Living cultural diversity in regional New South Wales

![CDATA[Bob Birrell and Virginia Rapson (2002, p.11), in an article for People and Place, claimed that Sydney and Melbourne, and to a lesser degree Perth, constituted Australia’s multicultural heartland and that the rest of Australia was distinctive for its relative absence of ethnic diversity. This, they speculated, had contributed to a profound fissure between the city and the bush. Sydney and Melbourne, they claimed, contain the generators and transmitters of the multicultural and cosmopolitan ideals which are now so influential in intelligentsia circles, and rearguard resistance to these images is largely based in regional Australia (Birrell and Rapson 2002, p. 21). As this paper foregrounds, not only are there parts of regional Australia that are notably culturally diverse, multiculturalism as a way of understanding this diversity may indeed be embraced by these communities. The town of Griffith, located in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, in the Riverina region of New South Wales, is the focus of this study of multiculturalism in regional Australia.]]