Robert Hughes reflects on his native land: Australia.
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Another reason why some Australians still want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian or black descent could settle in Australia, was abandoned in the 1960s, never to be revived. Whole suburbs, like Cabramatta in western Sydney, have become Southeast Asian enclaves. Though Australia admits only some 85,000 legal immigrants a year, a minuscule fraction of its population, the Asian component is very visible and it excites xenophobia. The role of the Queen as head of state has a calming effect, suggesting that the "old" Anglo-Australia is still notionally within reach.
Compared with their older selves, Australians — especially the younger ones — are a tolerant people. Few of the extreme emotions set off in the U.S. by the idea of multiculturalism have been awakened by its Australian version. We are, in fact, one of the world's most successful multicultural democracies, and this is an ethical triumph of no small consequence. Australians on the whole realize that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly bureaucratic polysyllable, responsible for so much hot air, really means learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of one's own. They realize, quite naturally and instinctively, that the desire to "give people a fair go," which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian life, also applies to immigrants, including those of a different color.
This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culti has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culti in the 1980s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.
Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work. It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British Empire has gone. The British Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive linkage between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined England as a foreign country. Australia's economic links to England, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison to its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union, and will act in accordance with its interests there, giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British because they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer "be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two countries are too far apart.
Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the hot emblematic issue in Australia's politics, as in America's, was communism. We feared Stalin and subversion by the enemy within; the "red menace" was played on, crudely but efficiently, by conservative politicians. Today all that is gone. Australian politics has a new emblematic issue, a different moral center. It has nothing to do with ideology. It is race: the politics of identity, of Aboriginal rights, and the obligation to face a murky and cruel history.