SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
BRUCE SCATES: This episode, ‘Multicultural Mosaic’, is part of the series that deals with people.
It begins in Sydney, the site of the
first European settlement, and ends in Canberra, the site of Australia’s
national capital. We consider the immense contribution waves of immigrants have
made to the making of a nation, and we question the purpose of closing our borders.
BRUCE SCATES: Welcome to Sydney, the glittering state capital of New South Wales.
SUSAN CARLAND: Sydney is Australia’s largest city and we’ve chosen this series’ largest object from here.
It’s that unmistakable Australian icon, the Opera House.
BRUCE SCATES: And we’ve chosen the Opera House for three very special reasons.
First of all the site where the Opera House
actually stands, here on the edge of Port Jackson, near the entrance to
Sydney Harbour, the waterway that laps all around this great city landscape.
It’s through the Harbour’s entrance, the Heads, that Sydney’s first white immigrants came.
Here, those first convict prisoners found
landfall in Australia. So in a way this is the place, the site of the first
European settlement, where the story, the story of immigration to this country, really begins.
SUSAN CARLAND: The second reason has to do with origins. For many people, the
Opera House is the archetypal symbol of Australia and you’ll find it on key-rings,
tea towels, even snow domes in every tourist shop in Sydney. And yet its
designer, Jorn Utzon, was a Danish architect. Those distinctive white sails
there found their inspiration, like so much of Australia’s culture, in a land
oceans and oceans away. So this particular structure reminds us of the
myriad of different peoples who have contributed to building and the reimagining of Australia.
BRUCE SCATES: Thirdly and finally there’s the form, the form this remarkable architectural statement takes.
I guess everyone’s got their own interpretation of the Opera House.
Some people liken it to sails on Sydney Harbour, or sharks cutting through that water.
Utzon described it as an orange broken open into segments. But you know our
favourite explanation of the Opera House’s inspiration is the metaphor of waves,
the waves that surround the shores of Sydney Harbour and encircle this great continent as a whole.
SUSAN CARLAND: Those waves carried those first convicts to Australia
and they also remind us of the waves of different immigrants
who have made this land their home. Those waves began, as Bruce just said, with
Australia’s British settlers, but even that first convict society was
culturally diverse, made up of men and women from all across the British Isles;
Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales and beyond.
BRUCE SCATES: And even before the British invasion
in 1788, there was a long history of journeys from Asia to Australia.
From as early as the 1400s, fishermen from Makassar in modern-day Indonesia
journeyed to northern Australia in regular seasonal migrations.
They came to gather trepang, sea slug, a delicacy sold in Asian markets. We call
them ‘Sojourners’. The monsoon winds carried them to Australia and carried
them home again with that valuable harvest.
SUSAN CARLAND: It was that search for things of value
that fuelled the first mass migration from Asia to Australia
In the 1850s tens of thousands of Chinese travelled
south, all keen to find a fortune on the goldfields of eastern Australia.
They were joined by Americans, Canadians and people from all across Europe. As far as
immigration was concerned, gold changed Australia overnight, from a place of
exile for a colony of British convicts to a diverse and cosmopolitan community –
now everyone wanted to come here.
BRUCE SCATES: They wanted to come but really,
they had to come. From the 1840s these shores provided shelter, they provided
sustenance for thousands, thousands fleeing the famine in Ireland.
Again, Australian history has to be seen in a global context – the 19th century was a
time of mass migration all the world over.
SUSAN CARLAND: Australia may have been a British
colony, but throughout the late 19th century Afghan cameleers carried goods
across the arid interior of Australia; labourers from the Pacific Island worked
the cane fields of Queensland; Japanese pearlers swam our waters in the
tropical north; and miners and seamen came from one end of the globe to the other.
BRUCE SCATES: Those waves of migration continue – they continue after the Second World War as
displaced men and women, refugees from all across Europe, are recruited to build
the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. ‘The Snowy’, as we like to call it,
remains this country’s most ambitious engineering project. The energy that
powered Australia came from the toil of Poles and Latvians, Italians, Greeks and Germans.
SUSAN CARLAND: So in a way Australia was always a multicultural society, and that
cultural diversity is all too evident today. Melbourne is one of the world’s
largest Greek cities, second only to Athens. And the children and
grandchildren of Turkish migrants brought out to work in factories of an
expanding economy occupy key positions in government and industry.
Our universities host students from hundreds of different countries including
thousands from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
BRUCE SCATES: Australia is multicultral and we are multi-faith.
This is St James. It’s one of the oldest surviving churches in Sydney.
This great building was consecrated in 1824
and religious services have been held here ever since. Back then, in colonial
times, Christianity was the dominant faith of Australians – white Australians, that is.
Christianity never supplanted the rich spiritual legacy of Aboriginal people.
The stories of the Dreaming explained every feature of this landscape;
they offered laws to live by, they evoked a complex cosmology and then,
as now, transcended space and time.
SUSAN CARLAND: Sydney, like the rest of Australia, is
home to more than 100 different faiths. And not far from here you’ll find
synagogues and mosques, chapels and temples, the great cathedrals of
Christendom, right down to the small and humble places of worship and belief.
BRUCE SCATES: For countless thousands Australia has proved a land of opportunity.
People of different faiths, different cultures have built new lives here, often escaping
poverty and persecution in the lands of their birth. But immigration isn’t just a
story of acceptance and success, far, far from it.
SUSAN CARLAND: Migrant labor was cheap labour – that’s why government and private employers
recruited overseas workers in the first place.
Migrants worked the longest hours in the worst jobs for the poorest pay and in
many ways they were marginalised by mainstream Australian society.
Today, the trade union movement welcomes all workers to its ranks. In the 19th and
much of the 20th century so-called ‘coloured labour’ was feared and resented.
Foreign workers were seen as a threat to the wages and conditions won by white Australians.
BRUCE SCATES: And here you see a paradox in the history of our country.
From long before the First Fleet sailed into Sydney, Australia was a place of
tremendous cultural diversity. Aboriginal Australia is an instance of that;
over 300 language groups, each unique and distinctive, spanning one end of the
continent to the other. Now we could have kept that rich and complex character;
the new society we built here could have been open, tolerant, pluralistic.
Instead — and here’s the paradox – most colonial Australians defined themselves as British.
We strive to create what we called a ‘White Australia’, a society that turned
its back on the world’s oldest continuous civilisation and that denied
a simple statement of geography: Australia surely is a part of Asia.
SUSAN CARLAND: You’ll find a monument to White Australia here, right in the heart of Sydney.
It’s the Customs House, and from the mid-19th century,
when the building construction began, to the early days of
the Commonwealth, when the building was finally completed, this country made,
enforced and refined the White Australia policy.
BRUCE SCATES: Those windows up there
look out over the harbour, monitoring every ship as it comes into this bay and
back then, as today, not all those boats were welcome. The purpose of this
building was to protect Australia’s borders. Customs officials decided who
would enter this country, and when, and how.
SUSAN CARLAND: It’s here, and in Customs Houses like
this one, that Australia’s restrictive immigration policies came into practice.
BRUCE SCATES: First, came the Poll Tax. Now that’s a charge of a staggering ten pounds per person,
and it was levied on those Chinese gold-seekers coming into Melbourne and into Sydney.
SUSAN CARLAND: So to get around this, boatloads of Chinese landed in South Australia instead
and walked to the Victorian goldfields.
The journey took over five weeks and it’s the largest single migration in modern Australia's history.
BRUCE SCATES: And then, then comes the dictation test.
In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia is created and the very first legislation enacted by
our very first national parliament is the Immigration Restriction Act.
Under the Act, any immigrant to Australia could be forced to carry out a dictation test
in any European language. Those tests were administered here, in this very
building and they had very little to do with linguistic aptitude. Egon Kisch, a
political radical was fluent in English, in French, in German. So what do the customs
officials do? They administer his test in Scottish Gaelic instead.
SUSAN CARLAND: The Customs House controlled
the flow of people into Australia and it checked the flow of
ideas as well. Customs officials decided the books that Australians could read
and the films they could watch. This was the place where art, people and politics
were labelled foreign, obscene, undesirable. So in a way this building was a bulwark
against the outside world. It embodied the narrow, insular ideal of the White Australia Policy.
BRUCE SCATES: Well, Australia’s changed a great deal since then and
you can see that here, in this very building.
Once the Customs House was about closing Australia’s doors; now it’s one of
Australia’s liveliest public libraries – it’s free, it’s open to all.
In 1973 a progressive Labor government formally abolished the White Australia Policy.
Today immigrants and investment from Asia is welcomed rather than feared and
this country, this country has proved itself one of the most successful and
inclusive multicultural societies in the world. In Australia, around 20 per cent of
our population is born overseas. Compare that with 12 percent in the US,
13 per cent in Britain and unlike Britain or the US or so many countries in
Europe, social diversity has come with a high degree of social cohesion.
In Australia we’re living and we’re learning together.
SUSAN CARLAND: Our country has changed.
The question is, have we changed enough? Some Australians still talk of
turning back the boats; still fear those of different faiths or cultures to their own;
still long for the inward-looking world embodied in this building.
But many Australians would also say that’s a world that belongs to Australia’s past –
not to its future.
BRUCE SCATES: We began this episode at the Opera House. We’ll end it here, in Canberra,
beneath the windows of the National Museum of Australia. As you can
see the designers of the National Museum incorporated the Opera House into the
very architecture of this building and in that – in that – they were making a very
powerful statement. You see back in the 1970s when the Opera House was built it
was seen by some as being too unusual, too confronting, too courageous.
Today, it’s part of the landscape of a modern multicultural Australia, an Australia
that welcomes and that celebrates difference and diversity.
SUSAN CARLAND: These windows,
like the Opera House that inspired them, look out on and engage the world.
And embracing the whole world, not just a small, selective
part of it, is surely at the heart of Australia’s multicultural vision.
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BRUCE SCATES: If you’d like to learn more about the issues raised in this episode
why not catch ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’.
This time Susan’s talking to Julian Burnside QC in a lecture at Monash University.
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