Performing Australian Ethnicity: 'Helen Demidenko'

The positioning of minority cultures is symptomatic of the paradox at the heart of national cultures. Do they 'belong' in terms of assimilation and appropriation or do they constitute the exclusionary framework of 'foreign bodies' which both encloses and defines a national culture? In the settler colony of Australia, the issue of minority literatures, including the emergent writings of the Indigenous peoples, continues to be a thorn in the flesh of those who maintain the institution of Australian literature. After all, this cultural formation was really only consolidated in the 1970s by those left-wing intellectuals who managed to place class and, to some degree, gender at the centre of these definitions. Thus Australian literature emerges in the latter part of the century as respectably replete with workingclass and women writers. There was, however, little acknowledgment of the impact of post Second World War immigration which redefined, in retrospect also, the 'always-already' multicultural character of Australia. It has been difficult to gain any serious recognition for writers from those sixty or more groups who wrote both in English and other languages but whose writings were, until recently, neither, systematically nor comprehensively, collected or studied as a significant part of the Australian literary heritage (Gunew 1994). The difficulties have continued to perplex critics in the field who have had to deal not so much with any version of 'backlash' as with an entrenched refusal to take minority cultures seriously. Indeed, the small gains that have been made within, for example, the ambiguous orbit of 'multiculturalism' in both its state and 'community' manifestations, have provoked consistent 'backlash' reactions to attempts to introduce concepts of cultural and racialised difference, or efforts to illustrate the hybridised nature of all cultural productions. A recent major literary controversy in Australia highlights some of the complexities involved in these debates.