The SBS series Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta makes for difficult viewing. Racism, poverty, family dysfunction and crime present an often sad and ugly picture of the challenges faced by Vietnamese refugees as they settled into their new home following the abolition of the White Australia Policy.
But mercifully the take-home message is that these are challenges overcome. What this documentary provides above all is a story and a voice for this group of Australians who have formed a unique part of our history. As former Fairfield councillor Thang Ngo wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:
The Vietnamese refugee community has learnt that you need to find your voice and to take up your full democratic rights. Only then do you stop being guests in this country. That's the moment you become Australian.
For many people 'becoming Australian' means assimilation. Yet in a multicultural society assimilation is not a fixed goal. The multicultural experiment in Australia means groups like the original Vietnamese refugees help to define Australia, even as they learn to adapt to it.
At the heart of our multicultural ideal is the faith that whatever difficulties we face, unity can prevail if we let it. Migrants arrive as outsiders, but the boundaries between 'insider' and 'outsider' shift until our identity as Australians is revised. The message of Cabramatta is that time can heal all wounds.
Some in our society fear that our social cohesion is more fragile than we realise; that our unity and equality is undermined by a focus on our varied ethnic identities. In recent months Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt became the most publicised exemplar of this view.
Despite being found guilty of racial vilification for his comments regarding the self-identification of fair-skinned Aboriginal people, Bolt was not motivated by racism but by his ideal of what it means to be Australian. This view was informed by his experience as the child of migrant parents. He felt like an 'outsider' and initially sought refuge in the ethnic identity of his Dutch heritage. These days:
I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a