This book presents the first comprehensive survey of being a local in particular in Australia.
As in much of the colonised English-speaking world in Australia the paradox is that the
locals are not indigenous peoples but migrants with a specific ethnic heritage who became
localised in time to label other migrants as the newcomers and outsiders. Claims of belonging
as 'local' provide a crucial insight into power relations that extend beyond the local level to
questions of national identity and the ethics of belonging in a postcolonial multicultural
nation. How have Anglo-Celtic Australians installed themselves as locals? Where do Indigenous
Australians stand in this local politics of identity? What are the ethical considerations for
how we connect our identities to places while also relating to others in a time of intensifying
migration? This book explores these questions via a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach
and a mixed methodology that blends a critical language study of being local with
auto-ethnographical accounts by the author himself a 'local'.
