One of the Australian political debates in recent weeks has been around returning the country to a monoculture
This has been of of those pointed remarks that stupidly aims at the country’s longterm view of being multicultural because, after all, we’re largely a population of migrants.
In some ways the Australian fear of being swamped by a foreign culture is a response to our unease about the history of the nation, which formed from colonisation of the oldest continuous human cultures in the First Nations.
It’s a potent raw nerve for conservative politicians and has been exploited in fears of “boat people” and most recently been espoused as the desire for a monoculture that was expressed by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
Given my parents were both born overseas, you can likely guess where I sit in this debate.
Wherever you look in the history of Australia (or the continent before that name) it was never a monoculture -- even the centuries of rivalry between the Angilican and Catholic churches points to the conflict between English and Irish migrants from the day soldiers escorted convicts onto a sandy beach.
However, I was watching a Rick Beato discussion just now and realised the notion of a monoculture is another of the “Golden Age” type arguments that somehow propose returning to an earlier time that will never be within reach because technology now prevents it.
There’s this thing that we call the monoculture that were, where hit songs back in 2005 if you had a hit song, everyone knew the song.
It was played at the stores, grocery stores, everywhere you went. It was on the radio, right?
And then the age of algorithms started happening, right?
…And there’s very little shared music because of that.
