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The noisy arrival of Hansonism on the mainstream political scene in Australia has, it could be said, had something
of the effect of an opening of a Pandora's box of racially based social distinctions in the Australian national
psyche. Of course, its not the first time such a can of worms has been dramatically opened. Ever since the
bipartisan policy of socio-political homogeneity known as the White Australia Policy quietly gave way to the equally
bipartisan policy of socio-political heterogeneity (or multiculturalism) in the nineteen-sixties and
nineteen-seventies, there have been sporadic outbursts of public yearning for the psycho-social security of times gone by
(i.e. for the relaxed and comfortable, to paraphrase John Howard, era of the nineteen-fifties and before). Indeed,
all throughout these good-old-days gone by, racial distinction was a central tenet of Australian public and private
life; assimilability to an ephemeral Australian way of life was the yardstick by which Australianness was measured,
and race was the primary determining factor of this assimilability.
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It is against the background of Hanson-inspired political race-card playing, then, that Jon Stratton has written his
Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis; a book which, as he puts it, was born out of a conviction that it
was not only an intellectual necessity but of political importance that somebody should write about the meaning of
race in multicultural Australia (9). There is a persistent myth, as he calls it, that race, as a concept and as a
determining force, has been effectively expunged from both political discourse and everyday life in the thirty or so
years that multiculturalism has been the new high coda of Australian national identity. The inaccuracy of this
myth, for Stratton, is what makes the discussion of race an intellectual necessity. Race, he argues, has not
disappeared, it has merely changed its status: from being the thing which determined culture, race has undergone a
transformation to the status of a signifier of culture. In something like an epistemic shift from the absolutes of
modernity to the relatives of postmodernity, race has slipped from the status of maker to that of marker.
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It is this slippage which allows someone like Hanson to, on the one hand, express what seem to be straightforwardly
racist sentiments, and yet on the other hand, to claim with some vehemence that they are not in fact being racist.
It allows Hanson herself to expound upon the threat to the Australian way of life posed by the Asian menace to the
north, while claiming to have nothing but respect for those Asians who have made their homes here, provided their
loyalty is to Australia. They are Australian you see, despite their racial otherness; they have adopted Australian
culture, their race no longer makes them necessarily culturally different, no longer automatically excludes them.
The threat Hanson is talking about is in fact from alien cultures to the north, cultures which are signified
by race -- and not from alien races working to determine culture. So, racism as a mode of socio-political expression
is replaced here by a form of culturalism: the essentialising of differences between cultures, and the ordering of
value based on these differences.
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All this leads into what I presume Stratton means when he talks about the political importance of elucidating the
concept of race in the current Australian context. It is important to have a clear recognition of how the
discourses of race and of culture operate in order to effectively challenge political positions which are founded on
racial and cultural distinctions. And it is this clear recognition which Stratton is trying to provide here. For
the most part he makes a convincing and thorough job of it. There is a concentration on the issue of race in
relation to immigration and immigrants, however, which inevitably appears at the expense of a similar concentration
on the issue of race in relation to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. It is accepted almost everywhere,
though, that these are two almost separate issues, and are each so big in themselves as to make any attempt to deal
with them in tandem unwieldy in the extreme. In any case, an analysis of the political self-racialisation of
Aborigines in Australia would probably not fit very well with Stratton's thesis about the primacy of culture over
race in contemporary Australian national self-imagining.
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And besides, it is always easy to criticise on the basis of what has not been said. In terms of what has been said,
I found Stratton's distinction between official multiculturalism and everyday multiculturalism to be an interesting
and valuable contribution to the project of understanding modern Australia. I also found his assertion that
official multiculturalism, as a political policy, is more conservative than it is liberal, to be both
thought-provoking and, on reflection, probably close to the truth. It does appear to leave the assumed centrality of white,
Anglo cultural forms in Australian society largely unchallenged: under official multiculturalism they remain the
benchmark against which everything and everyone else is measured and categorised. His notion of everyday
multiculturalism being a kind of creolisation, a process of cultures merging to form a new unique culture is, I
think, closer to the mark in describing what is happening in Australia today. The centre is shifting, and becoming
less monolithic. Mainstream Australia is all the time becoming harder to define in terms of culture, as well as of
race. It certainly is in a daze of some sort.
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With its clever title, and striking Warhollian cover design (Pauline Hanson as objet d'art?), then, this book
makes an interesting and informative read, and one which any student of Australian racial and/or cultural politics
will find useful.
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Details
Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis. By Jon Stratton.
Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 1998. ISBN: 1-86403-053-4; RRP: A$ 24.95.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Paul Mc Cormack. "Race Days, 'Race Daze'." M/C Reviews 24 Oct. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/race.html>.
Chicago style:
Paul Mc Cormack, "Race Days, 'Race Daze'," M/C Reviews 24 Oct. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/race.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Paul Mc Cormack. (1999) Race Days, 'Race Daze'. M/C Reviews 24 Oct. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/race.html> ([your date of access]).
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![[image]](http://media.socialchange.net.au/pluto/gifs/154_racedaze.gif)