Australia's 'tough conversations' about diversity are yet to happen

Australia Broadcast Center

5 days ago

When the nomadic, quasi-Australian, quasi-American restaurant critic, Besha Rodell, finally returned to Melbourne in 2017, she sent her American-born teen to a local school, only for him to come home regularly shocked by the talk he discovered in the schoolyard.
In her thoughtful and beautifully written memoir, Hunger Like a Thirst, Rodell writes of her 14-year-old son's first days of school " … baffled by the teenage customs and prejudices of his Australian classmates. 'They tease people here for being poor' … racism and homophobia were thrown around casually, as banter, in a way that would never have flown in the Los Angeles public schools he'd attended."
In her book about food, journalism and a life trying to find home, this wasn't the sentence I expected would stop me dead.
With a son in middle school myself, in a socio-demographic setting in Melbourne almost identical to Besha's, we had also been grappling with reports of the "roasting", trash-talking and general jeers and banter that came home from our son's school. Some of the stuff — racist, homophobic and sexist — was just appalling. It seemed almost impossible for any of the kids to avoid being swept up in it, especially the younger ones.
I couldn't figure out if it was commonplace, a generational thing, or specific to certain demographics — "class" is something you just can't talk about in Australia. But then of course I remembered the disgusting public chants of various private school kids that I'd covered over the years, and I remembered all the way back to my childhood, when the preferred insults of "dyke", "lezzo" and "poofter" were common at my state school.
Whereas a certain aspect of the commentariat would have you believe that fears of "cancellation'" have not only eradicated any non-inclusive language, but made us painfully too cautious, the reality seems far more troubling: how common is this kind of talk among our young students?
And why is the contrast with America so significant?
I asked Besha. She said she could not suggest that her son's experience was universal, but Felix, now in his early 20s, went to a huge school in the middle of Los Angeles, "about the most liberal place you could be". And the socially similar school her son went to in Melbourne — an inner north high school — was not somewhere she expected to encounter bigoted viewpoints as part of the accepted culture.
"We live(d) at the top end of Carlton and kids would tease him that he probably lived in the commission flats — in LA there was absolutely no shame in being poor, and in fact his wealthy friends were the ones who felt the need to defend themselves," she said.
Besha said that half the kids he knew in the US were black, Asian, Latino, had gay parents.
"One of his best primary school friends was trans and everyone just accepted it like it was no big thing. The schools he went to here were much, much whiter, and where there were Asian or black kids, they were socially fairly segregated."
Besha's writing life has bounced her back and forth between Australia and the US for decades: her comparative analytical skills are well-honed when it comes to considering the two cultures. She is under no illusions about the horrors of the US school system — like thousands of other American parents on that day in 2012, she rushed to her son's school just to be near him and to take him home when she heard about Sandy Hook.
But she can, perhaps more clearly than many of us, see the cracks in the stories we tell ourselves.
"I do think Australia suffers from this idea that we're basically an equitable society, and to talk about our deficiencies is to stir trouble, miss the point or be ungrateful. That has definitely changed over the last 10 to 15 years, or is beginning to, but we still haven't had a lot of the tough conversations, publicly, that America has had to have."
This week I heard the journalist Jan Fran — who with Antoinette Lattouf has an excellent news podcast called Ette — reflect on something similar: she wondered if we really were as successful a multicultural country as we like to think. The faces, the food, the surnames that dominate modern Australian culture comfortably lead us to believe that we've "done" multiculturalism better than anyone else: when "every Australian town has banh mi" how could you think otherwise?
But Fran isn't buying it anymore. Talking about diversity in newsrooms, including at the ABC, she said that Australia's multiculturalism is "peripheral: 'dots' of cultures and ethnicities that orbit the monoculture like satellites, hoping to get close, but never quite at the centre".
It's an analysis that stings, particularly when the slang comes home from the schoolyard and all the epithets are — still — about the assumed outsiders. When our parliaments, newsrooms, judicial benches and many other institutions all look a certain way, the satellite theory lands.
In this weekend's reads we have scams, frauds and the secret life of chauffeuring pets — which actually sounds like the dream.
Sailors to bikies — How tattooing became mainstream
INXS's Hottest 100 win: How worlds collided for Never Tear Us Apart
I quit my 30-year career as a flight attendant and became a chauffeur for petsResentment doesn't have to mean the end of a relationship
One week in the NT's Youth Justice Court shows effects of tough bail laws
The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters
Have a safe and happy weekend: I'll be at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's live performance of one of my favourite films of all time — yes, it's even in my Letterboxd — How to Train Your Dragon. I'm taking all the tissues with me to get through this scene, and its immortal music by the composer John Powell, in one piece. If you're in Melbs, I hope to see you there. Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.