Terms of Belonging – Why Australia’s Multicultural Compact is Under Threat [A July 2025 Preview]

I went to a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at the Sydney Opera House in February. It was a memorable evening and Noa Beinart, the Tel-Aviv-born mezzo-contralto who sang the fourth movement solo was sublime. I couldn’t help thinking that eighteen months earlier a mob from Sydney’s west had gathered at the same place to chant ‘death to the Jews’.

That’s Australian for freedom of speech and it inspired me to write Terms of Belonging which charts how Australia’s multicultural compact – an unwritten bargain allowing newcomers to keep language, cuisine and faith while pledging allegiance to liberal, secular law – has bent and begun to splinter under twenty-first-century pressures. The narrative opens on 9 October 2023, when pro-Hamas demonstrators on the Sydney Opera House steps chanted “Death to the Jews” a year before the same sails warmed to Mahler’s Third Symphony, a stark emblem of clashing civic visions. From that arresting scene the book rewinds to the colony’s famine years, mapping every major migration wave in sixteen thematic chapters. Gold-rush Chinese diggers, Afghan cameleers, Jewish refugees of World War II, displaced Europeans, Greeks and Italians rebuilding suburbia, Vietnamese boat arrivals, Serb-Croat antagonists, and recent humanitarian, Muslim and South Asian intakes each confront the evolving “terms” – accept equal citizenship, respect pluralism, leave imported hatreds at the quarantine station.