The SBS series Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta makes for difficult viewing. Racism, poverty, family dysfunction and crime present an often sad and ugly picture of the challenges faced by Vietnamese refugees as they settled into their new home following the abolition of the White Australia Policy.
But mercifully the take-home message is that these are challenges overcome. What this documentary provides above all is a story and a voice for this group of Australians who have formed a unique part of our history. As former Fairfield councillor Thang Ngo wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:
The Vietnamese refugee community has learnt that you need to find your voice and to take up your full democratic rights. Only then do you stop being guests in this country. That's the moment you become Australian.
For many people 'becoming Australian' means assimilation. Yet in a multicultural society assimilation is not a fixed goal. The multicultural experiment in Australia means groups like the original Vietnamese refugees help to define Australia, even as they learn to adapt to it.
At the heart of our multicultural ideal is the faith that whatever difficulties we face, unity can prevail if we let it. Migrants arrive as outsiders, but the boundaries between 'insider' and 'outsider' shift until our identity as Australians is revised. The message of Cabramatta is that time can heal all wounds.
Some in our society fear that our social cohesion is more fragile than we realise; that our unity and equality is undermined by a focus on our varied ethnic identities. In recent months Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt became the most publicised exemplar of this view.
Despite being found guilty of racial vilification for his comments regarding the self-identification of fair-skinned Aboriginal people, Bolt was not motivated by racism but by his ideal of what it means to be Australian. This view was informed by his experience as the child of migrant parents. He felt like an 'outsider' and initially sought refuge in the ethnic identity of his Dutch heritage. These days:
I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth ... I believe we can choose and even renounce our ethnic identity, because I have done that myself. But I also believe many people now increasingly do insist on asserting racial and ethnic identities.
Bolt's story mirrors that of many others from a different ethnic background who were born or raised in Australia. To those who feel they belong neither to the new homeland nor to the old one, the ideal of an individualistic Australia without ethnic labels may be very attractive.
The irony is that embracing an individualistic Australia that transcends ethnic heritage would leave us with a culture that is young, thin, and commercialised, lacking the deeper meaning and tradition that only come with time. Our mainstream culture has little history, little to distinguish us as Australians, or to enrich our daily lives with time-honoured customs.
It's one thing to become an individual in defiance of cultural inertia; it's quite another to have no real cultural inertia to defy.
The Vietnamese refugees who became Australians will never forget their history, their story. Andrew Bolt does not hesitate to remind us of his Dutch heritage and his struggle to reconcile it with the land of his birth. But those of us who have always been 'Australian' know no other heritage. We are the ones who are lacking a story and an ethnic identity.
Yet our stories do exist. I, for example, am descended from Scottish migrants who were driven from their ancestral homeland during the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. My ancestors lost their language and their culture; they married English migrants (despite the scandal of such ethnic mixing!) and raised their families in the townships of rural Victoria.
So I am not simply 'Australian'. I am the product of a people who lost their ethnic identity in the melange of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh migration to this strange new country.
If we wish to promote the unity and equality of modern Australia, the best thing we can do is learn our own forgotten stories of ethnic identity and heritage. I will never pretend to be Scottish, but nor should I forget the struggles and travails of my ancestors.
This is what it takes for, particularly, those of us who form the declining majority descended from the British Isles, to take our proper place in a multicultural society.
Zac Alstin is a research officer for Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide. He has an honours degree in philosophy, a graduate certificate in applied linguistics, and an amateur interest in Chinese philosophy.