Lao Australians on Sydney's Urban Fringe: A Non-Cosmopolitan Transnationalism?

Abstract

The research project on Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian Australians that informs this essay was designed in part in reaction to the marked stereotyping that has beset these communities from the early days of their settlement in Australia.1 Representations of the Vietnamese community as insular, secretive, and anti-assimilationist continue to this day, and reflect traditional Australian anxieties around Asian migration. The media-fueled moral panic around the Vietnamese ghetto in Australia has gained support from the fact that, from the early days of settlement until now, Vietnamese Australians show the highest levels of residential concentration of any ethnic minority community in the nation.2 Cambodian, and to a lesser extent Lao, Australians also live in relatively concentrated communities in the same suburban areas as do their Vietnamese Australian counterparts, and have been tarred with the same brush.