Suburbanasia!

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is a disagreement about just how multicultural the established media really are. Do NESB identities remain in the excluded margins of the symbolic nation imagined by the media or have they, to some extent, 'come in from the cold'? Two 'sides' in this debate are identified. The first is marked by the work of Tom O'Regan, and the second by that of the UTS Racism and the Media Project. In this paper it is argued that Australia is, as O'Regan has suggested, beginning to witness the 'mainstreaming' of multiculturalism in its mass culture. In making this case, the specific example of representations of Vietnamese in the Australian media are referred to. A greater volume and variety of representations of Vietnamese are beginning to be seen, some of them 'positive'. The common assumption that there exist only negative media images of Vietnamese has had a blinkering effect. In the case of the film, Romper Stomper, discussion of the film's deep preoccupation with ethnic difference was occluded by knee-jerk critical readings of its marginal and negative portrayal of Melbourne's Vietnamese community. The paper concludes by suggesting critical multiculturalism needs to move away from an understanding of the established Australian media as exclusivist and cultural absolutist. It would do better to focus on the ways in which existing inegalitarian intercommunal relations are reproduced under a cultural logic which positively values difference and tolerance.