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| Poster made by children at the Mosman Library reflecting the great diversity in Australia |
-This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY
March 21st was Harmony Day in Australia. In other parts of the world this day is celebrated as the International Day for the Elimination of
Racism. I must say I like our title better, because there is less emphasis on race and more on coming together, or at least living together in peace. This is never more timely as the world enters a new era of
xenophobia. [For students of English this means fear or hatred of strangers or
foreigners]. Although I will be talking mainly about Australia here -considered until recently the most successful multicultural country in the world, I believe there are lessons here for other countries too as many face similar problems.
As I write we have some particularly shrill folks calling for Australia to be just for Australians and for this day to be renamed Deportation Day, so my aim is to tell them who 'Australians' really are and for them to think a little bit about the many different people who call Australia home and the ways in which they have contributed to and enriched our society.
As well as being the home of the world’s oldest living culture, Australia is home to people from 300 different countries. Twenty -nine per cent of Australians were born overseas and 51.5% have at least one parent who was. While most people know about the great influx of people following World War II, there were significant movements of people both before and after.
I can’t hope to mention all of them here, but I will talk about some of the major movements and some of the ways in which they influenced Australian thought and development. The exploits of the British in Australia are well known. The others not so much, so I want to focus a bit more on other groups which have helped to shape Australia. Please don't be offended if I have left you or your group out.
EARLY SETTLEMENT
THE BRITISH
If we go back to the start of white settlement, we can see that the first modern influx of people was indeed mostly from the UK in the form of 162,000 convicts and their keepers with the breakdown being approximately as follows: 50% British, 40% Irish and around 5% -10% Scots and Welsh (Copilot). To them we owe our language, our legal and administrative system, our form of education, early architecture and urban design, literature and cultural artifacts such as libraries and theatres, cricket, fish and chips and our national dish – the meat pie. Even more importantly, they shaped our values such as belief in democracy and some of our attitudes such as maintaining a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity.
THE IRISH
It was most likely from the Irish, however, of whom there were some 40,000 in the initial contingent of convicts (1788 – 1868) for their hand in the “The Troubles” - opposing British Rule, that we got our spirit of independence and rebelliousness, our hatred of injustice and the British class system, along with Irish music and our football, which despite using an oval ball, is still more like Gaelic Football in that there’s no heading as in English and European football.
I suspect that’s
also where we got our often self -deprecating sense of humour and very possibly
our capacity to drink, given that there was one pub to every six people in the
early days of the colony. It was Irish settlers such as James Boag and son (Tasmania
1853), the Toohey Brothers (Sydney 1869) and Patrick Perkins and Nicholas Fitzgerald
(XXXX, Brisbane 1878) who established most of Australia’s beer brands. The Irish
were also instrumental in forming the first Trade Unions. Some never stopped being rebels. I'm thinking here of our more famous bushrangers such as Ned Kelly and Martin Cash.
Their numbers swelled considerably during the Irish Potato Famine (18545 -1850s) so that by 1870s Irish born residents made up 25% of the total population.
The SCOTS
The Scots didn't mind a tipple either, but though small in number, the Scots were generally of a more practical bent, and were often involved in various forms of engineering such as building bridges, industrial technology and railways and things like setting up water supplies such as that at Yan Yean in Victoria. Lighthouses were another beneficiary of Scottish design and engineering.
The huge Australian wool industry was also helped along by Scotswoman, Eliza Furlong who walked 1500 miles across Saxony to handpick the sheep she brought to Tasmania, adding to the merinos already bought and bred by Englishman John Macarthur who began bringing sheep to Australia in 1799. The large Patons and Baldwins woollen mill in Launceston, Tasmania, was the result of a partnership between a Scot John Paton and Englishman James Baldwin. Australia's first Black Angus cattle were also imported directly from Scotland, by Captain Patrick Wood, another Scot, in 1824.
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| Eliza and her sheep stand proudly in Campbell Town (Tas) which has produced a number of politicians |
Scots were also major contributors to health, medicine and education. Scottish physicians were among the early arrivals in the colony. When the Royal Melbourne Hospital was established in 1848 it was primarily run by Scottish doctors and staff. Dr. John Singleton brought medical education and public health initiatives to Victoria, while another Scot, Dr. William MacGillivray, did the same for Sydney and Scotsman Dr. Thomas Anderson Stuart, became the first Dean of Medicine at Sydney University. Melbourne’s Scots College was established along strict Scottish lines in 1851.
Golf is Scotland’s national pastime and the earliest golf course in Australia was established by Scottish settlers at Ratho in Bothwell, Tasmania in 1822, forerunner of the more than 1500 today. Though we see little highland dancing, bagpipes can often be heard at important public occasions.
THE WELSH
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| This image and subsequent ones are all taken from the International Wall of Friendship in Hobart |
Many of the convicts had committed only minor crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, which reflected the harsh conditions prevailing in England and there were a few other 'troublemakers' as well such as a contingent of American 'loyalists' and the larger than life Dane Jorgen Jorgensen, who had proclaimed himself the King of Iceland. Some 4 million Australians can trace their origins to convict stock.
OTHER GROUPS
Australia’s early explorers could not have done without help from Aboriginal trackers to guide them in this vast, dry continent, though they are seldom mentioned in the history books. Aboriginal people knew where hidden water could be found and which foods were edible when supplies ran out. Foolhardy Bourke and Wills, who were the first Europeans to explore the continent from South to North, perished on the way back because they refused the food which Aboriginal people offered them.
Later many Aboriginal people would become the unsung and usually unpaid stockmen and domestics in Australia’s sprawling pastoral regions and they fought alongside other Australians during both world wars, among the few periods when they were treated as equals.
Explorers would probably not have managed either without the Afghan camel drivers who later serviced the small settlements throughout the interior, and after 1860, when cheap labour was no longer forthcoming in the form of convicts, others were brought in to replace them. Pacific Islanders for example, were often taken involuntarily – a practice known as ‘blackbirding” to work Queensland’s sugar cane plantations. Indians were also brought in to do labouring and domestic work in the cities and agricultural work in the country.
THE GERMANS
From 1793 onwards, free settlers began arriving in the colony. However, one of the first mass migrations to the infant colony were 200 Lutherans fleeing religious persecution in their native Prussia in 1838. Initially they settled around the Torrens River in South Australia, but in the wake of crop failures similar to those experienced by the Irish at the same time, their numbers grew substantially and they moved to the Barossa Valley. By 1851 there were 7000 Germans living in the region. At first they were regarded with some suspicion by the native born and other arrivals because they established self -contained communities and kept to themselves, but in the ensuing years they contributed immensely to the development of South Australia and Australia itself. Though now well known for establishing the wine industry in Australia, a few other examples follow.
The Lutherans themselves held education in high regard and instituted day schools in their communities long before the advent of compulsory public education in 1875. By this time, one member, Friedrich Basedow, had become Minister for Education and instituted progressive ideas as well as helping to establish Roseworthy Agricultural College. Another, Theo Scheck, helped to found the School of Mines which later became the University of Adelaide and one F.E.H.N. Kirchhauff set up the colony’s Forest Board in 1875.
German botanist Dr. Richard Schomburgk greatly
expanded Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens and knowledge of Australian plants, while over in
Melbourne, another German, Baron Friedrich von Mueller, who had arrived
independently, did the same for the Botanic Gardens there. Landscape artist Hans Heysen (later Sir William) set South Australia on its course as a mecca for the arts.
Other Germans were also making their mark elsewhere. Although Ludwig Leichardt disappeared while on his third attempt at crossing the continent from East to West, he left behind detailed information about the vast interior of Australia. He discovered important rivers and grazing areas, collected plant and rock specimens and maintained geological notes. As mine manger of the Mt. Bischoff tin mine, 1875 -1907 Heinrich Wilhelm Kayser, a German mining engineer,was the first to apply hydro electricity to an industrial site. He extended this to the township Waratah and also created amenities for the workers there. And who can forget Austrian, Gustav Weindorfer who, recognising the beauty of Cradle Mountain, called for it be set aside as a National Park. These are but a few examples.
However, the First World War changed sentiment towards the Germans. Wiendorfer was accused of being a spy. Despite the fact that many Australian Germans fought alongside the Allies against Germany, many were interred and many German place names were obliterated – 70 in South Australia alone, and their achievements were largely omitted from our history books.
Other names and countries pop up too. The Strzlecki Ranges for example, are named after Polish born explorer, Pavet Strzlecki who climbed and named our highest mountain Mt. Kosciuszko in 1845, after a polish war hero who fought for freedom and equality.
THE GOLD RUSH (1857 -1914)
While there had always been a trickle of migration from other countries, the next really big and unplanned experiment occurred during the Gold Rush Era which began in 1851after one Edward Hargraves who'd emigrated from England in 1832 and had had a brief but unsuccessful attempt at prospecting in California, discovered gold near Bathurst in New South Wales. News spread like wildfire especially as more discoveries followed at Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria.
In the cities and fields, people abandoned their work in the middle of the day and rushed to the goldfields, as did others from around the world. Between 1852 and 1860, thousands converged on the various diggings, bringing great wealth the Victoria and lifting Australia's population from 430,000 to 1.7 million.
While the majority still came from the UK, 15,000 came from other parts of Europe, 18,000 came from the USA and 17,000 came from China. In the process, a distinctly Australian identity began to emerge which gave us many of our core values such as the secret ballot, one man one vote – until the 1850’s voting was restricted to large property owners, the eight -hour day, distrust of authority and ideas about equality and fairness. Peter Lawler (sometimes spelled Lalor), an Irishman, led the Eureka Stockade to protest the harsh licence conditions imposed by the British in 1854 and later championed the cause of the diggers in parliament.
The desire for greater self determination awakened by the Eureka Stockade, led to the amalgamation of the hitherto separate colonies in the various parts of Australia - New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia, into a single entity -The Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.
There was one casualty however, the sudden large influx of Chinese miners who created market gardens and later helped to build railways, became a very visible and significant minority, giving rise to fears of Chinese domination. This ultimately led to the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act, more generally known as The White Australia Policy soon after Federation in 1901.
This policy was not reversed until 1975 when Vietnamese who had opposed Communist rule, sought refuge after the Vietnam war (1975) and in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), after which some 42, 000 Chinese, mostly students gained asylum in Australia.
The Gold Rush slowly petered out and had completely ended by 1910. From 1873 onwards until 1899 the world was in the grip of Depression, called the Great Depression until the 1930s came along.
Next... The C 20th
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