WE’RE GOING TO CALL OUR KIDS “AFRICAN AUSSIES”’ 1 1 TO CITE THIS CHAPTER: Wilkinson, J. (2017). Were going to call our kids African Aussies: Leading for diversity in regional Australia. In Wilkinson, J. & Bristol, L. (Eds.). Interrogating educational leadership: Examining leadership as a culturally-constructed practice (pp. 54-74). Singapore: Routledge. ‘We’re going to call our kids “African Aussies”’: Leading for diversity in regional Australia Jane Wilkinson Monash University, Australia Introduction Australia is one of the most culturally diverse nations in the world with an estimated 28 per cent of its population having been born overseas (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016). Another 20 per cent of Australians have at least one overseas born parent and one source estimates that 32 per cent of the Australian population is from a non Anglo-Celtic background (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016). As a researcher from a working-class, ethnically mixed background (an Israeli Jewish mother who came to Australia at the age of 20 speaking no English and an Anglo-Celtic Australian father) my own ethnic heritage as a researcher reflects this trend. The increasingly diverse face of Australia as a nation is mirrored in its regions. Although actual numbers of overseas born people have not grown as a ratio of its population, the linguistic and cultural diversity of ethnic groups settling in regional and rural Australia has increased markedly as have the countries from which they are drawn (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2011). This ethnic diversity has arisen as a result of changes to Federal Government resettlement policies in the past decade, which aim to settle up to 45 per cent of refugees in regional Australia (Withers & Powall, 2003). The Federal Government’s policy reflects broader international trends in nations such as the UK, USA and Canada in which previously demographically homogenous regions are diversifying due to inflows of immigrants and refugees (Robinson, Andersson, & Musterd, 2003). These shifts in ethnicity provide a sharp contrast to historical constructions of regional and rural Australia as a discursive white landscape (Edgeworth, 2015), that is, an ethnically homogenous landscape in which Indigenous peoples had been positioned as the subaltern ‘other’. Such mythologies, rooted in popular