Taking for Granted Cultural Writings

What do I culturally take for granted in my writing?

In my writing, I don't think about the different gestures or the different ways that one character might act depending on where they're from. My character from my novel Leaving Limbo Mathias Laurent (who I previously spoke about in 'Writing people who aren't you' blog post) is French, like I mentioned in the post, but I write him as I feel like he would act and I don't think about how different French people are from me. But he's also lived in America since he was 14 (he's 27 now) so he would still have American tendencies. I also have a character in the same novel named Hana Rhee, who is Korean, specifically from South Korea, and she's lived there until she died (at the age of 21) of course unlike Mathias, Hana lived in the future so her mannerisms may or may not be different to the Koreans of the 21st century. Much like another character I have in this novel who is from 19th century Australia and he would have a different mannerism to me, a 21st century Australian, much like my last character in Leaving Limbo who is from 20th century Russia during World War II, he has different mannerisms to a 17th century Russia. 

I take for granted the nationalities of my characters. I put these multi-cultural characters forwards, because (again) like I've said before, my world isn't just one dimension white people. I live in Rosebud, 75km away from the CBD, there are 12k people living in this town. The statistics of people's ancestry taken from the 2016 Census Quickstats,  English 32.6%, Australian 28.5%, Irish 8.5%, Scottish 8.2% and Italian 3.5%. Thus the ancestors of people are pretty much all white (of course there are other people in Rosebud with different ancestries, but these are just the top responses. 

87.8% of people in Rosebud speak English, Households where a non English language is spoken 8.1%, whereas the other languages spoken at home are: Italian 1.4%, Greek 0.9%, German, Mandarin and Dutch 0.3%. The number of English speakers don't surprise me at all, as a majority of people I know are English speakers, while working at the local fish and chip shop, one of my co-workers was born in Greece so she spoke Greece and another one has an Italian background and she spoke Italian (but she was born in Australia). 

Monash University published a piece of Melbourne's (more specifically Victoria but okay) ethnicity map found here, and looking at Rosebud a majority of the ethnicity is Australia & New Zealand and West Europe, East Europe and Other are next to the majority, whereas Asia, Middle East, India and Africa and Indigenous (Australia's First Nation) are much of a minority. Whereas if you looked at the CBD every group has a large majority except for First Nation members. 

While I live in Rosebud (and have since I was 13), I have lived in suburbs closer to the city and I have friends who aren't white, and considering that I've been going to TAFE and university in heavily diverse areas (Chadstone, Frankston (though this can be a bit iffy), Cranbourne and now CBD), my view of stories containing one culture is limiting. 

So what does this have to do with taking things for granted? While I might write about different racial groups, I don't share the same worldview and I don't have a history with these groups (except for friends), I've only lived my current life as a white person, and thus I've only ever seen the world through that lens. Thus, I take for granted my view of the world. My characters will have the same mannerism as a 23 year old Australian, and not an 18 year old Australian born in 1881, a 36 year old Russian born in 1909, a 27 year old French man born in 1988, and a 21 year old Korean born in 2060. It's a disservice to the characters, to me and my readers.