I was moved and humbled late last year at my otherwise unremarkable RMIT graduation ceremony to hear the representative Wurundjeri elder invite the audience at the Telstra Dome to take a leaf or two from a gum tree the next time we saw one, and, in doing so, consider ourselves welcome on the land. I could not help but wonder what the audience thought of the gesture, given that it consisted largely of parents of international students. I do not believe immigrants living (even temporarily) in Australia can see that they have exactly the same psychical considerations and responsibilities regarding the land as do people whose forebears may have participated in its colonisation.

Australians are in a unique position in the world: we are surrounded by nationalities we do not understand. Furthermore, we are in possession of land traditionally owned by a people we do not understand. We tell jokes about situations involving Englishmen, Irishmen and Frenchmen, or Kiwis, or blacks, or Asians, because a joke about a situation involving an Indonesian, a Malaysian and a Korean makes little sense to us. The frequency (and similarity in context) of reference to ,Australian natives’ or ,Aborigines’ in the writing of non-Australian academics is also illuminating.

Irrespective of Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation, the Australian ,condition’ is irremediable – Patrick White nails this in Voss and A Fringe of Leaves. Australia, the United States, (and now the UK) are atypical places in that people live side by side with people they have little to no understanding of. Cultural diversity is sometimes stimulating, but its net product – at least, on an economic rationalist backdrop – is tension and conflict due to the lack of awareness by the majority, and the branding of any identification of difference as ,racism’. In mainland Europe stereotypes are more acceptable because they are patently truthful, but stereotyping does not constitute racism. The Collins English Dictionary defines racism (with my italics) as

1. the belief that races have distinctive cultural characteristics determined by hereditary factors and that this endows some races with an intrinsic superiority over others
2. abusive or aggressive behaviour towards members of another race based on such a belief.

Of course races have distinctive physical characteristics determined by hereditary factors: that is how they are defined. But even if one wants to hold the (more difficult) position that cultural characteristics are determined by hereditary factors, holding simultaneously any respectful variety of cultural relativism diffuses (by definition) the spectre of racism. Neither does a mute act of discrimination based on stereotyping constitute racism, if in it there is no notion of intrinsic superiority.

Some tensions arise, however, based not only on cultural dispositions but on fundamentalist religious systems. Abu Bakar Bashir made news in March when in a speech he likened tourists in Bali to „worms, snakes, [and] maggots”, and specifically referred to the immorality of Australian infidels. He demands tourists stay out of Indonesia, or suffer retributions by the Indonesian youth, which he calls upon to „aspire to a martyrdom death”, and not to „follow human law that is in conflict with Allah’s law”. I have never been to Indonesia and I have never had a desire to go there as a tourist. Especially since the treatment of Schapelle Corby and the Bali nine, a non-Muslim (or kafir) would lack conscience to unthinkingly trespass as a tourist in that Islamic land.