At the borders of belonging: representing cultural citizenship in Australia, 1973-1984

This thesis offers a re-contextualisation of multiculturalism and immigration in Australia in the 1970s and 80s in relation to crucial and progressive shifts in gender and sexuality. It provides new ways of examining issues of belonging and cultural citizenship in this field of inquiry, within an Australian context. The thesis explores the role sexuality played in creating a framework through which anxieties about immigration and multiculturalism manifested. It considers how debates about gender and sexuality provided fuel to concerns about ethnic diversity and breaches of the 'cultural' borders of Australia. I have chosen three significant historical moments in which anxieties around events relating to immigration/multiculturalism were most heightened: these are the beginning of the 'official' policy of multiculturalism in Australia in 1973; the arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese refugees as a consequence of the Vietnam War in 1979; and 1984, a year in which the furore over the alleged 'Asianisation' of Australia reached a peak. In these years, multiple and recurring representations served to recreate norms as applicable to the white heterosexual family, not only as a commentary and prescriptive device for migrants, but as a means of reinforcing 'Australianness' itself. A focus on the body as a border/site of belonging and in turn, crucially, its relationship to the heterosexual nuclear family as a marker of 'cultural citizenship', lies at the heart of this exploration. Normative ideas of gender and sexuality, I demonstrate, were integral in informing the ambivalence about multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in Australia. Indeed, for each of these years I examine how the discourses of gender and sexuality, evident for example in parliamentary debates such as that relating to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, were intricately tied to ongoing concerns regarding growing non-white ethnicity in Australia, and indeed, enabled it.