Multicultural Education in the Australian Context: An Historical Overview

Abstract

Australia’s experience of multicultural education, in its various phases arose at the intersection of the nation-shaping circumstances of British loyalty, Indigenous-oppression and reconciliation politics, geographic anxiety, mass settler recruiting immigration, the US Alliance, Asia-literacy, economic crisis and rejuvenation, educational experimentation and innovation. These elements are discussed chronologically from the inception of multicultural discourses in the early 1970s to the tenuous and contentious position of the multicultural interpretation of Australia today, and can be organized under wider themes of demography, geography and economy. Three phases of Australian ‘learning from ..