Civilisational Anxiety and the Vietnamese Refugee Intake

Reimagining Australia's Post-White Australia Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID12058648
AuthorsTin Nguyen (0000-0001-5372-8327, The University of Queensland, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume47
Issue3
Pages1-21
Publication date2026-03-30
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Intercultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0725-6868 • E-ISSN: 1469-9540
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07256868.2026.2650708
OpenAlexW7143377315
LanguageEN
References cited24

This paper re-theorises the Vietnamese refugee intake of the late 1970s and early 1980s as a key moment of civilisational anxiety in Australia's national imaginary. While the end of the White Australia policy is often celebrated as the beginning of a humanitarian and multicultural era, this paper argues that the arrival of Vietnamese refugees revealed unresolved anxieties within the settler-colonial psyche, particularly regarding Australia's identification with whiteness, Western modernity, and civilizational order. Drawing on critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and settler-colonial critique, the paper develops the concept of civilisational anxiety to explain how racialised migrants are included or excluded and symbolically framed as threats to national cohesion. Through discursive and conceptual analysis, the study shows how Vietnamese refugees, especially those arriving by boat, became figures of symbolic disruption, activating fears around borders, racial purity, and Australia's geopolitical position in Asia. Their conditional inclusion exposed the limits of multiculturalism, which often functioned more as a mechanism of containment than genuine transformation. Marking fifty years since Vietnamese resettlement, this paper urges a critical reassessment of national belonging. It offers civilisational anxiety as a diagnostic framework for understanding how race, identity, and emotional governance continue to structure Australia's response to migration and difference.

Anxiety · Identity (music · Immigration · Refugee · Vietnamese · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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