Word: australians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vision goes beyond foreign policy and trade. In 1972 Don Chipp, a minister in the ruling Liberal government, suggested that Australia should become a multiracial society that could take "ideas, cultures and even people from overseas." Former Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell stormed in reply that no red-blooded Australian wanted to see a "chocolate-colored" country, while Liberal Cabinet ministers insisted Australia would remain forever homogeneous. Today Vietnamese immigrants gather around high-rise public-housing buildings in Melbourne's inner-city neighborhood of Fitzroy, playing cards or talking in the soft twilight. What they will make of Australia...
...massive postwar immigration, says Kalantzis, is one of two events of global importance to have taken place in modern Australian history. The other, she maintains, is the near destruction of Aboriginal society that followed the arrival of Europeans in 1788. Yet Aborigines have not only survived -- precariously -- but have begun to exert an influence on the public mind far beyond their numbers (250,000 out of a 17.5 million population). Examples of a burgeoning Aboriginal presence in Australian literature and music include Sally Morgan's 1987 autobiography, My Place, which chronicled a woman's discovery of her black identity...
...Australia, Asia has never been as important as it is today. It takes almost half of Australia's exports, especially the raw materials that stoke the region's seemingly insatiable appetite for growth. Japan has assumed a huge profile in the Australian economy, with 1 in 10 Australian jobs now in some way generated by Japanese demand, according to Gavan McCormack, an Australian visiting professor at the Kyoto Institute of Economic Research. The transformation has taken place in an astonishingly brief span of time...
...even today the link between Australia and its Asian neighbors is tenuous. Canberra discarded its whites-only immigration policy in 1976, but decades of Australian xenophobia linger in Asian memories. On Hong Kong and Malaysian television, Australia is often portrayed as a racist country. Australians, on the other hand, are still prey to what Governor-General Bill Hayden, the Queen's representative in the federal government, recently called "Orientalist fantasies," timeworn images of exotic, erotic and despotic Asians. Even after the cultural and economic transformations of the past decade, Australia differs radically from its neighbors in language, law, religion, concepts...
...only a slight trace of a Vietnamese accent, and he is training to be a surgeon -- one of Australia's first medical specialists of Vietnamese origin -- in Launceston, Tasmania. He has easily moved into the society he has come to call his own. Nguyen's sister married an Australian of Irish descent; one of his friends is a Greek who taught Nguyen Greek folk dancing at his wedding...