Australia and the Immigrant

The First Immigrants

Australia’s first immigrants, as I’ve previously mentioned, arrived here almost 60,000 years ago.  In those days, so much of the Earth’s water was stored up in frozen glaciers that the water level of the world’s oceans was more than a hundred meters lower than it is today.  Think about that.  Consider a beach, and the gentle slope of the land near that site.  A tidal change of only a few inches might expose dozens of feet of beach (or plunge them underwater).  Now imagine the water level dropping by three hundred feet.  All the beaches that we enjoy would be, in those days, hundreds of feet from shore, and many land masses that are now separate would, in those days, have been connected.  Australia and New Guinea, for example, were connected in those days into a larger landmass called Sahul, and it’s believed by many historians that this connection enabled the first Aboriginals to migrate over here (thus shattering my statement in an earlier entry that the Aboriginals sailed here.  I’ll still maintain that this is correct in a poetic, if not strictly literal sense).

The first settlers of Australia were then fairly isolated when the ocean levels rose, as we came out of the last ice age, a process which began about 20,000 years ago, and continued at varying rates until about 3000 years ago, when glacial melting stabilized and the Earth’s sea levels became relatively constant.  Once the sea levels began to rise, the Aboriginals were cut off from the outside by miles of sea, and they were left alone for quite some time.  To give you an idea of how much time, if you were to take the period from when the Aboriginals first settled the continent until now, and compress it into a twenty-four hour day, the British arrived just five and a half minutes before midnight.

The British, and Melbourne

Still, the immigrants came, as I mentioned previously.  The first colony was Sydney, of course, and then Brisbane, Perth, and Melbourne, to name the major cities (there were of course numerous, smaller establishments, the names of which none of you would recognize and so I have omitted).  Melbourne was a different sort of colony than the rest, however, with a history both brighter and darker.  As I’ve always maintained, real history contains in it both pain and promise, and it is in acknowledging and gaining knowledge about these facts that we equip ourselves in the best way to move forward.

So what first, then, the bright or the dark?  A coin flip later, we’ll begin with the dark.  The first European settler to occupy the area near Melbourne was a British man with – the funny to us now – name of John Batman (actually pronounced “Batmin”, but say it how you like).  Via a poor translator, Batman purchased from the Aboriginal people 600 hectares of land in the region for a pittance.  They, it turns out, believed that what he was purchasing was safe passage through the land in question.  The treaty he made with the Aboriginals was clearly exploitive, and is the subject of controversy even today.  However, it may soften the blow to notice that while Batman exploited the Aboriginals in his treaty, the other British at the time simply took the land they wanted outright, with no deals made.  Regardless of the moral implications of this man’s actions, he then, near the river Yarra, established a colony which would go on to become Melbourne.

Melbourne grew at a steady pace, and in the meanwhile all of Australia was doing the same.  Immigrants from Europe came in at a trickle initially, and it was the slow pace of free people migrating, and the overcrowded prisons in Briton, that kept prisoners coming to Australia, mostly men.  Melbourne was a bit different, though, and here is our bright spot: Melbourne was a free city, with no prisoners being shipped in or indentured servants being used to supplement the labor force.

The Gold Rush

The initial population of the Australian colonies was mostly men, and so a movement developed in Briton to bring more women into the country.  Widows and single women were offered free passage to the colony, where they were nearly guaranteed to find a willing husband with land: an opportunity that, for many, couldn’t be resisted.  But it was far out of the way, and many still decided it was too far.

Then, as happens sometimes, settlers stuck gold, in this case literally.  The discovery of gold in Australia caused a massive surge of new immigrants, known as diggers.  We can see at this point the national identity of modern Australia beginning to form.  The original convict settlers and their British military overlords, the rare free men and women who decided to try this new land, and now a horde of diggers looking to make their fortunes (it wasn’t until the modern era that Australians made attempts to integrate Aboriginal culture into the greater Australian one).  An idea that united many of them will sound very American: a resistance to authority.  As these groups mixed, the diggers integrated with the Australian society, and many decided to make their move permanent, even when the gold rush years had passed.

To give an idea of the scale, in just seven months, 2.4 million pounds of gold was mined from the Southern continent.  Over 730 thousand people migrated to Australia, tripling its population.  These numbers make the Australian gold rush larger than the Canadian, Alaskan, and Californian gold rushes combined.  The wealth created in this era was immense, and gave rise to the first period of development in Melbourne.  Great buildings were constructed, like the Royal Exhibition Building, and Melbourne gained the nickname “Marvelous Melbourne.”

It should also be mentioned that Europeans were not the only group to rush to Australia during this time.  Before strict laws were imposed limiting immigration, thousands of Chinese workers came to Australia also seeking fortune, and these people too colored the history of the country.  As I write this, I’m staying in a hostel in Melbourne’s vibrant Chinatown, and though most of the immigrants from China and other Asian countries came much later, their first foothold was during this time.

Chinese Immigration

Eventually, the gold rush subsided, and the next phase of history began.  Of course, these periods were not so neatly defined as one might imagine.  It must be remembered that history has always felt much like it does now, and so one must think about the present day.  How does it feel right now?  Like the end of an era?  The beginning of one?  The middle?  Likely you could argue convincingly for all three.  We look back on the past and admire its seeming stability and simplicity, while the future seems uncertain, in peril, and things appear to be moving too fast.  So too with those days, and I imagine that as the gold rush came to an end there were many saying that the gold would never run out, and others who had been yelling for years that it already had.  But we know, now, that for the most part, the people who came to Australia for the gold had stopped by the early 1900s.  And this resulted in a bit of an identity crisis for this British nation-state.  This is because of the aforementioned Chinese.

By 1861, Chinese immigrants made up roughly 7% of the population in Australia.  At this point, there were already some laws on the books restricting immigration of non-Europeans, but the need for workers was so high that most were still able to get in.  Shortly after the gold ran out, though, and workers were no longer needed, a much more strict policy was put into effect.  Fearing “demographic vulnerability”, laws were enacted to prevent further Chinese immigration (the US took much the same tack against Chinese “coolies”, who, you may know, built most of the rail network that brought our nation’s West online).  Formally called the “1901 Immigration Restriction Act”, the act was known colloquially as the “White Australia Policy”.  The popular politics at the time freely referred to the idea of “keeping Australia pure”, which meant keeping it white.  Actually, back then it was acceptable for political candidates to state plainly: “keep Australia white”.  And to think, now we’re ashamed of MAGA.

It hardly needs to be said that these strictures influenced immigration over the coming decades.  Australia, it turned out, still needed workers, as it used its mined wealth to rapidly industrialize and expand.  Two world wars also called on Australia to provide soldiers to help in the allied fight, and World War II directly threatened Australia as Japan’s hostile forces loomed just to the North.  Immigration was needed to fill the ranks and man the factories and farms of Australia.  Initially, only British immigrants were sought out, but Australia continued to grow more quickly than the British immigrants could keep up, and so other European countries were soon called upon to provide.  Italians, Germans, Polish, Czech, Greeks, and other peoples began to come to Australia, creating a European melting pot very similar to America, and around the same time that the American melting pot really began to bubble, near 1900.  Australia’s history actually resembles America’s so much that it’s kind of shocking.  During the two world wars, for instance, Australia held citizens in internment camps, suspecting that they might be spies, just as America did to American citizens during WWII.

“Australia and the Immigrant”

These new immigrants created friction among the established classes, and one political cartoon captures this perfectly.  A couple stands trying to read a wall of signs that have been erected before them.  Presumably they’ve just come off the boat, and the signs offer a confusing blend of mixed messages.  “Welcome Brother!” one says, beside, “You ain’t wanted!”  “Make Your Home With Us” a hair’s-breath away from “Go Back!”  The woman asks her man, “what does it mean?”  He replies, “I thinka they not speaka da English vera good!”

Odd, or perhaps not, that our views on immigration have really not changed much over the past hundred or so years.  But these attitudes towards outsiders go back further than that, as Carl Sagan reminds us, “To whichever little group we happen to be born, we owe passionate love and loyalty. Members of other groups are beneath contempt, deserving of rejection and hostility. That both groups are of the same species, that to an outside observer they are virtually indistinguishable, makes no difference.  This is certainly the pattern among the chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.”  This feeling, though, is countervailed in our society by the moral sense that these others are like us.  A few days ago I saw two Chinese boys playing a game with each other.  They stood apart from each other, and one tried to get around the other.  To distract his playmate, he pointed behind him and said something in Chinese.  I knew, without knowing his language, what his goal was.  Their behavior was ubiquitous.  All boys, it seems, play the same games as children.  Following this sentiment, some of us welcome immigrants with open arms, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with her bold claim of “wir schaffen das”.  Others tell us we are committing suicide as a culture for doing so, like author Douglass Murray in his compellingly-written The Strange Death of Europe.  Who is correct?

In the 1970s, the final bit of Australia’s antiquated White Australia Policy was dismantled, and the floodgates opened for immigrants.  Since then, the number of immigrants in Australia has increased substantially.  As of 2015, one in three Australian citizens was foreign born.  These are far higher numbers than in America, and could lead one to wonder, what will happen to Australian culture?

The task is made more complicated by the fact that it is not just one group of people moving to Australia.  The Chinese population has certainly increased substantially, but the majority of foreign-born citizens of Australia continues to be from the United Kingdom.  This suggests that cultural disruption is not as threatening as it may initially seem.  And Australia still needs workers.  In fact, as I’ve been traveling around between hostels, in every room I’ve been in there has been at least one person who was a foreign worker in Australia.  Young adults flock from Europe and Canada to make easy money on the farms of Australia, or doing jobs like brick-laying and other manual labor.  An Italian man told me, “man, they have a good system worked out here.  We do all the jobs they don’t want to, and then leave!”  They work on two-year visas, after which they return to their home countries, and as one German woman put it to me, “figure their life out”.

As H.L. Mencken put it, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  So with immigration.  Solutions like the simplistic nonsense given to us by partisan groups aren’t helpful or correct.  They are meant to fuel fires, not to put them out.  So no, the immigration debates in Australia, or anywhere else in the West, cannot be solved by simply opening the doors, or by slamming them shut.  Instead, as is pointed out in the Immigration museum here in Melbourne, it is up to each country to decide what kind of place it wants to be.

Countries born as colonies, like Australia and America, do not have rich histories stretching back thousands of years from which to draw.  Our cultures are more shallow, more dynamic.  We are the crossroads at which the ancient civilizations of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East intersect and cross-pollinate.  But this does not mean that we can complacently sit by and let the chips fall where they may.  The citizens of these melting pot countries must decide what sort of future they want, or else risk their tolerant cultures being highjacked by extremists of either political bent.  We must be optimistic in a certain sense, committed to believing that a better world is possible for all.  That unlike the tribes of our forebears, we can live our lives alongside each other in a responsible way.  The path we embark on is not simple or easy.  It requires diligence, humility, commitment, and responsibility.

What sort of place will Australia become?  Impossible to say.  The country will have to navigate a perilous path, like the journey of Odysseus through the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis.  It will want to preserve its Aussie heritage, with its roots in Briton, while it also faces the darker parts of that history, and the continued process of reconciliation with the Aboriginal people, who may add to the greater Australian culture in significant ways.  Even while this is happening, the increasing immigration and financial investment from China suggests that Chinese culture may leave its mark as well upon the future Australians.

Why the word of caution?  Because the Western world, which includes Australia in its cultural sphere, contains a precious gem.  The Western world, unlike China or Russia, or the countries of Islam, is a place in which you are allowed to be who you want to be.  Perhaps not in an economic sense, but as time goes on it becomes more true in the social sense.  In the hostel I’m staying in, in the bed below mine, sleeps a man who is very Chinese, and very gay.  He’s a permanent citizen of Australia simply because in China, men like him can’t marry.  This trait of Western society, tolerance, “live and let live” is an aspect of our society that we should jealously guard, and in fact the only danger I see in multiculturalism is the idea that one group may grow influential enough to outlaw the others.  I say this with full knowledge that whites have done it in the past, even here in Australia, though it is not a uniquely white tactic.

Regardless of what the future holds for Australia, or where their future citizenry hails from, I hope that this gem, at least, is preserved.  I hope that in the West writ large we work diligently to preserve this basic philosophy, which we in America call “freedom”.  It is the reason why immigrants come to the West. As the history of humanity plods forward, there will always be people moving from country to country, whether its travelers like myself or people seeking a better life, like the Italian woman Edda Azzola, who immigrated to Australia in the 1955, saying to her husband “Come on Angelo, we go and see the world.”  The issue is, of course, politically charged, and will probably always be.  I won’t attempt to define a solution here, but I will offer a reminder.  A city like Melbourne, and a country like Australia, would not exist without immigrants.  Today, it is a bustling metropolis, where a different language is spoken on every corner.  Here you can find all variety of cuisines, vibrant street art, beautiful parks and diverse architecture.  The melting pot, after all, is just black iron without the ingredients to fill it.  So regardless of the future of Australia’s immigration policy, and the future of Australian culture, we can take a moment to enjoy what is, and celebrate the history of those who were once “Not Quite Australian.”