Edition 61
Who We Are
- Published 1st May, 2018
- ISBN: 9781925603323
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
The idea that Australia is, in the words of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, ‘the most successful multicultural nation in the world’ is important to the nation’s sense of identity, but at times it seems that multiculturalism is more an article of faith than a work in progress.
Australia’s population has virtually doubled since 1975, and in recent years the rules around migration have been altered significantly. The apparent certainties of Australia as a permanent settler society are giving way to the precarious churn of temporary migration.
Who We Are, co-edited by Julianne Schultz and Peter Mares, gives voice to Australia’s changing reality, explores the big issues of belonging, citizenship and participation, and teases out how contemporary Australia might evolve. Contributors include: Tim Soutphommasane, Mirandi Riwoe, Randa Abdel-Fattah, James Button, Maria Tumarkin, Andrew Jakubowicz, Favel Parret, Laura Jan Shore, Donna Lu and many more.
Griffith Review 61: Who We Are is published with the support of Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith Business School.
In this Edition
The great transformation
IMMIGRATION HAS BECOME one of the great defining, dividing issues of our time. In Europe, it is helping to overturn governments, dissolve old political certainties, spawn large populist movements and, in Poland and Hungary at least, perhaps destroy democracy itself. Anxiety about immigration drove...
Citizenship elegy
FOR A MOMENT, as my plane finally descended into Canberra at the end of the long trip from Germany, I thought it must be making an emergency landing. I could see no trace of human life below. This seemingly uninhabited landscape was where I was to take up...
Race and representation
LIKE THE MEMBERS of every nation, Australians have fairly stable ideas about the kind of people we are, to the point of there being a clichéd sense of national identity. It goes something like this: we are fair and egalitarian; we are friendly and...
They must not talk…
MY PARENTS ARRIVED in Australia on a fine September Sunday in 1946, a light to moderate westerly blowing across Sydney Harbour. Their ship, the MS Yochow out of Hong Kong, had entered the heads on slight to moderate seas; it berthed at number 10...
No, I’m not your ‘Asian model minority’!
I HAVE A confession to make. Some years ago, while enjoying solace in a café, a well-nourished white bloke accosted me by thrusting his newly purchased cookbook in my face and demanding an autograph. ‘I love your recipes,’ he gushed. I signed his book with a...
Pumpkin seeds, angry minorities and race
DURING MY DOCTORAL fieldwork researching Islamophobia from the point of view of the ‘Islamophobes’, I spent many weekends in the town of Bayside on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where my parents had bought a holiday house. I had detected that Bayside’s unmistakable Anglo-Australian...
Self-imagery and self-deception
Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future...
Homesick
IN THE BEGINNING, I had to avert my eyes – not that he’d asked me to or anything. Sometimes I’d try to make myself look, but I could never quite bring myself to. My not-looking reminded me of times as a kid at the local swimming pool,...
Beyond the pale
My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’ ‘HEY, DON’T CLIMB that fence!’ It was perhaps an innocent warning to my five-year-old son, intended for his protection. But I was...
The hospital for bare life
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this essay contains references to deceased people. IN LATE OCTOBER 1959, in a small town in the far north-east of Western Australia, a woman brought her six-month-old to the District Hospital, known locally as the ‘White...
Only connect
Dedicated to the memory of Michael Gordon (1955–2018) THE PEOPLES OF the Indian subcontinent have a significant presence in contemporary Australian culture: as the second-largest non-European cohort of the population (after Chinese-born Australians) and the fourth-largest immigrant ethnic group; as Sri Lankan refugees languishing in...
Where are you from?
AT A PARTY last year, towards the tail end of summer when leases go up for renewal and people move jobs and cities, a close friend of mine found herself in an odd discussion. We were at a share house in inner Brisbane, a renovated...
Who do they think we are?
Each Australian has both sexes, and if a child happens to be born with only one, they kill it as a monster… They average about eight feet in height… In some areas they are found with an extra pair of arms coming out their...
Discrimination and the body
THE WORDS ‘WELCOME’ and ‘opportunity’ are used throughout the Department of Home Affairs’ migration webpages. There is the occasional sun-drenched photo. In each portrait the smiles are wide. Everyone looks satisfied and at ease. These are bursts of liveliness amid reams of dry text....
Re-imagining Parramatta
THERE ARE JACKHAMMERS everywhere. A new Parramatta is emerging out of the rubble, seeking to make real its tag line: ‘Australia’s next great city’. Thickets of new residential and commercial towers are rising – testament to the city’s ferocious ambition – overshadowing what remains of the squat,...
History never repeats?
RECENTLY, I WATCHED worried policemen and politicians denounce the crimes of Sudanese Australians. If you only caught the headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking that Melbournians were sandbagging their houses and stockpiling canned goods as a wave of African gang violence swept the city. Listen...
Not another diversity panel
WHAT I WANT is for three people to speak to you. Merlinda Bobis, Julie Koh and Mammad Aidani. You may know one of them, three of them, none of them. Whatever. I will speak to you too, I guess. So it’s one of you and four of...
Sentenced to discrimination
ON AUSTRALIA DAY in 2016, artist Elizabeth Close was at an Adelaide shopping centre speaking to her young daughter in Pitjantjatjara, when a woman approached and said to her: ‘It’s Australia Day. We speak English.’ Close was shocked, and replied, ‘Pardon?’ The woman slowed...
The stories we don’t tell
EVERY MORNING I would press my nose against the glass and try to imagine what this place could be. A bare room with white walls and beautifully polished floorboards in a shopfront next to a laundry and a bus stop. As I waited there for the...
At home with strays, strayers and stayers
‘STRAYLYA’. THAT’S HOW I can remember first hearing it – stray-lya – as if it was a place filled with strays. I wasn’t aware at that very young age of paying too much attention to the origins of the country’s name. But later I recall a growing sense of...
In the same boat
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this essay contains references to deceased people. SWINGING IN MY hammock, it’s hard to get to sleep. Beside my head the sea bounces between hull and wharf – a hollow liquid sound, repetitive scrape and gollop. The...
Good fences
RUBBERNECKING. THERE’S NO denying that was my intention as I huddled with the growing crowd behind the blue-and-white checkered tape, our smartphones at the ready. On the other side of the temporary barrier were dozens of emergency workers in high-vis vests. All heads were turned skywards...
Debt in paradise
ANNIE TRIED TO leave. She had no cash, just a car full of possessions. She’d worked full-time for four weeks with not a cent to show for it. ‘Wait on, you owe us $60.’ She couldn’t believe it. ‘Uh, no I don’t.’ The manager showed her a computer...
A bird flew from the mournful left
IF, LIKE ME, you have very few better things to do with your time, you may have noticed the humble Australian white ibis going through an image makeover in the last four years. It has transformed from being considered a nuisance in the city,...
Islam in the outback
ON A DUSTY corner just before the Oodnadatta Track begins to unfurl across the centre of Australia, there is an unassuming mud-walled building on the edge of Marree, a town with a population of one hundred and fifty. Grey nomads pull up outside the general...
The applicant and the sponsor
QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS AND more questions. Twenty-seven pages of questions for the applicant and seventeen for the sponsor. Is the relationship genuine? Describe the development of the relationship? What are the financial aspects of the relationship? What are the social aspects of the relationship? They are compiling a thesis on...
The gherkin jar
OUR FOOTSTEPS ECHO as we climb the stairs. My grandma holds my hand. Shhhhh – be quiet! My grandpa is sleeping. The third-floor flat, the heavy wooden door, and inside the smell of warm pipe tobacco and homemade cakes. Take your coat off – hang it on the coat...
Gold mountain woman
On the first Sunday of our summer-reading program, Griffith Review shines a spotlight on Mirandi Riwoe’s ‘Gold mountain woman’, published this year in Griffith Review 61: Who We Are. Set predominately in North Queensland during the gold rush of the 1870s, this stunning piece of...
Local spirits
DECEMBER NIGHTS IN the mountains of the Abruzzo are long. People get cabin-fever in these snow-bound high villages on the Adriatic coast of central Italy. By the winter solstice, it is not unusual for the locals to devise escapades on the slightest of whims....
Three poems: A hard name, Chameleons, Damaged
A hard name There were reds under the beds when we were growing up and someone at school always ridiculed my name the name of the woman spy frozen in a cold war movie. It has been a hard name to carry a hard name to explain but sometimes it starred in a...
Schadenfreude
The rosy she-oak table gleams, laden with bowls of steamy stew, a bottle of red and four glasses. The glissando of our voices. She tells the story of her garbage bin. The stink which turns out to be a rat, which gnawed open a crack and got stuck, half in, half...
How we see ourselves
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. Søren Kierkegaard Australia: that image of you swinging in a hammock with your turned down vowels & breezy Saturdays sea foam & bleached sand, always...
Featured Contributors
Mirandi Riwoe
Mirandi Riwoe’s novella The Fish Girl (Brio Books, 2018) won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V and was shortlisted for the...
Sheila Ngoc Pham
Sheila Ngoc Pham is a writer, producer and radio maker. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Australian...
Masako Fukui
Masako Fukui is a writer and producer based in Sydney. She has been a freelance radio documentary producer at...
Maria Tumarkin
Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. Her latest book is Axiomatic (Brow Books, 2018). She teaches in...
