a Christian basis. That Christian foundation is connected with the Anglican Church and through English settlers with whiteness, but all versions of Christianity are assumed to have the same moral basis. In this context it is not surprising to find that Jenny in The Family Law went to a Christian, actually Catholic, school in Malaysia where she met Rose, her best friend and interfering, repressed lesbian, who is invited to stay by Benjamin when he

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fears his mother is having a breakdown. The book on which the series is based is clearer on the two women’s Christian background: As kids Clara [Rose in the television series] and my mother had both attended Ave Maria, a private Catholic convent school staffed by severe, straight-backed nuns. Clearly the Christianity had stuck with Aunty Clara, Mum, not so much. ‘I believe in a higher something,’ Mum told me, ‘but I’m not into, like, God-God-God. Sometimes I talk to God, but I don’t need to go to church to do that’. (Law 2010, p. 111)

Whether she has remained a Christian is secondary to the reassurance we gain from knowing that Jenny (who is called Connie in the book) internalised Christianity at school and that her later beliefs continued to be influenced by that Christianity. One thing that helped the promo for Here Come the Habibs! to be so troubling was that it was unclear if the Habibs were Muslim or Christian. As Sarah Ayoub (2016) wrote in an article in The Guardian shortly before the show’s first episode, a reason for opposition to the show was that some people are ‘concerned that this very rare occurrence of diversity on Australian screens is part of a ploy to condition the population into thinking that Australian Muslims have a right to be a part of our national story’. With the help of Tahir Bilgic, one of the creators of the show, Ayoub (2016) went on to reassure Australians of the religious status of the Habibs: In some respects, I get it. These are troubling times. Those who don’t know otherwise feel that humouring Middle Eastern stereotypes could fan the flames of tensions with Muslims. But Bilgic has revealed that the Habib family are Christian, not Muslim, nullifying any concerns about Islamophobia while illustrating a diversity among Middle Eastern people that is too often glossed over.

What we have then in the show are two families of likely different Christian denominations—we are never told the religion of the O’Neills, there is no need they are so clearly white, though they are doubtless Catholic and Anglican—but shared moral assumptions. They have different cultural attitudes to some things, and different behaviours, but these differences are moderated by their shared moral repertoire coming from their shared Christianity. At the most fundamental level, the Habibs are whitened.

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In Australia, the Lebanese have always occupied the edge of whiteness. Ghassan Hage (2011, pp. 161–162) has argued that the problems faced by the Lebanese have much to do with lack of educational capital: the Lebanese migrants of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were unskilled and with very low level of education. They were initially recruited into an industrial sector (particularly the automobile industry) that was soon to be decimated, and they soon suffered massive unemployment. Because of their lack of educational and cultural resources (relative to the Australian context) this unemployment became of a chronic nature: it was inherited across generations. Muslim Lebanese today have the highest rate of unemployment in the country. This also means that an underclass structured around various ‘black economies’ flourished among them and features highly mediatised gang formations dubbed ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘Lebanese’ gangs.

The Habibs have moved from working-class Lakemba to Vaucluse. In spite of being Christian they fit the stereotype of Lebanese families. Before winning the lottery Fou Fou was self-employed. He made car-ports and did other handyperson-type jobs. He is semi-skilled. Nahid Afrose Kabir (2004, p. 167) has précised an argument by Stephen Castles and his collaborating authors who, were of the opinion that some migrant groups may fall victim to structural racism because the Australian labour market is highly segmented. There is a strong link between places of birth, gender and types of job people are likely to get. Segmentation means that job opportunities are based not on a person’s work ability, qualifications and productivity, but on non-economic ascriptive criteria, linked to ideologies of gender, race and ethnicity. Labour markets are structured to place women, migrants and racial minorities at a disadvantage, and their low-status positions are in turn taken as a practical proof of innate inferiority.

In other words, it is not just, as Hage (2011, pp. 161–162) suggests, a combination of lack of educational capital and economic bad timing that caused the Lebanese to be positioned, generally speaking, at the bottom of the Australian economic order. There are other factors at play. As Val Colic-Peisker and Farida Tilbury (2008, p. 52) put it: ‘Class relations, which determine control over material and symbolic resources, significantly overlap with the racial hierarchy’. The Lebanese, Christian and

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Muslim, occupy the liminal space of Australian whiteness. They mark the anxious extent of traditional, official multiculturalism. Beyond the Lebanese are those who are positioned clearly as non-white. The other key marker of whiteness in Australia is visible difference. Tony Mitchell (1992, p. 120) refers to Peter Shergold listing physical appearance as one of ‘the three main areas of difference seen as typifying NESB Australians by Anglo-Australians’. Natascha Klocker (2014, pp. 38–39) writes that: Even the oft-maligned soap opera Neighbours had a proportion of second-generation migrant actors (of non-English speaking backgrounds) representative of the level of ethnic diversity in the community. However, enhanced representation did not affect all ethnic minority groups equally. Despite a 10-fold increase in ethnic minority representation (from 2 per cent in 1992 to 20 per cent in 1999), much of this could be attributed to the increased screen presence of second generation European migrants.

These actors ‘looked white’ not least because they did not have accents identifiable as non-Anglo-Australian. In the borderland of whiteness people from many backgrounds can play Lebanese. Bilgic himself, of Turkish background, played Mustafa; Fou Fou was played by Michael Denkha, of Iranian background; Layla Habib was played by Kat Hoyos, of Colombian background; and Camilla Ah Kin, who played Mariam, asserts that she is Lebanese on her father’s side. Only Sam Alhaje, who plays Toufic, and Tyler De Nawi who plays Elias are fully of Lebanese descent. What all the other actors in the Habib family have in common is that they come from backgrounds that are regarded by Australians as borderline white. It is no coincidence that Toufic, in Here Come the Habibs! and Klaus, the son of the mixed white Australian and Japanese family who live across the road in The Family Law, are both body-builders. It would seem that developing one’s body, like tattooing it and body-piercing, can offer a distraction to a visual emphasis on inherited aspects of visible difference from whiteness.

Official Multiculturalism, Neoliberalism and Here Come the Habibs! I have been putting official multiculturalism in the past tense. As we have seen, over the period of John Howard’s coalition government much of the formal apparatus of official multiculturalism was dismantled in favour of

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the individualist policies of neoliberalism. This capitalist ideology breaks down any emphasis on groups to privilege the individual.4 At the same time there is a movement away from production, or even consumption, as the basis for profit towards more abstract and reified processes. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2000, p. 295) put it this way, production appears to have been superseded, as the fons et origo of wealth, by less tangible ways of generating value: by control over such things as the provision of services, the means of communication, and above all, the flow of finance capital. In short, by the market and by speculation.

It is in this context that we need to think about the way the Habibs’ winning of the lottery might be understood. The Habibs are not the first family on Australian television to have such success. In 1991 an Australian soap opera called Chances was based on the idea of the Taylor family winning three million dollars in the lottery. The intention of the show was to follow the consequences of this win. Chances was unsuccessful. In an article about the show Ien Ang and I (1995, p. 134) argued that ‘the effect of the Taylors’ gaining wealth was to cause a rift in the experience of the everyday’. At the time Chances was made it would seem that the television audience was not ready for a show in which the protagonists achieved their wealth in such an abstract and random fashion. We can remember that the Clampetts in The Beverly Hillbillies made their money from finding oil on their property, a fact made clear in the show’s theme song. However, in 2011 when three young women won the lottery in Winners & Losers the show following their lives, and that of their friend who had decided not to join them in their gamble, was a great success. Winners & Losers ran for five seasons with regular audience figures of over a million for the first three seasons. What had shifted? Commenting on the change in the way profit was made in neoliberal capitalism Comaroff and Comaroff (2000, pp. 295–296) write: Symptomatic in this respect are the changing historical fortunes of gambling. The latter, of course, makes manifest a mechanism integral to market enterprise: it puts the adventure into venture capital…. Over a generation, gambling, in its marked form, has changed moral valence and invaded everyday life across the world. It has been routinized in a widespread infatuation with, and popular participation in, high-risk dealings in stocks, bonds, and funds whose fortunes are governed largely by chance. It also expresses itself in a fascination with “futures” and their downmarket counterpart, the lottery.

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By the time of Winners & Losers and the later Here Come the Habibs! the lottery had become a perfectly understandable and acceptable way to achieve wealth. At the same time it signals the incursion of neoliberal ideas into a show founded on the pre-neoliberal ideology of official multiculturalism. The ideology of official multiculturalism continues to pervade the ways that ethnicity, race and identity are thought about in Australia. One exemplification of the shift away from the core/periphery structure of official multiculturalism is the denaturalising of the position of Anglo-Celts. Acropolis Now was made during the heyday of official multiculturalism. In that show among the Greek-Australian ethnic stereotypes there was one Anglo young woman. Her name was Liz: The show’s producer, Peter Herbert, has described Liz as ‘the AngloSaxon voice of reason in the wog chaos (who) represents the signposts of normality among the culture clash of the Greeks and Spaniard. Liz unravels the mayhem.’ In this role … Liz becomes a middle-class anchor figure for Anglo-Saxon audiences, at once sanctioning (but occasionally reprimanding) and interpreting the predominantly sexist behaviour of the working-class Greek males and representing a norm of behaviour against which their extreme antics can be judged. (Mitchell 1992, p. 125)

Here, Herbert spells out precisely the relationship between the role of Anglo-Celt and that of Greek-Australian stereotype in Acropolis Now. In modernity as reconstituted in Australia, the woman, and especially the mother, is understood to be the centre of the Australian moral order, the basis of society (see Finch 1993). She is the one who reproduces that moral order through her parenting: ‘The site credited with being the cornerstone of this modern order is the nuclear family, in which the wife/mother occupies a central role as guardian and reproducer of the moral repertoire’ (Ang and Stratton 1995, p. 125). In Acropolis Now, as Mitchell (1992, p. 125) makes clear, the reproducer of the moral repertoire is embodied by Liz. Liz is not represented as a stereotype and certainly not a negative one. Mitchell (p. 125) describes her as ‘the “straight” female character’. This was the classic organisation of official multiculturalism: the ethnics unable to make sensible, rational decisions, kept in their place by the Anglo-Celt hegemony. In Acropolis Now, Liz’s Greek-Australian counterpart was Effie. Effie was likeable, scatterbrained, dumb but sweet. She was the Anglo-Celt’s ethnic fantasy woman who could hardly look after herself.

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In Here Come the Habibs ! Olivia is no reproducer of the moral order. She turned her daughter’s bedroom into a shoe closet while Madison was away on her gap year and Madison’s eighteenth birthday party was actually an excuse for Olivia to invite Bonza Biscuits’ stakeholders. It is Madison who has to warn her mother about the dangers of using the internet—Olivia doesn’t listen and is taken away in a raid by the anti-terrorism police task force.5 The construction of the O’Neills as stereotypes signals the unsettling of the core/periphery structure of official multiculturalism. Of each family it is the children, Madison and Elias, who are the least stereotyped and who, in one of the key tropes of everyday multiculturalism, seek to develop an intimate, cross-group liaison—something constantly frustrated by both sets of stereotyped parents. Jack and Mariam discover they share an interest in baking. Jack has the idea of combining the Anzac biscuit that Bonza Biscuits sells with the baklava that Mariam makes based on a recipe handed down to her by her mother. Jack goes on morning television to promote the new biscuit. He claims the Anzaclava is the mixing of the quintessential Middle Eastern dessert and the symbol of the ANZAC fighting spirit. Jack describes it as ‘an edible ambassador of goodwill’. He goes on to claim that the Anzaclava ‘will do what no political party has been able to do; that is, unite Australia’. In this image we find the anxieties of official multiculturalism about the fragmentation of the nation as a consequence of the presence, and indeed encouragement, of diverse ethnic groups. In the first episode of Here Come the Habibs! much humour was found in Jack anxiously attempting not to mention the Cronulla riots of 2005 to Fou Fou. The Lebanese not only mark the limit of Australian whiteness in the era of official multiculturalism, they also marked the potential for division within the social order as expressed in the riots against them at Cronulla.6 Behind this anxiety was the fear that the Lebanese were Muslims. Jack understands the Anzaclava in terms of everyday multiculturalism, that this novel food could be an expression of the intermixing of Anglo-Celt and Lebanese. Indeed, in the show it is plain that Jack and Mariam are negotiating a more physical relationship through the substitution of their shared interest in cooking. However, Fou Fou is enraged. It is unclear if his anger is because Mariam has disclosed the secrets of her recipe to Jack or because he knows that this stands for something more. Structurally, Fou Fou’s anger can be related to the ethnic mixing with the Anglo-Celt, something discouraged

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in official multiculturalism as a by-product of the emphasis on the cultural integrity of ethnic groups. Fou Fou, we begin to realise, is nostalgic for an increasingly lost way of life; as is the show. He stirs up anger against the Anzaclava by claiming on social media that it has halal certification. A xenophobic crowd demonstrates outside the O’Neills’ house chanting ‘Halal no, we won’t go’. This apparently nonsensical phrase is a lift from the well-known American anti-Vietnam War draft dodgers chant of ‘Hell no, we won’t go’ now adapted as a protest against the perceived Islamification of Australia—understood as the cause of a loss of the homogeneous moral order underpinning Australian society. It should also remind us of the ‘Jesus not Islam’ the phrase shouted into a journalist’s microphone at a Reclaim Australia rally and discussed in Chapter 3. The upshot is that the Anzaclava is a financial disaster for Bonza Biscuits. It turns out that the family company was already failing. Family companies are anachronistic in the era of globalisation led by transnational corporations. The privately owned company can only be rescued by the O’Neills selling their house. The realtor who comes to put their house on the market is brown-skinned. Olivia says the family is being forced out. Jack adds ‘just like your people were’. The realtor replies, ‘I’m Sri Lankan.’ The implication is that she, and her family, are not refugees/asylum seekers. The complication is that, of course, many boat people were/are Sri Lankan, victims of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers. However, the show’s point appears to be that Australia is now racially visibly diverse because of legitimate migration. The realtor talks of having a Chinese buyer. At this point Here Come the Habibs ! starts to leave official multiculturalism behind. What the Sri Lankan realtor is signalling is the neoliberal, capitalist ‘open borders’ policy—the reference is to the amount of Sydney real estate that is being bought by overseas—read Chinese—investors. Suddenly, the local anxieties about the role of the Lebanese in Australian society are displaced by the neoliberal concerns of globalisation. The Sri Lankan realtor is dressed very well. She sees Mustafa next door poorly dressed and allowing the Habibs’ lawn mower to fall into the harbour. She is worried this will lower the price of the O’Neills’ house. The Sri Lankan realtor is a herald of the new Australia of neoliberal, globalised diversity—an Australia that supersedes the local Australia of Lebanese/Anglo-Celt power dynamics and questions about the limits of whiteness.

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The Chans do buy the house. They are from Hong Kong. They go round to offer neighbourly greetings to the Habibs. Just before Fou Fou opens the door, Mariam remarks to him: ‘Life won’t be the same without the O’Neills’. She is so very right. The O’Neills have been displaced in this new, neoliberal world where Australia is embedded in the globalised order. When Fou Fou and Mariam open the door the Chinese man (who is played by Shingo Usami who is of Japanese origin7 ) introduces them: ‘I’m Greg and this is my wife Helen. Here come the Chans!’ Fou Fou asks, ‘who says, “Here Come the Chans!”?’ This direct reworking of the show’s title signals the changing of the racial guard. The concern is no longer the Lebanese, possibly white Habibs, it is now the overseas Chinese Chans who do not plan to settle and will only use the house at infrequent intervals. Fou Fou’s incredulity suggests his lack of realisation that his old life framed by official multiculturalism has been transformed and replaced. Fou Fou asks, perhaps rhetorically, who buys a house without looking at it first. Greg Chan replies: ‘Very rich people’. Fou Fou turns to Mariam and speaks in Arabic. Greg says ‘very stupid rich people’. He understands what Fou Fou has said and tells him he is very funny. Greg even speaks Arabic. This is because he used to work in Dubai, he says. Will Kymlicka (2013, p. 111) argues that: The neoliberal vision of multiculturalism, … is largely indifferent to both the progressive equality-seeking component of multiculturalism and its national boundedness. The goal of neoliberal multiculturalism is not a tolerant national citizen who is concerned for the disadvantaged in her own society but a cosmopolitan market actor who can compete effectively across state boundaries.

Clearly, Fou Fou is threatened by this global cosmopolitanism. He is no longer dealing with local, Australian, Anglo-Celtic official multiculturalism with its foibles and its failings. He has as neighbours a couple possibly richer than him who come from Hong Kong with a husband who speaks his own language, Arabic. Fou Fou and Mariam literally close the door on the Chans. There is an echo here of the old Australia of closed borders. The metaphor of closing the door on asylum seekers goes back at least to the 1990s.8 Now Fou Fou and Mariam are closing the door on the new present of neoliberal globalisation. Fou Fou says to Mariam: ‘It’s a disgrace, the government lets them come into the country and then they buy our houses’. The joke

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here is that this is a classic Anglo-Australian line. Fou Fou and Mariam are asserting the old narrative of white Australians in official multiculturalism. Layla remarks to Fou Fou: ‘The Chans seem very nice but you’ll probably get bored to death’. Individualised neoliberalism doesn’t have group divisions the way official multiculturalism did. In a different context we can see this shift in Anita Harris’ (2015, p. 363) discussion of the attitudes of young people whom she had studied experiencing the increased diversity of the Australian population: They suggested that difference was ‘the new normal’, that is, it had itself become mainstream. They frequently proposed that the competence to deal with diversity was an indicator of mature citizenship, both in their discussions of their national identifications and their local neighbourhoods. This enabled them to demonstrate their comfort with and embracing of what they positioned as a normative aspect of modern life.

Harris suggests we use the term hyper-diverse for this new society where the proliferation of intermixing of people from varies backgrounds makes impossible official multiculturalism’s attempts to identify and distinguish particular ethnic groupings. However, the Chans are not everyday Australians. They are Kymlicka’s wealthy, cosmopolitan market actors (2013, p. 111). Individualised neoliberalism is globalised. The Chans will have little investment in the socio-cultural organisation of Australia. There is no ‘feud’ between Chinese and Lebanese. Further, the Chans must be interacted with as merely a couple rather than as Chinese. They will not see themselves as part of the Australian ‘Chinese community’. Throughout the six episodes the stereotypes of the Habibs have been in tension with the stereotypes of the O’Neills. In a world without official multiculturalism this tension becomes meaningless. What is left is everyday multiculturalism reinforced and asserted by the neoliberal emphasis on the importance of the individual.

Conclusion In this time of neoliberal globalisation the battle between the Lebanese and the Anglos is outdated. It signals a world of closed borders where whiteness was important and Anglo-Celts sought to preserve their hegemonic power. Jack’s mistake in seeing the Sri Lankan realtor as a refugee marks the outdatedness of his worldview. She is a member of the cosmopolitan, neoliberal elite. She may not even have Australian

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citizenship and, like the Chans, would not be interested in Australian politics. At this point, the Habibs are definitely whitened. They support the established order albeit transformed with them in control—though made possible by their lottery win and Fou Fou’s possibly underhand social media tactic. The conservatism of the programme, and the Habibs, is manifested in the final plot twist. Here, Fou Fou uses money from his lottery win to buy the O’Neills’ house back from the Chans and install the O’Neills back in it, now as his tenants. Next time, the Chans may buy in Vancouver. The whiteness of the Habibs is asserted by comparison with the Sri Lankan and the Chinese who are racialised as non-white. However, in this new world colour is not an important determinant of belonging. In neoliberal Australia belonging is founded on what one can contribute to the national economic order. Aihwa Ong (2006, p. 6) argues that: a focus on neoliberalism recasts our thinking about the connection between government and citizenship as a strictly juridical-legal relationship. It is important to trace neoliberal technology to a biopolitical mode of governing that centres on the capacity and potential of individuals and the population as living resources that may be harnessed and managed by governing regimes.9

This, as we have seen Kymlicka arguing, is very different to the traditional role of multiculturalism, for which read here official multiculturalism. It seems that Fou Fou wants to re-establish, or at least reassert, the Australia of official multiculturalism albeit with changes in the power structure. Fou Fou and the Habib family belong not because of what they contribute to Australia but by virtue of their whiteness and their positioning within the group structure of official multiculturalism. In the end Here Come the Habibs ! comes over as nostalgic—nostalgic for an order before the advent of ‘brown’, ‘yellow’ and indeed ‘black’ races in Australia, a multicultural Australia which had no place for Australia’s first people, and before the dilution of official multiculturalism caused by the inroads of neoliberal thought, when the ambiguities of the Lebanese marked the edge of whom was acceptable in the country, and when the limit of whiteness were generally considered important.

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Notes 1. At this point I shall distinguish between caricature and stereotype using the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions: a caricature is ‘someone or something that is very exaggerated in a funny or foolish way’; a stereotype is ‘a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment’. I shall have more to say about stereotypes later in this chapter. 2. Concerned with another show, Anandam Kavoori (2008, p. 59) writes: ‘Tecumsah is a fish-out-of-water tale in the tradition of Greenacres, The Beverly Hillbillies , The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and perhaps most closely, Northern Exposure’. 3. To my knowledge I was the first person to set up this distinction in Race daze (Stratton) in 1998. 4. I have discussed some of the cultural impacts of neoliberalism on Australia in Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia (Stratton 2011b). 5. The concern with who is legitimately able to stay in Australia pervades Here Come the Habibs ! When in police custody, Olivia expresses her great fear that she would be sent back to South Africa where she was born but never lived. 6. On the Cronulla riots see, for example, Lines in the Sand: The Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism and National Belonging (Noble 2009). 7. This playing of a Chinese man by a Japanese man can be viewed, among other readings, either conservatively as an example of (white) Australians assuming that all east Asians ‘look alike’ or more radically as an example of globalisation and the malleability of racial identity construction. 8. There is an article by William John Wingert ‘Closing the door on asylum seekers: Persecution on account of political opinion after INS v Elias Zacarias ’ (1993, pp. 287–316). There is an earlier 1987 article by Sidni Lambb ‘Denmark: Knocking on haven’s door’ (pp. 9–11). This usage is clearly styled after the Bob Dylan track, released in 1973, ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’. Whatever its origin, the rhetorical trope of a door that gives or stops access to asylum seekers became common across the Western world in the late 1990s. 9. On neoliberalism and citizenship in Australia, and the Cronulla riots, see ‘Non-citizens in the exclusionary state: Citizenship, mitigated exclusion and the Cronulla Riots’ (Stratton 2011a, pp. 299–316).

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References Ang, Ien, and Jon Stratton. 1995. The end of civilization as we knew it: Chances and the postrealist soap opera. In To be continued: Soap operas around the world, ed. Robert Allen, 122–144. London and New York: Routledge. Ayoub, Sarah. 2016. Ditch the premature outrage: Why I’ll be giving Here Come the Habibs a chance. The Guardian, February 2. http://www.thegua rdian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/feb/02/why-here-come-the-habibs. Accessed 26 August 2016. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bellette, Kwenton. 2016. Interview: The Family Law creator Benjamin Law talks about diversity on TV. Screen Anarchy, February 22. http://twitchfilm. com/2016/02/interview-the-family-law-creator-benjamin-law-talks-diversityon-tv.html. Accessed 25 August 2016. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. 2008. Being black in Australia: A case study of intergroup relations. Race & Class 49 (4): 38–56. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2000. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Finch, Lynette. 1993. The classing gaze: Sexuality, class and surveillance. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Gunn, Nicole. 2016. Exclusive: Why Nine took the risk on Here Come the Habibs|@Channel9. DeciderTV.com, February 8. http://decidertv.com/ page/2016/2/7/exclusive-why-nine-took-the-risk-on-here-come-the-habibschannel9. Accessed 25 August 2016. Hage, Ghassan. 2011. Multiculturalism and the ungovernable Muslim. In Essays on Muslims and multiculturalism, ed. Raimond Gaita, 155–186. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. Harris, Anita. 2015. Belonging and the uses of difference: Young people in Australian urban multiculture. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 22 (4): 359–375. Hssk. 2016. Bad start… But gets better. JB Hi Fi Online. https://www.jbhifi. com.au/movies-tv-shows/movies-tv-shows-on-sale/tv-comedy/here-comethe-habibs-season-1/940634/?reviews=true. Accessed 25 August 2016. Jupp, James. 2002. From White Australia to Woomera: The story of Australian immigration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kabir, Nahid Afrose. 2004. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, race relations and cultural history. London: Kegan Paul. Kavoori, Anandam. 2008. Thinking television. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Klocker, Natascha. 2014. Ethnic diversity within Australian homes: Has television caught up to social reality? Journal of Intercultural Studies 35 (1): 34–52.

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Stratton, Jon. 1998. Race daze: Australia in identity crisis. Leichhardt: Pluto Press. Stratton, Jon. 2011a. Non-citizens in the exclusionary state: Citizenship, mitigated exclusion and the Cronulla Riots. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 25 (3): 299–316. Stratton, Jon. 2011b. Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Taylor, Andrew. 2016. The Family Law: Benjamin Law’s ‘comedy about divorce’ screens on SBS. Sydney Morning Herald, January 9. http://www.smh.com. au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/tv-comedy/the-family-law-benjamin-lawscomedy-about-divorce-screens-on-sbs-20160101-glm2hg.html. Accessed 25 August 2016. Watt, Ian. 2001 [1957]. The rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wikipedia. 2016. Here Come the Habibs! Wikipedia.com. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Here_Come_the_Habibs#Ratings. Accessed 25 August 2016. Wingert, William John. 1993. Closing the door on asylum seekers: Persecution on account of political opinion after INS v Elias Zacarias. Boston College Third World Law Journal 13 (2): 287–316. Wise, Amanda, and Selvaraj Velayutham. 2009. Introduction: Multiculturalism and everyday life. In Everyday multiculturalism, ed. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham, 1–17. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass and Its Representation

Pizza and Housos were television comedy series both written and directed by Paul Fenech. Fenech also acted in the shows, in Pizza as Pauly Falzoni and Housos as Franky Falzoni. The two characters were cousins. Pizza ran in twenty-five minute episodes for five seasons between 2000 and 2007 across forty-two episodes in total. Housos ran for two seasons between 2011 and 2013 across eighteen episodes. Both were broadcast on SBS, the partially state-funded multicultural television station (see Ang et al. 2008). There have been three spin-off films linked with the shows. Fat Pizza was released in 2003, Housos v Authority in 2012, and Fat Pizza v Housos in 2014. Fat Pizza cost around $400,000 to make and grossed just under $3,500,000 at the box office. Housos v Authority was less successful, costing around $200,000 to make and taking a little under $1,400,000 at the box office. Between 2001 and 2005 Pizza was nominated four times for Most Outstanding Comedy Program at the Logies. Between Pizza and Housos there was another television series written by Fenech called Swift and Shift Couriers which ran for two seasons. Its basic set-up resembled Pizza. I shall not be concerned with Swift and Shift Couriers here. Pizza was centred on the adventures of the pizza delivery young men, there were no women, working for Bobo Gigliotti who ran the Fat Pizza pizza delivery shop. Housos was set in the mythical suburb of Sunnyvale. The title refers to people of little or no earned income who live in houses owned by the Housing Commission, a state-run agency. Indeed, what all the shows have in common is the low income of the main © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_8

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characters and their attempts to find alternative, and often illegal, ways to gain money. In Housos, they live on welfare payments and in Pizza, in the first three series, Bobo pays his delivery drivers $3.00 an hour with no benefits whatsoever. In the fourth series the pay is halved. These rates are, of course, well below the minimum wage but nobody argues with Bobo. In this chapter I will discuss some of the similarities and differences between Pizza and Housos, and their related films, as these illuminate the neoliberal construction of an underclass (see Stratton 2011). What Pizza and Housos have in common is their portrayal of life on the economic edge. The pizza deliverymen are just above the realm of underclass exclusion, literalised as Sunnyvale, occupied by the housos. The discursive construction of these people has much in common with the bogans discussed in Chapter 6. Fat Pizza culminates in the chaotic wedding of Bobo and his mail-order bride Lin Chow Bang at a church where the vicar has three other couples hammering on the front door because the time has been quadruple booked. This wedding is trumped by Habib and Toula’s wedding in Pizza in the final episode of season four. Toula is of Greek heritage, and Orthodox, Habib has a Lebanese background and is Muslim. They feel marriage is an inevitability because Toula finds she is pregnant. Neither set of parents approves—though in Toula’s fantasy life they are fully accepting. Bobo caters for the wedding which we watch in flashback on video as it descends into anarchy. Marriage is a key marker of respectability. It is central to the organisation of the modern social order. As far back as the seventeenth century in England, ‘marriage remained important to notions of respectability in civil society’ (Turner 2002, p. 51). The weddings in Pizza are poorly managed but they are weddings. The characters do not strive for respectability but it remains an ideal. In Housos there are no weddings and the two central couples, Shazza and Dazza and Vanessa and Kev are not married.

Pizza and Housos as Comedies We need to begin by contextualising Pizza and Housos as comedies. The two shows can be understood generically as part of a tradition of ethnic humour in Australia. John McCallum (1998, p. 204) notes that: ‘A great deal of popular humour since the mid-1950s has been about the feelings of displacement, migration and otherness which are a large part of the social and personal experience of all Australians’. Andrew Street (2016),

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writing about Here Come the Habibs! the ethnically/racially preoccupied television comedy series discussed in the previous chapter, suggests that it is broad ethnic humour, no worse or less affectionate than Acropolis Now! or Fat Pizza (whose alumnus Tahir Bilgic is also on the show). In fact, the closest parallel might actually be the venerable Kingswood Country, where broad stereotypes are used to make sly – and occasionally deeply unflattering – comments about Australian society.

Lesley Speed fits Fat Pizza into a genre she calls wogsploitation films. Linking Fat Pizza with the earlier film The Wog Boy (2000) she suggests that: ‘Far from being positioned as victims, the protagonists of these films simultaneously assert their ethnic identities and reconfigure the Australian stereotype of the “ocker”’ (2005, p. 138). I will be arguing that Pizza and Housos, and their associated films, are much more than this; that they connect with the historical construction of the ‘underclass’ and, indeed, their characters function much like members of the nineteenth-century residual class or non-class, sometimes called the dangerous class, out of which the idea of the underclass has evolved. The relatively recent advent of the underclass, as a rethinking of Marx’s lumpenproletariat, began during the 1970s and 1980s. It is intimately connected with the spread of neoliberal ideology among governments. The characters in Pizza and Housos, and their related films, are best thought of as caricatures. They are, indeed, versions of stereotypes taken to such extremes that only the most bigoted could consider them realistic portrayals. In their book on the history of the Special Broadcasting Service, The SBS Story, Ien Ang et al. (2008, p. 168) describe Pizza as, a wild and offensive roller-coaster ride of sex, drugs, violence, mail-order brides, crime and cars. No cow was too sacred for the Pizza boys. Defiantly politically incorrect, the show was brazenly lowbrow.

In Pizza, with only the exception of David ‘Davo’ Dinkum, whom we first meet in Fat Pizza, all the main characters are non-Anglos, ethnics in the naturalised Australian distinction. The narratives are related from their point of view. In Housos, a series much more obviously located in the underclass, the show is made from the point of view of the people struggling to make lives for themselves on the fringe of society. Generally

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speaking, Pizza and Housos take the speaking position of the oppressed minorities in Australian society. One way of viewing Pizza is as a satire on multiculturalism. David Marc (2009, p. ix) tells us that: ‘In its long development from ancient Greek theater to the inky page, satire was a term reserved for a particular kind of humor that makes fun of human folly and vice by holding people accountable for their public actions’. If Pizza and Housos hold anybody to account it is those in power, the political power of the government and more generally the Anglo social elite who continue to wield cultural power in Australia. In a 2003 interview Fenech reduced everyday multiculturalism to its lowest common denominator: ‘Have you ever been to the jelly-wrestling? Mate, let me tell you, it’s an entertainment festival. You’ll see heads that don’t exist anywhere outside of the confines of the Oxford Tavern in Petersham. There’s girls of different colours sliding around in front of blokes from every ethnic background. You’ll see Muhammed from Lakemba sitting next to Joe Bloggs from Fairfield and Phung Quoc from Blacktown. This is what’s happening in Australia, Richard. It’s not your white nerdy boys sipping lattes in some hokey café in Paddington. This is the real Australia, the true Australia. When I think about it …’ suddenly Fenech is having an epiphany, ‘… the jelly-wrestling audience is Australia’. (Guillart 2003)

In addition, what Fenech does here is explicitly displace Anglo, ‘white’, authority—while continuing to instate sexism as normal. Everyday multiculturalism is classed because visibly different people predominate in the lower classes. The ‘nerdy white boys’ are, Fenech implies, the middle-class, hipster liberals who pronounce about the wonders of multiculturalism while the nearest they come to diversity is eating in an ethnic restaurant. The jelly wrestling is working class and sexist, a part of bogan culture in the description discussed in Chapter 6, and the people involved come from many racial/ethnic backgrounds. Nobody is concerned about race—the male audience is concerned with desire. This, for Fenech, is everyday multiculturalism in practice. Similarly, and more obviously, Housos critically engages with the power relation experienced by those at the bottom of the social hierarchy by simultaneously constructing caricatures while showing how the power structure works from these people’s perspective.

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It is important to remember that Fenech’s shows were aimed at a teen and twenties audience. Graeme Turner (2005, p. 3) writes that: ‘A striking feature of the late 1990s was the number of comedy and satiric programs which pitched to a youth audience by parodying mainstream news and current affairs formats and programs’. Pizza and Housos did not parody news or current affairs programmes but, rather, white, middle-class respectability. Aimed primarily at a male audience, we can generalise what Michael Kitson (2003, p. 24) writes about Fat Pizza: ‘For the adolescent boy there’s the sashaying of bikini-clad models and loads of abject humour—“fat chicks”, vomit, sex and toilet humour’. To which we can add, among other things, in both shows a generalised satirical take on adults, especially those occupying positions of power. It is useful to compare Fenech’s parodic comedies with Jane Turner and Gina Riley’s suburban satire, Kath and Kim. Kath and Kim ran on the ABC between 2002 and 2005, and then briefly in 2007 on Channel 7. Interestingly, Pizza began its run before this better-known programme and finished after Kath and Kim had ended. Kath and Kim centres on the lives of mother, Kath, and daughter, Kim, along with Kath’s husband-to-be Kel, a gourmet butcher, and Kim’s ‘second best friend’ Sharon. They live in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Fountain Lakes. Sue Turnbull argues that Australian suburbia has a long history of being the butt of parody. Citing Barry Humphries’ comic creation Edna Everage, who began her critical dissection of suburbia in 1956, Turnbull (2008, p. 20) writes: If, as Simon Caterson suggests [in ‘A preposterous life’ in Griffith Review, 2005], satire is a ‘civilised form of loathing’, then, it might be argued, suburbia is still the loathed subject of Humphries’ comic discourse, as it is of Jane Turner and Gina Riley (the creators of Kath and Kim), despite protestations to the contrary.

Kath and Kim are, as Turnbull notes, fundamentally aspirational. Much of the show’s humour came from the lead characters’ attempts to better themselves, or portray themselves as being higher up the class system than they actually were. In this concern Kath and Kim is similar to English class-preoccupied sitcoms like Keeping Up Appearances . The suburbia in which Kath and Kim live remains ‘conspicuously … Anglo and white’ (Turnbull 2008, p. 27). This, as we have seen, is not the world of Pizza. Graeme Turner (2008, p. 578) notes that:

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The continuities that had hitherto idealized the Australian suburb as an entirely benign social space have been radically disrupted by the growth of Anglo-Australians’ anxieties about the promulgation of new ethnicities and the installation of prominent aspects of their cultures.

Commenting on this development, Turner continues: ‘Within such an account, where the suburb once stood for an inclusive if unreflective Australianness, it now becomes the battleground between essentialized ethnicized cultures’ (2008, p. 579). It is here that we have the world of Pizza. As we shall see, at times Turner’s metaphor of a battleground was literalised in the series. One way of thinking about Pizza and Housos is in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of carnival. Wendy Davis (2008, p. 357) argues that, the comedy of Kath and Kim bears a strong relation to the comic traditions of carnival. … Aspects of carnival have informed much Australian television comedy from Graham Kennedy through Norman Gunston, to Roy Slaven and HG Nelson.

Davis concentrates on bodies, especially the presentation of Turner’s and Riley’s, that is Kath’s and Kim’s bodies, and that of Kim’s second best friend Sharon, played by Magda Szubanski. Fenech takes this tradition and extends it in its grotesqueness and bawdiness. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986, p. 8) sum up Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival: ‘Carnival is presented by Bakhtin as a world of topsy-turvy, heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless over-running and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled’. Kath and Kim is, in the end, a critique of aspirational, borderline middle-class life in suburbia. It is bodies not the white, middle-class way of life that is carnivalesque. Indeed, it could be argued that white, middle-class respectability is entrenched as the standard through which Kath and Kim are judged as humorous by the television audience. Fenech is portraying an entire way of life as carnivalesque. This way of life is untied from whiteness and middle-classness in the case of Pizza and from class as a defining social category in Housos. It is their exclusion from normative Australian life, as defined by the white elite, which enables the lives of the ethnics in Pizza and the underclass in Housos to be constructed in terms of the comedy of the carnivalesque. A crucial difference between the two shows is the situation of authority. In Pizza, authority is vested in Bobo, who runs the pizzeria on behalf

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of his mother who owns it. Every so often a state government Health Inspector visits and identifies numerous deficiencies that should close the pizzeria down but Bobo disposes of these men in various ways, including shoving one into the pizza oven. In Housos, authority is more directly vested in the government, state and then federal. This is most obvious in the film Housos v Authority where at the culmination of the narrative the High Court sends Shazza and Dazza, Vanessa and Kev, and Franky, to jail in an attempt to discipline them. I shall discuss this later in greater detail. Shows such as Pizza and Housos are not unique to Australia. In the UK, The Royle Family, a sitcom set in the Royles’ council house, ran for three series from 1998 to 2000 with later Christmas specials. Shameless, a black comedy about the Gallaghers, a single-parent family composed of an alcoholic father and six children living on the fictional Chatsworth council estate in Manchester, ran on BBC television from 2004 to 2013. The Canadian show Trailer Park Boys has a similar premise to Housos, and there are good reasons to think that Fenech was inspired by the Canadian show which began in 2001, the year after Pizza and ten years before Housos (see Diduck 2006; Hughes-Fuller 2009). Trailer Park Boys is set in a Nova Scotian trailer park called Sunnyvale Trailer Park. The show centres on three residents of the trailer park, Ricky, Julian and Bubbles, who spend much of their time drinking, smoking dope and dreaming up money-making scams. The show’s conceit is that it is a documentary of Julian’s life paid for by himself and made as a warning to others not to lead the same kind of existence. It is perhaps a deliberate irony that the trailer park’s name, and subsequently the name of the suburb in Housos, echoes the name of the town in which Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran from 1997 to 2003, was set, Sunnydale. In Buffy, it turned out that Sunnydale was built over a hellmouth from which demons and associated evil beings entered the world. Sunnyvale Trailer Park, and Sunnyvale, are home to people who, in neoliberal terms, are socially excluded, people who when venturing into the respectable world may be thought of not perhaps as demons but as the non-respectable, members of the underclass. In Acropolis Now the characters run, and work in, a café. The Fat Pizza pizzeria is a step down. Where Jim Stefanidis has been given the café by his father and treats his workers as friends disguising their economic relations, Bobo Gigliotti’s pizzeria is owned by his mother who keeps him constantly under surveillance and Bobo attempts to take advantage of his workers in any way he can, especially when it comes to wages and conditions. Bobo manages Fat Pizza but his mother remains in charge.

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Affective familial relations are transformed into an economic transaction. In this neoliberal image of the workplace relationship the lineage of power is made obvious as is the structure of exploitation. All is held together by force and need. There is no affect. The characters in Housos are a step further down in this economic order and are situated outside it. They have no work. They are constructed as members of the underclass, as the Other who do not contribute to the maintenance of society. It is this shift downwards in the place of the characters in the work structure, both borderline with one just above and one below the economic border, that marks Pizza and Housos as being fundamentally different series to Acropolis Now and the wogsploitation films and series. It is this same shift that marks a key difference between Pizza and Housos, and Kath and Kim.1

From the Lumpenproletariat to the Underclass The idea of the underclass evolved out of the nineteenth century linked ideas of the criminal class and the dangerous class (Welshman 2006). It was during the second half of the nineteenth century that this group was gradually consolidated as being distinct from the industrial working class. In France, Victor Hugo thought of the people who were identified in this way as a ‘nameless thing’ and the discursive production of this group was imbricated with the anxious gaze of the bourgeoisie. After all, it would not take many false steps for a bourgeois to lose their work and their wealth and find themselves among the members of the residual class they so despised, and who horrified them more than they could understand. Peter Stallybrass (1990, p. 71) comments on this Other of the worker, both middle-class and working-class, of industrial capitalism: Hugo’s ‘nameless thing’ is transformed into the endlessly reproduced spectacle of the grotesque, the exotic, the low. But this spectacle of heterogeneity establishes the homogenizing gaze of the bourgeois spectator.

It is the spectacle of this constructed Other which gives capitalistic meaning to the lives of the bourgeoisie. This spectacle answers the question: what is work for? We should also note that the continuity between the construction of this Other as grotesque, exotic and low, and the ways Fenech’s underworld of pizza delivery men and especially of housos is constructed.

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For Karl Marx this Other was the lumpenproletariat. The lumpenproletariat had no identity as a class. Rather, they were known for the kinds of activities they practiced. Their employment is irregular if they have employment and often outside the law, and they usually work alone; often self-employed. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, published in German in 1852, Marx offers a lengthy list of those he considers members of the lumpenproletariat, they include vagabonds, discharged soldiers, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, gamblers, brothel keepers, among others (1990, p. 75). This list should remind us of Porter’s list of those who do not work and are the essence of unreason which he provides in his outline of Michel Foucault’s insight concerning the importance of confinement from the middle of the seventeenth century, discussed in Chapter 1. These people are the social abject of a class organisation founded on work. Because these occupations, where they are such, are often illegal—and we need to remember that the law is not an objective entity—and outside the moral acceptability of the respectable classes, there is also a moral overtone to the kinds of people identified as members of the lumpenproletariat. The regular jailbirds of Sunnyvale Trailer Park, Julian and Ricky, as well as the denizens of Sunnyvale, would be identified as members of the lumpenproletariat. The lowly paid pizza delivery drivers of Fat Pizza who are also part-time drug dealers and petty criminals are positioned on the jeopardous border of the lumpenproletariat. However in the era of neoliberalism, overlapping with this identification is the more recent ideology of the underclass. The underclass is a reworking of the idea of the Other best described as the lumpenproletariat in the context of the neoliberal reconstruction of the social order in the terms of the economic. It was Margaret Thatcher, at this point the British prime minister, in an interview in 1987, who succinctly summed up the neoliberal view: I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me. They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. (Thatcher 1987)

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Thatcher, as a political practitioner of neoliberal ideology, understood society as an illusory offshoot of the economic relations which bind individuals together. We can understand the evolution of the idea of the underclass in this context. Sedef Arat-Koç (2010, p. 315) traces the popular use of the term: Since the 1980s, the term ‘underclass’ has become increasingly popular in the U.S. Introducing the term to a broad audience, a 1977 Time cover story stated: ‘Behind [the ghetto’s] crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined. They are the unreachables; the American underclass.’ … Despite its enormous problems and limitations as an analytical category, ‘underclass’ has grown in its ideological appeal.

For Arat-Koç, writing about the use of the term in an American context, underclass has become a way of talking about race, about African Americans, without acknowledging the racialised basis of neoliberal socioeconomic exclusion. As with the lumpenproletariat, the members of the underclass go by many different names. In the UK, they are often termed chavs (see Tyler 2008; Jones 2011) or, as Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi call them, echoing a term from an earlier time, in the title of an article they published in 2009, ‘The Undeserving Poor’. David Bates (2013) argues that: The ‘underclass’ are the constitutive ‘Other’ of indebted neo-liberal subjects. They are what an increasingly exhausted, alienated, and exploited section of the population look to with disdain when they start their second job of the day. They are what the lower middle classes chose to despise, while gazing on their ‘shameless’ exploits with titillation in the pages of the Daily Mail.

The reference to ‘shameless’ here is to the British television series mentioned earlier. The moral point is that the underclass are not ashamed of not working, and not ashamed of their unrespectable behaviour. What Bates emphasises is the fracture between the working class and the lowermiddle-class, and the Other of the underclass. What he also suggests is the anxiety felt by the working members of these classes as they are increasingly immiserated and brought closer to the non-class Other of the underclass.

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As the category of the underclass has developed it has been in the context of welfare and entitlements. This is because of the neoliberal divestment of responsibility from the state to the individual. Thatcher (1987) herself, in the interview from which I have already quoted, says: People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

Lena Dominelli (1999, p. 10) explains that: Those neo-liberals on the New Right who have advocated privatization held in their hearts the view that the welfare state is a luxury that countries cannot afford not only because it is taking resources away from other more useful purposes, but also because it encourages those who have accessed its benefits—an idle, feckless lot,[–] to become dependent on its largesse and no longer contribute to the society they live within as ‘good’ citizens are obliged to do.

The idea of mutual obligation, closely implied in what Thatcher said, was the cornerstone of John Howard’s approach to social security when he became Australian prime minister in 1996 (Macintyre 1999). In this view, those people on welfare are automatically assumed to be members of the underclass who are not contributing to the economic order. There is no sense here of a social responsibility. Mutual obligation is founded on the idea of an individual contract and requires that people contribute to the economic order in order to receive funding from the state. Thus, for example, paradoxical as it may sound, a person is required to work in order to receive unemployment benefit. Where the nineteenth-century non-class Other was constructed in relation to the capitalist work of the middle class and working class, the neoliberal Other of the underclass is constituted in relation to the idea that it is the economic order of capitalism which founds human relations and that this economic order is based in contracts. Social relations are, in the first place, economic relations. Thus, those people who have fallen out of the economic web of mutual relations will be lacking in social skills. They will be selfish and most likely violent in their aggressive need to acquire without compensation and, in neoliberal thinking, it is the welfare state which has formed these people by giving them benefits without those people taking responsibility for their behaviour. Here, we come to

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the image of the underclass that has become increasingly normalised. The media image of the underclass is of people behaving far worse even than the older image of the lumpenproletariat. The family members in The Royale Family are slacker, behave more badly, are less concerned about each other, than the members of the working-class Garnett family in Till Death Us Do Part which screened to tremendous popularity between 1966 and 1968 and in a second series between 1972 and 1975. In Till Death Do Us Part there was a sense of a working-class culture binding the family together. In Shameless, as the title suggests, this working-class culture is mostly missing. The media image of the underclass is different, though it has similarities with, the image of the lumpenproletariat. It is more unforgiving.

Representing the Underclass In Britain the television series Steptoe and Son offered a representation of the Marxian lumpenproletariat. In the series, which ran from 1962 to 1974, a father and son, Albert and Harold, live together and run a rag-and-bone business. Ragpicking is one of the jobs identified by Marx as signifying membership of the lumpenproletariat. Albert stays at home while Harold takes out the horse and cart. Frank Krutnick and Steve Neale (1990, p. 251) argue that: In Steptoe there is a marked non-correspondence between its situational normality—the stable situation to which each episode returns—and the bourgeois-familial ‘normality’ which is the ideological touchstone of the traditional domestic sit-com. In fact, in its lack of regular female characters, its emphatic squalor, and its verbal and physical crudity (and sometimes cruelty), Steptoe and Son is the inverse of such shows: the show’s situational ‘inside’ is the conventional ‘outside’ and vice versa.

Steptoe and Son is an image of the lumpenproletariat broadcast when Britain had recovered from the straightened times of the post-Second World War era. By the 1960s rag-and-bone men using a horse and cart were increasingly an anachronism. As Krutnick and Neale write, Steptoe and Son made sense as a kind of—remembering Stallybrass’s words— grotesque and exotic inversion of middle-class, or indeed working-class, life during a time when it was believed that near full employment and the

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welfare state had more or less eradicated the actual people whose lives had been discursively constructed as the lumpenproletarian Other. In Britain the discourse of an underclass came about at the same time that Thatcher was operationalising neoliberal theory. The representation of the underclass began shortly after. In 1991 the photographer Nick Waplington published a book called Living Room. It contained photographs that Waplington had taken on the Broxtowe Estate, an area of council houses in Nottingham. Waplington has said that: ‘The pictures are about producing positive images of the underclass that was created in Britain in the 1980s’ (Sozanksi 1992). Waplington’s grandfather lived on that estate and his photographs document his grandfather’s life and the lives of neighbours and friends. For Waplington the project was a sympathetic report on the lives of the people who had become the excluded of the neoliberal economic order that Thatcher had created. At the same time, as Edward J. Sozanski (1992) comments: If you’re used to suburban neat, clean and shiny, Waplington’s images of blowsy, tattooed Hausfrauen lounging on sagging couches surrounded by domestic debris might disconcert or even repel you. These aren’t pretty or sentimental pictures.

Waplington’s work was followed by the photography of Richard Billingham who in 1996 published a photobook, Ray’s a Laugh, comprised of images of his alcoholic father and over-weight, chainsmoking, heavily tattooed mother. Billingham subsequently made a film about his family called Fishtank. Paul Dave (2006, p. 131) has discussed this: The film’s title succinctly captures the role that the ‘underclass’ plays in the urban pastoral with its emphasis on a secure containment that promises an unobstructed, exotic class spectacle. As [Julian] Stallabrass remarks, the film and the earlier collection of photographs featuring the same subject, Ray’s a Laugh (1996), present Billingham’s family as a ‘lumpen’ underclass who appear to subsist on welfare and home brew.

In other words, regardless of the empathy with which Billingham, and earlier Waplington, wanted to portray their subjects, the images the two photographers have made get read through the new discursive lens of the underclass as being of people not just excluded from the socioeconomic order but also as disruptive, selfish and uncaring about their lived environment.

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By the late 1990s there were other (re)constructions in Britain of the life of this newly defined social non-class. Biressi and Nunn (2005) write about the Tina trilogy of television films directed by Penny Woolcock, Tina Goes Shopping (1999), Tina Takes a Break (2001) and Mischief Night (2006). Shot on a tough Leeds council estate: ‘In the Tina films the dramatic reconstruction of estate life involves the improvised acting of real-life estate inhabitants themselves who take on and perform the everyday dramas of estate survival’ (2005, p. 62). Tina is a single mother whose shopping in the title of the first film consists of commissioned shoplifting for other residents of the estate. Biressi and Nunn (2005, p. 62) go on to explain that: ‘In all these films, the estates are represented as grimly realistic, the raw underside of an iniquitous class system, but they are also sites of complex celebratory cameos of almost exotic menace and the risk of everyday existence’. Once again we have the invocation of the idea of the exotic suggesting the Otherness of the people and situations shown in the films. These estates, and their inhabitants, would reappear later, and more comedically, in Fenech’s Australian Housos television series and films. This is not to say that Fenech was directly inspired by these films. Rather, as was the case in the American deployment of the term, the underclass is commonly constructed as living segregated from the rest of the community, and often in government housing. We have already seen that the English television series Shameless was set on a council estate.

Representing the Australian Underclass: Gangs on the Street and Women in the Home In Australia the representation of the underclass, by Fenech in particular, occurred after Howard’s reshaping of the social security and welfare aspects of Australian society. Sonia Martin (2008, p. 7) has commented that: There is evidence that the underclass thesis, as it underpins the Howard government’s welfare reform agenda, is being operationalised at the level of service delivery by welfare providers. … Their work shows evidence that the problem of welfare dependency has been converted into a problem of the individual and pathologised to fit in with the existing methods of intervention.

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What, then, does the underclass world created by Fenech look like? In the first place it is primarily male. We have the traditional lower-class division of the street as a male domain and the house as the domain of women. While bordering on the underclass, the pizza delivery personnel in all the Pizza series are male. The Fat Pizza pizzeria is run by a male. In the first three series there are two pizza deliverymen, Pauly Falzoni, who like Fenech who plays him, has a Maltese background, and Sleek the Elite, an aspiring rap artist of Lebanese background. His religious affiliation is unclear though his best friend, Habib Halal Habib, is a Muslim. There is an ethnic hierarchy here. Bobo is of Italian background, in terms of Australian multiculturalism more acceptable than Maltese or Lebanese, and especially Muslim Lebanese, ethnic groups which are darker; nonChristians are even less acceptable. This hierarchy is more pronounced in series four when Bobo takes on more deliverymen. In this 2005 series, Pauly and Habib—Sleek the Elite had left the show earlier—are joined by the Maori Kev the Kiwi, the Asian, as he is identified in the programme, Chong Fat and the Samoan Junior who Bobo takes on as his apprentice cook. This increased diversity emphasises the multicultural hierarchy. In Fat Pizza, Bobo also employs the stoned white Australian, Davo. Pauly explains to him that he is chocko, ‘chockoness man, it’s like the opposite of Anglicized. Like you would be Anglicized, I would be chocko’ (see Collins 2009, p. 74). This construction of the Australian ethnoracial order places chocko, from chocolate implying black, in opposition to Davo’s whiteness. Here we see a break with the earlier Greek and Italian ‘wog boys’ of the Acropolis Now television series and The Wog Boy film. These characters were constructed as more or less white, just ethnically different. The Maltese Pauly, and the other increasingly diverse deliverymen employed by Bobo, see themselves as non-white. The deliverymen form a rudimentary male gang with Bobo as their dysfunctional boss or leader. Their maleness is reinforced when in episode 6 of series 4 Bobo employs a waitress, Sharona, to work in the pizzeria. She is white and conventionally—that is to say within the discursive order of whiteness—attractive and the delivery young men lust after her. She is interested in Chong Fat and the two go to the fair together where Chong Fat, who has already been stereotyped as a typically awful Asian driver, loses control of a dodgem car killing Sharona. The pizzeria returns to being a male domain. While the deliverymen are an implicit gang bound together by their work situation, that is to say they remain members of the working class because they are paid labour even though they are paid

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a miniscule amount, there are other gangs. In the same episode that we are introduced to Kev and the other new Fat Pizza workers, there is a climactic gang fight between the white bikies and the pizza deliverymen helped out by Habib’s cousin and his Lebanese mates, Kev’s Maori mates, who turn up when the rugby on television has finished, and Toula’s gang of Fat Chicks. The Fat Chicks are the exception to the male gang groupings and serve to emphasise that maleness. The bikies retreat in disarray with Pauly commenting: ‘That’s what you get when you take on the United Nations of chocko pride’. The gang structure is more apparent in Housos. Here, the authority of the state is more obviously weakened then in Pizza. It is clear that the Sunnyvale police are ineffectual. They often chase Franky but are unable to capture him and once we see that their police car had its wheels taken by the junkie gang. Indeed, remembering the discussion in Chapter 1, Sunnyvale might be described as a virtual no-go zone. Ulises Zarazúa Villasenor ˇ (2011, p. 236) writes that: what happens in such a place is directly connected to governmental neglect and the withdrawal of the state, expressed in the absence or low quality of public services and urban infrastructure. In other words, a dangerous district should be looked at in relation to the local power. A no-go area can be explained by its role in a particular society.

Sunnyvale’s role is to house the excluded underclass and make of them a moral statement. Even the bus service no longer goes to Sunnyvale because the junkies keep robbing the bus drivers. Kathy Arthurson, Michael Darcy and Dallas Rogers investigated how actual people who live in housing commission houses felt about their depiction in Housos. They write about the series that: [Housos ] is a highly embellished representation of Australian social housing estates as lawless zones where people act outside of the law and common norms of society. In this depiction ‘housos’ is a proxy for an ‘underclass’ that is explicitly spatialised through clearly recognisable signifiers which identify residents of specific urban spaces. (Arthurson et al. 2014, p. 1335)

Housos takes the implied moral statement about the fecklessness of the underclass and inverts it, putting the viewer on the side of the housos. In Sunnyvale there are numerous gangs, the junkies, the Lebanese Assassins, the bikies. In Fat Pizza v Housos these gangs are complimented

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by increasingly diverse racially based gangs, the Asian Tigers, Island Kings and the African Reffos. One way of reading these gangs is as a satirical take-off of the ethnically based organisation of official multiculturalism. Instead of respectable groups with community centres putting on cultural shows attended by the Anglo-Celts of the dominant multicultural core we are offered deviant and aggressive gangs. Read in terms of multiculturalism as the power of the Anglo-Celtic core diminishes so the ethnic groups no longer need to present themselves in the guise of middleclass respectability. The new gangs are racially based not ethnically based. Official multiculturalism was designed to function as an umbrella for a diversity of ethnic groups who shared a moral repertoire and who also shared whiteness. I discussed this in Chapter 3 with reference to the importance of Christianity as a foundation for Australian society. The original Lebanese gang reminds us that Lebanese were always on the borderline of whiteness. The increase in racial diversity in Australia is equated with fears of the breakdown of that shared moral order, hence as we have seen in Chapter 3 the equation of Muslims with race, and therefore a breakdown in the authority structure based in that moral order. The racially based gangs are a nightmare expression of this loss of a shared morality and acceptance of white authority. Read more generally in terms of the Australian state, it seems that as central authority is diminished in this Australian underclass world so male gangs take over. At one point in Housos v Authority, Franky steals a car, spray-paints the bonnet with the phrase ‘Cop Hunter’ and shouts: ‘I am the Cop Hunter’. He then drives straight at the local police car mysteriously succeeding in flying over the top of it. When he gets out of the car, Franky yells at the police: ‘I hate authority, mate. I hate it’. There is a 1976 cult Italian film in the poliziotteschi genre titled in English Cop Hunter but the more likely reference here is Mad Max. Released in 1979, this cult film portrays a post-apocalyptic Australia with a much weakened central authority where violent gangs are increasingly rampant. In this film Crawford Montizano, the Nightrider, a member of Toecutter’s gang, is referred to on the police radio as a cop killer and is described in the police pursuit as terminal psychotic. One of the taglines for Mad Max was: ‘When the gangs take over the highway… …Remember he’s on your side’, he being Max. One way of understanding the prevalence in Australian dystopic fiction of the compensatory rise of gangs when central authority is weakened can be found in the myth of mateship. Commenting on early Australian ballads,

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Russel Ward (1958, p. 188) notes that, ‘the greatest good is to stand by one’s mates in all circumstances, the greatest evil is to desert them’. Australian mateship is historically male. Male gangs develop to fill the space vacated by central authority. Women in Pizza are confined to the home. Toula is the only woman who has ongoing interaction with the deliverymen. She is GreekAustralian but she is nothing like Effie in Acropolis Now. Effie, as mentioned in Chapter 7, was the ditzy cousin of the café’s owner, Jim. She worked as a hairdresser, had big hair and considered herself to be very attractive. She spoke in broken English and often repeated what became her catchphrase: ‘How embarrassment’. She was the AngloAustralian’s fantasy of the funny, endearing and ultimately inoffensive Greek-Australian girl in multicultural Australia. Toula was the epitome of the Bakhtinian grotesque. She was obese, slovenly, unemployed and still living with her parents, knew her own mind and was sexually active.2 Toula was Effie on steroids. At one point, as I have indicated, Toula put together her own gang of overweight young women known as the Fat Chicks. She could have been a character in one of Billingham’s photographs. Nevertheless, she exists in a world outside of that of the underclass. Her parents’ house is large and they are clearly well-off. The underclass live in Sunnyvale. Here, while the gangs are male, though one of the junkies is female, and with the exception of the strippers who work for the bikies, the women are in the domestic environment. Shazza lives with Dazza and his mother, Beryl, and her mentally challenged partner Reg, Vanessa lives with Kev. None of them have jobs. They spend much time scheming to get more benefits out of Centrelink. They do not function as the moral centre of their homes or of Sunnyvale. They are the neoliberal nightmare of people on welfare wanting something and giving nothing in return. In Pizza, it is Bobo’s mother who owns the shop. Occasionally she visits, more often she rings him. Constructed as the opposite of the stereotypical Italian mother, she is concerned that Bobo might get married. In Fat Pizza v Housos she assumes the role of the state. Worried about Bobo getting enough staff at the extraordinarily low wage he pays, she invents a work for the dole scheme which she persuades her nephew Renzo who works for Centrelink to give to his superior. This is such a success that she later invents a voucher scheme so that there will be no need for Bobo’s house workers to be paid in money. Rather, they get

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pizzas. These schemes are satirical takes on the Howard government’s neoliberal revamping of the social security system. In Trailer Park Boys it is the superintendent Jim Lahey’s ex-wife who owns the trailer park. In Housos v Authority it is ultimately the female prime minister, a sound-alike for Australian ex-prime minister Julia Gillard, who attempts to exert authority over the housos. These women are removed from the everyday environment and their relationship with the male society is commodified—actually, it becomes economic, as we have seen do all relationships in neoliberal ideology. Traditionally, the woman was understood as the moral core of the family and the family of the social order (see Finch 1993; Stratton 2016). Now, in this neoliberal order, she is the capitalist owner of the organisation, for which read society, in which the men function. She provides the context for the organisation of the economic order. Bobo’s Mama’s role in Pizza literalises this. This is a displacement of woman’s role as the reproducer of the moral order. In these images of neoliberal order the woman is the lynch-pin of the economic system—and the socio-political order, which is also the economic order, in the case of the prime minister in Housos v Authority. Bobo’s mother’s invention and implementation of a work for the dole scheme through her nephew epitomises this changed role.

Representing the Australian Underclass: Exclusion and Populism The socio-political exclusion of the underclass is apparent in the different ending to Housos v Authority than to The Castle. The narrative in The Castle, released in 1997, was about a family, the Kerrigans, whose home is to be repossessed for an extension to the airport next door. The Kerrigans are respectable working class. Darryl, the family patriarch, is the owneroperator of a tow truck. After failing to prevent the repossession in the local, district court, a QC befriends the family and takes the case to the High Court where he argues that the Kerrigans have a right to their home as shown in the Constitution. Mr. Hammill (QC) cites Section 51 para 31 of the Constitution: ‘Parliament shall have power to make laws with respect to the acquisition of property on just terms’. He argues that the removal of the Kerrigans, and their house, is not on just terms. It’s not an eyesore, as the lawyer for the airport describes it, it’s a home. At this time home was a very current concern. I have discussed this in Chapter 5. The Native Title Act was passed in 1993. Christine Anu’s version of ‘My

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Island Home’ had been released in 1995. The High Court overturns the acquisition order on the Kerrigans’ house.3 Justine Lloyd (2001, p. 183) suggests that: The appeal of the ending of The Castle lies in its sublimation of the local into the national: the democratic right to representation in the legal system and justice is upheld when the High Court overturns the acquisition order.

In Lloyd’s argument, in The Castle the legal system is shown in alignment with the dominant ideology as functioning on behalf of everyone who is a member of society and protecting the rights of the battling working class. In Housos v Authority, Shazza and Dazza, Vanessa and Ken, and Franky, set off on a road trip to Alice Springs where Shazza’s mother is dying of lung cancer. Shazza’s mother asks Shazza to sprinkle her ashes on top of Uluru—they all call it Ayers Rock.4 However, when they get to the park the five cannot afford the entrance fee. Uluru/Ayers Rock is not available to all Australians, only to those who have enough money to enter the indigenous Anangu’s sacred site. Consequently, the five later break in. At the base of Uluru, Vanessa and Kev have sex while Shazza and Dazza have a bong and light a barbeque, and Franky sprays a graffito on the side of the rock. The five are subsequently caught and arraigned before a judge in Alice Springs. Shazza explains to the judge that: All I was trying to do was sprinkle me mum’s ashes what are in that ugg boot right there, on top of the rock. Now, how can you tell me as an Australian how can that possibly be illegal. … and it’s unAustralian to tell us that on our own rock we can’t have a barbeque. It’s a bloody Aussie tradition, mate. … and anyway, even if what we done was illegal, as a trueblue Aussie, it wasn’t wrong, mate. Especially here, in the Territory, this place is the piss-drinking capital of Australia. And I for one fucking love it!

There is here an implicitly racist challenge to the Aboriginal right to control access to Uluru as a sacred site. For the housos Uluru, for them it remains Ayers Rock, is a signifier of Australianess. Shazza is arguing that if what they did was illegal then the law is at variance with the received understanding of Australian culture, her use of ‘wrong’ implies a moral claim, and she activates one of the standard myths about the Northern Territory: that people there drink a lot of alcohol. In Shazza’s worldview people who drink a great deal of alcohol will also share her populist

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understanding of Australian culture because a feature of that culture is the drinking of a lot of alcohol. The judge lets the five off saying: Miss Jones, you know you’re bloody right. In this part of Australia we still love a beer, and a barbie, and the occasional bong. I’m gonna let yers off with a warning. Case dismissed! Bailiff, give them all a beer on the way out.

Here, the law, as interpreted in a Northern Territory understood as being classlessly populist, and therefore as not fully part of the Australian state, is aligned with the housos’ sybaritic understanding of Aussie culture (see Stratton 1989). However, this is by no means the end of the matter. Back in Canberra, the politicians are determined that the housos be taught a lesson. We are not told which party is in power. It does not matter, the point is that they have the power. Their class position is signalled by their ‘posh’ accents. As one of the politicians remarks later while watching the shenanigans in court on CCTV: ‘My God. Can you believe that people like this actually share the same air that we breathe’. The politicians see themselves as fundamentally different from, and fundamentally respectable as compared to, the members of the underclass. A law is passed punishing people who disgrace national monuments. On A Current Affairs [sic] the Minister for National Monuments tells the television audience that: ‘There has been a wave of anti-Australian behaviour within the community. Myself and the prime minister agree it has to be stopped’. At the same time we see heavily armed police storming Shazza and Dazza’s home, and that of Vanessa and Kev. Sunnyvale, remember, is a virtual no-go zone and this excessive show of force is what is necessary to exert state authority there. It seems the new law can be applied retrospectively. All five are taken into custody and put before a High Court judge. Shazza explains to the judge they broke into the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park because they have no money. She goes on in a similar vein to her rant to the Alice Springs judge: ‘You can make your laws to stop us having fun but we’re true blue Aussies, and we’re not backing down to anyone’. She explains that: We’re like all the good Aussie heroes, like the ANZACS in World War 2, and Phar Lap, fuckin’ Brockie [Peter Brock], so, as a real representative of all true blue Aussies I’ve got a message for you and the government: go and get fucked you small-dicked, knob-jockey, fuckwit wanker.

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‘Waltzing Matilda’, Australia’s informal national anthem about a swagman who commits suicide rather than be arrested for stealing a sheep to eat, plays as Shazza is led away. Dazza mentions Ned Kelly, the bushranger hung in 1880 whose grave the five visited, along with that of the legendary AC/DC singer Bon Scott, on their way to the Alice.5 Shazza’s point is that the housos are the real Australians, the ones who like a barbie and a drink, who will do anything for their mates. These are, of course, mythic characteristics. She takes a stand knowing that the housos will be found guilty by these wealthy/government/judiciary people who are not ‘good Aussie heroes’. Indeed, the mention of Ned Kelly by Dazza reminds us that ‘true Aussies’ are anti-authority and often persecuted. While her history is misremembered, Shazza’s reference to the ANZACS is to a corps of around 60,000 Australian, and almost 9000 New Zealand, soldiers now thought of by many as being sent to die at Gallipoli by out-of-touch senior commanders. Phar Lap, a New Zealand racehorse, was very successful in Australia, and was in folk knowledge notoriously poisoned in the United States by bookies fearful of the amount of money they might lose to, it would be assumed, working-class punters. Peter Brock raced touring cars in the 1970s and 1980s and was celebrated as an anti-authority figure. In Fenech’s construction, the Australian underclass takes on the mythic Australian characteristics of egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism. Indeed, what Shazza is arguing is that Australian culture is constructed from the bottom upwards and because of this it is the people most excluded from the dominant socio-cultural order who are the most characteristically Australian. In marked contrast to the judge in the Northern Territory, the High Court judge is part of the elitist power structure which, Shazza is arguing, is out of touch with the real Australia, the Australia, of the everyday multiculturalism exemplified, in Fenech’s metaphor, in the audience for female jelly wrestling. This judge finds the five housos guilty. They are sentenced to ten years prison each for: ‘Illegal drug use, illegal sexual activity, and defacing a national monument’. However, this is not the end. The politicians have CCTV footage of the five housos antics in the court room. They release this to A Current Affairs [sic] expecting a wave of shock and horror among the Australian population which will increase the government’s approval rating. Instead, A Current Affairs plays the footage while explaining that all the five had wanted to do was keep Shazza’s promise to her dying mother. The Australian population turns against the government and their approval rating drops 85 per cent. The Prime Minister demands that the Minister

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makes the case go away. The five housos have their convictions quashed and are set free. Whereas the Kerrigans won their case within the law, the housos are freed because of a popular uprising. It is made clear that the law functions in the interests of the governing elite and is not the law of ordinary Australians, the ones who drink beer and smoke dope. There is no separation of powers in the law portrayed in Housos vs Authority, unlike in The Castle, and the expression of the law is understood as being related to political power. Here we have the increasing authoritarianism in neoliberal societies discussed in Chapter 1. The housos’ behaviour in the court room connects them to the longstanding myth of larrikinism. As Melissa Bellanta (2012, p. xii) writes: ‘To be a larrikin is to be sceptical and irreverent, to knock authority and mock pomposity, engaging in a practice known as “taking the mickey”—or more often, “taking the piss”’. The original, nineteenth-century larrikins, who in Chapter 6 I argued were the ancestors of the bogans, were members of the dangerous class, the lumpenproletariat. The housos are in the same tradition and are members of the neoliberal excluded underclass. In the Housos television series and films class, and the experience of exclusion, is more important than ethnicity and race.

Conclusion Marx argued that the lumpenproletariat were politically conservative. Having no connection to the means of production the people described as members of the lumpenproletariat would not make alliance with the working class. A similar argument can be made about the excluded underclass. In Housos v Authority, Shazza’s politics as derived from her rants in the Northern Territory court and the federal High Court are populist. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (2007, p. 3) define populism as, an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.

Populism is the political force engaged by Australian antiauthoritarianism. The best recent example in Australian politics is the rise and fall, and rise again, of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation

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Party. A problem with populism is that by mobilising masses of people against the established political elite it can work outside of the modern, democratic political system. Albertazzi and McDonnell’s definition well describes the worldview that comes through in the claims that Shazza makes. In her thinking, and as reflected in the narrative of the film, the dangerous class is not here the lumpenproletariat, or rather the neoliberal underclass excluded from the socio-economic order. Rather, it is the besuited, wine-drinking, self-satisfied and clearly wealthy politicians who as I have mentioned, unlike Shazza, do not even speak with a broad Australian accent. It is important that, while the prime minster is a Gillard sound-alike, we are never told which party is in power. In typical populist thinking, it does not matter, the politicians are simply that; politicians and therefore opposed to the people. Furthermore, Housos v Authority asserts the correctness of Shazza and her friends’ point of view by having the political elite defeated by a popular response that supports her position. The film asks for us, as viewers, to be on the side of the housos. Housos v Authority makes explicit the political position mostly implicit in the Housos television series. The politics of Pizza are more traditional. We have already seen that Fat Pizza ends with Bobo and Lin Chow Bang getting married, and that Toula and Habib also get married. The main characters in Pizza are imbricated in neoliberal capitalism. They earn their pitiful wages working for Bobo who supports his mother with the earnings from the pizzeria she owns. We know this because at the beginning of Fat Pizza v Housos Mama tells Bobo that during the fifteen years he has been in jail for chainsawing to death a Health Inspector she has had to sell her house to support herself. The pizza deliverymen make ends meet by dealing drugs and running other illegal scams. Bobo’s refusal of state interference in his place of work, the Fat Pizza pizzeria, signalled by his murder of Health Inspectors, and his denial of a fair wage and award benefits to his staff, could be read as an expression of the assertion of the neoliberal belief in the free market, minimum interference in workplace practices and support for individuals in small business by cutting back red tape. Yet, as viewers we are asked to find Bobo’s antics funny. Rather than seeing him as the kind of entrepreneurial small businessman Thatcher and Howard wanted to support, Bobo can be read as a parody. Pizza was significantly more popular than Housos. This may be because Pizza spoke to the moral complexities of neoliberal, post-official multiculturalism Australia with characters perched precipitously on the edge of

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economic exclusion. It was a show more concerned with ethnicity and race than class—though it was pervaded by class. Housos was more clearly situated as being about the underclass. The portrayal of the characters in Pizza allowed for an identification by those working people, especially young males in low-paid and often dead-end employment, who live dayto-day not wanting to think too much about what might happen if they were to lose even their minimum award wages. Housos showed a representation of the Australian underclass Other created by the policies of politicians from both sides of politics from Labour Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating onwards but especially the policies of Howard and later politicians subscribing to neoliberal ideas such as Tony Abbott and, yes, Julia Gillard. Patrick O’Leary (2016, p. 267; see also John 2013) comments that: ‘[Kevin] Rudd (2009 [“The Global Financial Crisis”]) effectively denigrated neoliberalism, but it is possible to place his administration and the subsequent Labor Government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard within this broad ideological tradition’. The Australian version of an underclass as represented by Fenech in Housos modified the imagery of bad behaviour and selfishness central to the general myth of the underclass in the UK and the United States by offering it through a prism of Australian myths, of egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism and larrikinism. The consequence was the production of an underclass that was appealing because of its fundamental populism.

Notes 1. It is intriguing that Kath and Kim has garnered a significant academic scholarship while virtually nothing has so far been published on Fenech’s series. 2. The British comedic equivalent to Toula is Vicky Pollard in the character sketch-driven series Little Britain. Vicky Pollard is a school-age, unemployed, single mother. There is, though, no ethnic inflection in Pollard’s portrayal (see Lockyer 2010). Little Britain was first broadcast on the BBC in 2003. 3. For a discussion of The Castle in relation to Aboriginal Land Rights and, in particular, the High Court Mabo ruling (1992) see Felicity Collins and Therese Davis’s chapter ‘Coming from the city in The Castle, Vacant Possession, Strange Planet and Radiance’ (2004).

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4. The Indigenous name for the rock Uluru became a part of official usage in 1993. 5. The five’s journey was incredibly circuitous as Bon Scott’s grave is in Fremantle Cemetery on the other side of the continent.

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Nunn, Heather, and Anita Biressi. 2009. The undeserving poor. Soundings 41 (1): 107–116. O’Leary, Patrick. 2016. Neoliberal policy and employer industrial relations strategies in the United States and Australia. In Reclaiming pluralism in economics, ed. Jerry Courvisano, James Doughney, and Alex Millmow, 265–278. New York: Routledge. Sozanksi, Edward J. 1992. Documenting life: Meet Nick Waplington. Inquirer Art Critic, May 1. Speed, Lesley. 2005. Life as a Pizza: The comic traditions of wogsploitation films. Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine 146 (147): 136–144. Stallybrass, Peter. 1990. Marx and heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat. Representations 31: 69–95. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stratton, Jon. 1989. Deconstructing the territory. Cultural Studies 3 (1): 38–57. Stratton, Jon. 2011. Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stratton, Jon. 2016. Whiteness, morality, and Christianity in Australia. Journal of Intercultural Studies 37 (1): 17–32. Street, Andrew P. 2016. Here come the Habibs: So, did the new Channel Nine sitcom destroy Australia? Sydney Morning Herald, February 9. https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/here-come-the-habibs-so-did-thenew-channel-9-sitcom-destroy-australia-20160209-gmpuy0.html. Accessed 31 December 2019. Thatcher, Margaret. 1987. Interview for Woman’s Own, September 23. http:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. Accessed 2 January 2020. Turnbull, Sue. 2008. Mapping the vast suburban tundra: Australian comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim. International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (1): 15–32. Turner, David. 2002. Fashioning adultery: Gender, sex and civility in England, 1660–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Graeme. 2005. Ending the affair: The decline of television current affairs in Australia. Sydney: NSW Press. Turner, Graeme. 2008. The cosmopolitan city and its other: The ethnicizing of the Australian suburb. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9 (4): 568–582. Tyler, Imogen. 2008. ‘Chav mum chav scum’: Class disgust in contemporary Britain. Feminist Media Studies 8 (1): 17–34. Ward, Russel. 1958. The Australian legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Welshman, John. 2006. Underclass: A history of the excluded, 1880–2000. London: Bloomsbury.

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Zarazúa Villasenˇ or, Ulises. 2011. No-go areas and chic places: Socio-spatial segregation and stigma in Guadalajara. In Selling ethnicity: Urban cultural politics in the Americas, ed. Olaf Kaltmeier, 239–260. Burlington: Ashgate.

CHAPTER 9

Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened …

I write this Conclusion in early April 2020. The population of Australia is locked down. We can only leave where we live for work, to shop, for medical reasons, to visit close family and to take exercise. On 3 April Italy reported over 115,000 cases of COVID-19, China had about 82,000 and the United States lead the numbers with over 242,000 infections. Trump’s early denial of the seriousness of the virus is having ramifying effects on how many Americans are infected day by day. Australia had somewhat over 5000, many of these were people arriving by plane and passengers on cruise ships. Air travel is now mostly limited to freight, returning Australian travellers, and emergencies. In late March Qantas stood down roughly 20,000 or two-thirds of its staff until at least the end of May. Across Australia cafes, bars, restaurants are only allowed to sell takeaways and deliveries. Many have had to close. Tens of thousands of casual workers have been laid off. Places of worship are closed and people may only meet in twos. We have no idea how long this will continue. The best estimate is at least six months but there is as yet no available cure and it is not expected that there will be a vaccine until sometime in 2021. From this perspective it might seem that the pandemic has put a full stop on many of the concerns discussed in this book. This is unlikely to be the case. Indeed, at the present time the reverse is true. The governments, both state and federal, have arrogated to themselves more powers. The state of emergency has enabled many civil liberties safeguards to be overridden in the name of protecting the wider population. At the same © The Author(s) 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_9

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time there has been increased racism against many of the Othered groups identified in this book. The massive rise in unemployment impacts most the casuals who have no savings and no superannuation. The neoliberal gig economy is being shown up as offering no safe haven for those who worked as waitstaff, and who were self-employed, for example driving for the ride-share companies like Uber and Dido. Many of these people come from new migrant communities, East Asian, South Asian and African as well as international students, many of whom are Chinese.

Surveillance and Control In the Introduction I distinguished between a state of emergency and a state of exception. Following Walter Benjamin and more recently Giorgio Agamben I argued that democratic states have been moving towards a permanent state of emergency since World War One and that Australia is no exception. The pandemic has provided a perfect excuse for instituting a formal state of emergency. The closing of places of entertainment and worship, indeed all places where people might physically gather together, coupled with the lockdown which requires people as much as possible to stay at home, suggests nothing less than the kind of curfew instituted during military coups. In an article on the experience of the lockdown in suburbia we find a reference to Margaret Mossakowska for whom ‘the scenario of social distancing is eerily familiar. Originally from Poland, the former statistician said in the early 1980s her country of birth banned large social gatherings during a period of martial law’ (Sas and Esposito 2020). This feeling of the militarisation of Australian society has been reinforced by the closing of borders. Over the last few weeks there have been increasingly strict rules about who is allowed into Australia and under what circumstances, and more recently these have been matched by the increasing regulation of the borders between the states and territories. Within Western Australia, the largest state in the commonwealth, there are now even severe restrictions about travel between the different regions of the state. Western Australia has been divided into nine regions, Kimberley at the top, below that Pilbara, then Gascoyne, Mid West, Goldfields and Esperance, Wheatbelt, Perth, Peel, South West and finally Great Southern. Travel outside of the region in which you live is forbidden unless it comes under the usual excepted categories like work, freight or a medical emergency. For the purpose of this new ruling Perth and Peel,

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which are now one conurbation stretching along the coast, are considered to be a single region. Fines of up to $50,000 can be levied on people flouting this new, temporary law. Perth Stadium, now known as Optus Stadium after the naming rights were sold, opened in January 2018. It has the most up-to-date communications technology in the city. At the beginning of April the stadium was commandeered to become one of four coronavirus crisis management centres. It is worth quoting the premier, Mark McGowan’s announcement of this development in full: The centre has been established to police maintaining law and order and mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on the community. Police will track workforce impacts and plans for essential services across Western Australia. They will turn the directions which come out of the state emergency committee meetings, which happen at least twice a week, into operational guidance for officers.

The police commissioner Chris Dawson amplified these remarks: It is multi-sectorial, it covers both public service and private sector and other voluntary and community groups. … There are many issues that will impact on people’s lives, on their businesses and, indeed, on the way you operate as a family and a community, but it is being done under a state of emergency declaration, which I have signed, in regards to restricting and firmly controlling access by people who wish to enter Western Australia. (News.com.au 2020)

At the end, the commissioner goes a little off message. In doing so he reveals the sense of overarching and detailed control implied in his and the premier’s statements about the setting up of the centre. The last time a centre like this was established in Perth was for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 2011. That centre was the Maylands incident Control Centre, opened in time to police CHOGM. Its operations integrated the four District Command Centres across greater Perth. In the present state of emergency the commissioner said that the Optus Stadium centre was one of four being set up to manage police work. Doubtless the District Command Centres were being repurposed in the present emergency. The Maylands Centre

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cost five million dollars to build: ‘About 100 officers will continuously man the state-of-the-art facility, watching video screens spanning a 30metre long wall and rolling CCTV footage from fixed and mobile devices throughout the city, during the three day event’ (Trenwith 2011). The present commissioner makes the repurposed Optus Stadium sound less ominous, this time it is the community which is being policed rather than a concern with a potential terrorist threat, but we can be sure that the facilities available to the police in the centre have even greater surveillance capacities than were available when CHOGM was being monitored and protected. Now it is the Western Australian population, benignly being constructed as a community, being protected from itself. The premier mentions law and order. What he and the commissioner are worried about is an incipient breakdown of society as a consequence of the increasing restrictions coupled with the sudden numbers of people being thrown into unemployment. Perhaps they have been watching Contagion, the film by Steven Soderbergh released in 2011, about the impact of a new virus on the United States in which the action takes place against a backdrop of increasing social disorder. In this description of what is happening in Western Australia we have a microcosm of the increase in surveillance, and police powers, being activated across Australia as a whole.1 What we do not know is how many of these powers, and how much surveillance, will be rescinded after the pandemic is deemed to have ended. We are living in a state of emergency, a step away from martial law. A characteristic of the nascent state of emergency in modern democracies, in part a function of neoliberal political practice, was that the population lived in constant precarity. The more Othered a particular group was, the greater that precarity, the fear of being excluded from the state and, in Agamben’s term, transformed into bare life. I discussed this in the Introduction with reference to people who had been born elsewhere but lived their lives in Australia who then, having committed a crime, were sent to the country in which they had been born. If a permanent resident is identified as undesirable to Australia for any reason their permanent residency visa can be revoked. The way the pandemic has been managed in Australia, reinforced by how it has been reported in the media, has reemphasised that sense of precarity. It has become heightened into the experience of anxiety. Thus, for example, we have articles like ‘Coronavirus is causing “significant” anxiety. Here’s how to cope’ (Scott 2020). It is not so much the coronavirus that is causing the anxiety but the way it has been constructed by our political leaders and by the media.

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Primarily, this construction has been in terms of war and death. We wage a war against the virus, in the United States President Donald Trump declared himself a wartime commander in chief (BBC News 2020), and we fear the death that COVID-19, the sickness that the virus brings on, may give us. The media lists the numbers infected and the numbers of deaths entailed. These figures are questionable. As the official figure for infections reached a million across the globe, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy suggested that the true figure ‘was likely “five to 10” times higher’ (ABC News 2020a). If the Chief Medical Officer is correct then the ratio of infections to deaths is far greater than we are continually being informed by the media. Death recedes somewhat as a potent source of anxiety. In the context of the state’s construction of precarity, death offers the final, absolute exit from Australia. At the same time we are rarely given figures, no matter how rubbery, of those who have recovered from the infection.

The Rich and the Underclass In times of the outbreak of infectious diseases—the first bubonic plague pandemic in Europe, known as the Black Death, ran from 1346 to 1353—royalty, nobility, senior clergy and, later, the new wealthy and governing classes, would retreat from the urban centres to isolate themselves in castles, country houses and the like (see Naphy and Spicer 2004). In the present pandemic the super-rich have no doubt done something similar. The peasants and the urban poor were left to the tribulations of the plague which travelled rapidly through their overcrowded living spaces. The more obvious divide in the present pandemic is between those who can work from home and those whose work requires their physical presence. Working at a computer tends to be a better paid, more middleclass job. This is the kind of work found in the public service, in company offices, in bureaucracies and many self-employed architects, designers and the like. More manual, working-class jobs such as labourers, tradespeople, cleaners, supermarket shelf stackers and cashiers, all require the physical presence of the worker. Many of those who use computers can isolate at home while continuing to work. Those with manual jobs cannot isolate. They either have to continue to go to work, often using public transport where they are likely to be unable to maintain social distancing, or give up their jobs to self-isolate in the comparative safety of their home. For most, giving up their job is not an option. These people tend to be less

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white, often they are members of groups Australians identify as Other, Indigenous Australians, people of African heritage, Muslims. Compared to the more middle-class workers who can work from home, these people inhabit a more dangerous environment where they are more likely to be infected by the coronavirus. In other words, the likelihood of becoming infected at work is to a significant extent related to class. In Australia in the early days infection arrived by way of air travel and people returning on cruise ships. These people tended to be relatively wealthy, travelling for business, middle-class young people on gap years, or retirees on cruises. Reflecting this, the worst hit suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne were in richer areas. In Sydney by 27 March, the hardest hit suburbs were Waverley, on the well-off northern beaches, then Woollahra then Sydney City, the city itself where youthful, hipster backpackers would live. In Melbourne, the Stonnington council area, which includes the affluent suburbs of Tootrak, Malvern and Praharn, has the highest number of cases at 57. Next is the Mornington Peninsula (36), holiday hub and home to popular retirement spots for wealthy Melbournians such as Sorrento and Portsea. (Evershed and Boseley 2020)

All these affluent suburbs are predominantly white and, with the exception of Sydney City, return Liberal parliamentarians.

Borders and Racism The Melbournian retirees may well have returned from cruises. Cruises are a popular holiday for older Australians who wish to go to other countries without the hassle and discomfort often associated with air travel. However, cruise ships have turned out to be an important problem in the time of coronavirus. Air-born infections spread easily in confined and overcrowded spaces. The case of the Ruby Princess is particularly egregious. After the ship docked in Sydney Harbour a decision was taken to allow the passengers to disembark. Since then, as of 5 April, 662 passengers and crew, mostly some of the 2700 passengers, are known to have become sick with COVID-19. Eleven have died. In one of several ironies cruise ships, with their complement of relatively well-off white, older Australians, function similarly to the living conditions of the poorer

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members of Australian society who live in cramped apartments and overcrowded houses. These are the people most likely to be infected were there to be a wave of community transmission in Australia. These people are also less white and include many members of the groups Othered in Australian whiteness. In another irony, where asylum seeker boats have been turned into objects of great fear, even, as was noted in the Introduction, having it suggested that they might contain terrorists, cruise ships have been welcomed by Australian port cities for the economic benefits they bring from their touristic passengers. However, as it became clear that some of these passengers were infected with the virus, Australia’s harbours started turning the boats away. In Fremantle, as the MSC Magnifica docked, a woman on the harbour-side held up a placard on which was written ‘Go Home [Go] Away’ (see Hondros 2020). Once more boats are unwelcome. This time, though, they carry predominantly ageing, white people. The rhetoric the woman’s placard uses is the same as that used by racists against non-white people in Australia: go home, or, in a phrase that became the title of an SBS reality series, go back where you came from. The passengers on the MSC Magnifica came from Germany, France and Italy. In an article for WA Today Nathan Hondros and Emma Young (2020) made the connection between the premier Mark McGowan’s threat to ask the navy to intervene to stop the ship docking and John Howard’s use of the navy and troops from the Special Air Service Regiment in 2001 to stop the MV Tampa, which had picked up asylum seekers from their sinking boat, from docking at Christmas Island. That was the beginning of the Pacific Solution. On 1 February, restrictions were placed on people flying to Australia from China. On 1 March this decision was extended to those coming from Iran and on 5 March these were further extended to arrivals from South Korea. It was not until 11 March that the travel ban was extended again to Italy by which time Italy had over 12,000 known infections and was reporting that there had been 827 deaths from COVID-19. Why did it take so long to stop arrivals from Italy? The prime minister, Scott Morrison, gave a number of reasons, for example, ‘We have about five times… the number of people coming from Korea than we do from Italy’. Trying to stop the spread of a highly infectious virus this does not sound very convincing. Morrison went on to say: ‘The other issue is that with Italy, this more broadly feeds into the issue of Europe, and travel from Europe more broadly, and we will be watching those developments over

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the days and weeks ahead’ (ABC News 2020b). Morrison’s point here is related to Italy being a member of the European Union and the complications involved when there is free travel between key members of the Union allowed under the terms of the Schengen treaty. This, too, is not a convincing argument. Could something else have influenced the late decision—China and South Korea are both Asian countries, Iran is identified as being Muslim and Middle Eastern. Italians are mostly Catholic and in Australia have been included in whiteness since the 1950s. Everyday racism often functions through taken for granted assumptions, assumptions we don’t realise we are making or that are so naturalised that the discrimination that is a consequence is not apparent, at least not to the person or group making the assumption. This kind of racism is endemic in attitudes to Indigenous Australians and impacts on how these groups are treated during the pandemic. Thus: ‘One incident involving a patient identifying as Aboriginal took place in a regional hospital in New South Wales, where they were reportedly denied testing after being told that treatment would only be offered to “real Aborigines”’. Here the claim was that a non-Indigenous person was trying to rort a system specially put in place to advantage Indigenous Australians who, because so many have serious health problems, are at greater risk of dying from COVID-19 than the general population. The health worker involved presumes they can tell an Aboriginal person by looking at them. In another example a health worker claims to know that Indigenous Australians have less hygienic habits than the members of the hegemonic culture: ‘In a Western Australian hospital, a comment was made that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients “only get it [coronavirus] because they don’t wash their hands”’ (Tsirtsakis 2020). In these examples we can see how everyday racism is embedded even in the health sector’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Such everyday racism can work the other way round, when a white patient interacts with a nonwhite health worker. Gold Coast surgeon Rhea Liang posted on Twitter that: ‘Today a patient made jokes about not shaking my hand because of coronavirus in front of my team. I have not left Australia’ (Young 2020). What the white patient regarded as a joke, and probably would not have thought it racist, Liang understood as both racist and that it demeaned her and the quality of her work as a surgeon, diminishing her in the eyes of the health workers who worked for her. What we have here is the power of white hegemony in Australia.

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One manifestation of the racism against Chinese in Australia can be found in the fear of eating in Chinese restaurants. In an early February article about the decline in custom in Chinese restaurants Samuel Yang and Christine Zhou (2020) write: ‘Mr [Charlie] Men said the Gold Coast Chinese restaurant community had taken a battering with a 50 per cent drop in business on average’. Yang and Zhou go on: Mr Men’s experience is a familiar story across Australia, with the coronavirus fear factor taking its toll on Chinese restaurants in the Sydney suburbs of Eastwood, Chatswood and Burwood as well as Glen Waverley, Doncaster and Box Hill in Melbourne.

What we seem to have here is a version of the ‘all Chinese look alike’ racism. The logic goes something like: coronavirus was first contracted from animals by humans in China, it is therefore, as Trump called it, a Chinese virus; Chinese restaurants are run by Chinese people, therefore we might catch the virus if we eat there. Indeed, we might catch the virus from the food served there. Such thinking groups all people of Chinese descent together whether they were born in China or Australia or elsewhere, and regardless of whether, as Liang points out, they have recently, or indeed ever, visited China. Chinese food is considered jeopardous because it is Chinese. Jane de Graaff (2020) had a similar experience in Sydney in early March: ‘Yesterday I took a walk through Sydney’s Dixon Street. You might know it better as Chinatown, full of restaurants, spruikers, hustleand-bustle, long queues for bubble tea, Emperor’s Puffs, hot pot and chilli crab’. She goes on: ‘Yesterday the place was all but deserted. At lunchtime. On a weekday’. Here we have the same drop off of custom that Yang and Zhou comment on. De Graaff (2020) asks: ‘Now the virus is in Italy (among other countries), will our local pizza joints start going out of business too?’ The answer is no. As I argued above, Italians are treated as individuals who happen to be Italian or of Italian descent. They are not treated as Other. Not any more, or at least not compared with groups who are now Othered like Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and, most importantly given the origin of the coronavirus infection, the Chinese. Australians, white Australians, will continue to eat pizza. Pizza is now Australian food—though perhaps still not quite as Australian as steak and chips.

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Sometimes the racism becomes direct. People who are thought to look Chinese have reported a significant rise in racist behaviour since the coronavirus started to impact on Australia (see Fang et al. 2020). In early April in a Sydney suburb: Police allege two sisters of Asian descent were at a pedestrian crossing on the corner of Illawarra Road and Petersham Road in Marickville yesterday when they were allegedly approached by the teen who was yelling obscenities about their race and the coronavirus pandemic. ‘Asian b______, you brought corona here’, the woman can be heard saying in video footage witnesses took. (Dinjaski 2020)

When she spat on the sisters a man intervened. ‘Asians’ is a highly emotive term in Australia. In the Introduction I discussed the background to Pauline Hanson’s claim in her 1996 maiden speech in the House of Representatives that Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians’. The teenage girl is making precisely the connections I have already outlined. She views the sisters as members of a group, in this case Chinese are subsumed into the category of Asians, and as members of the group which comes from where the coronavirus originated, and, as the sisters are in Australia, they are responsible for the virus being here. This kind of racism has become more common as people settle into outlast the pandemic.

The New Normal There is much talk at the moment about the new normal, what society will be like after the pandemic. There are, for example, some utopian suggestions based on the opportunity to change radically the energy mix. The very large decrease in the use of fossil fuels because planes aren’t flying, cars aren’t being driven and many energy-intensive industries have been forced to close for the period of the lockdown, will enable a more rapid take-up of renewable energies as the lockdown ends and industry starts gearing up again (see Lynch 2020). In an allied argument some people suggest that the massive drop in carbon emissions which should slow global warming gives breathing space for reconstructing the tax system to encourage more production of climate friendly technology, more electric vehicles, more gadgets to help make our homes more energy efficient and so on. There is even an argument that there may be a further governmental distribution of wealth along the lines of the tax breaks and

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moratorium on loan repayments being put in place as I write, along with the extra funds being directed to the suddenly unemployed (see Verrender 2020). A more dystopian idea is that the gradual social breakdown engendered by lockdown, the huge rise in unemployment, the loss of money in the economy which may go beyond the economic collapse of the Great Depression, will see a post-pandemic society so damaged that generations will struggle to recover what they can of the pre-pandemic social order. What I have suggested in this brief conclusion is that the postpandemic new normal will look much the same as the pre-pandemic normal. However, the rich will be richer and the divide with the less well-off will be more pronounced; there will be acceptance of greater surveillance and government management of the population; many people will continue to work from home; the unemployment rate will continue to be higher than before the pandemic not only because many small businesses, including cafes, bars and restaurants, will not reopen but because people have been finding new ways of doing things often involving the internet and communication technologies like Zoom. Out of necessity the gig economy is likely to get larger as more people get more purchases delivered, more people use web-based sites such as Etsy to sell creative work, more people use ride-share firms because it’s cheaper than, and almost as convenient as, owning a car. While some of this development will be through choice, because of the flexible working conditions and the opportunities for personal satisfaction, for others, the unemployed forced, through necessity, into harsh working conditions with no sick leave or superannuation, they become the late capitalist, indeed neoliberal, equivalent of the day labourer in a developing country living hand to mouth. Finally, racism will not disappear. As I have argued, it is already worse than before the novel coronavirus surfaced. Indeed, it may get more pronounced as the underclass constructed in neoliberalism increases in size and in relative if not absolute immiseration to the rich. This may sound rather negative. It should be balanced with some of the utopian possibilities. For example, there will be more renewables in the energy mix if only because renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels and the economic fracture caused by the pandemic provides an excellent opportunity for large energy companies to transform themselves into providers of clean and green energy in the process helping to diminish the effects of climate change. But, in this book, and in this Afterword, I have focused on the structure of race and Otherness in Australian society, and on the intersection with the underclass much of which is comprised

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of members of the groups Australian society Others. This structure shows no sign of disappearing. The fight for social inclusion, indeed for a state which thinks in terms of inclusion, will remain to be won.

Note 1. It is perhaps a coincidence that Mark McGowan, the Labour premier of Western Australia, joined the navy in 1989 and served until 1996. He is quoted on his Facebook page from 24 February, 2017 as saying, ‘My life in the Navy taught me the importance of having a plan’.

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Hondros, Nathan. 2020. ‘We are not going to have a Sydney Harbour fiasco on our watch’: WA premier Mark McGowan. WA Today, March 26. https:// www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/seven-confirmed-viruscases-aboard-cruise-ship-off-fremantle-20200326-p54e2g.html. Accessed 9 April 2020. Hondros, Nathan, and Emma Young. 2020. ‘Leave and go home’: WA premier hints at Tampa response to cruise ship chaos off Fremantle. WA Today, March 25. https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/leaveand-go-home-wa-premier-hints-at-tampa-response-to-cruise-ship-chaos-offfremantle-20200325-p54dtn.html. Accessed 9 April 2020. Lynch, Lydia. 2020. Cure for coronavirus-hit economy could be in renewables: Garnaut. Brisbane Times, March 11. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/pol itics/queensland/cure-for-coronavirus-hit-economy-could-be-in-renewablesgarnaut-20200311-p5494c.html. Accessed 9 April 2020. Naphy, William G., and Andrew Spicer. 2004. Plague: Black Death and pestilence in Europe. Cheltenham: Tempus Publishing. News.com.au. 2020. ‘Perth’s Optus Stadium being converted into a coronavirus crisis management centre. News.com.au, March 24. https://www.news.com. au/national/western-australia/perths-optus-stadium-being-converted-intocoronavirus-crisis-management-centre/news-story/0eb86c20264c5addd34f3 d0955bba418. Accessed 9 April 2020. Sas, Nick, and Brendan Esposito. 2020. Coronavirus and the suburbs— How we’re dealing with social isolation in the suburbs. ABC News, April 5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-05/coronavirus-social-isolat ion-in-suburbs-how-to-deal-with-covid19/12115386. Accessed 9 April 2020. Scott, Kellie. 2020. Coronavirus is causing ‘significant’ anxiety. Here’s how to cope. ABC Life, April 1. https://www.abc.net.au/life/coping-with-anxietyduring-coronavirus/12084932. Accessed 9 April 2020. Trenwith, Courtney. 2011. CHOGM police unveil country’s ‘most advanced command centre’. WAtoday, October 14. https://www.watoday.com.au/nat ional/western-australia/chogm-police-unveil-countrys-most-advanced-com mand-centre-20111014-1lozn.html. Accessed 9 April 2020. Tsirtsakis, Anastasia. 2020. Experts warn ‘racism will cost lives’ during coronavirus response. NewsGP, March 27. https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/ clinical/experts-warn-racism-will-cost-lives-during-coronav. Accessed 9 April 2020. Verrender, Ian. 2020. Is capitalism dying or just in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic? ABC News, April 6. https://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2020-04-06/is-capitalism-dying-or-just-in-isolation-coronavirus/12123874. Accessed 9 April 2020.

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Index

A Abbott, Tony, 73–74, 110, 120, 139, 203, 255 abjection, 19, 29–30, 31 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), 126 Aborigines, 12, 51, 87, 89, 104, 121–122, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 138, 151, 155–156, 158, 166, 169, 173, 179–181, 182, 207, 268, 269 Aborigines of Australia: their history, their habits, their assimilation, 137 Acropolis Now, 203, 212, 215, 220 Act for Marriages in England, 107 administrative power, 31 Afghanistan, 98 Africa, African, 15–16, 30, 45, 49, 51, 52, 56–66, 78, 83, 124, 125, 129–131, 133–134, 136, 137–138, 150, 169, 170–179, 181–182, 191, 193–198, 240, 247, 262, 266

African-American funk, 49 African-American sailor, 52, 56, 60–61, 62–63, 134 Agamben, Giorgio, 17–24, 29, 262, 264 alcohol, 42, 48, 55, 90, 108, 122, 186 Alice Springs, 156–157 Aliens Act, 4 Alligators, 63 American War of Independence, 176 Amorite, 82 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians , 104 Anglo-Australian, 2, 10, 42, 66, 102, 190, 212, 218 Anglo-Burmese, 42, 45, 50–52, 54, 58–59, 66 Anglo-Celtic, 6, 11, 14, 47–49, 63–66, 191, 211, 223 Anglo-Indian, 42, 45, 51–52, 54, 58, 64

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5

305

306

INDEX

Anu, Christine, 34, 145–146, 149, 156–160, 162, 163–164, 249 ANZAC, 221 Aotearoa, 189, 190. See also New Zealand Apartheid, 15 Arab, 77, 103–104 Arafura Sea, 145, 161 Aristotle, 81 Arnhem Land, 34, 145, 148, 156 Aryan, 82 Ashkenazi, 4 Asian, 6–7, 14–16, 47, 51, 66, 86, 100, 173, 188, 191, 197, 226, 262, 268, 270 Asian-Australian, 208 ASIO, 27 assimilation, 8, 21, 43, 46, 120, 127, 137 asylum seeker, 1, 23–24, 32–33, 35, 74, 76, 84, 97–98, 103, 109–110, 183, 222–223, 226, 267 Australia Card (identity card), 25 Australian Border Force, 27 Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, 27 Australian Federal Police, 27 Australian High Court, 99 Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA), 145 Australian Tax Office, 26, 30 Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, 27 Australian values, 11, 73, 75–76, 90–91, 97, 101, 106, 108, 111–112 Australian Workplace Agreements, 26 Ayers Rock. See Uluru, Ayer’s Rock B Barbary Corsairs, 83 bare life, 22–23, 31, 264

Barnes, Jimmy, 124 Basics Card, 108 Battle of Tours, 83 Beethoven’s, 43, 53, 56, 60, 62 beggar, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 19–20, 262 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 20, 25, 29 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 226 Bible, 83, 96 bikies, 246–247, 248 Billingham, Richard, 243, 248 Birrabirragal, 207 black, 3, 16, 17, 30, 41, 44–45, 48, 49–54, 56–57, 60–63, 64, 66, 67, 75, 89, 112, 124, 130–131, 132–135, 136, 139, 148–149, 154, 170, 173–175, 176, 178–179, 181, 182, 189–191, 193, 195–198, 217, 225, 265 Black and White Minstrel Show, 173–175, 182 black dancing, 57 Black Death, 265 black economies, 217 blackface, 34, 169–184, 188–189, 191–193, 194, 196, 198 Blackfella-Whitefella tour, 145, 159 blackness, 16, 30, 49, 51, 133, 192 Blair, Wayne, 133 Bleakley, John, 137 Blues Brothers, the, 124 boat people, 32, 207, 222 body politic, 22, 151 bogan, 48, 184–188, 189, 191–192 Border, National, 2–6, 13, 17, 23–25, 120 Border, State, 1, 4, 22 Bringing Them Home, 122, 126 Brock, Peter, 252 Buddhist, 112 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 237 Burmese, 42, 45, 51–52, 54, 58–59, 66

INDEX

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, 129 Bushrangers, The, 179

C Calwell, Arthur, 9, 52 Cambodia, 19 Canada, Canadian, 1, 6, 14, 35, 47, 99, 237 Captain Cook, 207 caricature, 196, 203–204, 214, 226 Carlotta, 43 carnival, 176–177, 178, 183 Castle, The, 249–250, 253 Catch a Fire Christian ministries, 74 Catholicism, 75, 92–93 Caucasian, 54, 82, 104 Centrelink, 30, 106–107, 108–110 Chances , 219 Channel Nine, 34, 215 characterisation, 188, 211 Chaser Decides, The, 172 Chifley, Ben, 8 China Beach, 124 Chinatown (Dixon street, Sydney), 269 Chinese, 5–6, 35, 173, 183, 188, 208–225, 226, 262, 269–270 Chinese restaurant, 269 chocko, 245–246 CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting), 263 Christian, Christianity, 3, 8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 33, 73–84, 86–95, 96–104, 106–108, 109–112, 215–218 Christianity the Means of Civilization Shown in the Evidence Given Before a Committee of the House of Commons on Aborigines 1837 , 87 Christ, Jesus, 74, 80, 82

307

Church of England, 17, 75, 84–85, 89, 92, 107 Church of England Church Missionary Society, 87 citizenship, 11, 13, 26, 73, 150, 224–226 civic obligations, 13 Clash of Civilizations, The, 76, 84, 99–100 clubbing, 41, 47, 65 Coates, Dandeson, 87–88 colonialism, 75, 85, 104, 105, 139, 149, 150–151, 162–163, 198, 212 colour-blindness, 137 Comedy Company, The, 185, 213 Come My Way, 146 Commitments, The, 133 commonality, 2 common values, 11, 76, 94–97 Commonwealth, 6, 14, 85, 109, 262, 263 Competency in English, 11 confinement, 4, 15, 20, 29 Connections, 43, 73, 91, 146, 166, 270 Connick, Harry Jr., 170–172, 174–177, 184, 191 Constantinople, 79, 83 Constitution, Australian, 30, 99, 125–126, 249 Contagion, 264 Con the Fruiterer, 213 convict, 4, 90, 93, 130 Coon Carnival, 178 corroboree, 179 Costello, Peter, 76, 96–97, 99, 101, 108, 111 country and western, 125, 127–128, 132, 134, 140 Covering Islam, 100 COVID-19, 261, 263, 265, 266–268 crime of war, 18

308

INDEX

criminal, 3, 20, 27 criminalised outcasts (convicts), 32 Criminalising [of] the Arab Other, 103 Cronulla riots, 101, 102, 105, 221, 226 cruise ships, 261, 266–267 cubs (cashed up bogans), 187 culchies, 134 cultural surrender, 2 Cummeragunja, 120–123, 129, 134–136, 138, 139 curfew, 262

D Dance Fever, 59 Dawson, Chris, 263 death camps, 23 Declaration on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, 15 decolonisation, 151–152 Defining Moments in Australian History project, 139 democratic, 18–19, 26, 86, 262 Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 162 Department of Immigration, 13, 27 Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, 13 desert, 145–146, 152, 154, 156–157 dictation test, 5 disco, discotheque, 42–43, 45, 49, 52, 56, 59, 63, 65, 67, 170 discrimination, discriminate, 14, 26, 46, 50, 111, 126, 127, 139, 207, 268 displaced people, 8, 129, 151, 155, 164–165, 207, 222 dispossessed, 22, 162 diversity, 2, 12–14, 16, 33, 44, 45–46, 49, 66, 74, 76, 95, 159, 190,

197, 208, 211, 216, 218, 222, 224 Division of Labour in Society, 95 downtown, 50 dress code, 55 drug dealing, 239, 254 Dutton, Peter, 28–29 E Elcho Island, 34, 145, 149, 154, 161 Electronic Dance Music (EDM), 65 Empire, British, 85, 86 Engels, Frederick, 91 enlightenment, 1, 81 equality, 3, 93, 101, 112, 205, 223 ethics, 75 ethnic cultures, 46 ethnic humour, 175, 204–205, 216, 221, 235 ethnicised, 17, 48, 65, 190, 203, 213, 215 ethnic radio, 46 etiquette, 57, 59 Europe, 1–2, 7, 8, 41–42, 65, 78–80, 83–84, 99–100, 125, 133, 176, 215, 265, 267–268 Evangelical Christian, 90 exclusion, 1, 2–7, 10–19, 15, 22–23, 25, 27, 29–30, 31, 33, 34, 50, 81, 97, 108, 139, 226 exit, 58, 66, 265 expulsion, 4, 31 extremist, 2 F Fabrication of Aboriginal History, The, 121 Family Law, The, 208–210, 214–216 fascism, 18 Fat Chicks, 235, 246, 248 Fat Pizza, 213

INDEX

Fat Pizza v Housos , 231, 238 fear of difference, 4 Federal Marriage Act 1961, 107 Federation, 5, 8, 92, 130, 133, 148 First Fleet, 32, 85, 139 First World War, 17–18, 21, 262 Fitzgerald, Tony, 28 Footy Show, The, 34, 172, 181, 184, 187 Foreign Affairs , 76, 99 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, The, 82 Four Corners , 28, 105 Framlingham, 155 Freeman, Cathy, 173 French, 9, 10, 14, 20, 35, 79, 80, 150, 157, 213 French Canada, 9 French revolution, 20, 80 Fresh Off the Boat , 210

G Gaelic, 8, 9 Galbally, Frank, 45–46 gambling, 90, 108, 134, 219 gang, 77, 103–105, 106, 217 gang rape, 77, 103–104, 106 Gaulle, de Charles, 9 gay, 43, 52 gay club, 43 gentilising, 80 Georgia Lee Sings the Blues , 131 Georgia Minstrels, 179–180 ghosts, 153, 155 gig economy, 271 Gillard, Julia, 120, 249, 254–255 Global Financial Crisis, 25 globalisation, 222, 223–225, 226 Gobbles, 48, 60, 65 Go Bush, 145 Goldberg, Whoopi, 174

309

gospel, 74, 86–88, 131 Great Depression, 271 Greek, 6, 8, 17, 44–45, 47, 54, 58, 77, 92–93, 104, 161, 191, 203, 212–213, 215, 220 Guardian, The, 216 H Halal tax, 74 Hand, Gerry, 23 Hannibal’s, 47–50, 53–54, 57–58, 61, 63–64 Hanson, Pauline, 6, 66, 77, 86, 204, 253, 270 Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, 107 Harmony Sisters, the, 131 Havana’s, 47, 63–64 Hawke, Bob, 12–13, 23, 25–27, 66, 148, 183, 203, 255 Hazara, 98 Health Inspector, 237, 254 heathen, 81, 88–89 Hegel, 80 Henry VIII, 75, 84 Here Come the Habibs , 34, 203–208, 211, 214–216, 218–220, 221, 222, 225, 226 Hey Hey It’s Saturday, 169, 184–185 Highland Clearances, 155 hijab, 77, 86, 105–106. See also naqib Hilliard, Bishop, 89 hip hop, 45, 56, 59, 64, 175, 189–191 History Wars, 120 Hitler, Adolf, 19 Hobbes, Thomas, 20–22 Hollingworth, Peter, 98 Holocaust, 19 Holt, Harold, 47 Home Affairs, Department, 13, 27–29, 30

310

INDEX

Home Territories , 151 homogenisation, 16 honorary white, 112, 192 houso, 23, 31, 34 Housos v Authority, 231, 247, 249–250, 253–254 Howard, John, 11–13, 23, 26, 32–33, 46, 73–77, 82, 93–99, 100–102, 109–111, 126–127, 138–139, 165, 172 Hugo, Victor, 238 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 122 I idleness, 3 Immigration Restriction Act, 5–6, 180 inclusion, 2–3, 6, 11, 30, 33, 81, 207 Indian, 42, 45, 51–54, 58, 64, 66, 129, 192, 193, 195–197, 213 Indigenous, 1, 3, 12, 13, 16, 30, 32, 34, 44–45, 55, 67, 89, 104, 107, 108–109, 110, 120, 125–129, 130–133, 134, 137– 139, 145–148, 151–154, 156, 158–160, 162–165, 172–173, 175, 179–181, 195–196, 207, 266, 268 Indigeridoo, 173, 179 invasion, 16, 84 Iran, 267–268 Iraq, 98 Irish, 7–8, 42, 46, 92–94, 132–134, 136, 163, 166, 170, 188–189, 192, 199, 205 Iron Curtain, 100 Islam, 16, 33, 73–75, 77–78, 83–84, 94, 97, 100–101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 222 Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, 107 Islamophobia, 216 Israel, 78–79

Italian, 6, 8, 45, 48–50, 53–56, 58, 64, 77, 92–93, 104, 191, 211, 213, 215, 268, 269 J Jackson Jive, 34, 169–172, 173, 177, 182–184, 189, 191–192, 197 Jackson, Michael, 51, 53, 170–172, 173, 177, 183, 189–190, 192 Jedda, 175 Jerusalem, 78, 79 Jesus Christ, 74–75, 78, 82, 83, 112 Jim Crow, 174–176, 177, 181 Job Network, 109 Judaism, 78, 83, 94 Judeo-Christian, 76, 97–99, 100 Jules, 47, 48, 49–51, 52–54, 56–58, 59–60, 63, 64–65 K Kath and Kim, 184 Keating, Paul, 23, 25–26, 66, 95, 126 Keeping Up Appearances , 235 Kelly, Ned, 252 Kennedy, Robert F., 125 Kerrigans, the, 249–250, 253 Kev the Kiwi, 245 Khmer Rouge, 19 Kingswood Country, 233 Koran, 77. See also Qur’an Ku Klux Klan, 195–196 L Lambeth Conference of Church of England bishops, 85 land rights, 125–126, 147, 148–149, 151, 154, 156, 159, 165, 182 language, 5, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 33, 46, 50, 93, 95, 105, 128–130, 147, 149, 187, 223 larrikin, 176, 186–189, 192 Latino, 52

INDEX

La vie est un long fleuve tranquille, 213 layabout, 3 Lebanese, 8, 17, 58, 102–103, 191, 203–205, 206–207, 211, 215, 217–218, 221–225 Lebanon, 46, 94, 215 liberal, 3, 6, 18, 19, 21, 28, 120, 124, 266 Liberal Party, 28 liberty, 2–3, 86, 261 liberty of expression, 2 Lilley, Chris, 172–173, 179, 188 Logies, 231 lumpenproletariat, 3, 233, 238–240, 242–243 Luther King, Martin, 120

M Mabo decision, 126, 147, 157, 162, 164 MacDonald, Jackie, 170 Macedonia, 47 Madame Butterfly, 162–163 Mad Max, 247 madness, 3 Magnifica, MSC, 267 Maher, Bob, 42 Mahon, Olivia, 193–196 Malta, 46, 92 mandatory detention, 23, 35, 183 Manus Island, 23 Maori, 135–136, 189–190 marginalised, 1, 31, 191 Maronites, 94 Marriage Amendment Act 2004, 107 Maruroa atoll, 150 Marx, Karl, 3, 91, 233, 239, 242, 253 Mary, the Virgin, 80, 83 mateship, 247 Mauboy, Jessica, 124–125

311

McGowan, Mark, 263, 267 McLachlan, Ian, 147 McQuiggan, A.J., 122–123 Mediterranean climate, 41 Melbourne Press Club, 97 Melville, Henry, 179 Mercator, Gerardus, 79 Methodists, 94 middle class, 57, 78, 87, 89, 91, 106, 186, 192 Midnight Oil, 145, 159 migrant, 1, 4, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 14, 15–17, 26, 32–34, 41–42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 58, 65, 77, 86, 92, 94, 177, 182, 190–191, 204, 206–207, 211, 212, 217–218, 262 migration zone, 32 Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, 148 mining boom, 41, 187 Minister of Home Affairs, 13, 20, 27–29, 30 miscegenation, 137 Mischief Night , 244 moralisation, 101, 106 morality, 75, 78, 81, 83, 91–94, 96, 100, 107, 108, 112, 184, 211 Morrison, Scott, 267–268 Moth of Moonbi, The, 175 Motown, 123–125, 130 Muhammed, 83, 112 Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity, 13 multi-racial, 9, 52 Murphy, Brendan, 265 Muslim, 3, 16, 17, 30, 74–75, 76–80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 91, 98–107, 109–112, 215–218, 221, 266, 268 Muslims in Australia, 77, 86, 94, 98, 112 mutual obligation, 13, 110

312

INDEX

My Island Home, 34, 145–147, 148–151, 154–156, 157–165, 182 N Nalliah, Daniel, 74 naqib, 77. See also hijab National Agenda on Multiculturalism, 93 National Farmers Federation, 147 national homogeneity, 7 national moratorium rally, 138 National Party, 28 national security, 24, 28 National Uncanny, The, 153 native Americans, 81, 153, 195 Native Title Act, 126, 147, 151, 162 naturalisation, 26, 97, 138 Nauru, 23 Nazi, 23, 82 neighbour, 121, 223 neoliberal, 1, 2–3, 13, 17, 19, 22, 24, 27, 29, 30–31, 32, 110, 119, 121, 137–139, 203–204, 208, 220, 222–225, 262, 264, 271 Newman, Jocelyn, 110 Newman, Sam, 34, 172, 180–181, 184, 189 new normal, 270–271 New South Wales, 4–5, 8, 29, 35, 87, 122–123, 192, 268 New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board, 122 New World, 78, 225 New Zealand, 33, 87, 88, 135, 189–191 nightclubs, 41–42, 44, 46, 51, 55, 61, 66 no-go zone, 15, 246, 251 non-Christian, 3, 94, 95, 111 Non-English-Speaking Background (NESB), 10

non-white, 16, 47, 52, 54, 66, 67, 80–81, 92–94, 97, 99, 101, 102–103, 105, 110–112, 124, 181–183, 190–192, 211, 218, 225, 267, 268 Noongyar, 173 Northbridge, North of the Line, 44–45, 48–49, 55, 65 nostalgia, 121, 155, 157, 172, 185 6NR, 59 nuclear family, 96, 106, 107, 220 O objet petit a, 162 ocker, 187, 189, 199 Office of Multicultural Affairs, 13 Office of Transport Security, 27 Official Languages Act (Canada), 9 Old Testament, 96 One Nation, 204 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 82 Optus stadium, 263–264 Orthodox, 77, 92–94, 96, 100, 112, 121 Other, Othering, 1, 10, 16, 21–22, 66, 73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 87, 94, 97, 100–103, 111, 112, 152, 176–177, 180–181, 182, 183, 191–192, 194, 195, 197, 212, 237–239, 240–244, 255, 262, 264, 265–267, 269, 272 overseas Chinese, 223 P Pacific islands, 161 Pacific solution, 23, 267 pakeha, 190 Palladium, 48, 49, 63, 64–65 pandemic, 261–262, 264–265, 268–272

INDEX

panoptic prison, 4, 20, 29 Papua New Guinea, 23 Papunya, 145, 154, 156 Patriot Act, 24, 35 Peace of Westphalia, 4, 18 Perkins, Rachel, 162, 164 Perth, 33, 41–45, 46, 48–53, 54, 56, 60–63, 64–66, 173, 190, 262–263 Perth Stadium, 263 Phar Lap, 251 Philippines, 34, 92 Pinocchio’s, 43, 48–49, 53–54, 56, 57, 59–60, 61, 63, 65 political correctness, 172, 184 political prisoner, 22 polygamy, 106, 108, 109 Polynesia, 150 Polynésie Française, 150 population, 2–4, 6, 8–9, 13–14, 17, 19, 25, 26–28, 29–30, 33, 41– 42, 44–46, 48, 51, 64, 67, 92, 107, 109, 110, 146–147, 148, 152–154, 158, 174, 177–178, 181, 196, 205, 216, 224, 225, 261, 264, 268, 271 populism, 249, 253, 255 Presbyterians, 94 Prince, 50–51, 53, 226 prophet, 83 prostitute, 3, 213 Protestantism, 87 Puckapunyal army base, 136 Puritanism, 81 Purple Rain, 50

Q Qur’an, 75, 83. See also Koran

R R&B, 45, 49, 53, 60, 64, 65, 124, 189–191

313

race, 9–10, 12, 16, 33, 75, 78–80, 82, 86, 93, 94, 99–101, 105, 112, 122, 134, 137, 158, 183, 193, 198, 203, 206, 208, 217, 220, 225, 226, 270, 271 racial contract, 80 racialised, 48, 63, 65, 108–110, 192 racial profiling, 30 racial stereotypes, 198 racism, 15, 45, 49, 54–55, 74, 75, 87, 109, 121–122, 136–138, 169, 171, 176, 181, 188, 191–192, 193, 197, 198, 217, 262, 266, 268–271 racist, 30, 86, 171, 182, 185, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 204, 267, 268–270 Radiance, 162–163, 164, 166 rap, 49, 53, 173, 190 rave, 43–44, 65, 67 realism, 209–211, 214 real-seemingness, 209 Reclaim Australia, 74, 75, 106, 113, 222 Reconquista, 83 Red Faces, 170, 171, 183–184 referendum 1967, 125 Refugee Resettlement Watch, 84 reggae, 59, 191 religion, 3, 33, 73, 75–77, 78, 80, 81–82, 83, 84–85, 86, 89, 90, 93–95, 97, 99–102, 104, 111–112, 216 Rescue Christians, 109 Review of Post Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants, The, 45 Revised Migration Act, 5 Rex, John, 95 Rise Up Australia, 74 robodept, 30–31 rock’n’roll, 59 Rolling Stone, 43

314

INDEX

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 126 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 9 Royale Family, The, 242 Ruby Princess, 266 Rudd, Kevin, 120, 255 rule of law, 3, 21–22 Rumours, 53

S Sabbatarian, 90 sacred, 78, 152 Samson and Delilah, 127 Sapphires, the, 34, 124–133, 137–139 Satan, 81, 88 savages, 80, 81, 87–88 Sayles, Irving, 179 Schengen treaty, 268 Scots, 8, 96, 101 Second World War, 6, 8, 19, 42, 44, 67, 77, 92, 94, 130, 205 self-employed, 217, 239, 262, 265 separation of Church from State, 85 settler, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 9–11, 12, 14, 32, 34, 76, 93, 96, 107, 122, 125– 127, 129, 147, 148, 151–154, 156, 157–161, 162–163, 164, 179, 196, 198, 207, 215 sexism, 234 sexual freedom, 2 shared values, 2, 12, 33, 101 Sharia law, 74 Sleek the Elite, 190 Snowy Mountains Scheme, 8 social cohesion, 2, 13 social inclusion, 11, 272 social security, 26, 109 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), 87

Solid Gold, 59 Somali, Somalia, 17 Soul Deep, 124 South Africa, 15, 178, 226 South Korea, 267–268 sovereignty, 3, 4, 7, 18, 22, 29, 148, 150 Stadtluft macht frei, 136 state of emergency, 17, 19–22, 24–25, 28, 35, 261–262, 263–264 state of exception, 18–23, 31, 35 Steptoe and Son, 242–243 Stolen Generations, 121, 126, 128–129, 139 Sudan, 16 Sunnyvale, 231, 237, 239, 246–247, 248, 251 Supersessionism, 80 Supremes, 123–124, 129–130, 136 surveillance, 2, 4, 13, 24–25, 27–28, 30–31, 91, 262, 264, 271 Sydney Olympics, 158 Symons, Red, 170–171, 189

T Tahiti, 149–150, 161, 165 Tampa MV, 76, 98, 267 Tax File Number (TFN), 26 Ten Commandments, 96, 101, 108, 111 Tent Embassy, 126 terra nullius , 147, 152 terrorist, 24, 74, 76, 84, 98, 264, 267 9/11 terrorist attack, 24 Thatcher, Margaret, 6, 243, 254 Thriller, 183 Tiddas, 162–165, 166 Tiki Showband, 135 Till Death Us Do Part , 242 Tina Goes Shopping , 244 Tina Takes a Break, 244

INDEX

Top Forty, 45, 53, 56, 57, 60 Top of the Town, 43 Torres Strait, 34, 126, 146–147, 149, 151, 157–158, 162, 165, 268, 269 torture, 22, 104 Toula, 232, 246, 248, 254 Trailer Park Boys , 237, 249 Transforming Cultures eJournal , 106 Treaty, 4, 148, 152 tribalism, 101 Trudeau, Pierre, 9–10 Trump, Donald, 261, 265, 269 Turnbull, Malcolm, 11, 28 U Uluru, Ayer’s Rock, 156 Umayyad, 83 unAustralian, 76, 77, 108 Uncle Ed’s, 132 underclass, 3, 23, 30–31, 34, 265, 271 Understanding Australia’s Neighbours: An Introduction to East and Southeast Asia, 206 United Nations, 14 uptown, 49–50 Utopia, 161 V Valignano, Alessandro, 79 vaudeville, 169, 174, 183, 184 Vietnamese, 17, 58, 66 457 visa, 26 W Waplington, Nick, 243 war, 2, 6, 8–9, 11, 23, 30, 34, 42, 44, 46, 52, 58, 67, 77, 86, 92,

315

94, 99–100, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128, 130, 137–138, 176, 195, 196, 203, 205, 213, 215, 222, 262, 265 war crimes, 18 warships (American), 52, 60 Warumpi, 34, 145–146, 154, 157–158, 159, 164, 165 welfare, 108–111, 122, 139, 241, 242–244 White Australia policy, 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14–16, 33–34, 42, 47, 52, 58, 60, 62, 66, 86, 93, 94, 124, 125, 130, 131, 180, 182–183, 194, 211 White Christ, Black Cross , 89 white dancing, 57 white privilege, 194, 195–197, 198 white supremacy, 177, 195 Whitlam, Gough, 9, 14–15, 45, 47, 120, 125–126, 180, 211 Wik decision, 147, 148 Winmar, Nicky, 34, 172, 180–181, 184 Winners & Losers , 219 wog, 44–45, 46–47, 50, 60, 220 wogsploitation, 233, 238 Womanhood, Oriental view, 86 women’s rights, 2 work from home, 265–266, 271 World Trade Center, 76, 98 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War

Y yellowface, 173, 188 Yolngu, 148 Yorta Yorta, 123, 128, 130 Yothu Yindi, 148–149 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, 148–149