What, you might wonder, has the childhood of an ordinary little Australian girl in the 1960s got to do with global issues of race, religion, culture and immigration facing Australia today?
Travel with me for a while and find out….
Growing up with the New Australians
I grew up in a poor housing commission suburb of predominantly working class and under-employed people including lots of new migrants who were known as “New Australians”.
When I was 4 years old, Nikki and Maria lived next door and I adored their vivacity and openness, and going around their garden with them smelling all their pretty Mediterranean flowers that grew very well in my climate-alike city. I’d be invited to dinner at the huge wooden table, served by their big Italian mama as if I were one of her own children, eating things I’d never heard of, like pasta, and enjoying listening to them talk, though I did not understand a word of it.
My best friend when I was 7 years old was a tall, quiet Dutch boy with a delightful name of unfamiliar consonant pronunciations and ‘de’s and double ‘a’s. We wrote love poetry to each other and passed it under the school desk. Although extremely shy, I’d find myself invited to dinner, sitting at the table with eleven kids and two parents who could not speak English. I greatly enjoyed listening to the Dutch conversation and eating the unfamiliar, interesting foods.
Similarly with my German friends and their families. Many of my own foremothers and forefathers were German pioneers in Australia 100 – 180 years ago, but I do not know the language. However on Friday nights when I was eleven years old my best friend’s family took me to German Club in their new Volkswagen Kombi van. Everyone spoke German and I did not understand it but I loved listening to them and watching the slap-dances – the guys leaping about in their lederhosen, and the women in their bright clothes laughing and talking. And the strange, yummy German foods.
Of my friends at school I can only remember two or three who were born in Australia (including just one Aboriginal). The rest were a wide spread of race, religion and culture from around the world: English, Scottish, German, Hawaiian, Irish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Cypriot, Turkish, Dutch, New Zealander, Jewish, Japanese, Indian, Polish….. I just loved it! Rarely did we have people from Africa, Asia or the Middle East in those days; those waves of migrants came later after the Vietnam war. However there were Aussie kids who had Chinese and Afghani descent, going back to colonial days of mining and exploration. And all of us were mixtures, like probably everyone in the world, admit it or not!
Our Aboriginal connection
As I mentioned, Australian Aboriginal people were ‘in short supply’. Our school’s one Aboriginal girl was so popular it was hard to get any time with her for a chat or a game. One year our class was taken into town to see a Pitjantjatjara art exhibition, and it was one of the highlights of my education. Shyly exchanging smiles with equally shy kids from the deserts of the Great Australian Bight, who had not seen white people before, was quite a thrill, and outshone the art itself. However I and other kids in my class began to incorporate elements and styles from Aboriginal art into our own artworks. I went hunting for coloured clays, sifting them, and experimenting with natural paints. Like many other fifth generation Aussies, I have some Aboriginal in my ancestry and took to the art “like a duck to water”.
Of folk dancing, yoga and religion
At school we had folk dancing classes of I-don’t-know-what-cultures and I was paired up with a towering lad from Bulgaria who was so strong that he’d get me airborne when we spun. We sang Scottish songs. We danced Greek dances. We watched Indian yoga teachers on TV. In art I drew portraits of beautiful black Africans and Japanese, wore Polynesian costumes for school plays and made Native American head-dresses and weapons for games at home.
There was quite a mix of religions in school too, with a preponderance of Christian types. Thursdays the whole school had “Religious Instruction” known as RI, when all the kids were sent off to classes with teachers of their own religion. No-one came out of those classes attacking anyone else or separating themselves with arrogance or superiority. I do remember there being some insulting chants about Catholicism going around, that originated with a few parents who’d been through religious persecution at some point. But we kids didn’t feel that for ourselves. Interestingly, practically all the kids hated RI and just wanted to play together irrespective of apparent differences.
Settling in together
All these people of diverse races, cultures and religions came to this ancient, worn land, joined the Australian community, contributed their languages, foods, festivals, art, music, styles, skills and ideas into the ever-evolving ancient-young nation, and adapted to the new blend. They built their own shops, churches, synagogues, shrines, clubs, restaurants, whatever, and enjoyed continuing their own ways as part of the mix, but did not expect Australia to be converted into a version of their lands of origin. Importantly, they did not try to force their cultural religious practices and beliefs onto the existing inhabitants of their new country or onto each other. There was some racial and cultural tension of course as is usual when new individuals and groups arrive and mix, especially when locals felt their jobs might be threatened by people from other lands. But in general everyone settled into the Australian society relatively quickly. It reminded me a bit of adding new animals to a flock or herd: a bit of pecking, biting and scuffling, but everyone finds their niche and becomes an integral part of the group!
The laboratory bench
After I graduated with my science degree I worked as a research assistant in a university medical school, studying the nervous system. Our research team was quite large with a range of expertise that attracted attention the world over. In those days, the 1980s and 1990s, scientists collaborated far and wide, freely sharing techniques and data, before the corporates got in and started locking everything up in ‘intellectual property” rules. Our lab was a melting pot of global scientists from the Americas, the UK, all over Europe, Japan, China, India, New Zealand, Israel, Brazil and more. I had the privilege of teaching them not only our research methods, but also about Australian culture. We took them camping, fishing, bush walking, folk dancing, sunset and starwatching on the beach, dinners, game nights, football matches and barbecues. The friendships lasted long after the international scientists went back to their home countries, and we would travel to visit them, keeping the friendships and collaboration alive.
What’s different in Australia now? Why the recent intensification of racial, religious and cultural tension? Where’s the fear coming from?
Enter the media and the masses
I rarely watch or listen to mainstream media news (so biased!) but I do hear people talking and complaining about current events and trends as they are portrayed in the media. What’s becoming increasingly apparent is that Australian people are feeling more threatened by immigration than ever before. Why, when we have people from everywhere on the planet living here already? Apart from the unprecedented scale, speed and clandestine agendas behind immigration today, many of the immigrants are behaving differently from the past. Rather than being grateful for a new land with more freedom and opportunity than their homelands, and fitting into Australian culture as immigrants did in the previous 200 years, the new ones are pushing to re-create within Australia the unhappy conditions that they ran away from back home! This is not acceptable, as it threatens the very foundation of our free country and the thousands of Aussies who died in wars defending it.
Aren’t we all the same at heart?
I’ve always believed that separatists and troublemakers are a minority expressing some deep pain that’s driving their bad behaviour. That really what every human wants is to be loved, to be useful, to fit into their communities in harmony, to have meaningful work and raise their families in safety and peace. I still maintain that to be true. I’ve all my life welcomed new and different people with open arms, beginning with those joyful childhood days at school and in my neighbourhood. And continuing throughout adult life, where my mix of beloved friends includes Buddhists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Protestants, Orthodoxes, Hindus, Shintos, Aetheists, Pagans, Jews, Sanyassins, Jains, Hare Krishnas, Indigenous people, people from every continent on the Earth, blacks, whites, reds, yellows, browns and every shade of race and belief in between. It brings me joy, as always, to invite diverse people into this land and my life. And I look forward to welcoming genuine new people who want to integrate into Australian culture rather than to violently reshape it.