By Vivienne Stanton
(Published in Life & Style, 2008)
HOPE Street, Perth, is a quiet lane in the back streets behind the Western Australian capital’s nightlife district: a compact, three-square-kilometre rectangle of Asian restaurants, Indian supermarkets, Italian cafes, kebab shops, sushi stalls, sex shops, Karaoke bars and backpacker hostels, doing their best to shake the city’s—my hometown—reputation as “Dullsville”. On any given Saturday, you’ll find backpackers stumbling out of Irish pubs, Italian ‘Stallions’ doing slow laps in hotted up convertibles, exhaust fumes, aftershave and hip hop music trailing behind them, bachelor party revellers in Elvis suits, and giggling girls with tiny handbags and towering heels, Cosmopolitan-drunk and clutching cans of Red Bull.
Across the railway, shiny, steel-and-glass office towers jut like fence posts along the edge of the sprawling Swan River – a river so wide and deep sharks and dolphins sometimes swim in it. Above the city’s rooftops, cranes reach for the sky, evidence of the fortunes being made. BMWs and Mercedes move in orderly, traffic-code-abiding files past furniture stores, gourmet delicatessens, and new car dealerships. Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss and Gucci have all opened stores in Perth in the past year, the Gucci store doubling in size in its first few months. These are boom times for the 1.5 million people who live in Australia’s fourth-biggest capital, a once-sleepy place famous for its crystalline beaches and for being the most isolated city on earth, closer to Jakarta (a mere 3000km away) than it is to Sydney.
Lately, it’s been pumping out $130 million a day in exports, thanks mostly to China’s insatiable demand for copper, nickel and iron ore in the State’s mineral-rich, dusty North West. “Everyone’s talking about the boom,” a friend, an oil and gas lawyer, told me on a recent trip home. “It’s boom this, boom that. We’ve all got so much money now we don’t know what to do with it.”
While the rest of the country grows at a respectable 4.2 percent a year, Western Australia speeds along at 7 percent. Unemployment is the lowest in the country, at 3.1 percent, and employers are struggling to meet demand. Building sites sit idle, awaiting materials and labour. Plumbers and electricians are in short supply. ‘Help wanted’ signs abound in shop windows, while restaurants and tourist venues are cutting back opening hours because of staff shortages. The labour scarcity has sparked the city’s biggest immigration intake in decades, as engineers, nurses, doctors, computer technicians and truck drivers flock from all over the world to cash in on the boom. Nearly one in three West Australians were born overseas—the highest ratio in the country—and more than half of the city’s “sandgropers” (so-called after the burrowing insects that live in the sandy soil the city stands on) have parents born overseas.
Hope Street, with its modest bungalows and white picket fences, embodies the immigrant dream of building a new life in a far off land, in a young and prosperous country. For the past 80 years, the neighbourhood has been a stepping-off point for successive waves of newcomers: first Jews and Poles, then Greeks and Italians, followed by Vietnamese and Chinese, and now, willowy, dark skinned refugees from the Horn of Africa, who walk its streets and fill its parks with music and barbeques. It’s also one of the most culturally diverse neighbourhoods in the country, if not the planet. Follow Hope into Orange Street, and you’ll come upon one of my favourite parks, a small grassy block with a children’s playground, where groups of Aborigines sit cross-legged under leafy Moreton Bay fig trees. Beyond, the twin copper domes of the Greek Orthodox Church blaze in the sun. A few streets away, the arabesque arches of the Perth Mosque stand within metres of a Japanese Karaoke bar, an Indian supermarket, a German sauerkraut shop, and a throng of Vietnamese, Thai, Greek, Indonesian, Indian, Lebanese, Italian, Mexican, Egyptian, Chinese and Malaysian restaurants. When it comes to cultures of migration, food is always the first frontier.
It’s hard to imagine, as you watch a blonde four-year-old expertly manoeuvre chopsticks through a bowl of soba noodles, or tuck into a plate of ‘hybrid cuisine’ Shitake Risotto or Polenta with Smoked Kangaroo, that it wasn’t always this way. When my Polish-Jewish grandfather moved into Hope Street in the 1920s, into a house he shared with three other families, making rent by selling stockings door to door, the only bread you could buy was white, the only drink men ordered was beer, and English “Sunday roast” was what you got when you went to the pub for a special lunch (there were no restaurants). Until as recently as 1973, the country that today prides itself on its cosmopolitan lifestyle was a cultural desert, largely due to restrictive, racist immigration laws, similar to those of apartheid-era South Africa: a whites-only scheme that for more than 70 years restricted entry to non-Europeans, called, unabashedly, the White Australia Policy.
But history has a way of showing its stretchmarks.
On a sunny day two years ago, with a few puffs of cloud breaking the intense blue of the Sydney summer sky, a tranquil beachside suburb became the site of violent riots between local surfers and Lebanese immigrants. More than 5000 young people, many blonde and blue-eyed, draped in Australian flags and wearing t-shirts with slogans like “We Grew Here, You Flew Here,” “Wogs Go Home” and “Ethnic Cleansing Unit”, took over the beach, attacking anyone who looked Middle-Eastern. Revenge followed: convoys of Lebanese men stormed the beach suburb of Cronulla – a popular tourist attraction 26km south of Sydney, whose name means “place of the pink seashells” in local Aboriginal dialect – with baseball bats, smashing windshields and storefronts.
It was a far cry from the image of racial tolerance beamed across the world five years earlier, during the Sydney Olympics, when Australia’s champion Aboriginal sprinter, Cathy Freeman, lit the Olympic torch in the opening ceremony before going on to win a gold medal in the Games. While many Australians – including the conservative, centre-right Prime Minister John Howard – dismissed the Cronulla riots as the work of drunken hooligans, it underscored racial tensions and racist attitudes towards immigrants that have been part of Australia’s history since it was colonised by the British in 1788.
Like a school soccer captain picking his team, Australia has always guarded the right to dictate who’s in and who’s out. While White Australia Policy has been relegated to history’s dustbin, in its place are some of the most restrictive immigration policies in the world—being copied by the U.K. and considered by the U.S—and some of the harshest treatment of illegal migrants anywhere.
TWO WONGS DON’T MAKE A WHITE
Australia is the world’s oldest, flattest and driest continent, nearly four times the size of Mexico. To grow up there, is to be aware of strange animals—the oddly cute and utterly original platypus, kangaroo and koala—deadly sea-creatures, and vast empty spaces that stretch off to infinite horizons. Australians are proud of their sporting prowess, their beaches and their Hollywood movie stars, including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman. It’s always been a nation of immigrants. The first to come were Aborigines who island-hopped on rafts across the Indo-Malaysian archipelago some 45,000 years ago. Then came the British, who founded a penal colony in 1788, banishing their pickpockets, sheep-stealers and other petty criminals (plus a few more dangerous types) to build their prisons on a hostile, remote island on the other side of the world.
Like the Spanish in the Americas, the British had a fatal impact on the indigenous inhabitants in the Antipodes, who were mostly nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes who’d never before seen white men, and were unexposed to European weapons or illnesses. Massacres, smallpox, measles and influenza, and the introduction of alcohol and venereal diseases, cut the black population from an estimated one million at the time of colonisation to as few as 50,000 by the early 20th century. By the time Australia became a Federation in 1901, it was almost entirely white, and its leaders intended it to stay that way. Race riots against Chinese workers who arrived in the 1850s Gold Rushes had set a bad precedent. Many feared that more would follow, threatening jobs and wages with their willingness to work as cheap, un-unionised labour. “Our chief plank, is of course, a White Australia,” Labor leader Billy Hughes said at the time. “There’s no compromise about that. The industrious colored brother has to go – and remain away.”
Australia’s first major piece of legislation was to protect the racial ‘purity’ of the country – the Immigration Registration Act 1901, otherwise known as the White Australia Policy. The Act didn’t explicitly ban non-whites from migrating to Australia, but relied on a series of discretionary “dictation tests” that immigration officials could set in any language. One German immigrant in 1903, for example, also fluent in French and English, was tested in Greek. He failed, and was sent to prison as an illegal.
The White Australia Policy was aimed at Australia’s populous Asian neighbours in the north and Kanaka labourers from the Pacific Islands. When arguing for the bill, Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, told parliament, “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.” Australians feared great hordes of Asians, the “yellow peril”, would try to invade. At the time, many Australians thought of England as “home”, and saw Australia as an outpost of Great Britain in the Southern Seas. Young Australian brides were advised, jokingly, on their conjugal beds, “to lie back and think of England.”
With World War II, attitudes to immigration started to shift. When the British surrendered Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 and Japanese fighter planes started dropping bombs on Australia’s northernmost city, Australia realized it could no longer rely on England to defend it. With only seven million people to fill 7,686,850 square kilometers of land, Australia’s post-war slogan became “populate or perish.” Nearly six million immigrants arrived in Australia from more than 140 countries in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
While the country opened its doors to millions of post-war immigrants, it preferred them to be white. In a twist on the moral, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Australia’s post-war Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, famously stated: “Two Wongs don’t make a White.” When it became clear there weren’t enough English and Irish willing to make the journey, Australia encouraged fair-skinned Poles, Italians, Dutch, Germans and people from the Balkan States to immigrate, providing them with boat fares. Post-war immigrants were expected to “assimilate” – that is, to lose all traces of their ancestry, and most of all, to fit in. My grandfather, for example, did his best to lose his thick Polish accent (something he never achieved) and sent his Australian-born daughter to English elocution lessons, so as not to be considered a “Wog,” the derogatory name for Greeks and Italians, but used collectively for any funny-speaking European. Immigrant children may have been ridiculed at school for their unconventional sandwiches, but the presence of so many new migrants slowly began to change the culture of the country.
As Australia expanded economic links with Asian neighbours, it became increasingly difficult to justify an immigration program that excluded its trading partners on ethnic grounds. International pressure, along with changing attitudes to racism, the influence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the growing anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, all contributed to the end of White Australia. By the 1970s, when boatloads of refugees from the Vietnam War—in which Australian troops had fought alongside the U.S.—arrived on Australia’s shores, attitudes had shifted so much that the government allowed them to stay. By 1973, when the White Australia Policy was finally put to pasture, 14 percent of migrants were from Asian countries.
“What’s remarkable is that this policy lasted for 70 years,” Australian journalist, author and commentator, Paul Kelly, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Australian Story. “Even more remarkable is its surrender to a dramatically different idea – a diverse and multicultural Australia.”
FORTRESS AUSTRALIA
Today, nearly one in four of Australia’s 21 million people—the entire country has same population as Mexico City—were born overseas, the highest rate among the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and way above the OECD average of one person in 12. English and New Zealanders make up the largest groups of overseas-born but the new focus, especially in Sydney, is among people with Arabic-speaking and Chinese backgrounds. In Sydney, the most common language spoken at home, after English, is now Arabic (3.9 per cent) followed by Cantonese (3 per cent) and Mandarin (2.3 per cent), according to the 2006 census. Chinese are now the third-largest group of overseas-born Australians, overtaking Italy, Vietnam, Greece and Scotland in the past decade. At any given time, there are an additional one million Australians living, working or traveling overseas.
“On the one hand, Australia is to be congratulated for its high number of immigrants, but you also have an immigration system that reeks of Soviet-style manpower planning,” British economist Phillippe Legrain told The Bulletin in a recent interview. “John Howard taps into anti-immigrant feelings, especially in election years, but he has also presided over an immigration boom. You get the feeling that he is constantly reassuring Australia’s citizens that ‘yes, we are taking more doctors and IT programmers but they’re from poor countries so no one should feel threatened’.”
While the Great Australian Dream of owning a car and a house in the suburbs is being shared by bigger numbers of immigrants, Australia is still incredibly picky about who it takes. Unlike the free-enterprise U.S., Australia has one of the most rigidly state-controlled immigration programs in the world. All arrivals (other than New Zealanders) need visas, including tourists and students, something unique among developed states. In a system copied in the UK and being considered by the U.S, Australia has a complex points system for skilled migrants, which favours young, educated, English-speaking immigrants at the expense of low-skill labourers, reunifying families or asylum seekers. It’s been criticised as overly prescriptive, rewarding job skills rather than character and work ethic. Many of the country’s most successful migrants would never have made the cut by today’s tight rules. My own grandparents wouldn’t have been let in.
At the same time, Australia has one of the toughest policies on illegal immigrants in the developed world, mandatorily locking them in gulag-style detention camps, sometimes for years at a stretch, in a practice labelled inhumane and degrading by the United National High Commission for Refugees and condemned by Amnesty International. Overcrowding and understaffing, along with psychologically disturbed behavior among detainees, are features of these camps.
In January 2002, in Woomera detention centre in South Australia’s dusty red desert, 370 detainees went on hunger strikes, 40 of them sewing up their lips, refusing to eat, and attempting suicide by hurling themselves on to barbed wire or swallowing shampoo-and-sleeping-pill cocktails. Two years ago, after media coverage of a three-year-old who had spent her entire life in detention and had mental health problems sparked a public outcry, Australia softened its detention rules so that families with children are no longer be held in detention centres, but are hosted by the community. While many Australians are shamed by they way their country treats refugees who risk their lives for the chance to make new ones in Australia, there are equal numbers who applaud the government’s tough stance.
While the U.S. builds kilometers of fences and sends its National Guard to protect its border with Mexico, Australia sends its Navy into international waters to patrol its shark-infested, 25,760 km coastline, and intercept mostly Middle-Eastern asylum seekers en route to Australia—harsh measures given the relatively few boatpeople who actually make the treacherous journey, a number which peaked in the thousands in the early 2000s and is now down to a few hundred. These numbers are small indeed compared to the estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year, and compared with the 45,000 or so visitors who overstay their tourist visas in Australia, most of whom are British nationals who arrived by air.
Australia has even taken the extreme measure of excising a number of islands—Ashmore, Cocos, Christmas—from Australia’s immigration boundaries so it doesn’t have to process refugees on home soil, and offering financial inducements to aid-client states such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea to become “declared countries” to which asylum seekers would be sent for processing.
In August 2001, on the eve of a federal election, the government sent elite SAS troops on board the Norwegian freighter Tampa to stop the captain taking 438 sick and frightened, mainly Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers into Australian territory, after rescuing them from a sinking Indonesian fishing boat in the Indian Ocean. While the wretched refugees posed little threat to Australia’s security—all but two were eventually granted legitimate asylum—the move helped Howard win the election, appealing to voters’ fears for national security in a time of international terrorism. The fact the asylum seekers were of Middle Eastern and Asian ethnicity fanned the flames. When conservative Prime Minister John Howard launched his winning campaign for the 2001 election, the biggest cheer came when he declared: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
Despite such tough talk, the diminutive, balding Prime Minister with the bushy eyebrows and conservative vision for his country, is talking one way, walking another. Under his government, Australia is actually taking more migrants than ever before. The lowest unemployment in 30 years, steady economic growth and an ageing population, mean there just aren’t enough workers to fill demand. “I heard they need cat-killers there,” a Mexico City hairdresser told me recently. “So my brother and I decided, we’ll go to Australia, to kill cats.” Like thousands of others, she and her brother, a graphic designer in DF, realise that if there was ever a time to migrate to Australia, this is it.
“Immigration is a key part of the Government’s economic policy, but one it rarely talks about,” respected economist Ross Gittens wrote in a column in the Sydney Morning Herald in June. “Why? Because Howard wants his Battlers to think he shares their dislike and distrust of foreigners, especially boat people. And it wouldn’t help his image for people to know he’s running the biggest immigration program we’ve ever had.”
When Howard was elected in 1996 he cut the planned immigrant intake to 68,000, but by last financial year he’d more than doubled it. There were 148,000 new immigrants fro 2006-7, and the government is projecting 152,800 new migrants will arrive in 2007-08. With a declining natural birth rate, immigration now accounts for a bit more than half the overall growth in the population. It’s also keeping the economy growing strongly, preventing skilled labour shortages from causing a wages blowout, keeping inflation under control, limiting the rise in interest rates and keeping house prices rising rather than falling.
Australia may make it hard for them to get there, but once immigrants arrive, they generally do very well. Despite the example of the Cronulla riots, Australia’s 185 ethnic groups live in relative harmony. The rate of intermarriage between ethnic groups, one of the best assimilation gauges, is high, particularly for second and third-generation immigrants. Economically, migrants have high rates of employment—97 percent of skilled migrants are employed within 18 months of their arrival—and home ownership. One Muslim Bosnian couple I met in Perth, for example, who arrived ten years ago as penniless refugees from Srebrenica, own their own three-bedroom home in the suburbs and are currently building a second, investment property, with money saved from cleaning houses six days a week. While neither finished high school in Bosnia, their seventeen-year-old daughter is studying for a commerce degree. A recent study by the University of New England showed that migrants to Australia were healthier, better educated, more law-abiding, and less dependent on welfare payments than the average Australian-born citizen.
In a relatively short space of time, Australia has gone from an Anglo-Celtic dominated society—a White Australia—to one of the most multi-ethnic places in the world. How Australia deals with this transition, and the tensions that inevitably come with it, remains to be seen. Howard, facing a crucial election later this year that threatens to end his coalition party’s 11-year rule, has chosen to deal with these challenges by disbanding Australia’s 30-year policy of multiculturalism, and insisting on the concept of “Australian values”, something critics have said leads to false stereotypes and hypocrisy, such as veneration of Aboriginal culture in national ceremonies while the majority of Australia’s indigenous population continue to live in squalor, and to racism and intolerance toward foreigners. The idea has, however, proved popular with some key sectors of the electorate.
Australians have long prided themselves on their egalitarian creed, and the idea of a ‘fair go’ for all. This manifests in small and big ways, from the relatively narrow (compared to the U.S. and Latin America) gap between rich and poor, to a tendency to sit in the front seat beside taxi drivers. While Australia greets the world with a leveling, “G’day mate” salute (made famous by Crocodile Dundee superstar Paul Hogan and his real life, crocodile-hunting counterpart Steve Irwin), it runs its immigration scheme like an exclusive nightclub owner with a strict door policy. Despite the words of its national anthem, Advance Australia Fair—“For those who’ve come across the seas/We’ve boundless plains to share”—Australia’s immigration policies have always made, and continue to make, its sandy beaches and brilliant sunshine, and the white-picket fence houses of Hope Street, a destination for the select few, rather than the hopeful many.