ABSTRACT. This article challenges the theoretical opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism with empirical research on the ways in which a group of ordinary Australians talked about multiculturalism in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. It shifts attention from identity work to the understanding of day‐to‐day social relations: it finds that they are strongly nationalist and yet also display a cosmopolitan embrace of the benefits of cultural diversity. They draw on the inclusionary resources of Australian nationalism and its history to strengthen their cosmopolitanism and calm their anxieties about living with diversity. Their commonsense conceptualising of Australia's contemporary multicultural society in terms of a mix of individuals rather than an ensemble of groups is crucial to understanding why cultural diversity has been embraced within the framework of the nation.
This article examines policies of Aboriginal assimilation between the 1930s and the 1960s, highlights how different forms of settler nationalism shaped understandings of the Aboriginal future, and explores the impact of the shift from biological notions of Australian nationhood (white Australia) to culturalist understandings of national cohesion and belonging. Assimilation policies were underpinned by racist assumptions and settler nationalist imperatives. Aborigines of mixed descent were a special focus for governments and others concerned with Aboriginal welfare, "uplift" and assimilation. This is most evident in the discourse of biological absorption of the 1930s, but lived on in notions of cultural assimilation after the Second World War. One of the ongoing motivations for assimilation drew upon the nationalist message within "white Australia": the need to avoid the development of ethnic or cultural difference within the nation-state. The article highlights an ideological split among the advocates of individual assimilation and group assimilation, and uses the writings of Sir Paul Hasluck and A. P. Elkin to illustrate these two views. * Thanks to Judith Brett, John Cash and Eugene Victor Wolfenstein who read and commented upon earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers whose comments and suggestions proved invaluable in teasing out the argument, and the editors for several improvements.
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