Australia is still being used as a dumping ground for many other world cultures. Unfortunately, instead of providing a bridge between Aborigines and European Australians, it merely adds to the rift. It must be clearly understood that the Aboriginal nation (yet to be recognised) has little or no enthusiasm for the so-called multicultural society of Australia, for it is unbelievable and a great indictment of European Australians that the Aboriginal people find themselves once again at the bottom of the Australian socioeconomic scale with regard to multiculturalism. In the multicultural case, we continually find ourselves firmly lacking in any priority of position on any ‘ethnic' shopping list. This is true in all areas, including theatre. But then again, one must never mention the selling off of the Aborigines' stolen lands to multinationals in the same breath as the expression ‘multiculturalism'.

As a proud Aborigine, I have witnessed, among Asian and European peoples, the replanting of their grassroot cultures on my Aboriginal homeland, and I have seen only the continuation of prejudice and suffering for my people. Only the history of the European and English Australian, it seems, repeats itself over and over again in this, my country.

Modern Australia, however, does have the key to logical race relations, but White Australia is preventing it from happening. Firstly, it is prevented with egotistic insistence on assimilation for all other cultures, by implementing heavily weighted Anglo-Saxon educational methods and systems. Secondly, through refusing to acknowledge that traditional Anglo-Saxon estimations of what constitutes intelligence and criteria for assessing ability and achievement must be reshaped in order to recognise and include other aptitudes at grassroot level.

It is possible to rectify this situation with a sensible, fair and reasonable approach to education. Education departments must revise their out-of-date, mid-Victorian criteria. When tutors from other countries and Aboriginal elders from this country, through cultural exchange, are recognised and their true worth recognised in universities and schools, then we will have, and will be able to boast of, a truly multicultural society.

At present, however, when Aboriginal people ‘achieve' at a university or tertiary institution, they are forced to lead a double life. By day such a person is a replica of a white Australian, slightly — sometimes heavily — suntanned, who is taught to respect and accept the same Anglo-Saxon heroes as his or her peers; by night, a ‘real' person, with his or her own cultural identity. I have named this double existence. ‘the super-hero syndrome'.