Interwoven threads of Australian-Lebanese culture
Jill Kerr Conway has drawn our attention to the fact that we are all autobiographers whether we choose to formalise our stories on the written page or not.1 She urges us to pay close attention to the form of our stories, warning that the structure has a way of dictating an ending which conforms to what came before.
The same might well be said for societies and cultures as a whole. In Australia the debate over who composes, controls and disseminates our national stories is perhaps hotter than it has ever been before. On one hand there is a political desire to close down the spectrum to a single homogenising story steeped in a set of contradictory values, and on the other there is an apparent willingness to allow even that single story to be lost in a morass of imported ones from the United States, with the prospect of diluted ‘local content’ protection.
Interestingly, there has been a concurrent upswing in an art practice that speaks of the possibility of multiple stories, the telling of places and times from different perspectives.
It is the great conceit of the Anglophone settler nations that migrants are only welcome if they present the artefacts and customs of their culture for perusal on arrival, like traders in cultural capital, and willingly accept that their new nation can pick and choose which elements of their homeland they can keep and which must be discarded like potentially dangerous fruit in the bins provided. In this country, we quite like our immigrants to bring food, possibly quaint folkloric customs, and a little bit of colour. They are expected to leave their religion, their language, their