Among the Barbarians: the dividing of Australia
Paul Sheehan, Random House, 1998
Review by Tim Costello
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

Paul Sheehan has proved that it is still within the power of a particular book to set the agenda and to get people seriously debating important issues. Just as Helen Garner's The First Stone ignited a furious new chapter in the feminist debate, responses to this book reveal it to be a watershed work. Positive reviews and angry rebuttals have flowed thick and fast ever since its publication. It has apparently sold 50,000 copies and become the focus of talk back radio, quality current affairs programs (such as Lateline and the 7.30 Report) and editorials in both the quality and tabloid press.

Sheehan should be commended for anticipating the political shift that all Australians now realise has occurred since the Queensland election. He beavered away producing his thesis in the dormant years when it appeared that Hanson might totally deconstruct, especially when dealt a fatal comic blow by her own paranoia with the bizarre after death video. The seismic shift in Australian sentiment to embrace much of the Hanson anger is something he understood, when others had declared her to be falling, burnt-out star.

The opening chapter, "The Troglodyte", immediately wins the reader's sympathy. Therein he quotes the scorching dismissals of his writing published in the Sydney Morning Herald under the heading "The Multicultural Myth". Typical respondents saw Sheehan as "a betrayal of all that is truly Australian . . . the worst of gutter journalism . . . a depiction of his innumerably boring psychosexual problems".

To be pilloried in such a way is to prove in an instant his thesis-that there is an oppressive political correctness that suffers no dissent. He calls it the "multicultural industry", intent on exposing at every turn white racism, but believing that this is the only form of racism in Australia. It seeks to disempower us by appealing to episodes of real guilt and then never allowing us to forget those chapters. It is the politics of embarrassment.

What follows is a strange mix of wheat and chaff. The wheat chapters include an incisive exploration of the dilemma facing multiculturalism through the acceptance of traditional aboriginal spearing punishments. These are grievous assaults under European law but fully accepted by the multicultural industry, while the cultural practice of female circumcision by Muslims is not accepted. When and how do we distinguish? The historical recounting of the achievements in building an Australian democratic society, and particularly our future role as an environmental superpower, are inspiring. Most of us would applaud the idea of a global environmental regulatory body equivalent to GATT. The Green Corps is developed as solution to unemployment and environmental leadership in a very thoughtful manner

Less inspiring are the arguments about other countries and ethnic groups. It is the Chinese and Vietnamese that get special treatment, though Turks and Greeks also receive his "love missives". He is certainly skating on xenophobic ice in his chapter on Chinese racism. A couple of sources, remarkable in their brevity, are fodder enough to sustain arguments that all Chinese are thoroughly racist and totally sneering in their attitudes to Europeans. The vials of steroids masking agents found on the Chinese swimmers is proof of their arrogant disregard for fair play, democracy and, ipso facto, their readiness to become Australian citizens. This is a curious argument, as he acknowledges that the East Germans under a communist system pervasively cheated, but he does not see them as inappropriate prospective migrants.

The Vietnamese are particularly vilified. While it should be said that I agree with his contention that immigration policies can be questioned without the charge of racism being thrown at the questioner, this right must be treated circumspectly. Particular ethnic groups susceptible to drugs and trafficking should be protected from his hysteria. Vietnamese, for example, are blamed for introducing indigenous Australians to heroin. My own experience with many homeless, heroine-using Aborigines tells me that this is manifestly untrue.

The chapter accusing Labor of funding and controlling the multicultural industry is particularly farfetched. If only it were that simple. Most Victorians who have watched Jeff Kennett woo the Greek vote, with his stand on Slav Macedonia for populist electoral reasons, know that this is simplistic.

Indeed, this polemic summarises the selective use of evidence and the ideological axe Sheehan grinds. What he describes as the Afterthought, "A Dance with the Thought Police", is pure 'attitude' and personal anger peppering the pages. In the Afterthought he vents his spleen about a complaint made about an article of his which exposed Vietnamese ghettoes in Cabramatta. The complaint was made to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the very same Commission that has received authorial invective throughout the book. I was left with the distinct impression that the complainant was right and Sheehan was wrong. Personal experience explains so much about motivation and obsessions.

This is an important book for understanding our times and the enormous forces of anger that are finding expression through our political structures and media. It behooves us to read and be as well informed as we can in order to intelligently and sensitively engage the mood of our culture and the scapegoats carrying our unease.

Tim Costello is Minister of Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne, and author of the forthcoming, Streets of Hope (Allen & Unwin).