Passengers on Train Australia - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ien Ang
LET ME FINISH WITH AN EXAMPLE that illuminates the current debate: the English-language requirement for Australian immigrants. I have no objection to the requirement as such; passengers who step into the train must know that the ability to speak English is essential to a viable life in Australia. English has become the lingua franca of the nation – an outcome of the continent's history of colonisation and its modern development – and it is now a fact of life. But hectoring immigrants to ‘speak English or else' reveals a spiteful lack of empathy with the enormous hardships of trying to learn a new language, often with scarce resources and limited time. The perspective of those who do not communicate in English is born of the frustration of not being able to. Defensiveness and ethno-linguistic enclaves are often the result – not out of wilful separatism, but a sense of insecurity, shame and failure.
It is important for monolingual Anglo-Australians to recognise this, and to be disabused of their linguistic intolerance. The presence of migrants speaking languages other than English may sometimes be a ‘problem' or a ‘nuisance', but it may also help people get used to a world where linguistic diversity rules, despite convenient illusions that ‘everyone speaks English'. At the same time – and this is important for conversation – the work of integration should engage with such groups by making the most of the possibilities of translation.
Ashfield Council in Sydney, for example, has experimented with a program of working together with Chinese restaurant owners to translate their shopfront signage and menus – which long-time locals often find offensive – and present them in both Chinese and English. Such bilingual representation encourages the understanding that these restaurants are accessible, and expands the possibility of intercultural familiarisation. Elderly Anglo-Celtic residents were invited to the restaurants to taste the food, in an effort to overcome their anxiety and fear. Such experiments are a practical, even mundane, way of promoting a cosmopolitan multiculturalism. Such strategies writ large could help bind the nation together in a non-assimilationist way.
There is no definitive or perfect way of resolving the multicultural problematic – only ways of juggling multiple, often competing truths and realities, and imperfectly reconciling divergent interests and perspectives. While extremists and assimilationists propound a singular world-view, cosmopolitan-multicultural integrationists resist the violence of easy simplifications, acutely aware that cultural diversity will not go away. The train does not, indeed, have a destination – it only goes around and around, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. The task for the passengers is to reach out and talk to each other. ♦