The Broome Mix is useful to bear in mind when thinking on all things multicultural - cultural diversity. In Broome that's culture - a mix of Aboriginal, Asian and European.
"I used to boast about you, my son the painter. You painted trees, now you paint squares to humiliate me." Quote by the artist's father in the early 1970s Melbourne.
Looks at the art practice of Gunta Parups who was and remains a displaced person. The experience of leaving one's homeland as a refugee at the age of thirteen during the war is etched indelibly into her being.
In December 1990 the South Australian Government announced a new 'Multiculturalism-in-the-Arts' Program to encourage major arts organisations in receipt of government funding to increase their activities for people from linguistic and culturally diverse backgrounds.
A great deal of agonising has gone on since the 1988 Bicentenary about the nature of Australian identity and therefore the nature of our distinctive culture.
At times, life feels like a collection of unrelated events, a necklace without the string. Christl Berg writes of her experiences of leaving Germany when she was 25 and having lived in three different continents with three different cultures at varied stages in her life.
It is the responsibility of Australian Collections to preserve this material - correspondence and manuscripts as well as printed texts - in many languages, not as exotic flowers of 'accented' literature, but as integral parts of the history and literature of multicultural Australia.
The Australian National Gallery's library has just completed a project which documented ethnic and immigrant objects in about 750 photographs. The bulk of these photographs show textile and ceramic craft brought with immigrants to Australia or made in Australia following traditional methods and designs. Nearly 20 ethnic groups from Europe, the Middle East and Asia are represented. Photos of textiles included.
Exhibition Review: Tandanya Adelaide South Australia January - June 1991. Interviews with curators Kerry Giles Kurwingie and John Kean. Images of inma at Ernabella included in the article.
Above all we need new myths to suit the new Australian culture which is part of the Asia Pacific region. We can't live by Aboriginal myths alone, as some have suggested, in a land so changed by our coming. The unpacking of cultural baggage by writers of all cultural groups, old and new, has to continue until it gives rise to a myth which we all recognise as fitting the Australia to which we have contributed. Wrote David Malouf.
The alphabet was invented, so they say, in Lebanon. To some Lebanese, their country represents an un-broken link with the birth of human history. Non-Aboriginal Australians, by contrast, share stories of interrupted family ties, of exile and forgetting. How then do these Lebanese relate to life in Australia?