Sunday 11 June 2006

Multiculturalism or mulit-mono-cultures?

I'm currently living in a reasonably ethnic suburb. Ok, let's cut to the chase - I am living in wog-ville. I have gone from the white bread, anglo-saxon, English speaking, blonde haired, labrador lower north shore and eastern suburbs to the inner west. Italian is the first language up at our local shops. English is definitely a second language around here - and for once, I have got the rough end of the pineapple.

Not that I am complaining. I used to make pilgrimages out here from the north shore to buy the most excellent Italian hams and cheeses and smallgoods that the locals stock. You just can't make a nice pizza without top quality ham and gooey cheeses. The ham is something else - double smoked, nicely aged and sliced paper thin right in front of you. I don't always get what I went into the shop for as my Italian is very patchy. I asked for some sort of cheese a few weeks ago and walked out with an unpronouncable sausage. Once I get past "prego" and "ciao" I am lost.

There is one drawback to all this Italian culture - it is a very distinct mono-culture. I was thinking the other night about putting together a cheese platter of nice stinky cheeses, and I ran into a big problem - where to buy them in this neighbourhood. Stinky cheese is really the province of the French, with a bit of a nod to the Spanish, but the Italians just don't go in for wet, stinky washed rind cheeses or heavy, nasty blues like Stilton. Yes, the locals sell the greatest buffalo mozzarella and great parmesan that costs a bomb, but they wouldn't ever think of selling something that didn't have a green, red and white flag on it. The Italian cuisine is as far as their tummies and tastebuds will stretch.

So I had a dilema - where to buy some stinky cheese?

The local Franklins is a complete write-off. They sell white bread and coon and stretch the dairy cabinet to Kraft singles. Hopeless.

Then there is Supa-Barn. They sell a nice range of brie and stuff - they must have 10 different types of brie, but they don't go beyond that. They do however have a great range of quince paste and peach paste and other things that go really well with cheese on sale. I give them one thumb up and one thumb down.

I considered taking a walk from the office to the GPO, which has a really, really, really good cheese shop in the basement. Yes, the cheese costs about the equivalent of a pay packet (pre tax), and anything that I bought at lunch would be well ripe by going home time and I would be cycling home with a packet of reeking cheese on my back. I doubt any cyclist would want to follow me closely. Stinky cheese really is quite stinky when it gets going.

I ended up having to drive to Broadway to visit Harris Farm. They at least have one washed rind cheese on sale, but it is a bit of a girls blouse of a stinky cheese. As far as stinky cheese goes, it is the Kraft Singles of the stinky cheese world. It is a Claytons stinker. The stinker you have when you don't want a stinky cheese.

Very annoyed.

Anyway, my quest for a stinky cheese got me thinking about multiculturalism, and what it really means. To me, it means having the best of dozens of cultures. I get to pick and choose a bit of everything. Yep, come on over, bring your Thai cooking and learn English and settle down and live the good life. I'll eat at your restaurant 5 nights a week. No problemo.

However, what I see in my suburb is a distinct mono-culture. Multiculturalism isn't about a blending of cultures. That's complete crap. What we have is dozens of cultures all living cheek by jowl and largely not interacting. A non-melting pot of cultures. It's not like putting a bag of Smarties on the stove top and watching them melt - it's like leaving a bag of smarties in the fridge and watching them do anything but melt.

The only people getting anything out of these cultures are the Chardonnay swilling wankers a mile or two away in Balmain - the literati white bread anglo types who think they are being all multi-culti by eating Chinese once a month and attending the odd Mongolian film festival. The wogs around me would prefer to die rather than eat Chinese food. Chinese food is for the chinks - Italians eat pasta. Try asking an old wog how many curries he's had in the last ten years. Zero would be the normal answer.

The theory of multiculturalism is like putting a bag of Smarties in a circle and drawing a line between each and every Smartie - you end up with a non-hierarchial matrix of cultures all joined together. How nice and warm and fluffy.

The reality is that you have the dominant anglo culture at the top, and a hundred or so subservient cultures beneath it - think of the company org chart but with no middle management. All the lines go upwards to us, the descendants of poms, and none go sideways. You have a bunch of silos that do not connect (to use some recent management want words). That's great for me - I can watch the footy and the cricket and drink beer and red wine and have great coffee and gelato and Indian curries and Thai food and French cheese and vodka and tapas and sushi and all that kind of thing and think about what a great country this is.

Just don't try to get the Serbians to have dinner in a Macedonian restaurant.

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