Vincenzo Andreacchio

Nat Trimarchi

Vincenzo Andreacchio

So we began that way. As well as that we enjoy making music. We enjoy making music. It illustrates three things. It illustrates what we're going to explore this morning, that is, it illustrates a development and shift and a renewed vision of multiculturalism, our experiences. It illustrates the cultural tensions as a result of diversity, the issues that live at the heart of cultural community development. You know, the voices aren't to be silenced. It also presents us with central issues that we will focus on as we project towards the next century and this is what we're going to be exploring.

One of the first points is that part of the issue of what we're trying to explore here is building cultural bridges. Those of you that understood the language would have immediately connected with what we were saying. The first song that I sang was a chant. It was by someone I heard in the marketplace, we were buying something in Spain and there was someone sitting there on the ground. He had woven a cloth and he was singing about the cloth that he had woven and it was for sale but the song was a cry because the cloth had a mark on it and because of the mark he had to lower the price to sell it at the marketplace and that meant one mouth less to feed.

The other song, Nescia Suli, it's very small, doesn't matter. The point behind that is that it's sung in southern Italian and as it was expressed earlier in our opening, Italy is culturally diverse and in the south the dialect is something that's very important to the people of southern Italy. So this particular song is quite critical here in our Australian context because you won't find in any textbook in any Australian school the dialect spoken of children that come from families of southern Italy. So the cultural genocide occurs not only across cultures but also within cultures. This is one of the dilemmas and issues that the community working with education is attempting to address.

Yet linguistically - and this is one of the dimensions of our discussion today - linguistically language forms a core value of culture and unless that particular core value remains part of the identity then the culture starts to become threatened and eventually there's a dislocation of the community and members of the culture. So the linguistic component is quite critical. We have all experienced - children from my generation that have grown up have had to deny their Calabrian dialect because, well, it's not formal Italian and it's not practical. We don't use it any more. It's something that we were totally removed from.

But linguistically and educationally it's a lost opportunity and this is how it connects up to CCD because they are lost opportunities and the lost opportunity is that the dialect actually links with the formal Italian but it's also a bridge with the Greek culture. There we have three cultural contexts. We have the formal Italian. We have the dialect of southern Italy and we have the Greek context. Then moving onto that we then we had Nat's song and Natale, would you like to say a little bit about your song.

Nat Trimarchi

This is really just an image of my mother and myself travelling on a train journey and being stared at by people at a very early age.

Vincenzo Andreacchio

In 1995 there was what was called the McKay report. Communities were surveyed right across Australia as to their attitudes to cultural diversity and multiculturalism. The responses were amazing. The attitudes that we had expressed and felt in the seventies and eighties reappeared in the late nineties The McKay report, it said things like "Nobody asked me whether I wanted to have a multicultural Australia," and things like "We had a white Australia policy but now it's in the reverse. The blacker they are, the more Asian, the easier it is to get in," and, "I sometimes find it offensive when these people are having discussions in their native tongue, especially if they talk loudly." Other comments like "The word must be out in Asia. You can come down here, be paid not to work. What a joke." Another comment, "Sydney will become an Asian city. I like it the way it was. Asian people are different, let's face it."

So the attitudes, the tensions that existed in the seventies and eighties still persist. So there have been changes but attitudinally they still do exist. What has changed though is something unique. Because of concepts that we have heard so far, things like globalisation and working in different cultural contexts, what has happened is that our environment, our work has actually been defined in four - what we call four very different frameworks, four community cultural contexts.

The first one is an intercultural context, the second one a cross-cultural, the third is intracultural and the fourth is a multicultural. Our song, for example, illustrates those concepts. Let's go through them slowly one at a time.

In an intercultural approach what we have is a situation where the context, the intercultural context, provides a very broad international relationship for a community arts project. So you have got one country in relationship to another country. Australia, for example, in relationship to Japan. There's a community exchange. There's artwork exchange between one country and another, for example, world music performance events. There might be cultural exchanges. There might be international exhibitions. The intercultural relationship context provides and suggests a particular way of working. I'm going to follow these up later on and show what are the key issues in working in these four different contexts but the first one, intercultural one, is quite important and has emerged because of our emerging relationship say with Asia.

The second context that we have found ourselves working in is a cross-cultural context and this is one that we're mostly familiar with in community arts. That is that one theme or an issue or an item of culture is explored at a particular time across a diverse range of cultural groups. For example, there might be projects which deal with communication style. It might be a violence towards children project cutting right across several cultures; attitudes towards women, so we're looking at women in different cultural contexts. One issue is taken at a time that's looked at across a whole range and series of cultures.

The cross-cultural context is probably one of the most common ways of working and yet one of the most important because it suggests important critical analysis skills that need to be dealt with here. So the second context, a cross-cultural one. I'm trying to highlight these because very often we have been using the words quite freely like multicultural whereas in actual fact we're really meaning intercultural or cross-cultural, so that's the cross-cultural.

The third one has been that we have been working in an intracultural community context, that is, we're looking at one cultural setting only. The uniqueness about the intracultural approach is that we are looking at the core values of the culture. What are the core values? Core values are the language, the religion, and the family. In those other contexts, in the intercultural and cross-cultural, those issues, the core values, do not come to the surface as often. In fact they very rarely do. If we're arranging an exhibition the core values aren't necessarily part of negotiation but in interculture they become part of the actual work.

Core values, we mentioned language and that's why we began with a song because the marker of any culture, what goes down to the deep roots, the heart of the culture, is the core values. The diagram here tries to illustrate the centre part, the core part, but surrounding it are things like food, the arts, one's political views, health care and so on, but at the centre the moment you touch the core values - the language, the notion of family, or religion - then the culture starts to feel weak and crumbled and the person may feel alienated from the culture. That's what happened with us. When we grew up we were told not to speak the Calabrian dialect, as I mentioned before, and so 20 years later there's this alienation that we feel from our own families, from our own communities because of that.

One way to commit - this has been known in history - to commit cultural genocide is to target the core values, that is, the language. Some cultures take religion as the core value. For example, one has to be of the Malay religion to be Malay. We're not asked to be of a particular religion to be Australian. To be Hebrew once again one has to be of the Judaic religion. So in some cultures religion takes the priority of the core values. In others it's the family, in the Italian culture the family far more - especially in southern Italy - far more than language. Decision-making is done collectively in a family context. Even the simple thing of setting up a tablecloth, a tea table, "Which one are we going to set up? Let's have the one we had when auntie came last time," or "We shouldn't have this one because we have had it twice." It becomes a collective decision-making issue. In Vietnamese culture, very similar, the family is a high priority core value.

So in the intracultural context what I'm getting at here, the core value notion of the culture is critical. This doesn't appear in the intercultural and cross-cultural. Then we have the multicultural context. What makes the multicultural unique nationally and internationally is that Australia, we have this issue of identity and participation and equity which we have all become familiar with in the last 10 years. They are critical issues in our work, in our community work. In other words, we need to be participating.

Several years ago when we had the International Year of Tolerance there was a concern, there was quite a bit of concern, especially in South Australia at conferences there, with the notion and the word of "tolerance". Why? People were saying, "We don't want to be tolerated, we want to be accepted. We want to participate in society equally with all other Australians." So the participation and identity issues are part of the work. In other words, my identity is involved in the work that's happening. I'm not a response to it. It's actually part of the process, and that is unique.

Here we come to a very important part of the agenda. The agenda that has been working - and this is one of the perceptions that has changed - is that we have been speaking and using the words "cultural diversity." The word "multiculturalism," some people still feel uncomfortable with it and do we replace it with "cultural diversity"? My personal opinion is no. If we replace multiculturalism solely with cultural diversity then we lose that important dimension which we have constructed in the last 10 years in policy making as to what is unique about multicultural policy because after all, Japan is culturally diverse. Israel is the highest culturally diverse nation in the world. Australia is second but Israel is not a multicultural nation because its attitude towards its minorities is very different to ours in the way we deal with minority groups, minority ethnic groups here in Australia.

For example, the Arabic population which is about 1 million in Israel, on their passport they have a particular mark, a particular identity which distinguishes them from the rest of the population. You can't as an Arab join the army. Japan is culturally diverse. We're dealing with Asian countries which are very culturally diverse but Japan in its outlook is monocultural because once again its attitudes to its ethnic minorities is quite different. In the education system they have been very conscious that Japan is this country that was engulfing economically the rest of the world, so to change the perception the whole education system was revamped about 6, 7 years ago with the intercultural perspective, that is, trying to link up, projecting a cultural link with the rest of the world. But its attitudes within Japan have remained very much the same. So a lot of the indigenous people, for example, in Japan are pushed to the north of the island.

So those are the four contexts which have been clearly put in front of us in our working context and the way we approach community arts and to be able to distinguish between the four is quite critical. What I'm not suggesting is that one is more important than the other. What I'm also not suggesting is that one is exclusive of the other. They do actually overlap. But it's important to know which context wešre working in because they require different skills and we will be looking at this in a moment.

So those are the four contexts, that is something unique that is emerging now at the moment. How are we dealing with this on a policy level because, for example, one of the things that Japan is very interested in Australia about is that we are actually developing policies. We're one of the very few nations that do have a multicultural policy as well as policies like the Creative Nation policy of 1994 in which we speak about cultural rights. Not many nations actually, in policy form, stipulate a commitment to cultural rights. So how is this expressed in policy? In this part I will hand you over to Nat who will illustrate quickly the current multicultural position within the Australia Council.

Nat Trimarchi

The second one is to recognise, support and advocate for the participation of artists and communities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the arts. I have a little footnote here and the footnote basically explains that the main focus of this policy in terms of this objective, in terms of encouraging participation, is on people from non-English speaking backgrounds and Australian South Sea Islanders. These are two of the access and equity target groups that government has identified over the years. The other target groups of course are Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. The Australia Council has recently adopted a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts policy. So this policy, the Arts for a Multicultural Australia policy, focuses specifically on these particular communities in terms of encouraging participation. The reasons for that are similar to the reasons that we were talking about earlier, to do with language, culture and the cultural context.

The third objective is to promote cultural understanding as a key competency in the development of proficiency in expression through the arts and in the administration, facilitation and promotion of the arts. In other words, in all aspects of the arts there are cultural competencies that are essential. What we're talking about here in terms of the community cultural development area in particular is that if you're wanting to look at audience development, if you're wanting to look at any aspect of the arts where you're trying to engage people from non-English speaking backgrounds or Australian South Sea Islanders, then community cultural development processes are central to that because community cultural development processes are about developing long-term relationships with communities. Essentially the point here is that other art form areas in doing that work can learn a lot from the community cultural development processes. That's it really.

Vincenzo Andreacchio

We looked at things like in their vision statement; did they express aspects of cultural diversity and multiculturalism? Was it embedded in their policies and plans? Did the representation on management committee reflect cultural diversity? The cultural mapping, did that reflect cultural diversity? The research component embedded that came out in the policies of the organisation, did that reflect cultural diversity? What about the training and development programs and the networking and the activities undertaken and completed by the organisation? How far had they actually gone in reflecting the multicultural perspective's?

This is a very quick survey of the arts organisations. With regard to visions and policies you will see a strip goes down from South Australia down to Tasmania there's a band which is roughly in the middle area, low to middle area.

When we come to participation of non-English speaking background and indigenous representation, once again low to the medium band. Research, extremely low throughout Australia. Training and development, low to medium. Activities completed by the organisation which clearly demonstrated cultural diversity or multicultural perspective's, as you can see, quite low.

So we come to the point that, okay, in this context that there are full cultural perspective's, in the context that there is a policy, what competencies, skills and knowledge do we need as community cultural development workers working in the field, to be able to work in these contexts? It seems that it's been implied by what we've said there are four things. The first one is that there needs to be clear understanding of theory and concepts related to multiculturalism.

For example, one of the important things in debate is to be able to deconstruct debates. Pauline Hanson debates need to be deconstructed. What is the difference between race, cultural diversity and citizenship, the notions there? We need to be clear about what those concepts are so that we can use language to deconstruct, well, in this case, attitudes towards racism and the comments like we say in the McKay report.

The second one is management skills and we need to have strategies for being able to work together collaboratively, networking and facilitating participation of people of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and we've seen some of that happen already, there are some very good examples. Networking, it's happening but it's a very important component and facilitating participation of people of diverse cultural backgrounds, another important area.

Cultural understanding, Nat's already mentioned that, and this includes knowledge of the core values of culture which I mentioned and the familiarity and sensitivity of cultural appropriate practices, traditions and customs. This runs right across the board, whether it's intercultural cross-cultural, intra and multi. For example, if you're doing an exhibition in an intercultural setting, then the appropriate practices, traditions and customs are quite critical in the negotiations and so on, which we're all familiar with.

The last one is cross-cultural communication skills, highly critical to be able to work effectively in culturally diverse communities and this includes knowledge and awareness of use of languages other than English. So those are the four key competencies to be able to work effectively in communities and culturally diverse communities.

Just before we finish tying everything together between our song and the songs that we presented, which by the way I didn't mention before - I mean, I was born in Southern Italy, came to Australia, the song I sang was in Spanish, working in cross-cultural context has been for me a major preoccupation. I feel quite at home, quite within my family within the Spanish culture, within the Calabrian culture, within Indian culture because Flamenco is inspired by Indian music; in fact its rhythms are Indian based and so familiarity and moving within the Indian culture is quite part of the norm.

So this method of cross-culture working in the music field in particular is quite high but just to conclude, it seems that we are living in a moment of history that calls for a very bold imaginative interpretation of the idea of democracy and diversity. Is not only the salt of life but the cutting edge of creativity, a creativity inspired by the human condition searching for a sense of worth, purpose and identity by our culturally diverse communities. It's clear that community arts practice is the source of enrichment for all aspects of Australian life. Whilst there are forces that threaten our cultural democracy, and in particular the indigenous people of this country, it's equally evident that there are communities working together with unitive purpose, the achievement of unity in diversity and it's this that we have to celebrate as we embrace the 21st century.