I've recently been working on a little survey of my own, looking at some demographic information of health care users. For the most part this has been relatively painless, asking information on people's age, medical condition, employment status etc. But it got really interesting when we started looking at how to ask people about ethnicity.
In fact, the very first debate was about what to call it. There are so many terms that mean subtly different things, subtleties that are lost in the general public but are the kind of thing politically correct health policy workers care deeply about. What is your ethnicity? What is your race? What is your country of birth? It took a great deal of research and negotiation before we finally agreed on 'What is your ethnic or cultural background?' Covering all bases there...But the next hurdle was by far the most interesting. Australia has significant populations from hundreds of countries. As a major post World Wars destination, there are many deeply ingrained European communities who have been here for generations. In Melbourne alone there are Jewish neighbourhoods, Vietnamese neighbourhoods, Italian neighbourhoods, Turkish neighbourhoods... So how do you make a list of options for ethnic/cultural background that is inclusive of all major population groups? And what do you call white Australians?
Caucasian Australian? No, nobody knows what Caucasian means. Australian of European descent? No they're not from Europe. White Australian? Please! So we finally settled on.... an open box. And the funny thing is that most respondents simply write 'Australian'.
So what does it mean to be Australian? And why does it matter so much? Well in New Zealand, its a debate people have been having for a while. In fact a whole movement was formed to replace the census classification New Zealand European with the term New Zealander/Kiwi. And they were successful, as in 2006 Statistics New Zealand caved and created a new category called New Zealander.
It is a fascinating debate, and one that I don't have a clear position on. On the one hand I understand that people who are descendants of settlers feel distant and unrelated to the country those ancestors moved from. Their grandparents, and often their grandparents' grandparents, were not from Europe. So why the European label? On the other hand, I can't help but feel deeply distrustful of people who so firmly reject their colonial past. Their ancestors were from Europe. It isn't anthropologically correct. Yes their nationality might be New Zealand, or Australian, but their ethnicity is not.
The other problem, and I think my main problem with this form of thinking, is that it is a subtle and underhanded way of othering people who are not of European ancestry. If people of European descent fall under the ethnicity 'New Zealander' where do Maori people fall? If people of European descent fall under the ethnicity 'Australian' where do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders fall? Where do I fall in all of this? This 'New Zealander' and 'Australian' nonsense seems to me a natural extension of the Don Brash One New Zealand line of thought, or that horrible icky term 'post-racism'. No special treatment, no other cultures, no other race. We are all one, and of course that one has no room for anything other than majority right?
Maybe my issue is that my sense of identity is so fragile. Being mixed race and having lived in three different countries now, I'm pretty confused. I have very little affinity with South Africa - pictures of the landscape, the music, the cinema, it all leaves me cold. I have even less affinity with India - I don't speak an Indian language, I'm never identified as Indian and Indian South Africans certainly never accepted me as one of them. And don't get me started on my feelings about my European roots... Nationality wise, I feel a complete and utter affinity with New Zealand. When I travel and people ask me where I'm from, the answer is always New Zealand, without pause. That doesn't help me fill out a census though.
My feeling reading the census results was mixed. I'm happy to be living somewhere so multi-cultural. I'm glad that minority populations might soon approach majority. But I must say I'm very sad that I no longer live somewhere that challenges ideas of nationality and ethnicity as rigorously as New Zealand does.
