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| Victoria's basalt plain is now home to people from all over the world. |
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| Digital composite created by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996, from photographs by Mark Trengove, Melbourne Market Authority and Merrill Findlay (ITF). |
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| Sashi (right back) and Vinod with their children, Ridhi (right front) and Sahil, in their shop in Footscray, on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay 2000. |
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Victoria's basalt plain is now home to people from every inhabited continent on the planet, and from many different islands in many different seas.
On the suburban streets, in the trains and buses, in the schools and around people's kitchen tables you can hear locals exchanging stories in over a hundred different languages.
Little stories about the familiar trivia and toils of their daily lives, and big stories about anguish and suffering maybe, and about courage and love. Stories that might have begun in far-off places, but continue here on this plain to be woven into the rich fabric that is this still-young but uniquely diverse and multicultured society.
Multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, is about acknowledging and affirming differences. Different ways of seeing the world. Different ways of being. The people of the indigenous nations of the basalt plain were the first locals to confront cultural difference with the arrival of the first Europeans, those strange pale-coloured people who sailed halfway around the world to these shores two hundred years ago. Australians can no longer hide the suffering that those early contacts caused, but we can be proud that small acts of reconciliation are occurring every day, and that some of the differences are slowly being bridged.
Since that first European invasion, many waves of migrants have brought yet more values, yet more belief systems to the plain. And now, in western Melbourne and Geelong especially, cultural diversity is something to be celebrated.
The truth is, however, that cultural differences between people can be very challenging. When others believe radically different things from you, when they speak and dress in different ways and eat very different food, when they are as shy about engaging with you as you are about engaging with them, and when their notions of what is polite and civilised behaviour mean they interpret your behaviour as rude or ignorant or arrogant or naive ... well, it can be very hard to achieve mutual understanding and friendship. Sadly, some people never even try. And even those of us who do can unconsciously offend.
Because it's so easy to offend ...
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| Venerable Thich Phuoc Tan, abbot of the Quang Minh Temple, planting a sacred bodhi tree beside the Maribyrnong River, at Braybrook, on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Photo by Le Van Tai, 2000. |
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I have to admit that I've naively offended many people as I've tried to reach out and understand both how they are different from me, and how they are the same. Take the other day, for example. I was visiting some Eritrean friends I hadn't seen for ages, and my friends' mother, a woman of great elegance and grace, offered me a bowl of nuts and dates. I smiled and reached for them, but with my left hand instead of my right. She said a few words in Tigrinya to her son, Brhan, and he translated her words for me: 'By tradition we don't eat with our left hand,' he said.
I apologised and blushed. My friends are very traditional Muslims, and to them eating with your left hand is extremely offensive. And I knew that! I'd known these people for over ten years. I'd visited them in a refugee community in Sudan, I'd stayed with other Eritreans in their homeland during the war my friends had fled from, and I'd travelled in other Muslim societies, but, in my joy at seeing Brhan and his extended family again, I'd forgotten the left-hand rule. And I'd also forgotten to take my shoes off at the front door. My friends smiled at my gauche behaviour and forgave me, but I still remember the incident with shame.
And I'm sure I unconsciously offended Sashi and her family when I visited their shop, Krishna Imports, in Footscray (See 'India in Footscray'), or the Venerable Thich Phuoc Tan and his congregation in Braybrook (See 'Buddha on the Maribyrnong') when I participated in community activities at the Buddhist Quang Minh temple. But like my Eritrean friends, both Sashi and 'The Venerable', as the abbot of the temple is called, have been extraordinarily good-humoured with me as they have introduced me to their own cultural heritage, and extended my own understanding of what it is to live on Victoria's culturally diverse basalt plain.
What are your stories about celebrating differences, and sharing your own cultural heritage with other people?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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