Multiculturalism Archives - thegoodwills.com

Celebrating Multicultural Australia

Australian Bureau of Statistics chart shows growth in population of people born elsewhere since the mid-1940s

Australia is more culturally diverse than ever, according to the first results from the 2021 Census. Almost half our population of 25.76 million people have at least one parent born overseas. Almost a quarter of Australians (24.8%) speak a language other than English at home. Just over a quarter (27.6%) report being born overseas (Ed: and that includes him and me – Scotland and Canada’s loss is our gain, we modestly reckon).

In the five years since the last Census, India has become the second-most common overseas country of birth, shifting New Zealand and China down the list. The above chart from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the shifting demographic.

Dr Sukhmani Khorana, Senior Research Fellow, Western Sydney University, says the growing number of first-generation migrants means Australians’ ancestry will change significantly over the next decade.

“Australia will continue to change and look different, and we must ensure our institutions and policies reflect this,” Dr Khorana wrote in The Conversation.

“That work, by governments and policy makers, should begin now so they can gain trust and maximise the belonging of these communities. Research shows feelings of belonging lead to better socio-economic outcomes”.

Dr Khorana believes there would have been substantially more immigration were it not for the COVID pandemic with its restrictions and lock-downs.

Dr Khorana highlights an important item from the Census data:

the number of people who are either born overseas or have a parent born overseas is greater than half (13.26 million people or 51.5%).

The data shows Australia is as multicultural or even more so than countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada’s latest Census (2016) showed that 21.9% of people were immigrants, led by people from South Asia. Similarly, data from the UK’s 2018 Census showed that 14% of the UK population was from a minority ethnic background. In the city of London, this figure was 40%.

Dr Khorana, who conducts research for migrant and refugee-focused organisations in Western Sydney, says Australia would have received more migrants had it not been for the COVID pandemic, which shut borders from early 2020.

Census data shows the pandemic led to an 80% decrease in the number of overseas visitors, which affected the tourism, hospitality and higher education sectors of the economy.

We also received fewer relatives of overseas-born Australians, for example on family-sponsored visas.

Our local refugee and migrant network organised an event in Warwick last Sunday. Visiting chefs prepared samples of ethnic food from five different countries. There was also music and dancing. About 60 adults and children showed up at St Mark’s Hall including two Hazara Afghan families wearing traditional dress.

Southern Downs Regional Council Mayor Vic Pennisi attended the event and made a short speech. Italian-born Cr Pennisi related his arrival in Australia as a child “with not one word of English”. He grew up in Stanthorpe in a time he acknowledged was not as friendly towards ethnic minorities as Australia is now.

“I left school after Grade 10 and now I’m Mayor of the Southern Downs Regional Council and only in a country like Australia could you do that.”

The event, ‘A Taste of the Southern Downs’, was open to the public, with cooking demonstrations and a chance to sample dishes from South Korea, China, The Philippines, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network organized the event with the support of a grant from the Queensland Government and sponsorship from Acciona’s McIntyre Wind Farm Project.

Our contribution to the event was to set up our PA, make a multi-cultural music play list and present a short set of Australian folk songs. Our theme was the Anglo-Saxon immigrant experience. She Who Still Has a Canadian Accent sung ‘Un Canadien Errant’, a traditional French language song about a young Canadian exile forced to leave Quebec.

We learned two new songs, Farewell to old England and The Shores of Botany Bay, and performed my immigration story, Rangitiki.

Earlier, we listened to guest speakers who impressed me with their command of English language. Even though most grew up in Australia, if you are from Asia, knowing what ‘cooking from scratch’ means is quite impressive stuff. Few of us could translate this to any of the many Asian dialects!

Likewise, a Hazara Afghan and friend of our group, related his story coming from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor in 2012. Now a confident young man with a good command of English, he gave some insights into the sacrifices refugees make when forced to flee their home countries. After a decade in Australia, he has only recently been re-united with his family.

Donations were raised for a Melbourne group, Hazara Women for Change. This group aims to support the ongoing education of Afghan women. Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, have shut down schools and forbid women from receiving an education. That’s the least of the worries for persecuted minorities like the Hazara trying to survive within Afghanistan.

The United Nations recently released a report voicing concern over the Taliban authorities’ carrying out human rights violations with impunity. This included extra-judicial killings of individuals accused of affiliation with armed groups, but also cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishments, and excessive use of force by Taliban officials.

The report documented a total of 237 extra-judicial killings. Most of them (160), targeted former members of the Afghan military and government.

No matter how uncertain their future may be as refugees in Australia, Afghan citizens who were evacuated last August will be grateful to be here, although lamenting those family members left behind.

I had to do some digging to establish the 2021 population of people born in Afghanistan. As you might expect, given the upheaval in that country since the last Census, the Afghan population here has grown from 46,800 in 2016 to 67,030 in mid-2021. And that was before the Taliban came back and some 4,100 people with Australian visas were evacuated to this country, many of them Afghans. For perspective, there are about eight million Hazaras living in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan.

While Australia is a multi-cultural country, the population is still dominated by English-speaking people who were either born here or came from countries where English is the first language.

The top five most common places of birth (outside Australia) are led by England (468,465), India (362,187), New Zealand (267,327), China (239,951) and the Philippines (113,035), followed by Vietnam, South Africa, Italy and Malaysia. People who ticked the ‘born elsewhere’ box numbered 364,949 (includes countries not identified individually by the respondent and people born at sea).

People from the UK still rank among the top five sources of ancestry including English (33%), Irish (9.5%) and Scottish (8.6%).

In his election campaign in May, then Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said becoming prime minister with his Italian surname would proves “you can do anything in this country”.

“We’re a diverse country, and the fact that I have a non-Anglo-Celtic name … I think it sends a message out there hopefully to multi-cultural Australia that you can achieve anything in this country,” he said after being elected in May.

Indeed. We also have a Senate leader named Wong.

It wasn’t always like that.

FOMM back pages (2018)

Multiculturalism under siege

Australia Day and the Highland Clearances

australia-day-highland-clearances — Image: Ruined croft houses on Fuaigh Mòr in Loch Roag. The island was cleared of its inhabitants in 1841 and is now used only for grazing sheep. Wikipedia/Sarah Egan CC.

Australia Day came and went and alas, not once did I think about my birthplace, Scotland, or the country where I spent my childhood (New Zealand). The older I get and the further away from my Citizenship Day ceremony (January 26, 2000), the more it seems I have assimilated.

I do not mean assimilate in a flag-wearing, gum boot-tossing, beer-swilling, ‘It-was-in- the-‘Stralian-so-it-must-be-true’, sense.

Regardless, it is some admission from an iconoclastic alien, someone who had to be repeatedly pressed by the family lawyer to become an Australian citizen. Prior to 2000, I was a British citizen with permanent resident rights in New Zealand. I held an EU passport (what a relic that soon will be), with a return visa which over the years saw increasingly stringent conditions attached.

In the 1970s, when we first set off from New Zealand on our “OE” (overseas experience), we did not need a passport at all. When leaving New Zealand to visit Australia, we just filled in a two-sided visitor card; on which as it became apparent, too many people entered fictitious details.

Immigration Minister Ian McPhee introduced passports for Trans-Tasman travel in July 1981. The main aim was to stop abuses of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangements.

Until that time, Kiwis and Aussies were free to travel back and forth to either country to live, work, play and inevitably meet their life partners and settle in one country or the other.

The evidence of this is seen in Census statistics which showed that 518,466 people born in New Zealand were living in Australia on Census night 2016. Conversely, 62,712 Australians were domiciled in New Zealand on their Census night in 2013.

While it may now seem like folklore, the free and easy Trans-Tasman arrangement fell apart due to revelations about the Mr Asia drug syndicate run by ruthless Kiwi criminal Terry Clark.

He was 2IC of the syndicate in the late 1970s, but rose to the top by ordering the killing of syndicate head Marty Johnstone. The influence Clark and his couriers had on importing heroin into Australia has been well-chronicled. The sordid story was also dramatized in Channel Nine’s Underbelly series.

The years between 1978 and 1983, when Clark died in a British prison, were trying times for law abiding, adventurous Kiwis who travelled across the ‘Dutch’ to work. Young Kiwis thought of Australia as the equivalent of eight countries (six states and two territories), with six times more people, hence unlimited job opportunities. They were escaping New Zealand at a time when unemployment was around 7%.

Australia’s unemployment was also high, but New Zealanders came looking for jobs with a built-in reputation for punctuality, honesty and hard work, Terry Clark notwithstanding.

When I became an Australian citizen on Australia Day 2000, I’ll admit I went into it a trifle blasé – for me it was a necessary formality. But the event in Brisbane Town Hall brought out a lot of emotions as I realised, in company with 699 others, many of whom were refugees, that for some people this ceremony was literally life-saving.

So to Australia Day 2020 and I’m watching the Wugulora Morning Ceremony on ABC TV. It is being held on the lawns of Sydney’s best-known waterside location, Barangaroo. As an armchair viewer, I was immediately touched by the dancing, singing and ceremony, not to mention appropriate speeches by NSW Governor Beazley and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

For me, the televised spectacle was exemplified by a young Aboriginal boy holding aloft two flags – in the right hand the Commonwealth’s symbol of colonial power and in the left the red, yellow and black Aboriginal flag. There was a decent-sized crowd there on the foreshore and the overall impression was one of peace, reverence and inclusion.

Elsewhere in Sydney that day, 10,000 [people marched to protest ‘Invasion Day’, the central tenet of which is that Australia Day should not be held on the day Queen Victoria’s vassals took the country by force.

As someone who was not only born in Scotland, but can trace ancestry back through the same small coastal fishing village to the 1700s, I should know more about the Highland Clearances or the ‘eviction of the Gaels’ than I do.

The eviction of rural tenants between 1750 and 1860 was driven by Scottish lairds, some of whom may have been English or at least owed money to the English. They drove the changes to increase their income and pay off debts.

Previously, farms were run on the runrig system of open fields and shared grazing. These collectives were replaced with large-scale pastoral farms stocked with sheep. Rents were much higher, with many displaced tenants forced into crofting communities, to be employed in fishing, quarrying or the kelp industry. The sudden demotion from farmer to crofter caused much resentment.

Between1815 and the 1850s, as a result of famine and/or collapse of crofting industries, crofting communities lost the means to support themselves. Assisted passages became commonplace, with landowners paying for their tenants to emigrate.

Some of this sounds a little bit like the oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal people, dispossessed and eventually herded into State-run settlement or missions.

Census papers list my forebears’ occupations as ‘agricultural worker’, ‘crofter’, ‘railway gatekeeper’, ‘flax mill worker’ or ‘labourer’. There is a high school teacher in the family tree, but in the main the Wilsons were working people and for centuries stayed in the one place. That is until my Dad had an epiphany and started looking for work in another country under the ‘assisted passage’ scheme. We missed out on going to Ontario for reasons which were never discussed with mere children. Instead, we were booked to sail to New Zealand in the southern winter of 1955. We arrived in Wellington and then took a night train to a small town in the centre of the North Island.

Bob’s song, Rangitiki

This week we watched the documentary, Gurrumul, a unique glimpse into the late indigenous singer’s life in a remote Arnhem Land community. Gurrumul became famous the world over, singing his own songs and stories in the Yolngu language. He touched people with his music, even when they did not understand the lyrics.

According to custom, the Yolngu people request that the names and images of tribal people not be used after their deaths. In Gurrumul’s case, they made an exception.

In a similar vein, Scotland has produced numerous bands that sing in Gaelic, including Manran, a band that recently toured Australia. I find myself moved in a spiritual way by Gurrumul’s music just as the often patriotic songs of modern Gaelic bands give me goose bumps. We don’t understand the content but we absorb the emotional message.

I’m never sure how many people actually look up links, although I must recommend the intriguingly-named Red Hot Chilli Pipers. I will leave you with this snippet from this energetic nine-piece band.

As always, the skirl of the bagpipes sends shivers down the spine and brings goose bumps to the forearms. Once a Scot always a Scot.

Red Hot Chilli Pipers

Refugee documentaries – preaching to the converted

As it is Refugee Week, I’ve been reflecting on how my support for refugees and asylum seekers is shamefully passive. I was reminded of this after attending a viewing last Saturday of Julian Burnside’s refugee documentary, Border Politics. Then on Monday I was one of 67 people who devoted the evening to a public viewing in Buderim of the refugee film, Constance on the Edge.

‘Constance on the Edge’ charts the struggles of a mother and her six children on a journey from war-torn South Sudan, via a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp, before being settled in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Constance suffers culture shock, adding to existing (and so-far untreated), post-traumatic stress. She has difficulties fitting in to a rural town, encountering unexpected racism. She also voices frustration that the help refugees receive, well-meaning as it may be, is not always what they want or need.

During question time someone asked how we could ensure more people get to more refugee documentaries like ‘Constance on the Edge’ and develop some empathy for refugees. As he said, the 67 people in the room already know about the issues and how much work needs to be done.

The debate about Australia’s asylum seeker policies resides within disparate echo chambers. First there’s the chamber of humanitarian outrage, where we gather to watch refugee documentaries, drop gold coins in the donations bucket and froth about our disappointing government. Then there are those who do have compassion but feel/believe that the government is right to take a hard line with asylum seekers. Perhaps they have never asked themselves why, merely trusting in their political masters to do the right thing.

While I fully support the expatriation of refugees from offshore detention, an increase in the refugee intake and a more relaxed attitude in general, a few hundred people protesting in King George Square or waving banners outside Peter Dutton’s electorate office is not going to make much difference. Many people who are bothered by the government’s attitude to refugees thought things would change when Labor won the election. Not only did Labor not win, the party’s position on refugees is quite similar to that of the LNP, with the exception that Labor would have entertained New Zealand’s offer to resettle people from Manus and Nauru.

Today I’m asking myself the same question I put to you – how many refugees do you actually know? Had anyone over to lunch recently or for a sleepover? I know a few local people who have opened their homes to refugees, linking up with local support groups like Buddies and Welcome to Maleny. The latter organised the viewing of Border Politics, part of the Sunshine Coast Refugee Action Network’s film festival. This film, co-produced by BBC Scotland, owes a bit to the style of outspoken US film maker Michael Moore in that it tells its story regardless of another point of view. The opposing stance is depicted in carefully chosen media clips of Donald Trump and others defending their position (John Howard is shown stating: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

This much-used quote comes from a long election campaign speech in 2001 amid the Tampa affair and the ‘children overboard’ claims.

Human rights barrister Julian Burnside certainly got around the place making this film. It revealed some things about refugees I did not know, namely the decision by outlying Scottish shires like the island of Bute to welcome as many refugees as was practical. Burnside also visited the Greek island of Lesbos, which at one stage in 2015 was literally awash with refugees arriving ad hoc from mainland Turkey. Many locals just reacted as they would if one of their own had been tossed out of a boat and was in danger of drowning. They gave food and shelter and helped them find their feet, all in the name of humanitarianism.

The problem with Border Politics, as is the case with many of the refugee-based documentaries doing the rounds, is that it preaches to the converted. It simmers with outrage and absolutely ignores the opportunity to engage in a debate with intelligent but conservative people who are wedded to the government line that an open door policy is an invitation to terrorists to set up camp and destabilise from within.

Some refugee documentaries, like Orban Wallace’s ‘Another News Story’, try for another angle. ‘Another News Story’ turns the camera on the news crew and film-makers. They, after all, are the ones who capture stark images like the photo shown in Burnside’s documentary of a toddler lying dead on a Mediterranean beach. As The Guardian’s Charlie Phillips wrote: “Film crews are shown asking refugees the same things over and over, then moving on to the next story. Their intentions may be honourable, but the scrum to get the most emotional pictures feels unpleasant and desensitising.”

Phillips lists documentaries which have real shock power, notably Gianfranco Rosi’s Oscar-nominated ‘Fire at Sea’ and Daphne Maziaraki’s ‘4.1 miles’, a 28-minute documentary which shows coastguards rescuing refugees arriving on Lesbos.

Australia’s ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’ gets an honourable mention. I have seen this film, which deals with the personal struggle of a trauma counsellor working at Christmas Island’s high-security detention centre. Christmas Island counsellor Po-Lin is herself traumatised by the experience of counselling traumatised refugees while battling the indifference of centre management.

The documentary has a twin purpose – to chronicle the annual migration of red crabs from the jungle on one side of the island to the open sea on the other. The analogy is not wasted. h

Documentaries like those mentioned involve us in a passive way, while actually making a decision to go and work with refugees, as many volunteers do, is probably more effective. Many of these films are in limited distribution, tagged on to film festival programmes or being shown to like-minded people who have donated money to make the viewing affordable. But some can be found and viewed for nothing via YouTube or Vimeo or streamed for a small fee.

Some refugee documentaries are hard work: ‘Border Politics’ is harrowing and so too Ai Weiwei’s ‘Human Flow’, a three-hour tour of all the world’s refugee hotspots. Here’s the trailer – the movie is available for streaming or download through Amazon.

Some use comedy to get the message out, for example, ‘The Merger’, (a struggling rural AFL club recruits African refugees to bolster the team’s efforts). When the proportion of refugees living among us is less than 0.25% of the population, we need insights like these to remind us that people escaping wars and persecution are settling here. They need our help, even the small things (like the CWA lady in Wagga teaching one of the African women how to knit).

While Refugee Week (an Australian initiative now in its 20^th year) ends tomorrow, I recommend tracking down at least one of the movies mentioned here. They give voice to important stories which are not in general circulation, and that in itself is commendable.

Refugees settling in despite funding cuts

refugees-Toowoomba-funding — Multiculturalism: Toowoomba’s Mayayali Association (Kerala province south India) participates in the city’s annual Carnival of Flowers parade. Photo by Bob Wilson.

While refugees and migrants have been welcomed into Australia’s rural communities, successive Budget cuts have made life difficult for refugee support services. Although not attracting too many headlines, a $50 million cut in the 2018-19 Budget, and another $77.9 million over four years in the 2019-20 Budget, means that organisations trying to help refugees with the transition to a new country, a new culture and a new language are left scrambling.

The Refugee Council of Australia pointed out that the Budget found $62 million extra for Operation Sovereign Borders, while spending $50 million less on refugee support services.

“The Government has savagely cut its allocation for financial support for people seeking asylum by more than 60% in just two years, from $139.8 million in 2017-18 to $52.6 million in 2019-20”.

The 2018 cuts were particularly bad for organisations like Toowoomba Refugee and Migrants Services (TRAMS), because the government also stopped funding translation services, which means TRAMS and other networks throughout Australia have to fund their own.

Over the past 15 years, more than 4,000 families have settled in Toowoomba,130 kms west of Brisbane. They came from conflict-torn homelands of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan.

TRAMS director Kate Venables told regional ABC that Federal funding was cut from $390,000 to $240,000 in late 2018, taking the organisation by surprise.

“Part of that funding now goes towards an interpreting service that was previously government funded. So really our funding was reduced to $160,000, a massive reduction for us.”

About 400 TRAMS clients are Yazadi, a persecuted religious minority from Iraq. The Yazadi follow their own religion and speak the little-known dialect of Kurdish-Kurmanji.

According to the 2016 Census, 3,657 people living in Toowoomba spoke a language other than English at home. They included Mandarin (934), Arabic (879), Tagalog (482), Dinka (474) and Afrikaans (444). Tagalog is the language of Filipino natives while Dinka is spoken by South Sudanese ethnic groups. Most of the Yazadi refugees arrived after the Census was taken.

Toowoomba’s population has more than doubled from 73,390 in 1986 to 160,799 in 2016. In a provincial city settled mainly by people of Anglo-Saxon or German descent, that is considerable growth and diversity of population. The city also has significant communities of migrants from India and the Philippines.

When we visited last September for the Carnival of Flowers, I was taken with the way the traditional street parade had become a celebration of multiculturalism and diversity. If you want to know how multicultural Toowoomba has become, the weekend we were there, more than 2,000 South Sudanese people attended a funeral for a local Anglican priest. Some of these people came from out of town, but such was the show of support they had to hire a high school hall for the service.

According to a survey of 155 newly arrived adult refugees and 59 children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who settled in suburban Brisbane, Logan and Toowoomba, those who settled in Toowoomba had the easiest time integrating and feeling a part of their local communities.

The survey by Professor Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney and Professor Carol Read, Professor, Western Sydney University, was funded by the Australian Research Council. The findings are the first to emerge from a three-year study of settlement outcomes of recently arrived refugees in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nearly all refugees surveyed in Brisbane and Logan are Christians – a consequence of the Turnbull government favouring mainly Christian refugees from Syria and Iraq. As well as settling Yazidi refugees, Toowoomba also welcomed a smaller number of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.

I recall checking out an Afghan takeaway and grocery shop in Toowoomba’s Margaret Street. We chatted to the young man behind the counter who said that while he liked Toowoomba well enough, he found it very quiet after the constant hubbub of Kabul (population 4.65 million).

One key issue related to immigrant and refugee settlement in regional and rural Australia relates to the warmth of the welcome. Collins and Read said 68% of the refugees in Queensland overall – and 81% in Toowoomba reported that it was “very easy” or “easy” to make friends in Australia. About 60% found it “very easy” or “easy” to talk to their Australian neighbours.

“When we revisit these families in 2019 and 2020, we expect the numbers will even be higher,” the survey authors said.

Syrian refugee Yousef Roumieh, a bi-cultural support worker with TRAMS, helps Yazadi refugees with day-to-day tasks, such as booking appointments and reading mail and text messages.

He learned to speak Kurdish-Kurmanji during a five-year stay in an Iraqi refugee camp.

“There is not enough funding to pay for the supports, this is a big problem,” Mr Roumieh, formerly a pharmacist from Damascus, told the ABC.

The Department of Social Services made it clear the onus was (now) on refugee support services to provide their own interpreting services. The department said the previous arrangement was ‘contrary to the intent of the Free Interpreting Service program’.

You may recall the Australian Story episode Field of Dreams in 2016, which told of the positive outcomes flowing from settling African refugees in the New South Wales border town of Mingaloo. It’s not difficult to find similar stories, particularly in rural Victoria and NSW. The Economist published a story in January about the 400 Yazadi refugees resettled in the NSW regional town of Wagga Wagga. The primary school in the town had to hire interpreters to communicate with families (a fifth of its students are refugees) and the local college is busy with parents learning English and new trades. As the article observed “Few locals seem fussed about the changes and to those fresh from war zones, ‘Wagga’ is an idyll.”

Many grassroots organisations and charities have weighed in to help refugees make the transition to new towns in Australia. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) said resettlements had occurred in Hamilton, Swan Reach, Kerang, Nhill, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Shepparton, Albury/Wodonga, Wagga, Griffith, Leeton, Armidale, Mingoola and Townsville – “to name a few”.

In the tiny Victorian town of Nhill (pop 2,184), 160 refugees from Myanmar helped boost the town’s economy by taking jobs with a local poultry farm.

Funding for refugee support services is often derived from a variety of sources. The Nhill initiative was co-funded by the Federal government, Hindmarsh Shire and the poultry farm, Luv-a-Duck.

A report published by Deloitte Access Economics and settlement agency AMES Australia said the initiative has added more than $40 million and 70 jobs to the local economy between 2010 and 2015.

At its annual conference in December, the Labor Party made a commitment to increase community-sponsored refugee programmes up to 5,000 places per year, and boost funding for regional processing and resettlement. The unequivocal promise of support is in stark contrast to the $50 million cut to refugee services by the Coalition. Coincidentally, this is the exact sum set aside for the redevelopment of the site at Botany Bay where the British explorer and his crew first set foot on Australian soil in 1770.

That’s what elections are all about, really; you vote for the party that spends (or doesn’t spend) money on things you care about.

FOMM back pages:

Errata: Last week I somewhat underestimated the cost of a political bill board, which an informed reader told me was $10,000 a month.

Keeping the Toowoomba carnival afloat

Macca-Toowoomba-carnival — Photo: Macca amongst the people at the Toowoomba carnival of flowers – by Bob Wilson

So there we were at the unaccustomed early hour of 7am in Laurel Bank Park, Toowoomba, trying to catch Macca’s eye to say, “Mate, we’re here.”

Ian McNamara,* the host of Australia all Over, who sometimes plays music by our band, The Goodwills, had invited us to attend his second OB (outside broadcast) of the year.

Laurel Bank Park was pretty as a picture, thanks to a big team of gardeners and a decision by the Toowoomba Regional Council to water the town parks, despite the drought. It makes little sense to have a famous Carnival of Flowers without making some attempt to preserve the gardens.

The Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers has been going for 69 years, attracting ever-larger crowds each year to take tours of the prize-winning gardens, watch the grand parade and dine out in the city’s eclectic ‘Eat Street’. It was sentimentally appropriate that we were in Laurel Bank Park, where rumour has it we (She and Me) once had a re-affirmation of vows ceremony, cunningly disguised as a bush dance. We lived in Toowoomba in the 1980s (and my how this sprawling country town has grown).

Last weekend, we stayed with old friends at Highfields, now a satellite suburb 10 kms north-west. Our friends bought an acre of land and a house there when it was still in the bush. Now there’s a service station on the corner (and traffic lights). We drove into town to watch the Grand Parade on Saturday, parking in a secret place known only to locals. On the way we detoured up Bridge Street, past what used to be the Toowoomba Foundry, now home to the biggest Bunnings store I’ve seen for a long time. The Foundry facade on Ruthven Street has been left standing, along with remnants of the old saw-tooth factory roof, which you don’t see much of in this era of tilt-slab concrete industrial sheds.

Toowoomba has certainly become not only bigger but more multicultural since we lived there. Walking past St James Anglican Church on Russell Street, we saw many Sudanese people gathered outside. They had just returned from the funeral of the Rev James Ajak, a respected priest and community leader among Toowoomba’s large South Sudanese community. A thousand people, some who came from as far away as Western Australia, attended his funeral at the Centenary Heights State High School Assembly Hall.

Multicultural-Toowoomba-carnival — Multicultural Toowoomba carnival

Multicultural groups were well represented in the grand parade of floats, bands, vintage cars and dancing schools. Our host told us an amusing story about a grand parade from years gone by when it rained relentlessly. There were two elephants on a flat-bed truck, he said, and one of them heeded nature’s call, leaving a wet pile of dung for the people following behind to negotiate.

It wasn’t really the right mental picture for a lovely Spring day with a big crowd of good-natured people enjoying the hour-long parade, led by the Toowoomba Caledonian Pipe Band. I was never very good at estimating crowds, even though I was given a few tips by Toowoomba police back in the day when I worked at The Chronicle as a general reporter and columnist.

Thousands, let’s say, drifting down Margaret Street to Queens Park where floats were lined up for inspection (and judging). Our host’s grandkids cunningly detoured Pop to sideshow alley, while we strolled hand in hand through one of our special places. If Queens Park had been watered lately, it was still thirsty, not surprising given the city has had only 70mm of rain in the past six months. Only one of those rainy days amounted to much (20.8mm). As gardeners would know, this is when you have to think about what to water and when.

Nonetheless, Laurel Bank Park, with its topiary, flower beds, scented garden, flowering peach trees and bowling green lawns was at its showcase best. We did catch Macca’s eye, as he roamed among the 600 or so people who showed up to listen to his four and a half hour live Sunday morning broadcast.

We sang a couple of songs and listened with admiration to local duo Kay Sullivan (accordion) & Peter Freeman (double bass) accompany Mimosa, a gypsy jazz duo from Terrigal, with Toowoomba trombone player Ian Craig chiming in as required. Macca sang a couple of songs and the band played along – as if they’d all had rehearsals. It was impressive.

Later I was reminded of the column I once wrote for the Toowoomba Chronicle in the 1980s. It started life prosaically as This Week with Bob Wilson and later became Friday on My Mind. We were reminiscing about the time our local folk club built a scale model of the Glenrowan Pub on the back of a truck and entered it into the grand parade with a bush ranger theme. I satirised this in one of my old columns (September 1984). Such fun to quote yourself:

“The float-building gang were having a right old bludge. There was Bluey swarming all over the back of his smash repair truck pulling ropes and lugging hay bales while the gang of nine procrastinated beneath a tree where someone had thoughtfully erected a makeshift bar, keg and 10 seven ounce glasses. Ted and Hughie arrived with their contribution to the float – a four-metre high model of the Ryebuck Shearer complete with black singlet, hand shears and a big placard which read “One out, all out”. Bluey inspected the newcomer and tapped its 44-gallon drum chest.

“Good welding job. Thing must weigh a ton.”

“He used to shear 100 sheep a day, mate,” said Molly.

Ben turned up in his bright green Ute with two sheep in the back. Hollering things like ‘Bewdy’ and ‘Have a go’, Ben carted the bewildered animals (one under each arm like Colin Meads), and plonked them on the back of the truck.

“I’ll bet we need a permit to transport live sheep on an open truck during a street parade,” said Cautious Col.

By midnight the day before the grand parade, the Ryebuck Shearer had been bolted to the back of the truck cab, a sheep chained to each of his formidable legs.

“You’re not going to leave them sheep here all night are you?” Bluey said. “They could clean up my back yard before tomorrow.

“It is tomorrow,” said Molly, “And I’m going home.”

Later, about noon, the Rybebuck Shearer was disqualified from the parade because stewards ruled that neither he nor his placard could pass safely beneath overhead power lines. Ben’s sheep (Banjo and Henry), were also pulled out of the race. Rain fell on the parade and the bloke who’d lent the hay bales said they weren’t worth a pinch of sheep now and charged them $2 a bale. Bluey’s truck got a flat tyre as he tried to turn it round in the marshalling yards. Molly started crying into her rum and coke and the barmaid from across the road came over and said anyone with pub glasses please take them back or she’d lose her job.

“I told you so,” said Col.

*Rebecca Levingston interviews Ian McNamara on South Bank’s Ferris wheel, August 2017 (log in to Facebook first).

https://www.facebook.com/abcinbrisbane/videos/10155634496309669/

Clarification: Last week I referred to the cost of a visitor visa to Nauru as $800. It is $8,000 for a journalist.

Multiculturalism under siege

multiculturalism-perilli-monument — Monument to Multiculturalism in Toronto, a sculpture by Francesco Perilli. Photo by Shaun Merritt https://flic.kr/p/5d7sTp

My plan to write something cuddly and wholesome about Multiculturalism Month in Queensland was derailed somewhat by the egregious maiden speech of crossbench Senator Fraser Anning.

One of our newest politicians, he chose his maiden speech to call for a return to the White Australia policy, suggesting that a plebiscite be held to ask Australians if they want ‘wholesale non-English speaking immigrants from the Third World and, in particular, whether they want any Muslims’.

Politicians who make incendiary speeches are often misquoted, so this is exactly what Senator Anning had to say about Muslims.

“A majority of Muslims in Australia of working age do not work and live on welfare. Muslims in New South Wales and Victoria are three times more likely than other groups to be convicted of crimes. We have black African Muslim gangs terrorising Melbourne. We have ISIS-sympathising Muslims trying to go overseas to fight for ISIS and, while all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these days are Muslims. So why would anyone want to bring more of them here?”

He said a lot of other things too; about countering the growing threat of China both outside and within Australia; about building coal-fired power stations to return us to the cheapest power in the world, and about (ahem) restoring personal freedoms and free speech.

The thing that outraged many, however, was his use of the words, ‘the final solution’, made infamous by the Nazis in WWII. Senator Anning seems unrepentant, amid claims the speech was deliberately structured to be controversial and raise his profile. He claims the use of the term “final solution” (the Nazi regime’s euphemism for exterminating Jewish people), was “inadvertent”. But he has not backed down, saying the outrage is coming solely from political opponents.

The counterpoint to Senator Anning’s divisive speech was a plea for consensus by the Member for Chifley, Hon Ed Husic. His response in Parliament described the experiences of his Bosnian parents, who came to Australia in the 1960s.

“My old man worked on the Snowy Mountains scheme. Dad worked with his hands and Mum stayed home to make sure we had a family that could take advantage of all the great things in this country.

“Like many kids of migrants, I carry a debt – a debt of gratitude to this country that we were able to achieve this. I went to university. I could count on one hand the numbers of folks in my family or from my Dad’s generation that got to do that. Now I get to serve in this place (Parliament) and regardless of my faith, my commitment to the community is what I’m judged on.”

Opposition leader Bill Shorten weighed in, saying “…As leaders, as representatives of the Australian people, as servants of diverse communities in a great multicultural nation, we cannot stay silent in the face of racism.”

Even former MP John Howard condemned the tone of Anning’s speech, which is a bit rich coming from the bloke who introduced the One Australia policy in 1988, which called for an end to multiculturalism (and opposed a treaty with Aboriginal Australians).

Anning might not have read the spray in the Tweed Daily News from Australian-born journalist Charis Chong, who said that although she drinks all kinds of Australian beer and has a Weber in her backyard, “I’ll never be Australian enough”.

She talks of her negative experiences as an Asian Australia, but also her true friendships with people who don’t talk about assimilation – “they are just nice, decent people who appreciate each individual person for who they are.

“The problem with Senator Anning’s comments is that they seek to exclude people from ever being good enough to be ‘Australian’ simply because they don’t look ‘white’ or want to practice a certain religion.”

Katharine Murphy writing for The Guardian warned that the Anning speech was a sign that Australia was being caught up in global nationalist debates.

“What we are witnessing in national politics is the latest manifestation of Australia’s cultural cringe. Far right political operatives, and the media voices prepared to give them succour, are importing the nationalist debates that have sprung up in the shadow of the global financial crisis.”

Murphy is correct in saying that debates about race, multiculturalism, sovereignty and immigration have flared up elsewhere because of deep resentments felt by the losers of globalisation. While Australia was not as deeply affected by the GFC, the ‘outrage consciousness’ that exists elsewhere is being imported, validated and projected here, she said.

The 2016 Census revealed a lot about the ethnic makeup of Australia. Nearly half (49%) of Australians had either been born overseas (first generation Australian) or one or both of their parents had been born overseas (second generation Australians). Of the 6.16 million overseas-born persons, nearly one in five (18%) had arrived since the start of 2012. While England and New Zealand were still the next most common countries of birth, the proportion of those born overseas who were born in China and India has increased to 8.3% and 7.4% respectively. Malaysia now appears in the top 10 countries of birth (replacing Scotland) and represents 0.6% of the Australian population. While 52.1% of Australians identify as Christians, those who listed Islam as their religion numbered 620,200 or 2.6% of the population.

One might imagine that immigrants and refugees settling in regional and rural Australia would receive a chilly reception from the stereotypical ‘rednecks’ of the bush. But Prof. Collins wrote in The Conversation that a research project on immigrants living in regional Australia a decade ago dispelled this myth, with 80% of respondents reporting a warm welcome.

“Our new research confirmed this finding, with 68% of the refugees surveyed in Queensland overall – and 81% in Toowoomba – reporting it was ‘very easy’ or ‘easy’ to make friends in Australia.”

Meanwhile, people who believe in embracing multiculturalism continue to celebrate its existence, which in Queensland is the month of August.

If you live in regional Queensland and support cultural diversity, you could look out for BEMAC’s Culture Train. (BEMAC is Queensland’s leading multicultural arts producer, presenter and artistic development organisation).The train will be making 15 whistle stops on a tour that starts today. A group of five culturally diverse musicians will present free concerts and workshops starting at Dunwich (Stradbroke Island), then on to Dalby, Chinchilla, Roma, Charleville, Longreach, Barcaldine, Emerald, Rockhampton, Gladstone, Childers, Cherbourg, Toowoomba, Ipswich and finishing at the Brisbane Multicultural Centre on August 31. The Culture Train 2018 ensemble is: Sarah Calderwood: Celtic singer-songwriter, flute & whistle player, Chong Ali: Vietnamese rapper and emcee, Marcelo Rosciano: Brazilian percussionist, Ben Kashi: Persian dulcimer and percussionist and Gertrude Benjamin: Torres-Strait Islander folk and soul singer.

Sarah, who is also musical director, said the group would be performing shows which combine songs from the group’s vastly different cultures backgrounds, with individuals performing solo work as well.

“The five of us are thrilled to not only celebrate this diversity through music and storytelling,” she told FOMM, “but to promote inclusion and bring communities together to collectively celebrate multiculturalism in regional, rural and remote communities.”