WHAT STRIKES ME FORCIBLY when I return to the Land of OZ is the amazing ethnic diversity, especially in the cities (where almost 90% of folk live). Since arriving here in the United States almost 19 years ago, I have made the trip to my homeland almost every year. Over this last decade, there seem to be more and more Asian and Chinese faces. Consider that, in a population of some 23 million, folk have arrived from almost 40 countries, currently at the rate of about 350,000 per year. Some 200 languages are spoken by people living permanently Down Under; twenty percent were born in other countries and another twenty seven per cent are the children of people born elsewhere; and almost seventy per cent of Australians acknowledge upwards of 300 different ethnic traditions. Equally amazing is that virtually all speak and read English, a benefit of government programs to encourage and fund learning this language. Matched to this tough line on the
lingua franca is cultural encouragement to preserve ethnic language and customs. For example, the education system allows children of immigrants to take special subjects relating to to their original language and culture at the public examinations.
Another huge benefit is the culinary diversity that has made no concessions to what might be 'Australian tastes'. If one goes into a Greek restaurant, for instance, Greek food is what you get. In Melbourne, where I lived for a decade, a favorite street of mine boasts some thirty different ethnic cuisines; you can eat in many countries just by walking up and down the street! If there once was an 'Australian identity', it has been long since lost in ethnic diversity.
How very different from the Australia into which I was born and grew up. Seventy years ago the population of Australia was about 7.45 million and there was hardly a 'foreigner' to be seen. Then we had the 'White Australia' policy. In 1942, the then Prime Minister (John Curtin) laid it out very clearly,
"This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those
people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an
outpost of the British race."
When I started school, in terms of migration, rather more people were leaving Australia than arriving. By the time I was about to attend High School, all that had begun to change and at fast and furious pace. By then, the population had increased to 8.4 million, mainly due to immigration. Now the population is over 23 million, 60% of this increase being due to immigration.
These waves of immigrants from the Baltic states, the Mediterranean states, the Middle East, Asia Minor, Asia, China, and so many individual countries (including the United Kingdom), completely overwhelmed and obliterated the sense that Australians had of themselves when I was but a lad. Then we thought of ourselves as British; England was our real home and many of us made our pilgrimage by ship to this homeland when we became of age, taking the long sea voyage this ancestral land.
Not that every ordinary Australian welcomed these new arrivals, these 'DPs','Baults', 'Pommies', 'Wogs', 'Wops', 'Slope Heads' and 'Slant Eyes'. We did not like their food, their customs, their energy, or much at all about them. We considered that they would eventually take over and diminish our opportunity. In a way something like this did eventuate because this process radically transformed the country, absorbing much from the old and the new to produce something very much better. Now our racial memories encompass the whole world, even North Americans migrate Down Under. If Australians have any sense of what it is to be an 'Aussie', it surely entails a sense of being from many places and supporting one's "mates" regardless of from whence they came.
BUT...then came the Boat People. Folk making their way across the sea from Indonesia, a way station in the long journey from places like Iran, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, all refugees seeking a better place, fleeing a home land that had become impossible for them, selling all they had and even borrowing much to make the journey the last leg of which was a perilous sea journey in small, un-seaworthy boats designed more for small scale off-shore fishing than to transport human cargo. Many boats have sunk and at least a thousand men folk, women, children, and infants, have died making this hazardous way to freedom and what promised to be a better hope.
This exodus had begun just before I came to the US. I was living in Darwin and occasionally one of these boats would turn up, the people on it arrested and the craft set then set to fire. The Australian defense forces became adept at finding these boats in transit so that, over the years, the smugglers of people have come to depend on being 'rescued' at sea. For me, and many expatriate Aussies, this unfolding drama, now drawn out over almost two decades, was off-stage. In Australia, these folk who were refugees of various sorts became transformed into 'illegals' without rights and interned under conditions often approaching in-humane. No one knew much of where these 'boat people' came from, the financial and physical cost or the nature of the journey, the perils they faced, and the conditions endured, or the treatment they received at journey's end, should they have survived. If they were barely 'above the radar' for Australians they surely got little notice in other countries.
THEN...two intrepid journalists living in Afghanistan, one a writer and the other a photographer, risked their lives to insert themselves into this harrowing experience. Eventually, they reached Christmas Island surviving to tell the story we all ought to hear. Last month it was published, of all places, in the New York Times Sunday Supplement. I came across the article,
The Dream Boat, quite by accident and was appalled by what I read and saw. You can enter into the journey yourself by reading the story by clicking on the highlighted title above.
Many who read this blog live in Australia. I hope this NY Times story will stir you to serious consideration and action. Others of you, who live elsewhere, have friends in Australia. I hope that you will send the story on to them.
If you read the comments of my fellow expats that appear below the article, I think you will see that mostly we are shocked and chagrined at what we have discovered. Australia is very much a melting pot filled with locals, displaced persons, refugees, and good old Brits that have come to live together to make Australia a 'Lucky Country', releasing inestimable benefits, adding quality and energy, and enriching our culture. It almost unimaginable that with our experience of immigration, we should treat refugees in this way...except that we have.
