A conference on 'mixed race' identity production in Australia is timely for two major reasons. First, Australia's treatment of its so-called 'stolen generation' - those Aboriginal children of mixed descent forcibly removed from their indigenous families - is nothing short of disgraceful. Moreover, the Australian government has refused to issue an apology to this segment of the indigenous population, thereby sparking protests from Aboriginals and many sympathetic non-Aboriginals. Second, 'mixed-race' children form Australia's largest rising demographic. A significant percentage of these children are the result of marriages between Australians of different ethnic backgrounds. In other words, a significant percentage of Australia's future population will, if current estimates are accurate, have 'mixed blood.' Thus, the future face of the nation is more than likely to be brown than white, for inter-racial couples are becoming increasingly common in contemporary Australian society.

I introduced the seminar by noting that there are basically two positions that Australian politicians and media commentators adopt towards people of 'mixed-race': the first is perhaps best described as remorseful, the second celebratory. The former position is usually, though not exclusively, employed with reference to the 'stolen generation,' who are a significant source of anguish because they are a living testament to the country's racist past. The practice of 'assimilating' mixed-descent children into the country's non-indigenous population continued unabated until relatively recent times, reaching its apotheosis during the nineteen-fifties and sixties. However, Aboriginal children of mixed-descent resisted the Australian government's attempts to make them identity as European. In 1997 a report - Bringing Them Home - investigating the plight of this these children was published. The report documents the official policies and regulations enacted to facilitate the removal of 'racially-mixed' children from their homes. It also contains the testimonies of those Aborigines removed from their families. The report makes harrowing reading, and explains why there is no 'mixed-race' movement in Australia, for the stolen generation identify, as a matter of pride and survival, as Aborigines.

Australia's policy of multiculturalism, while attracting more than its fair share of criticism, has produced a different attitude towards people of mixed-descent. Earlier this year the Australian franchise of Sixty Minutes, that bastion of quality television journalism, broadcast a story titled 'Cappuccino Kids.' The report proffered the city of Darwin's multi-ethnic, multi-cultural population as evidence of Australia's 'inter-racial' future. The Sixty-Minutes cameras moved around the city, lingering on several happy 'inter-racial' families frolicking in the sun, enthusiastically consuming a wide range of ethnic foods such as curries, pastas, noodles and nachos (cuisine has been the most popularly accepted aspect of Australian multiculturalism). Shots of cute 'inter-racial' children playing with equally cute animals completed this utopic vision. Interviews with some of these 'happy' families followed. Predictably, most of the talking heads came across as cheerleaders for multiculturalism, declaring optimistically that racism will soon be outdated.

In short, the tone of this story was generally up-beat, celebratory. Moreover, the usual critics of multiculturalism - Pauline Hanson (founder of the controversial One Nation Party), Bruce Ruxton (outspoken President of the Returned Servicemen's league), and Geoffrey Blainey (prominent conservative historian) - were absent. Nobody was wheeled in front of the camera to condemn this apparently inevitable re-fashioning of Australia's national identity. However, two things disturbed me: first, the story constructed Darwin's 'racially mixed' population as a relatively recent phenomenon - 'mixed-race' populations have not just suddenly appeared out of the ether. Second, terms like 'mixed-race' and 'mixed-blood' (terms that were casually used in the Sixty Minutes story) have extensive and troubled histories. As Patrick Wolfe noted in his keynote address, these expressions deserve their scare quotes because they presume the existence of distinct racial categories. Categories that have been vigorously contested since the end of World War II.

Patrick, a Victoria Research Fellow in the Europe-Australia Institute at Victoria University of Technology, presented a paper entitled 'Genetic Arithmetic - Policing the Boundaries of Race.' This closely argued presentation explored how various historical discourses and 'practices of difference' produced the modern category of race towards the end of the eighteenth-century. More specifically, Patrick pointed out that 'race' is 'a distinctively western and industrial-capitalist differentiating practice, one which should not be confused with or assimilated to other forms of discrimination (xenophobia, colour prejudice, etc).' He went on to demonstrate how the boundaries of 'race' as a category was threatened by people of mixed 'racial descent.'

Tony Birch's playful reading of his poem, 'The Anatomy Contraption,' demonstrated the contradictions and absurdities within racial nomenclature by re-writing an obscure nineteenth-century text, Physiology for Beginners. The poem explored the ways in which colonising nations have used science to legitimate racial categories, have been instrumental in oppressing indigenous populations. Tony's poem has been recently published in a collection called Performing Hybridity.

Joost Coté, a senior lecturer in the School of Australian and International Relations, Deakin University, presented a short but highly informative paper on the representation of 'Indische mensen' - the 'mixed-race' progeny of Dutch colonialists - in popular literature. Joost documented the most common literary tropes and figures used to demonise 'mixed-race' characters in nineteenth-century colonial novels. Loes Westerbeek, one of Joost's doctoral students, followed with a presentation titled, 'The colonial métis as diaspora,' which examined the colonial context and postcolonial expression of Dutch Indies identity in Australia. Loes' ethnographic study looked at the tensions and divisions that marked the life of this community in both the Dutch East Indies and Australia.

The rest of the conference had a distinctly South Asian focus with presentations on various aspects of the Anglo-Indian diaspora. The 'mixed-race' Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. Today, they are a largely diasporic community with significant settlements in Britain, Australia, and North America. Keith Butler, an Anglo-Indian writer and a postgraduate student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, initiated proceedings by reading one of his short stories 'Tabernacle of my Loins.' The story mischievously combined fact with fiction to produce a hilarious account of Anglo-Indian life in India in the nineteen-fifties. He was followed by Kylie Boltin, who delivered a highly engaging paper on Bombay cinema and the various roles it performs for Melbourne's Indian population. She was followed by Erica Lewin, a doctoral student from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who is researching Anglo-Indian women in Australia from the perspective of feminist standpoint theory.

I brought the conference to an end with my paper, 'The Good Australians: Anglo-Indians and Australian Multiculturalism.' In short, I argued that Australian multiculturalism provides the discursive pre-conditions for representing Anglo-Indians as 'good' Australians who point to multiculturalism's success without radically challenging 'normative' constructions of the Australian nation. A version of this paper will appear in the next edition of The International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies.

In summary, the conference proved to be a highly stimulating event, due, in no small part, to those delegates whose informed and highly intelligent questions provoked a series of engaging debates. These discussions underscored the fact that issues connected with the production of 'mixed-race' identities have global resonances, even though the status of 'mixed-race' populations vary widely in different parts of the world.

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