I opened the fridge and the whole world stared back at me. Bulgarian goat’s milk scowled from being left long enough to sour. Chinese prawn crackers crouched under the weight of the fat Italian meatballs container, and Indian butter chicken sauce drooped down onto a large thawing box of American super-sized frozen fries. The small glass jar of Vegemite sat in the back corner; the most familiar among the myriad of emotional food.
What a variety, I thought. I’d never really noticed, but my family eats food from so many different places, you wouldn’t know what nationality we are. Maybe this was a lead for my essay on multiculturalism. I had an exam for Society and Culture coming up and I was stuck on what to write about.
Beep beep!!
Mum honked her horn and I slammed the fridge door shut, scooped up my soccer gear and jolted out the door, leaving the crazy contents of the fridge behind me.
“TEAM!” Coach’s voice boomed out, scaring the little sparrows in the tree so much they jumped and hurriedly flew away. Jess and I covered our ears. Sometimes I wondered if he was actually capable of talking in a normal tone.
“THIS….is Jamila,” he said gesturing towards a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl to his left, “SHE… has moved to Australia from Dubai and I am sure you will all help her get familiar with how we run things around here.”
We all shouted out “Hey Jamila”, and blushing she sat down next to the rest of us. Coach left to set up the field and I shuffled over to her. Her long thick hair was in one low plait and her shorts reached almost below her knees; far more modest that the rest of us with short-shorts. She smiled timidly as I approached and when we got talking, I noticed a strong Arab accent amid her broken English and how she referred to soccer as ‘football’.
“Hey Jamila, I’m Mel. How do you like Australia?”
“Allow Mel, Oztralia is nice. Friendly people and all from different countries too. I don feel like I don belong becoz everywan from different places. I em just shy with new people.”
It was interesting that even though Jamila was new to Australia, the first thing she had noticed was that not all Australians have blonde hair and blue eyes. Australians came from places all over the world.
On Saturday morning, Dad was trying to install our new flat-screen TV. I was really excited, our old one had been used since my parents had gotten married – and that was quite some time ago. My brother, Stephen, was giving him a hand.
“Far out, these are the most useless instructions! What manual has every other language but English!”, Steve exclaimed.
“Pass it here, you weirdo. Of course its got English.”
The booklet was filled with pages of the same instructions in fifty different languages. Japanese characters looked like little houses and moustaches with their small, straight lines. Arabic was written from right to left; it looked like ‘w’ was the only letter in the alphabet, just rewritten over and over for every word. I blinked and flipped to the back page. On the bottom half of the page in probably a font size of nine, were the instructions written in English.
“There you go: English instructions.” I smugly handed Steve back the manual. “You might need a magnifying glass though”, I joked.
English was my first and only language, and the most well-known language in the world. But not being able to find the English translation in the manual made me realise that Australia is not the only country in the world. We bought the TV in Australia, but it could have been bought by virtually anyone in almost any country in the world. That was the reason for myriad of languages in the manual. Maybe I wouldn’t flunk my essay after all.
The day of my exam came the following Monday. Walking to class, I waved hello to three Mexican boys near the lockers. They were a humorous bunch, commonly known as ‘The Three Amigos’. They gave a cheery reply and turned back to their own conversation. Only, I couldn’t understand what they were saying and it took me a few moments to realise they were speaking in Mexican to each other. Wow, I thought. They could say anything and Aussies like me wouldn’t have any clue what they were talking about…
“YOU HAVE FORTY MINUTES, STARTING… NOW.”
Everyone immediately had their heads down, engrossed in the task at hand. The tops of pens moved up and down like bobble heads as their hands moved across the page. I thought about all the places I had seen examples of multiculturalism just in the past week. The broad range of foods from different countries that were stacked in our fridge; all the different languages in the TV manual and even the boys talking in Mexican to each other. Multiculturalism was everywhere, even Jamila had noticed and she was new to Australia herself. I was so lucky, I thought. To live in a country where all the cultures of the world could be combined into one, because everyone who lived in Australia was called Australian but a lot of us have come from different corners of the world. I can say Australia is a symbol of unity. The number of cultures represented in Australia are more than you could count and my country, Australia, is the one to bring them all together. Australia is renowned to be a multicultural nation. If you need proof, just open the fridge.
