'It is 50 years – two generations – since then Immigration Minister Al Grassby launched the idea of a multicultural Australia at a Melbourne conference in 1973. Ghassan Hage, Professor in Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, and currently visiting scholar at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, has become the most significant intellectual commentator on multicultural Australia of the second of those generations.' (Introduction)