Who the bloody hell are you?

Do you have to love cricket, Kath and Kim and beer swilling to be a fair dinkim Australian? Or can we finally relax into the multicultural community we really are?

By Kate Gauthier

It’s interesting to speculate at what point after arrival does a person become accepted as a fully-fledged member of the community. My experience as an ex-pat in New York for six years made me realise what my immigrant dad was complaining about all those years. Americans would feel free to bitch in front of me about “wet-backs” and other immigrants “ruining this country” to someone who was basically another immigrant.

But because I was white and English speaking, they didn’t see me as such. I was immediately given the keys to the city and considered one of them, albeit a resident with a weird accent, and a penchant for potty-mouthed truths and beer swilling. It reminded me of the time when, as a teenager, I was told by a quickly discarded north-shore friend that it was OK that I was half wog because I didn’t look like it.

I often compare the behaviour of Strayan ex-pats overseas with immigrants in Straya. In NYC, many Australians will only socialise with other Aussies, so much so that locals coined the term “gum-nut mafia”.

And yet Australians have the gall to complain about people of Vietnamese background who congregate in Cabramatta. Honestly, haven’t these hypocrites ever been to Earl’s Court in London? The ground is thick with Aussies hanging out exclusively together on their European gap year. Do we expect Aussie and American workers in the oil-rich Arab states to live exactly as the locals? No. They submit to the local laws but within their own compounds they live as western as they can get away with. Why then do we have a double standard when it comes to others integrating into our culture?

Nowhere is this hypocrisy inflicted with such venom as on the newest and most vulnerable members of the Australian community – refugees.

In October 2007, former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said that Sudanese refugees were not integrating, citing instances of young men drinking in parks late at night and getting involved in fights in nightclubs. I would have thought this shows they are assimilating pretty well into our culture, these being the favourite activities of many young Aussie men.

The response from the African community and the broader Australian community was mixed. Some rallied around the Sudanese community, and many journalists wrote opinion pieces attacking Andrews’s comments. One letter to a newspaper stated, “I am not Sudanese. I am Australian.” This echoes the sentiments of many immigrants (or even their children) who are frustrated at being constantly identified as being other than just plain Australian: the Chinese-Australian, the Greek-Australian. Have you ever heard of anyone described as an English-Australian?

Read the full story in Corker Issue 1: Autumn 2008

Image by Kate O’Brien