Multiculturalism in Norwood

For our August 2026 issue of our newsletter, Samela Harris sent us a long lost copy of a newspaper article written by her father, the legendary Max Harris. Although written in the early 80’s it reads very topically today – especially with the ‘monoculture/multiculturism’ debate recently conducted. And it makes numerous mentions of his beloved Norwood. We included a portion in the newsletter but the full article appears below…

Norwood Parade, Adelaide, The World, The Universe by MAX HARRIS

It worries me that the term “multiculturalism” still confuses people with its vagueness and portentousness. In any case, it’s a horrendous word that should have faded into disuse.

My definition of multiculturalism is as follows. It is an amity, civilized interaction between people of different backgrounds, languages and cultures that owes nothing to the common factor of the nation-State in which they find themselves, but to the common quality of their humanity.

It is this idea of the nation-State that is the sticking point for the brainwashed, the bigoted and the politically manipulated, not only in Australia, but everywhere. The pathology of tunnel vision can be inherent, genetic or spread as a socio-political virus.

There still seem to be too many people unaware that their village is global, and that if it isn’t ‘the sooner’ it becomes so the better. The nation-State obsession has had it.

Let me define multiculturalism another way, as the Norwood Parade.

The Norwood Parade is a long expanse of small and thoroughly chaotic shopping enterprises, servicing a suburban area of Adelaide that has a mixed population of middle and working-class peoples, from a complete mish-mash of backgrounds. This mish-mash has long since been taken for granted. It doesn’t even evoke much curiosity.

The Parade is just that: the broad footpaths are parading areas, used for strolling. Local citizens, young and old, take their constitutionals in large numbers almost exactly after the famous “strada” fashion of Valletta or Athens. There are no inhibitions about striking up conversations with strangers. That’s largely the point of it.

The greengroceries are Greek or Italian-owned. The staffs are usually cheerful middle-aged Oz ladies. The customers are swarthy, blonde, accented, toffy, tatty, elegant. They push their vegetable trolleys around with a hubble-bubble of exchanged comments on the products, the price, and the weather. Buying the week’s supplies has been a rewarding and well-spent social half-hour of simple interactions.

A few shops down the Parade is Laidlaw the Butcher, an establishment that couldn’t be more Anglo-Australian. It’s all good cheer, a flurry of chat and chummery. “How’s your son, Mrs Ludowici?” “He’s gone off to Lwow for a month to see his grandparents.” “Nice town, Lwow?” “No, ghastly.” “How’s the legal game today, Mr Singh?” “Ah, lawyers are two a rupee in this district, Mr Laidlaw. My daughter earns more than I do working for the Electricity Trust.”

In short, there are no “ethnics” in the butcher’s shop. There are no “Australians”. Only people.

So what’s better about what is, against what used to be, before multiculturalism? It’s been the broadening of the narrow.

Quite frequently, I take lunch at the Norwood Hotel. The hotel is owned by two Italian brothers who like to be known as the Booze Brothers, an Australianism that would surely delight Mr Hawke, Mr Elliott, and even Bruce Ruxton. The Booze Brothers, however, specialise not in pasta, but bagel cuisine, which they have pinched unwittingly from New York Jewish traditions.

They talk with me to find out about their own culture. They know all about Banjo Paterson, but I tell them that Italo Calvino is coming to be regarded as the peer of Proust, and Joyce, and Lawrence, and they should ensure that their youngsters should read Calvino’s folk tales. We discuss Italian cinema, and we all exchange theories on why Italy can produce a cinema of childhood sense and sensibility without mawkishness or Spielberg frenetics. They are as puzzled by the Italian obsession with children as I am.

As a variant, I take Sydney visitors for lunch at the Maylands Hotel, which is as true trad British as an Australian pub could get. The decor is pure Surrey village; darts, chalkboards, Real Ale on tap, and so on. Yet it is Yugoslav-owned and entirely family-managed, without any outside employees—mum, dad, a bevy of daughters, and sons-in-law.

The cuisine is an ethnic chaos. There’s Italian pasta, Yugoslav sausage and fish and chips. At the weekends, families gather in droves to hear the Irish folk band while consuming British ale, Yugoslav sausage and Italian espresso. The family comes from what used to be known, I think, as the Cockpit of Europe – the land of ethnic confusion and vendettas.

Yet these sweet people have a notice in the loos: “Our establishment is for your pleasure and recreation, and if any patrons behave inappropriately please let us know.” If any hoons or loudmouths turn up, they are given the bum’s rush by the family forces. They have learnt to value manners and peace of mind more than most of us.

At the very far end of the Norwood Parade area, in the pensioner cottage territory of Beulah Park, there’s the deli run by a Lebanese. It’s no great shakes as a deli, but if an aged pensioner runs out of bread, butter or milk, the owner jumps into his aged Volkswagen and delivers the litre of milk as a gesture of basic humanity. He knows at first hand what it feels like to need help when you are helpless.

‘In short, there are no ethnics in the local butcher’s shop . . . only people. The narrow has been broadened’

This illustrates, in experiential terms, my definition of multiculturalism.

These ordinary people have come to Australia to live in what that great novelist Narayan, and Graham Greene and Conrad before him, and Melville before all of them, believe to be: “Living in a free State”. That is, to be a citizen of no nation-State. To be a man of all seasons in all places.

What on earth is there about “Australian” values and conventions that are so crash-hot that we should fret that multicultural values could be a threat? A threat to what? We are, like other nation-State cultures, neither bad nor good. We could well be a better culture if we detribalised and rejected the fictionalised qualities of the nation-State in favour of a philosophy of simple humanisation. Reject the worship of the stereotype.

If you champion the image of Australia as a nation-State with superior values, then you are a bit of an idiot. Blind nation-State values, if encouraged, or politically rabble-roused by politicians, can lead to a blowing-up of the planet. I kid you not.

My God, it isn’t as if the historical proof wasn’t before our very eyes. It’s not merely the Hitler and Mussolini manipulation of good people into bad people. It is Iran, and killer religious fundamentalism. It is Pol Pot. It was the murderous genocide of Stalinisation in Eastern Europe. It is Mrs Thatcher slaughtering Argentinians in the Falklands. It is Chinese commissars having children mown down.

Multiculturalism is not the assimilation of others. This happens by natural social process. It is the detribalisation. That is the a priori condition of any civilised society.

I am not an “Australian”. I do not wish to be an “Australian”. But I do wish to be a prophet of the good things to come, and to contribute to the best community values of the bit of world to which I was born, as were my ancestors over the past century and a half.

When this conviction came to me, I had to detribalise the hard way. Australia was a petrifaction of stereotypes during the philistine decades.

I explored all the worlds I could, to find what worked and what didn’t. I was not a tourist, but a Livingstone exploring the demographic goods and evils. Like the snail, my ethnic home was something I carried on my back. Easter Island, Tahiti, Chile, Louisiana, the alti-plano of Bolivia, Britain, East Berlin, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, India and Indo-China, all over.

In all these places I sought affinities of the mind that would transcend the vicious incestuousness of nation-Statehood.

I found them. It was easy.

In Greece, I could be as Greek as any Greek. In Bolivia, I could be part of the pain of those who saw and understood what was being done to them by power-mongers. I walked blindly into three revolutions – in Czechoslovakia, in Chile, and into the violence of the colonels in Greece. These battles were my battles.

Repeatedly, I came back to my own piece of soil, loyally, with a single message in mind. Be people, be a community. Love one another, test your values right. Don’t do a Bob Hawke if you win the America’s Cup. Don’t be conned by the false victories or failures of the nation-State gods. Don’t worship who you are. Live in a free State.

No longer do you need to travel umpteen million miles to discover the truths that should be historically self-evident.

Our migration policy moved from White Australia to multiculturalism. The world, at last, came to us. It brought problems, but those problems were fundamentally ours. The migrants came to us to escape nation-State bigotries and compulsions.

The problem was not, and is not, how human beings from other places can be turned into facsimiles of ourselves. The problem is how we can change from the inherited stereotypes of a society that views itself as a hot exemplar of the right values and mores of an acceptable global social unit.

The answer is that the less we think of ourselves as “Australian”, holders of the civilised grail, the more we can enter into the free State, a harmonious village in an unpretty global world.

All we need do is to walk down the Norwood Parade, thinking nothing other than: Here I am, at home in a fraternity of languages and cultures. This is my Australia.