Kim Neville is a Vietnamese-Australian.
I'd just arrived in Sydney and some friends took me down to the Mardi
Gras
workshop and said, "This is the Queers for Reconciliation
float. If you want to be in it you can." There were heaps of people
doing stuff and looking really busy, it looked really good. There
were lesbians everywhere that give a shit. It looked like a good mob
to
be walking
with.
It's necessary to have this kind of presence in the parade so
that people can see that other people are taking on the Wik and Native
Title issues quite seriously. I don't know a lot about Native
Title
but what the government seems to be doing is setting it up for it for
racism to
be quite a major issue in the next election campaigns.
The gay and lesbian community, if there is such a thing, has been quite
reluctant to
take on any race issues, So it's good that people are mobilising around
Native Title. I hope that people are talking about it and confronting
the fact that all this Mardi Gras joy-joy stuff is a very White and
middle-class scene. It's good that some of these issues are on the
agenda, like the Sydney Asian Lesbians have a float. People often
don't want to talk about these issues, racism, as if they aren’t
relevant. That
surprises me because lesbians have had a strong presence in all kinds
of political movements and have always been looking for ways to expand
the political agenda. I don't know about the gay scene, I haven't
been involved. The lesbian in me is the political in me.
That was the other thing about the group at Mardi Gras. It was very
White crowd.
"White" is the wrong term. I'm more inclined these days to think in
terms of
mainstream. Not all White is mainstream. There's particular
relationships we have
because of what colour we are but there's a mainstream
agenda and
there are always
dykes out there challenging it.
But sometimes it feels like begin Vietnamese in that environment is,
well, it’s the
token difference thing. I was born in Vietnam in 1971 and arrived in
Australia in 1972
- the leader of the "Yellow Peril" - there were only two or three
adoptions at the
time. They didn't want inter-racial adoptions, which is interesting
because that
happened during the Stolen Children era.
It's interesting to look at the commonalties and difference between
Stolen Children
and inter-racial adoption. I was brought up in a White, Irish-Catholic
family. But
there's a difference between a bunch of orphans who had been displaced
because of a
war and someone riding on their horse into a village and saying, "We're
taking you." It
wasn't like that for me. I've met other people like me and we
don't
really feel like
we've been cheated or that it was anybody's conscious intention to
do
that. So the
issues are different. The political colonisation of Australia is
different from the
imperial war in Vietnam and the role of Australia there.
Interview by Zohl
de Ishtar