"We're multicultural mate!": regional Australian discourses of multiculturalism and the reproduction of 'white Australia as a national identity

This paper considers the complexities of „everyday understandings‟ of multiculturalism as a discourse to deal with racialised difference. The paper is based on one of the author‟s doctoral researchi which analyses the complexities of how whiteness and race are socially produced and lived in regional Australia. Drawing on a set of qualitative interviews conducted in South Australia with 29 people who self-identity as „white Australian‟ we consider the social and political history of a „white Australia‟ continues to inform the terms of multiculturalism for these people. We argue that this reflects the ways that state multiculturalism manages diversity and obscures the language of race. As a consequence the white national identity remains raced without an everyday vocabulary to deal with it.