This book is a documentary history and critique of the concept and policy of multiculturalism in Australia for the period 1970 to 1986. The book brings together for the first time a range of documents charting the emergence and implementation of multiculturalism across the main institutions of Australian society and culture. The institutions covered in the book are education, health and welfare, the Church, law, media, the realm of work and, as a summarising chapter, human rights and race and community relations in Australian society in the 1980s. The wide range of documents and the critical thematic introduction and contexting make the book ideal as a teaching text for students in many disciplines and an invaluable research source.

This book argues that in a globalising world in which nation-states have to manage population flows and intensifying cultural diversity within their borders, multicultural policy and approaches have never been more important. The author takes an extended case study approach, examining Australia’s experiments with pragmatic forms of multiculturalism and multicultural policy since the early 1970s up to the present. The Public Life of Australian Multiculturalism challenges some larger assumptions about multiculturalism – either that it undermines national identity or that it is, and should strive to be, a post-national approach to identity issues. Instead, it argues that framing multiculturalism by inclusive national identity has been the key to multiculturalism’s continuity and general success in Australia. The book also directly challenges the claim that we have entered a post-multicultural world, making a case instead for the continuing relevance of pragmatic approaches to multiculturalism. Students and scholars researching in sociology, politics, migration, multiculturalism, ethnic and racial studies, nationalism, and identity studies will find this study of interest.

This book argues that in a globalising world in which nation-states have to manage population flows and intensifying cultural diversity within their borders, multicultural policy and approaches have never been more important. The author takes an extended case study approach, examining Australia’s experiments with pragmatic forms of multiculturalism and multicultural policy since the early 1970s up to the present. The Public Life of Australian Multiculturalism challenges some larger assumptions about multiculturalism – either that it undermines national identity or that it is, and should strive to be, a post-national approach to identity issues. Instead, it argues that framing multiculturalism by inclusive national identity has been the key to multiculturalism’s continuity and general success in Australia. The book also directly challenges the claim that we have entered a post-multicultural world, making a case instead for the continuing relevance of pragmatic approaches to multiculturalism. Students and scholars researching in sociology, politics, migration, multiculturalism, ethnic and racial studies, nationalism, and identity studies will find this study of interest.

Study of the historical origins of multiculturalism in Australian politics 1945-1975. Foreword by Sir James Gobbo, former Governor of Victoria. Explores questions about multiculturalism, its origins and how it became a basis for the Australian government's ethnic affairs policy. Includes abbreviations, notes, bibliography and index. Author has a PhD from Monash University.

Offering an unflinching and informed defense of cultural diversity, this book boldly stakes a claim for the overwhelming success of multiculturalism in Australia. Arguing against European governments that declare multiculturalism a failure, it assertsathat multicultural Australia has been a national success story.aCreating a solid case for why multiculturalism works, itaargues against those who believe aamulticultural approach to integration and diversityais detrimental to society. This is a celebration of AustraliaOCOs cultural diversity."

Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia's thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

This book examines the experience of race and ethnicity in Australia after the withering away of official multiculturalism. The first chapter looks at the formation of the Australian state, the role that multiculturalism has played, and the impact of neoliberal ideas. The second chapter takes nightclubbing in the city of Perth during the 1980s, the peak period for official multiculturalism, to exemplify how diversity and exclusion functioned in everyday life. The third chapter considers the imbrication of Christianity in the Australian socio-cultural order and its impact on the limits of multiculturalism with particular concentration on Islam and the Australian Muslim experience. Subsequent chapters discuss the exclusionary experience of various groups identified as non-white through the lens of films, popular music and television programs.