ON AUSTRALIA DAY in 2016, artist Elizabeth Close was at an Adelaide shopping centre speaking to her young daughter in Pitjantjatjara, when a woman approached and said to her: ‘It’s Australia Day. We speak English.’ Close was shocked, and replied, ‘Pardon?’ The woman slowed down her speech and repeated herself. Close retorted that as she was speaking a native Australian language, she ‘could not get more Australian’. The woman walked off without another word.[i]

The results of the 2016 Census reveal that more than three hundred languages are spoken in homes across the nation, and that more than 21 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home.[ii] That is one fifth of our population, and it is likely a modest estimate, as the Census does not account for Australians who did speak a language other than English at home but have since moved out and into an English-speaking home environment. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has publicly declared that Australia is ‘the most successful multicultural society in the world’, and Australia Day events centre around celebrating the nation’s multiculturalism. Yet our multilingualism is not accepted as part of our multiculturalism, even though a multicultural nation is by definition (and supported by the Census data) a multilingual one. A poll conducted in 2015 by ANU found that 92 per cent of respondents consider speaking English as ‘important’ in identifying as Australian, placing English skills higher than birthplace or citizenship.[iii] Despite the nation’s multiculturalism, English is a conspicuous marker by which Australians judge each other’s ‘Australianness’.