Migration, aboriginality and acculuturation

This chapter is based on the story of my experience of teaching a youth migrant class for the Adult Migrant English Service (AMES) in Sydney in 1996. It was this experience that later I spired my research for a Doctorate in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) on using drama education for anti-racism (2007). My own process of development as a teacher prepared me to teach this youth migrant class called Circuit Breaker, an AMES programme for intermediate level English recent arrival youth who were having difficulty acculturating into the Australian education system. This inspired me to present a paper called Aboriginality, Racism and the Circuit Breaker Program at a cultural action conference convened by the Centre for Popular Education at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in 1997. The positive reception given to this paper at the UTS conference and the subsequent demise of the Circuit Breaker and other youth programmes by Howard’s Liberal government, elected in 1996, motivated me to do my PhD to document my teaching journey for the benefit of other teachers and interested parties. In this narrative my very personal process of being a child migrant myself became political in the context of a government that some social commentators like Philip Adams (1997) considered to be a retreat from tolerance with elements of racism (see Andrew Markus, 2001). I reflect on the Circuit Breaker paper, which comprises the core of this chapter. Even though I only spoke Romanian and German when I came to Australia, I had no special support for learning English. There seemed to be an emphasis in the society, that to be truly Australian one needed to be of British descent and a Christian. As a Jewish person of Eastern European descent, I felt like I needed to conceal my background if I were to be accepted in Australian society. As I grew up in Sydney, I became aware of Aboriginal people living in certain parts of the city and yet for all my 17 years of formal education to a tertiary level, I knew very little about who these people were and why they were here. I was acculturated into what Professor Marcia Langton described as the toxic “relationship between Aborigines and many Australians of British background” (SMH, Saturday, 29 April 1996). I could not accept this view of Aboriginal people. So I began to research this topic and I made a film of Aboriginal people living in La Perouse in 1971. This process triggered my own questions of belonging and sense of place. In this chapter I explore these questions as a teacher and a researcher. My methodology includes auto-ethnography, narrative inquiry, historiography and praxis. It is framed within the discipline of social ecology, which includes perspectives drawn from personal, social, ecological and spiritual domain. This frame led to an emergent theory from my doctoral research of an ecology of culture, which in Australia constitutes three major cultural projects: the indigenous cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people; the colonial British culture that began with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and the multicultural project that became public policy in the 1970s. An ecology of culture uses system theory based on ecology to illuminate our understanding of culture.