By BAC member John Rhodes.
The message came home from my son’s school:
We invite all students to take part in our school-wide Harmony Day celebration. Students are encouraged to wear cultural dress or add a splash of orange to their school uniform. We look forward to embracing the rich multicultural heritage of our school.
I cringed. My son, Magic Dino Warrior (that’s who he is, just ask him) started Kindergarten this year and I’ve been alert to the possibility* that the Public School would veer away from teaching him letters, numbers and hat-mandatory play into unauthorised political and cultural territory. And here it was — students being encouraged to express their native ethnic identities. Don’t they know the State is meant to encourage a colour-blind meritocracy? That we shouldn’t notice or mention people’s ethnic background?
And then I realised that my gut reaction came from my own childhood experiences. I grew up in a different time, in the 90’s the mainstream was (over) optimistic about the success of the multicultural policy agenda. As such we were encouraged, as Anglo Australians, to believe we had no ethnicity or culture, and we were also encouraged not to “see” race or ethnicity. I think of the much played lamb ad where the Dad puts his foot in it asking the clearly Asian friend of his daughter ‘where she is from’ at dinner (“Ballarat”, of course).
Those days are gone. The progressive consensus that drives public education has decided that ethnicity, if not race, is too obvious to ignore, that the current political and cultural landscape means they can’t even try to tell us not to see it. What is seen cannot be unseen. So they instead choose to embrace ethnic identity as part of an exercise saying just how bloody good it is to have so many of them.
This is progress. Clearly, those of us with British heritage must for our own interest recognise our own culture and our own distinct ethnicity, and there is no way for antagonistic forces, even while trying to lift another ethnicity up, to do so without raising our consciousness of our own ethnic identity. And Harmony Day is far from the only place this dynamic plays out. The now-routine Aboriginal Welcome to Country and smoking ceremonies operate on the same logic — they draw a formal distinction between Indigenous Australians and everyone else in the room. That distinction is meant to elevate one group, but it necessarily defines the other. Reinforcing difference cuts both ways.
Once ethnicity becomes something worth naming and celebrating, that includes ours — not defensively, but as a normal part of the conversation. It gives those of us with British heritage standing to talk about who we are and where we come from, on the same terms as everyone else.
My son attended Harmony Day clad in tartan, representing his own distinct ethnic heritage in a way I was never encouraged or allowed to. I don’t think that was quite what the school had in mind. But that’s the thing about making ethnicity visible — once you open that door, everyone walks through it.
* certainty