A Multicultural Landscape: National Parks and the Macedonian Experience

3. Cultural diversity and social responsibility

Wealth implies obligations Drawing from Clendinnen’s view of social diversity is a source of cultural richness, we should ask how a bureaucracy or government agency might respond appropriately to such a source of wealth. At the NPWS we consider it axiomatic that to inhabit or frequent a place of ecological diversity implies responsibilities as much as it infers privileges. This attitude could be appropriately extended to encompass our relationship to the cultural diversity of contemporary Australia. To fully reap the social advantages that accompany ethnic diversity – the extended repertoire of skills, life experiences, languages, religions, customs, cuisines, accents: the sheer variety of ways of being in the world – dexterity is required of any service-providing organisation.

Matters of life and limb Whether the Government and its agencies are adequately meeting these challenges is a matter for conjecture. The apparent diversity of park users suggests that NPWS is, at least to some degree, fulfilling the needs of migrant people. But what happens when people unfamiliar with the Australian environment enter our reserves? Are they adequately prepared for the danger of outdoor spaces?

During my inquiries I was told about the death by drowning of two Koreans in Royal National Park during the past year. They are a grim reminder that life and limb issues underlie this subject. The dangerous surf and the exposed nature of various rock platforms used by fishermen present particular problems to people unused to Australian conditions. An understanding of the physical properties of the environment is not a luxury. Sometimes it is a matter of survival.

It might well be asked how those drowned Koreans could be expected to have understood the particular dangers of the NSW coast? I raise this not as an isolated example of confusion, but in order to countenance squarely the profound difficulties facing new settlers in this country: the bamboozling array of laws, rules, conventions, figures of speech, unwritten codes, to which the migrant is expected to adjust – more by osmosis than formal induction.

The culture of nature Where does the national park experience fit within all of this? It is common to think of national parks as ‘natural’ spaces. What this actually means is that society has devised an elaborate set of laws and codes that keep them ‘natural’: laws additional to those that apply elsewhere – banning pets or restricting the collection of firewood or prohibiting fishing or regulating the lighting of fires. How would a new arrival, unfamiliar with the English language, know about these laws? That some are written on signs would bring little comfort. The migrant is not necessarily literate in English or any other language. Far from being aware that different forms of conduct are expected in these particular geographic spaces, the new arrival may not even realise that he or she has entered what for other Australians is a quasi-sacred space: a national park. It is here that the cross-cultural mirror becomes especially useful, allowing us to recognise that the concept of the national park is itself ethnically specific.