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The cosmopolitan city and its Other: the ethnicizing of the Australian suburb

2008; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14649370802386487

1469-8447

Graeme Turner,

Urban Planning and Governance

Abstract Abstract In this article I argue that there has been a significant cultural change in the meanings attached to two specific sites in the Australian cultural imaginary—the city and the suburb. I see this change as the product of opposing versions of multicultural Australia. In several Australian cities, particularly Sydney, although the combination of multiculturalism and economic globalization has helped to create increasingly cosmopolitan inner city suburbs, it has also contributed to the development of an antithetical but perhaps more politically significant version of the middle or outer suburb. This new version of the suburb is defined by minority ethnic or racial identities; it is increasingly represented as criminalized; and its development runs against the grain of the traditional conception of the suburb in the Australian national imaginary, as well as the globalizing rhetoric endorsing a cosmopolitanizing transnational citizenship. The context for the discussion is given particular force by the series of ‘race riots’ which occurred in the Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla in December, 2005. These events raised serious concerns about the fate of multiculturalism in Australia and highlighted the tensions that lie beneath what is often regarded as a successful set of social policies. Keywords: multiculturalismcosmopolitanismnationalism Notes 1. See Skrbis et al. (2004 Skrbis, Zlatko, Kendall, Gavin and Woodward, Ian Stuart. 2004. ‘Locating cosmopolitanism: between humanist ideal and grounded social category’. Theory, Culture and Society, 21(6): 115–136. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); and Skrbis and Woodward (2007 Skrbis, Zlatko and Woodward, Ian Stuart. 2007. ‘The ambivalence of ordinary cosmopolitanism: investigating the limits of cosmopolitan openness’. The Sociological Review, 55(4): 730–747. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 2. Craig Calhoun talks of this as the ‘cosmopolitanism of the frequent traveler’ (Calhoun 2003 Calhoun, Craig. 2003. ‘Belonging in the cosmopolitan imaginary’. Ethnicities, 3(4): 531–568. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3. See, for example, Graeme Turner (2003 Turner, Graeme. 2003. ‘After hybridity: Muslim‐Australians and the imagined community’. Continuum, 17(4): 411–418. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 2007 Turner, Graeme. 2007. ‘Shrinking the borders: globalization, culture and belonging’. Cultural Politics, 3(1): 5–19. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 4. For example, Amanda Wise (2005 Wise, Amanda. 2005. ‘Hope and belonging in multicultural suburb’. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(1/2): 171–186. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Greg Gow (2005 Gow, Greg. 2005. ‘Rubbing shoulders in the global city’. Ethnicities, 5(3): 386–405. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). An edited collection entitled Everyday Multiculturalism is being co‐edited by Amanda Wise for publication by Palgrave in 2009. 5. The standard size of the suburban block in Australia since the end of the Second World War until relatively recently was a quarter‐acre, allowing room for a large backyard and a driveway. The allowance for a backyard, in particular, enabled the discourses of the rural and the natural to be a fundamental part of the meanings of the suburban home. 6. For those unfamiliar with Australian culture, ‘the bush’ is the term used to refer to the rural communities established since the beginnings of white settlement, as well as to the rural landscape itself. So, ‘the bush’ can also reference a model of community that is collectivist and egalitarian, as well as to a particular location that is thinly settled, and not urbanized in terms of infrastructure or lifestyle. For most of its history, Australia has understood the experience of the bush community as the foundational, authentic and formative, experience of white Australia. 7. When C. J. Dennis’s ‘sentimental bloke’, the hero of a the most celebrated series of Australian poems as well as a successful Australian film at the beginning of the twentieth century, decides to give up his evil ways (gambling, drinking and hanging out with his mates from ‘the push’) his conversion to a more stable way of life is signified by his leaving the city behind to settle on a bush selection with his beloved Doreen. It is a trope that is repeated time and again throughout Australian cultural production in the twentieth century. 8. Even the notorious ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ Tourism Australia campaign in early 2006, a campaign widely seen to be shamelessly recycling all the old clichés about Australian identity and reversing the tendency I am describing here, was nonetheless dominated by these more contemporary trends. 9. This program pioneered lifestyle programming in Australia with a mix of gardening advice, low cost interior and exterior design, do‐it‐yourself projects, and craft – all aimed at the activities that could be performed in the average suburban home or backyard. A major ratings success for its network, it ran for 18 years. 10. The program was revived in late 2007 when the Nine Network was facing ratings defeat by their closest competitor for the first time in decades, and when the Friday night slot was proving a difficult one to fill. The revival of the program, however, was not successful in reversing that decline. 11. Even those accounts most skeptical of the actual positive effects and intentions of the policies of multiculturalism, tend to accept that it has been thoroughly embedded in Australia’s cultural life: according to Peter Murphy and Sophie Watson, for instance, for all the mythology used to legitimate it, ‘Multicultural Sydney is simply here to stay’ (Murphy and Watson 2000 Murphy, Peter and Watson, Sophie. 2000. Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium, Sydney: Pluto. [Google Scholar]: 35). 12. Murphy and Watson even link the process of inner city gentrification, too, to the economic restructuring and globalization of Sydney’s economy: ‘Gentrification of inner Sydney, like elsewhere, has been driven partly by nostalgic interest in older housing—and a new cultural capital associated with these sites—and partly by a desire to live close to entertainment and cultural facilities which are typically found in the inner city. An important part of the explanation of gentrification has been growth in demand for symbolic analysts [that is, those employed in banking, finance, the media, advertising and so on] to fill private sector and government jobs in Sydney’s CBD’ (Murphy and Watson 2000 Murphy, Peter and Watson, Sophie. 2000. Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium, Sydney: Pluto. [Google Scholar]: 104). 13. See O’Connor et al. (2001 O’Connor, Kevin, Stimson, Rober and Daly, Maurice. 2001. Australia’s Changing Economic Geography: a Society Dividing, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 143‐4); see also Connell (2000 Connell, John. 2000. “‘And the winner is….’”. In Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Edited by: Connell, John. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 6). 14. See the accounts in O’Connor et al. (2001 O’Connor, Kevin, Stimson, Rober and Daly, Maurice. 2001. Australia’s Changing Economic Geography: a Society Dividing, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]), Fagan (2000 Fagan, Robert. 2000. “‘Industrial change in the global city: Sydney’s new spaces of production’”. In Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Edited by: Connell, John. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]), and Collins and Poynting (2000 Collins, Jock and Poynting, Scott, eds. 2000. The Other Sydney: Communities, Identities and Inequalities in Western Sydney, Melbourne: Common Ground. [Google Scholar]: Part One). 15. For more discussion of this see Murphy and Watson (2000 Murphy, Peter and Watson, Sophie. 2000. Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium, Sydney: Pluto. [Google Scholar]: 40–44), as well as their chapter on the ‘pink dollar’—the development of the gay and lesbian tourism markets in Sydney; and Sant and Waitt (2000 Sant, Morgan and Waitt, Gordon. 2000. “‘All day long, all night long’”. In Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Edited by: Connell, John. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 189–221). 16. Gary Punch, a Federal MP, reported on a 1995 conference dealing with Arabic speaking youth in the St George area (south‐western Sydney) which noted the high rate of unemployment among Arabic speaking youth (i.e. aged 16–25): 41% compared with 26.7% for the total population at that time. It was also reported that the Lebanese population in general had the highest rate of unemployment: 54.7% compared with 8.9% for total population at that time. (St. George Lebanese Joint Committee 1995 St George Lebanese Joint Committee. . Arab‐Australian Youth in Sydney. conference proceedings, St George Lebanese Joint Committee. Rockdale, NSW. [Google Scholar]: 14). 17. This is also a continuing theme in Jock Collins and Scott Poynting’s edited collection, The Other Sydney. 18. The election of independent candidate Pauline Hanson to the federal Senate in 1996 was enabled by a wave of electoral support for her attacks on multiculturalism and her warnings that Australia was being ‘swamped by Asians’, thus endangering the distinctiveness of an Anglo‐Saxon cultural identity. 19. For a closely contemporary take on this, see Murphy and Watson (2000 Murphy, Peter and Watson, Sophie. 2000. Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium, Sydney: Pluto. [Google Scholar]: 33–35). 20. The name of the political party launched by Pauline Hanson in the mid‐1990s. 21. The motif of the divided city is widely used in contemporary discussions of the political and social make‐up of Sydney. It informs all of the published work by Collins et al., it provides the thematic thread for Stimson et al.’s Australia’s Changing Economic Geography and it is the focus of Chapter 5 in Murphy and Watson’s Surface City. See also Michael Darcy (2000 Darcy, Michael. 2000. “‘Housing: the great divide’”. In Sydney: The Emergence of a World City, Edited by: Connell, John. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]).