A cultural kaleidoscope

By Claire Miller July 24, 2005
 

Italians in Carlton, Russians in St Kilda, Greeks in Doncaster? Look again. The footprints of where new arrivals settle in Melbourne are constantly changing.

Melbourne's multicultural character is a geographical work in progress, with settlement patterns creating a city map as nuanced in its ethnic features as the most complex topography, yet fluid as water. Streams, thickets and broad swathes of nationality are revealed in the lie of the land, and with them the story of a city grappling with an ever-changing landscape.

Migrants are drawn to settle in certain places for personal, social, cultural and economic reasons. As numbers grow, whole suburbs undergo subtle and unsubtle personality changes. The process is not without abrasion, but on the whole, observers agree that accommodating and tolerating diversity is something Melbourne seems to do rather well.

Premier Steve Bracks says history is one reason Melbourne and Victoria do it better than other states and cities. In its formative years in the 19th century, Melbourne experienced waves of migration like no other colony at the time, and this gave Victoria "a longer historical perspective on migration than any other state in Australia", says Bracks.

The first waves washed up just six years after Melbourne was founded, when Irish refugees fleeing the potato famines began arriving from 1841. Unlike Welsh and Scottish Protestants also fleeing trouble at home, Irish Catholics could not access the schools, churches and other institutions English settlers were establishing.

So they set about creating their own institutions to acquire the status, education and wealth required to infiltrate politics, the bureaucracy, the law, and eventually the trade union movement. Professor Mary Kalantzis, education chair at RMIT University, says gaining those vital social footholds was arguably more difficult in Sydney, where the English had long been the jailers and the Irish the convicts rather than all free settlers together.

Melbourne is marked by its Irish heritage, which I think makes it a better place than New South Wales, which is marked by its English, born-to-rule heritage."
Professor Mary Kalantzis"But the Irish were also more progressive because, as Catholics, they had to struggle more to be in this country," Kalantzis says. "And so then you also struggle for others, and coalitions work. Melbourne is marked . . . by its Irish heritage, which I think makes it a better place than New South Wales, which is marked by its English, born-to-rule heritage."

The rest of the world rapidly followed the Irish when the gold rushes began in 1851. Melbourne was the only port of entry to the Victorian fields, the richest in Australia. With more than half a million people flooding through the city in a decade - Italians, French, Poles, Germans, Americans and Chinese along with migrants from the British Isles - Melbourne got very used to different faces and cultures.

Maria Tence, community exhibition manager at the Melbourne Immigration Museum, says all those nationalities had to get along with each other on the goldfields. By the time of the Eureka Stockade, alliances were strong enough that while numbers inside the fort were small, the cultural diversity was large: Italians, Germans, Poles, Croatians and Americans stood with Anglo-Australians against the British colonial government.

"This idea of different countries of origin coming together to defend a cause, some say this was when the Australian identity started to form, the moment that multiculturalism began to crystallise," Tence says.

Similarly, the story of the Chinese on the goldfields is mostly one of peaceful co-existence. While there were occasional anti-Chinese riots, Kalantzis says these came well after the initial gold rush and large-scale Chinese immigration. Moreover, there were serious official attempts to protect the Chinese, with the police coming to their aid and compensation being paid for damage and injury.

It is not to say that xenophobia, particularly about the Chinese, was not alive and well. In the second half of the 19th century, it led to state and then national laws aimed at keeping the Chinese out and later discouraging even non-Anglo European migrants. But Bracks says many of those early migrants stayed to become "embedded" in Victorian society, often emerging as community leaders in their own right.

And so Melbourne's early experiences and Irish heritage continued to resonate, creating fertile ground for multiculturalism to take root when times changed in the second half of the 20th century. With such a history, Kalantzis and Tence say it was entirely characteristic that the first serious push against the White Australia policy originated in Melbourne in 1959, when progressive lawyers formed the Immigration Reform group and began lobbying.

By '66, the non-white ban on immigration was lifted. It was replaced with a points system that still favoured Europeans, but by the late '60s, more than 6000 migrants a year were arriving from Asia. A decade later, the concept of multiculturalism was also promoted out of Melbourne, starting with a landmark report by lawyer Frank Galbally.

Until then, Australian governments had adopted a passive integration policy. Experience in the 1950s had taught that assimilation did not work, and it was recognised that new Australians wanted to establish their own social and cultural organisations.

Multiculturalism went a step further in promoting and celebrating diversity. In commissioning the Galbally report, another Victorian, prime minister Malcolm Fraser, declared: "We cannot demand of people that they renounce the heritage they value, and yet expect them to feel welcome as full members of our society."

Successive Victorian premiers have echoed the same sentiment. At the height of the One Nation phenomenon, Jeff Kennett publicly denounced the party's anti-immigration ethos, and it was a matter of pride among people interviewed for this report that One Nation's message barely resonated in Victoria. "They could not get any foothold here," says Bracks.

By the time of the Galbally report in the late 1970s, mass migration programs had permanently altered the face of Melbourne. In 1947, more than 90 per cent of Melburnians were Australia-born of Anglo-Saxon descent. By '76, overseas-born were settling in numbers large enough to make their presence felt in certain suburbs, although never so many as to take over.

The English, Italians and Greeks were overwhelmingly the largest groups entering Melbourne from an almost exclusively European pool. The English went to the outer east, far south and bayside; the Italians went north and north-west; the Greeks intermingled with the Italians in Northcote, Coburg, Preston, Brunswick and Bulleen, but also gravitated south-east around Oakleigh and west around Williamstown and Altona.

Other nationalities occupied pockets. The Polish-born settled in Caulfield, reflecting the fact most were Jewish refugees and this was where Australian Jews had set up synagogues and schools. The Maltese went to the western plains, the Macedonians filled the factories in Dandenong and the Turks tended towards the outer-northern suburbs.

Where different nationalities overlapped, clusters tended to reflect geographical, cultural or political affinities. The Maltese, for instance, as members of a former British protectorate, settled in high numbers among the English migrants in the outer south-eastern suburbs. The Yugoslavians shared suburbs with the Greeks, Italians and Turks.

Hass Dellal, executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation, says migrant settlement patterns were the same the world over. "The settlement of newer arrivals is dictated by economic conditions - jobs - but they also tend to gravitate to family or community where they find solace, comfort and support," he says. "Those who have come before have set up resources and services in addition to the government services."

In the first post-war immigration waves, the pattern was especially visible among groups who, like the Irish in the 1840s, created their own institutions to fill a gap. "The Maltese fitted in better because they were Catholic and went to the same churches as the Australians, and spoke English," says Father George Kalodimos, from the North Altona Greek Orthodox Church.

The Greeks, on the other hand, had to build their own churches as a beacon for the community to gather around. "We stuck together through religion and language and we would have our own festivals and celebrations," says church elder Con Chrisanthakopoulos.

Existing communities first feel the presence of newcomers in localised and rather piecemeal ways. New languages or accents are heard in factories, schools, doctors' surgeries and hospital waiting rooms. Gradually the numbers build and new faces become more apparent on the streets. Small businesses pop up, with signs in foreign languages, which is generally when a new group becomes broadly visible. Initially the businesses tend to supply their own communities with goods not available in the Australian mainstream. Then come the restaurants. "I suspect they do not open for their own community's demand because they do not have the money to be eating out," says Tence. "But migrants understand we have a very wide palate, so they know a restaurant might be successful because Melbourne is acknowledged worldwide and they take advantage of Melbourne's well-known willingness to try new cuisines."

Immigration patterns in the past 25 years have created a more nuanced cultural map. The change is due in part to the advent of the European Union. "Our people have no need to migrate now," says Father Kalodimos. "They can go anywhere in Europe to get jobs, and they can do better there than here."

AS EUROPEAN migration began to slow in the 1970s, the door was opened wider to people from other parts of the world. Migration waves began to ebb and flow in concert with international conflicts and civil wars: Lebanon, Cyprus and Chile became major sources of migrants in the early '70s, and then the Vietnamese boat people began to arrive in '77.

An expansion in skilled migration programs in the '80s brought middle-class professionals from Asia, India and Sri Lanka. At the same time the refugee intake shifts borders every few years in line with hotspots identified by the United Nations: Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Middle East, and in the past five years, Sudan.

Bracks says that since 2000, Chinese and Indian migrants have outnumbered those arriving from Britain for the first time; Malaysia and Vietnam are the next most common countries of origin. Add in thousands of international students, and the city's cultural topography has become very finely contoured indeed.

Bracks believes only good can come from such trends, given India and China will be the two economic powerhouses of the future. "They are going to be such important markets for us in the future in trade terms, for our products, also in seeking investment, and for our industries. It puts us in a stronger position if we have a greater number of migrants from those two countries here, and we have a greater number coming to our universities and taking back their skills."

On the ground, it means the '76 stalwarts are still there in similar numbers, but new national groups are nudging or overtaking them. The number of English-born residents has nearly doubled in Box Hill, for example - 125 in 1976 to 212 in 2001 - but the Chinese, including those from Hong Kong, jumped from 17 to 952.

The same shift has occurred in Balwyn, where Chinese and Malaysians have overtaken the English and Greeks. In surrounding suburbs such as Doncaster, Blackburn and Burwood, the number of Chinese is rising to rival the English, Greeks and Italians, whose numbers have remained fairly stable in these areas.

The Vietnamese, by contrast, appear to have replaced the Maltese in the north-western suburbs. Similarly, few English-born, Italians or Greeks remain in Richmond and Fitzroy (the Greeks themselves replaced the Germans from the first post-WWII wave), and the Vietnamese are also numerous in Springvale and Keysborough.

The 2001 Census also shows the Vietnamese are diffusing throughout Melbourne. "They are buying up all the milk bars across the city," says Hass Dellal. "After 30, 35 years here, they are gradually moving out and very much getting into small businesses. In Sandringham, Brighton and Black Rock, all six milk bars are owned by Vietnamese. They take the extended family with them and then they start to integrate."

The ability to disperse is another key to multicultural success, according to Bracks. "If you look at Melbourne, there are more middle- and lower-income suburbs which people can migrate to and settle in," he says. "Sydney has fewer and there is a greater disparity between reasonably wealthy or well-to-do suburbs, and poorer, low-income suburbs. So there tends to be more of an enclave position in Sydney where, through demographic reasons and cost pressures, people are more likely to congregate in certain suburbs."

The dispersal in Melbourne is evident in the figures. Even in the few areas where one or two foreign-born nationalities number in their thousands, the overall community is still mixed. The pattern belies popular perceptions that some suburbs have been transformed into ethnic ghettos. In Springvale Road, Springvale, most shop signs are in Vietnamese or Chinese as well as English but that only seems to mean these people run the businesses; the faces observed on the street over half-an-hour are incredibly ethnically diverse.

"We don't go around saying people who have migrated from the UK or New Zealand have created ethnic ghettos," says Dellal. The Europeans, for their part, had different religions and languages, but physically looked similar. It meant that while Box Hill remained predominantly English-speaking after World War II, Dutch, Polish and other Europeans were able to settle there, blending in and quietly maintaining their cultures.

The Chinese now settling Box Hill and surrounding suburbs are mostly middle-class professionals, just like the white Australians and Europeans already there, but they cannot help but stand out more.

"The fact people look different makes people feel there are differences between communities when there aren't," says SBS Melbourne manager Mike Zafiropoulos. "If the suburb was full of Greeks, people wouldn't know. Ghettos mean separated from the rest of the community, or a city within a city, but that is not true here. There are no ghettos in Melbourne. People are happy to move around from suburb to suburb - would you consider Lygon Street a ghetto of Italians?"

Indeed, Malaysians, Singaporeans and Hong Kong Chinese are now the largest overseas-born groups in Carlton; the Italians moved out long ago, reducing Lygon Street to an Italian precinct in commerce only. Zafiropoulos says history shows that ethnic concentrations tend to be temporary. "Eventually people integrate. Can anyone say now where the Irish live, or the Dutch? There are only some symbolic places - like people think Carlton is Italian but they don't live here."

Some cultural clustering, however, is apparent. Where the English-born are found in significant numbers, so are the Scots and New Zealanders. Or the Indians and Sri Lankans, who live with the English in the new estate areas of Hallam, Hampton Park and Endeavour Hills. The trend reflects the middle-class, skilled profile of migrants from southern Asia, but perhaps also a cultural affinity with the British after so long under colonial rule.

Religious and geographical affinities might explain the clustering of Iraqis and Lebanese among the Turks in the northern suburbs around Dallas and Coolaroo. Similarly, where there are Greeks and/or Italians, Croatians, Serbs and Macedonians are often also found. South Africans are now also showing up in their hundreds in Caulfield, alongside the Poles who arrived pre-1976, an influx observers put down to Jews fleeing apartheid violence and post-apartheid instability.

The City of Greater Dandenong is the most culturally diverse of all, so much so that no one nationality dominates. In Dandenong itself, the top three foreign-born groups in 2001 came from Sri Lanka, India and Yugoslavia but together they made up less than 20 per cent of the total residents born overseas.

Dandenong North's top three groups came from Sri Lanka, England and Italy (with a combined 21 per cent), while in Keysborough and Noble Park, it was the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Sri Lankans (combined 25-30 per cent).

In total, 54 per cent of the City of Greater Dandenong's residents are foreign-born, from 151 countries; 48 per cent have non-English-speaking backgrounds. The composition reflects the municipality's industrial base, which traditionally provided jobs for new arrivals over the past 50 years, relatively cheap housing and Immigration Department units providing temporary accommodation for refugees.

"This municipality is used to having people arrive from different parts of the world," says Dandenong's cultural diversity planner, Pam Gatos-Haviaridis. But that doesn't stop abrasion when new groups arrive. Each has its effect on the community already there. One simple example is the Sudanese boys who run amok in libraries and swimming pools because they don't think they have to listen to female librarians and lifeguards.

Colour is another issue. "We are all human," says Phong Nguyen, chair of the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria. "Xenophobia is not only for Anglos. The Vietnamese see the Africans here now and they think we will become like America. They see the bad images with rap music on the television and their children start to behave like African Americans, and they think something they only saw on the television is now in the neighbourhood."

Carmel Guerra, director of the Centre for Multicultural Youth Affairs, says there was some hostility towards Africans, the most recent refugee group. "The Africans are new for us," she says. "The boys look intimidating, they are very cool and loud and they hang around in groups, so the average citizen is scared. But the kids hang around in groups because that is what kids do . . . The Anglos do too, but when it's African boys doing things, it scares . . . people who are not used to them being around. We are not so used to dark skin here as in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland, where there is a larger indigenous population . . . but I hope that because Melbourne has dealt with diversity so well, people will be more responsive to the Africans."

If history is anything to go by, it is a reasonable bet that will be the case.

 

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