Multiculturalism, Theatre and the Politics of Liberation: The Melbourne Workers Theatre and the Turkish Community

Abstract

Multiculturalism,   although not fully defined as a policy in the strictest sense of the term,   was nevertheless given official status by the Whitlam Labor government during   its brief period in office from 1972 to 1975. This recognition from 'above'   was a delayed reaction to Australia's cultural diversity 'below', in civil   society, in that the mass immigration of non-Anglo/Celts to Australia had   begun towards the end of the Second World War and had continued unabated   through the fifties. By the seventies, then, mass immigration had radically   alt_ered the ethnic mix of the country whose heterogeneity the existing   predominantly British colonial institutions were singularly ill-equipped to   handle.