In a 2020 special issue of Griffith Review entitled ‘The European Exchange’, Natasha Cica commented wryly on how the word Eurocentric has now become ‘a label of shame’ in Australia, rather as was the term ‘wog, when I was growing up’ (11). Also contributing to this special issue was the celebrated Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas, who argued against the assumption that ‘history’s ghosts’, those tensions and on occasions outbreaks of violence associated with particular ethnic loyalties, could simply be annealed by a progressive politics of multiculturalism. While acknowledging the destructive power of ‘Europe’s submerged ghosts’, Tsiolkas countered:
I am frightened of the reactionary elements to some of these impulses But I am more terrified of a Manichean idealistic progressive who thinks in black and white, and divides the world into the pure and unclean . . . As a writer in Australia I think the great promise of…