Australia's Media Industry: the voice of many Multiculturalism and the role of media

From June to August 2011, I have had the extraordinary opportunity to go to Melbourne, Australia and do an Internship at SBS, one of the two Australian public national networks.
Precisely, I have contributed to the production of the radio program broadcasted daily in Italian language.
At first, the idea of a national radio broadcasting contents in languages other than English sounded strange to me and consequently, I thought that I would work for a niche media.
However it took only minutes, after I reached the SBS headquarter at Federation Square - in the very centre of Melbourne – to realize that I was wrong.
Although I could note a strong cultural diversity observing people, shops, restaurants and media during my first days in Australia, I understood the real extent of Australian multiculturalism only when I got into the SBS offices.
In fact, it was the first time I could see so many people with several different origins and speaking so many different languages working together in the same building. I liked such environment straight from the beginning and that kept on fascinating me every day more and more. Moreover, the work experience at SBS fuelled my curiosity to find out how multiculturalism can be so successful in Australia and how media affect and are affected by diversity.
So, I eventually decided that those questions would be the topic of my thesis and represent the starting point of my research. Contemporaneously, given the possibility for me to access radio studios, booths and softwares of audio editing, I also decided to make a media project on the same subject: an audio peace entirely written and produced by me.
My thesis then will focus on investigating the peculiar Australia’s media industry and the role it plays in the Australian multicultural society.
Due to extensive immigration flows from about 150 different countries of the world throughout the last two centuries, Australia today hosts an incomparable variety of races, cultures, languages and traditions. Unavoidably, Australian governments have always had to deal with such situation in order to balance the need to build up a national identity and that to preserve diversity. In such context, media have been tools of democracy exploited both by governments and population.
Tracing the history of multicultural Australia and its multicultural policy, as well as exploring the current Australian media landscape, the thesis will aim at explaining the political and cultural processes which have shaped the Australian society and media industry.
Chapter 1 is the introduction of the research. It will define research’s purposes and methodology.
Chapter 2 will present Australia’s multicultural society through a short history of immigration into Australia, statistics related to the current cultural and linguistic composition of Australian population and the exposition of the most important stages of Australia’s multicultural policy development.
Chapter 3 will explore the present Australian media landscape and its role in the multicultural context.
Chapter 4 will investigate features, operations and strategies of particular media entities: Special Broadcasting Service and community/aboriginal media.
Chapter 5 will finally present the findings of the study, drawing conclusions and describing what the research has brought to light.