Shifts in attitudes towards British migrants from the late 1940s to the late 1970s chart the development of a non-British Australia. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, British migrants were accorded a special prestige based on a belief that Australia and Britain had fought to defend shared imperial British values. Although British migrants protested at hostel conditions, public sympathy remained on the side of the migrants. The rise of the Whingeing Pom stereotype around 1960 reflects the declining weight of British wartime experience and a strengthening of the idea of an independent non-British Australia. The 1970s saw the ending of British preference, and the debate surrounding British activism in Australian trades unions raised the question of whether British migrants were now merely an ethnic group within a multicultural Australia.
In their interactions with international students, either at home or abroad, teachers often find themselves speaking on behalf of the nation. Overseas students arrive with expectations created in the international education marketplace, expectations that depend more on a nationalist than on an internationalist outlook. Students also have ideas of national difference acquired through the globalised media. Teachers who seek to critique the nation by deconstructing media knowledge need to consider the ethics of engaging with their students' sense of self-identity and the pedagogical risks of questioning their own authority to speak on behalf of the nation. Internationalising the curriculum means developing teaching methods and assessment instruments which will invite students to reflect on their imaginative journey into ‘new’ and ‘different’ cultures; but it will also require the teachers to reflect on their own conflicting identities and loyalties, and to make that journey alongside their students.
Melbourne, like other cities that aspire to a global status, has attempted to enlist Indian popular film as a means of attracting Indian investment, business migration, tourism and international students. Key to understanding the representation of the global city in Indian popular cinema
is the much-marketed concept of the cosmopolitan lifestyle, and Melbourne's distinctive trams are used strategically to link consumerism with an urban lifestyle. Nonetheless, we need to look beyond the shopping malls to the other corporate spaces of what Saskia Sassen terms the glamour zone,
to the offices, hotels and apartment blocks, if we are to understand how multinational corporations not only use Indian popular cinema to promote their corporate brand but also work with government agencies to promote city brands which aspire to resemble New York or London. By viewing Indian
popular cinema through its representation of Melbourne as a global city, contradictions within the apparent embrace of globalization by Indian popular cinema are thrown into relief.
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