Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2
GEOFFREY SHERINGTON
AUSTRALIA’S
IMMIGRANTS 1788–1988
3
© Geoffrey Sherington
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No
reproduction
without permission. All rights reserved.
Sherington, Geoffrey.
Australia’s immigrants, 1788–1988.
2nded.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
4
ISBN 004 4422040.
325.94
5
To Lisa and in memory of Marjorie Frances Sherington
6
CONTENTS
Preface
Elements of Change
‘Criminal Influx’
‘Cultural Baggage’
7
The Ties of Kinship
Taking Stock
4 AN IMPERIAL DOMINION
5 A MULTI-CULTURAL SOCIETY
Notes
Further Reading
Index
8
PREFACE
It is a decade since the first appearance of Australia’s
Immigrants. Since then a number of special and general
studies have been added to the literature on immigration to
Australia, the most important being The Encyclopaedia of the
Australian People, published in the bicentennial year 1988.
An opportunity has been taken here to incorporate some of
this new research in what remains a general overview of the
immigration and settlement of Australia since 1788. Parts of
the original text have been rewritten, and in particular, a new
section has been added to Chapter 5 outlining those recent
changes to immigration and immigration policy which have
brought Australians much closer to a realisation of their place
within the Asia-Pacific region.
9
institutions that now form the basis of modern Australian
society were drawn from the many cultural fragments that left
the ‘old world’ of Britain and Europe during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The dynamic of change continues
today, albeit under new circumstances.
10
1
John Locke
11
Property was ‘the great source of distinction among
individuals’, observed a late eighteenth century Scottish
philosopher.1 Of all the forms of property, landed wealth was
the most significant. The vast estates of the nobility and
gentry provided the profits for investment in expanding
commercial ventures and the lever for political influence and
social prestige. One contemporary estimate of the income of
English society suggested that in 1803 about 1 per cent of the
population received one-seventh of the national income.2
Further down the complex social pyramid were the vast
numbers of ‘middling ranks’ distinguished from the
aristocracy and gentry by the need to earn their living through
some form of occupation. At the base of the pyramid,
constituting almost one-third of the population but earning
only one-sixth of the national income,3 were the ‘labouring
poor’, men and women with no particular skills or influence.
12
The harshness of the criminal law was intended primarily as a
deterrent, a means of intimidation. Probably less than half
those condemned to death were actually executed. The
‘justice’ of the law was tempered by ‘mercy’, partly on
humanitarian grounds but mainly as a means of maintaining
respect for legal processes. In the absence of any effective
form of imprisonment, the alternative to execution by hanging
became transportation, generally for sentences of seven or
fourteen years, or for life. It was hoped thereby to deter crime
and possibly to reform the prisoner in a new environment; at
the least, transportation removed the offender from ‘civilised’
society.
Population7
13
areas. By the end of the century the proportion of the British
population living in towns had increased from 13 per cent to
25 per cent of total population.8
14
a number of other tricks and fraudulent pretences, they are but
too successful in obtaining considerable booty . . . Many of
these atrocious villains, are also constantly waiting at the
inns, disguised in different ways, personating travellers,
coach-office clerks, porters and coachmen, for the purpose of
plundering every thing that is portable; which, with the
assistance of two or three associates if necessary, is carried to
a coach for the purpose, and immediately conveyed to the
receiver.12
15
debate on London crime in 1785, the solicitor-general
informed the House of Commons:
16
In view of their guardians in Australia, the London convicts
were ill disciplined. Such a view may be an indication of a
sense of camaraderie necessary for survival in a harsh penal
atmosphere in foreign surroundings. Most convicts were put
to work for the government or for private individuals. They
formed an unpaid workforce which helped farm the colony
and create the early buildings and streets around Sydney cove.
A few did escape such a fate but often because they stood out
from their fellow exiles. Michael Robinson, blackmailer,
lawyer and Oxford University graduate, arrived in Sydney in
1798 after a voyage in which his ‘superior manners won him
the special consideration of the captain; he was permitted to
take his meals with the petty officers, a bottle of wine and a
dinner being sent daily from the captain’s table’.20 In
Australia, the new colony made use of his legal talents,
employing him in public office (even though he sometimes
returned to old habits of fraud and malpractice). For a few
other convicts, the new environment provided opportunities
not open to them in England. Those who in the mind of the
authorities behaved themselves were granted ‘tickets of leave’
and later conditional or full pardons for their past offences.
Some returned home but most remained. Reporting on the
system of emancipation, the Select Committee on
Transportation noted in 1812:
17
Government stores. In this manner, they have an opportunity
of establishing themselves in independence, and by proper
conduct to regain a respectable place in society; and such
instances, Your Committee are glad to learn, are not
infrequent.21
Lord was a success story among the early convicts. Few of his
fellow exiles equalled his achievements, although at least one
more than matched his wealth. A former labourer in
Manchester, Samuel Terry, ‘The Botany Bay Rothschild’,
arrived in Sydney in 1800 at the age of twenty-four. A shrewd
property investor, by 1820 Terry owned almost half of all
land owned by ex-convicts in the colony. On his death in
1838, he left an estate of £250,000 ($500,000) and an annual
income of £10,000 ($20,000) from rent.23
18
For most ‘emancipists’ the greatest opportunity for private
enterprise was in farming and grazing. Here circumstances
and their background counted against them. Beginning in the
1790s, some did receive small land grants, but only
one-quarter of such potential farmers had any experience on
the land in Britain. More importantly, hardly any had amassed
the necessary capital to develop their property.24 By 1821,
almost two-thirds of those convicts who had received land
grants since the founding of the colony had failed to make a
go of it and had lost their holdings. A few returned to
England, but the majority remained in the colony as
labourers, sometimes tilling the very land they had once
owned.25
19
Ester Abrahams was a fifteen-year-old London Jewish
milliner when sentenced to seven years transportation for
theft in 1786. On the First Fleet, she met Lieutenant Johnston
and on landing in Sydney became his de facto wife. Johnston,
later to become infamous for his part in the ‘rum rebellion’
against Governor Bligh, formed a long-lasting relationship
with Ester. He married her in 1814 and on his death in 1823
left her his estate of Annandale.28
20
enter into an engagement with each other, not to give more
than certain sum for every article.30
21
Male and female convicts of urban background, particularly
from London, formed a distinctive pattern amongst
Australia’s first European settlers. The majority had been
tried in England. Scottish criminal law was milder than its
English counterpart, granting judges discretionary power to
modify sentences according to the youth, condition or
temptation of the prisoner. Few Scottish criminals were
hanged and those transported were only 3.5 per cent of the
total numbers sent from the British Isles from 1787 to 1823.32
22
countryside and as a result, between 100 and 200 Irish were
sent out to Australia.34
23
mutiny of sailors of the fleet in 1797. He was sent to Australia
in 1801. In 1802, he became assistant surgeon on Norfolk
Island, the beginning of a distinguished medical career in
Australia which would see him caring for the welfare of the
convicts, both in the service of the government and in private
practice.37 Of the ‘Scottish martyrs’, Thomas Fyshe Palmer,
an English-born Unitarian minister, was convicted in Scotland
in 1793 of ‘seditious practices’. Although ill treated on the
voyage to Australia, ‘During his seven years of exile in
Sydney Palmer was free from the usual convict restraints and
engaged in various enterprise to supplement his private
means’.38
24
had by 1815 become ‘prosperous and respectable’. A pub
owner, he was also one of the original shareholders in the
Bank of New South Wales.42 Another rebel of 1798, Andrew
Doyle, had by 1809 acquired property in the Toongabbie
district near Sydney, the foundation of property holdings by
his family which by 1880 stretched into northern New South
Wales, southern Queensland and the Gulf of Carpentaria
country.43
25
many of the civil and military officers were drawn to the new
colony by the prospects of social and economic advancement.
Those in positions of authority in the colonial civil and
military establishment had achieved their posts through the
exercise of that second great feature of eighteenth-century
Britain — patronage.
26
appointments were far less satisfactory. In Van Diemen’s
Land, Collins was plagued by an attorney-general who knew
little law, a chaplain who was intemperate, and medical
surgeons who had ‘social connections’ but few skills.46 As
isolated remote outposts, the early Australian colonies offered
little to talented professional men. Instead, they were a
convenient dumping ground not only for convicts but also for
certain incompetents whom those in authority wished to
favour.
27
Convicts in New Holland. Most convicts arrived in Australia
unmarried or having left their married partners behind. Some
established temporary and permanent relationships with their
fellow exiles, but most remained single.
28
English officer and lady in New Holland. Some English
officers brought their wives with them. Others established
liaisons with convict women. As the partners of officers with
land grants, many of these women showed themselves to be
shrewd entrepreneurs. Some managed family estates while
their husbands were away in England.
29
From the print published by the State Library of New South
Wales.
30
more for drink.’52 There was certainly a link between the
criminal court and the ranks of the Army. At times prisoners
were given the option of enlistment as an alternative to civil
punishment. Conversely, the end of wars dumped on the
labour market ex-soldiers who, with the lack of any definite
skills, turned to crime. As such, many in the ranks of the New
South Wales corps were not very dissimilar from those
convicts whom they were supposed to guard, although rather
more probably came from rural districts and small towns than
from urban areas. The identification in social terms between
convicts and soldier was made even a little closer by the
recruitment of military prisoners and ex-convicts to the New
South Wales Corps.53
31
husband was granted permission to follow a convict spouse
and some artisans were encouraged to settle because of the
need for their specific skills. Between 1800 and 1806 free
immigrants totalled 296, including women and children.56
32
of not only the female convicts but also later free immigrants.
Generally, ‘social distance’ between the governing authorities
and the convicts was carried over into the next generation. As
early as 1789, the colonial government provided financial
support for the schooling of the sons and daughters of
convicts, ex-convicts and soldiers in order to bring them up in
orderly habits and proper moral behaviour.60 In contrast, the
children of the military officers and others in authority were
educated privately or sent home to schools in Britain.
The former military and civil officials and the small groups of
merchants who had arrived by 1815 made up an emerging
gentry class who soon solidified their position in other ways.
By 1818, eleven families of the New South Wales colonial
elite were interlocked by marriage. Of the 100 largest
graziers, ten were enmeshed in this marriage network. To this
elite were dispensed most of the positions of high office in the
colony. In return, they themselves were asked to give away
crumbs of patronage: in 1827 the now well-established
landowner, John Macarthur secured civil service jobs for two
sons of an ex-convict clergyman.61
33
Source: S. H. Roberts, The History of Australian Land
Settlement, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1968, p.11.
Elements of Change
34
Congregationalists, were rapidly capturing new ground,
particularly amongst skilled artisans and craftsmen.
35
care. He was soon depressed by the vice and degradation of
the colony and angered by the activities of the officers of the
New South Wales Corps: ‘their extortion, their despotism,
their debauchery and ruin of the colony, driving it almost to
famine by the sale of liquors at 1200 per cent profit’.64 The
general moral tone of the new colony was certainly low, and
liquor consumption per head of population was up to twice
the United Kingdom level, although due allowance must be
made for the large number of single adult males.65 Little
assistance in improving morals came from the home
government at least in the sense of supplying the settlements
with adequate numbers of chaplains.
36
and to encourage the emancipists towards self-improvement.
His efforts were to meet strong resistance in Australia and
Britain. Nevertheless, it might be said that the appointment of
the new governor marks the beginning of the transition of a
penal colony into a society which would reflect the strains,
tensions and ideals which would go to make up Victorian
Britain.
37
2
Caroline Chisholm (on the need for women and the institution
of the family in Australia.)
‘Criminal Influx’
38
While crime increased, modes of punishment underwent
reform. Between 1821 and 1841, in the climate of the ‘moral
revolution’, hanging was abolished for over two hundred
criminal offences.3 In the long term, imprisonment would
replace the noose as the punishment deemed fit for most
forms of crime. In the short term, transportation provided the
answer to the growing criminal population.
Convict Population4
39
It is very seldom that any thieves is sent up the country, as
most of the gentlemen resides in Sydney, and would sooner
take for his servant a man that he knows been a regular thief
at home than one of those born done [sic] gentlemen . . . you
never hear tell of a thief getting into any trouble; but there is
very few goes, when I went, out of the two hundred men,
there was but five regular thieves in the whole.5
40
in Australia Ingham was to be in constant trouble with the
authorities.7
41
The Irish countryside was still in a vexed state in the early
nineteenth century. Growing population placed great strain on
scarce land resources and the survival of most of the Irish
peasantry depended literally on a good potato crop. In such an
environment, age-old violence flourished. Irishman fought
Irishman in numerous family feuds, and a large number of
Irish were transported along with their relatives. One ship in
1830 brought to Australia nine men in four family groups, all
of whom had been convicted of murder. Another transport in
1835 landed six pairs of brothers, two father-and-son sets and
one group of three brothers, while of the 100 Irish female
convicts on board the Minerva in 1839, twenty-one had
relatives on board, in transit, or already in New South
Wales.10
42
William Earles, attached to the clearing gang on the estate of
the Reverend Samuel Marsden; ordered to be confined in a
cell on bread and water, until he tells where an absolute
pardon is, given to him by John Durrah, to take to Dr
Douglass.11
43
force. Primarily a detective attached to the Sydney station in
George Street, he became known as the ‘George Street
Runner’. Chapman returned to London in 1829, but came out
again as a free immigrant in 1832. A year later, the colonial
government appointed him one of the six wardsmen in the
police force.14
44
have wrote to you, my dear mother and father, brothers and
sisters and all my friends belonging to me in that country; this
country is far before England in everything, both for work
and money. Of a night, after I have done my work, I have a
chance to make a few shillings; I can go out hunting or
shooting of kangaroo, that is about the size of a sheep, or
ducks or swans, tigers, tiger-cats or native cats; there is
nothing that will hurt a man but a snake, they are about five or
six feet long, but they will get away if they can. I have dogs
and a gun of my own, thank God for it, to make me a few
shillings, anything that I want; thank God, I am away from all
beer-shops, there is ne’er a one within 20 miles of where I
live. I have a fellow-prisoner living with me, which he is a
shoemaker, and he is learning me to make shoes, which will
be a great help to me; in about two years I shall be able to
make a pair of shoes myself; then, thank God for it, I am
doing a great deal better than ever I was at home only for the
wanting you with me, that is all my uncomfortableness is in
being away from you. Dear father and mother, I hope you will
understand it what I have wrote to you in this letter, as it gave
me much pleasure in writing it, and always will, let me be
where—15
45
years later, the artist Joseph Fowles wrote of the ‘elegant
design’ of his row of four houses in Pitt Street.16
46
had come with hopes of advancement. At the end of the road
for the aged and the lonely there was only the state asylum.
While the gentry, the civil and military officers, and the
clergy of the Church of England, were attempting to
reproduce in the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Sydney and
Hobart Town the fashions and gaieties of the London season,
out on the streets, in the tap-rooms, pot-houses, bush huts,
amidst all the uproar, commotion, the lust, the thirst and the
hunger, the world of Betsey Bandicoot and Bold Jack
Donohoe was being fashioned.19
47
Amongst the Irish at least, familial and other associations
were an important foundation for creating a community.
Overall, the high proportion of Irish amongst the female
convicts meant that many Australian-born children in the
colony were of Irish ancestry. In rural areas particularly, the
economy of family farms depended heavily upon the
productive labour of men, women and children. Pockets of
community settlement had formed by the 1820s, partly the
result of Irish emancipists having been granted land. The
Camden and Appin areas south-west of Sydney had a high
proportion of Roman Catholics. As news filtered back to the
home country, such settlements laid the basis for receiving
others who came as part of that great stream which would
soon make up the vast proportion of the Australian
population—the free settlers.
48
loss of financial security and social status if they remained at
home. After the wars, many ex-army officers were
unemployed. In southern England, agriculture was
undergoing a period of depression and re-adjustment. Under
such circumstances, Australia was attractive.
49
(to use his own words) he can either expect or desire. Our
situation as compared with his will be vastly superior we go
out with 12 or 13 times the amount of capital he did, our
name is already well known in the Colony, and immediately
we get there we shall be placed in the first Rank in Society . .
.20
50
Despite the increased number of colonial born they were
‘Englishmen’—a ‘nice set of men of the true British type’.
English in speech, loyalties and social attitudes. Nor did they
pre-empt this for themselves. Informed local opinion recorded
that the ‘squatters as a class. . .regard their men, not as slaves,
as is often alleged, but as Englishmen, entitled to all the
kindness and consideration which, in the old country, are
extended to the working class’.23
51
and Alexander, arrived from Aberdeenshire during the late
1820s and early 1830s. They soon owned property in
Tasmania and in the Two-fold Bay and Bega districts of New
South Wales.25 In both colonies the proportion of Scots-born
among land holders rose from one-sixth to one-third during
the 1820s.26 Overall about 3000 persons of Scottish birth
migrated to Eastern Australia during the 1820s.27
52
they believed in land—these Scotch pioneers, and in sheep,
and in wheat, and in horses, and cows—in all things in fact
pertaining to the soil—and the soul.31
53
Immigration from the Scottish Highlands to northern New
South Wales. The movement of people from one particular
region in Britain to a new specific location in Australia was a
marked feature of even early nineteenth century immigration.
This was a forerunner of the later ‘chain migration’ of
extended families and communities.
54
Elizabeth Day House. The house was built in 1835–1837 for
Scottish-born Alexander McLeay, Colonial Secretary in New
South Wales, 1825–1837, philanthropist and patron of the
arts and sciences. Now restored, it stands not only as a
symbol of imported ideas on architectural style but also as a
reminder of the wealth of some of the early Australian gentry
immigrants.
55
hectares) to the English land owner Thomas Peel and his
partner, Solomon Levey, an emancipist who had done well as
a merchant. Peel was. promised a further 250 000 acres once
he landed 400 settlers and another 500 000 acres (about 200
000 hectares) after 21 years, provided improvements had been
carried out on the original grant. The venture failed.35 What
they could grow, they could not sell. Western Australia
languished. In 1850, there were only 5886 persons in the
colony.36
56
Australia in 1828, intending to farm the land. He turned to
architecture again in the 1830s. He adapted the Regency style
and his work included Elizabeth Bay House and Camden
Park, the home of the Macarthur family.39
57
David Jones Limited.41 By the late 1830s, many other free
immigrants of urban background had also come to Australia
to make money.
The nineteenth century was the age of the vast exodus from
Europe. Of all Europeans, the British were the most
prominent in leaving their homes to settle elsewhere. By
1900, two-thirds of the English-speaking world lived outside
Europe. Most of this migration was westward towards the
Americas. Between 1815 and 1912, twenty-one and a half
million persons migrated from the British Isles and half of
these went to the United States.42 In comparison, migration to
Australia was minute and marked by various phases of
interest and neglect.
58
Canada 499,000
U.S.A. 417,000
Australia 58,000
59
shiploads at a cost of almost £5 million.46 Most of the finance
for their schemes came from the sale of land in Australia.
60
employment. Milliners and dressmakers are already too
numerous, and there is hardly any demand for a description of
upper females servants, too refined for hard work, who are
very often candidates for emigration. Those women who are
willing to go into the country and understand the management
of a dairy and the various female avocations are the most
wanted and would be the most readily employed.50
61
well dressed in frock coats and black beaver hats’.52
Eventually, it was estimated that the Society had assisted at
least 5000 immigrants by the time it wound up in the 1860s.
62
on the frontier in areas which were soon to become part of the
new colony of Victoria.54
63
Imagine in some village a couple of young married men, a
weaver and a farm labourer, both of whom are unable to get
work. Both are in the workhouse, and the spade of the one
and the loom of the other are equally idle. For the
maintenance of these two men and their families the parish is
probably taxed to the amount of £40 per year. The
farm-labourer and his family get a passage to Australia or
Canada. . .the parish gains £20 a year by being relieved of one
of the two pauper families. The emigrant gets good
employment. . .he finds that he has where-withal to buy him a
good coat. . .to supply his children with decent clothing;
instead of letting them run about in rags. He sends home an
order for a good quantity of broad-cloth, and this order
actually sets the loom of his fellow pauper to work and takes
him, or helps to take him out of the workhouse. Thus, the
emigration of one man relieves the parish of these two
paupers and furnishes employment not only for one man, but
for two men.55
64
Two ‘bounty immigrants’ of these years were the future
premier of New South Wales, Henry Parkes, and his wife,
Clarinda. Born in Warwickshire, and brought up in the
political radicalism of Birmingham, Parkes found he could
not make a living as an ivory turner during the hard times of
the 1830s. He went to London but still found conditions
difficult. On 6 December 1838, he wrote to his sister:
A day later, Parkes wrote again to his sister setting out his
expectations of Australia:
65
I am in high hopes of Australia, as well I may be when I
compare my chance of living there with my chance of doing
so here; but I cannot give you much information now or I
should be up all night. The colony of New South Wales is
three times as large as England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales,
and as beautiful a country as this. The soil produces almost
everything which this produces, together with pomegranates,
oranges, lemons, figs, &c. Land can be brought in some of the
towns for seven pounds per acre, in the second town in the
colony for twenty pounds, and in some parts of the country
for five shillings per acre. Mechanics can get forty and fifty
shillings a week, and buy sugar for two shillings a pound; tea
for two shillings; beef, twopence a pound; wine, sixpence per
bottle;
rent, four shillings per week. Sydney, the capital of the
colony, contains 25,000 inhabitants. However, my hopes are
not extravagant, though I make sure of getting rich and
coming over soon to fetch all of you. I had forgotten to say
the climate is the healthiest in the world.58
Sydney
September 15th, 1841.
My Dear Sister,
66
You will perceive by a newspaper of to-day’s date, which I
shall post with this, that hundreds of emigrants are at the
present time starving in the streets of Sydney, so great has
been the over-supply of labour here since my last. Of this
deplorable fact I could send you other and stronger proof had
I leisure to do so, but I write this away from home, not
deeming it right to delay a moment in letting you know. A
week ago there were eight vessels riding at anchor in the
harbour, all crowded with emigrants! And though many of
them have now been engaged to go into the interior, I am
afraid great numbers will not be able to obtain employment.
By the emigration regulations they are only allowed to remain
on board their respective vessels ten days after their arrival in
Port Jackson, and at the expiration of that time they are
invariably turned adrift to provide for themselves in the way
they best can. If they cannot get employment, and have no
money, of course they must starve! I saw a case in the
newspapers last week of a young woman who was turned out
of one of these emigrant ships when the ten days were up, and
was found by a policeman sitting on the Queen’s Wharf, and
taken to the watchhouse. The next morning she was brought
before the magistrate, charged with being drunk; and though
she stated that it was faintness, and that she was meditating
suicide when the policeman came to her, yet she was
sentenced, on the oath of the policeman, to sit one hour in the
stocks! What encouragement for persons to come to
Australia!
I must now conclude, hoping that you are all in the enjoyment
of health. Our little Clara is getting quite well again, Clarinda
and myself are quite well. The merchants of Sydney are all in
a state of bankruptcy.
67
Yours affectionately,
H. Parkes59
The issue of the price of land and the size of allotments would
remain a continuing problem throughout the nineteenth
century. In the mid-1830s one answer seemed to be offered
with the founding of the new province of South Australia.
68
favourable reception in the Colonial Office. The basis of his
scheme was that there should be an equitable balance between
land and labour in any colonial settlement. The price of land
was to be kept high, but not too high. The main aim was to
provide a pool of labour from those immigrants seeking to
save and buy their own property. Hopefully, this system
would stimulate the transference from Britain of not only the
gentlemen investors and the ‘paupers’ but also those of
meagre fortune who aspired to improve their station in life.
As with Caroline Chisholm, Wakefield believed that these
‘respectable’ immigrants must include both men and women
who would:
lead and govern the emigration of the other classes. These are
the emigrants whose presence in a colony most beneficially
affects its standards of morals and manners, and would supply
the most beneficial element of colonial government. If you
can induce many of this class to settle in a colony, the other
classes, whether capitalists or labourers, are sure to settle
there in abundance.61
69
most protracted. Civil rights, including the rights to hold
public office, had been granted to both Protestant
Nonconformists and Roman Catholics by 1829. The Reform
Act of 1832 had extended the franchise to many of those in
urban areas where Nonconformity held its strength. But
grievances remained. The Anglican Church was still the
established church with a right to collect tithes and with a
favoured position in such areas as government grants to
church schools. The aim of the founders of South Australia
was to end such privileges and create the new colony as a
haven for religious dissent. To George Fife Angas,
Commissioner of the South Australian Company which had
been formed under government auspices to promote
settlement:
70
received some form of assistance. Yet, being unable to speak
English, almost all were dependent on already settled
relatives or friends for knowledge of the local scene. A
considerable number of town-bred Germans adapted well to
living in Adelaide but others from rural Germany tended to
congregate in farming districts with neighbours from the same
region of their homeland. Once established, such rural
communities remained generally stable and closely entwined
in their own traditions.
71
companions, the Parish school-houses. . .providing men of
lowly origin, but noble minds’.67
The home background still held sway even over those who
had little to be thankful for in their past lives. Colonisation
thus meant much more than the settlement of large numbers
of people. It involved the importation of a whole outlook on
life which grew as much out of the culture of the old world as
from the environment of the new.
‘Cultural Baggage’
72
and blocks with scant regard for the irregularities of the local
landscape. Similarly, although styles changed throughout the
nineteenth century, the Australian colonists designed and built
houses in ways which reflected British and European
traditions. It was not until the early twentieth century that a
more distinctive form finally emerged for the urban
Australian home.68
73
agreement could be reached on the sort of political and social
arrangements which should operate in Australia.
74
Emigration of Distressed Needlewomen, 1850. Following the
example of such figures as Caroline Chisholm, numerous
charitable organisations in Britain assisted single women to
migrate. Many came from ‘respectable’ backgrounds but
were unable to make a living in Britain.
75
Any candidate for membership could be ‘blackballed’ by 10
per cent of the voting membership. ‘All the aristocracy are in
it’ wrote the organiser of the Club, Stuart Alexander
Donaldson.70 The Melbourne Club, also established in 1838,
was a similar institution designed for both townsmen and the
Scottish immigrant squatters. Original membership was
limited to 150 with a £25 ($50) entrance fee and annual sub of
£5 ($10).71
76
Australian colonies, the leaders of the non-Anglican
Churches, particularly the Presbyterian J.D. Lang, resisted the
attempted Anglican domination of colonial education. As the
opponent of Lang, Broughton informed the poet Coleridge,
The question now at issue is really a very great one: no less
than whether pure Christianity shall flourish or not over a
sixth part of the habitable world’.74
77
League was an expression of radicalism with its main support
in the middle class; Chartism was an attempted focal point for
a new political consciousness amongst the working class. In
both of these cases, there was a search for mass support and
national organisation. Attempts were thus made to break
down the local allegiances upon which the old aristocratic
eighteenth century politics of deference had rested.
78
This exclusivist view of political privilege was opposed by
the middle and lower orders of society, particularly from
among the immigrant waves of the late 1830s and 1840s. As
such, they were carrying forward the British radical tradition
of individual rights and of government serving the interests of
the whole population rather than being reserved as the domain
of the few.
79
rights’.76 The political campaigns of Australian radicalism
were thus drawn as much from perceptions of a British social
structure dominated by an aristocracy as from experiences of
the Australian situation. The solution to the problem of the
large land holdings of the colonial gentry was often described
in peculiarly English terms. The ‘land monopoly’ was posited
as a denial of a traditional right of an Englishman to his own
agricultural plot. In 1835, recent immigrants petitioned the
Colonial Office protesting that the conditions in the colony
were inferior to what had been promised and calling for
‘thriving farms and neat cottages’ on ‘our fertile plains’.77
80
Outside of New South Wales, the impact of Chartism was
more muted. In South Australia, an Elective Franchise
Association was formed in 1851 with a platform embodying
such traditional religious dissenter aims as the abolition of
state aid to religion plus certain points of the People’s
Charter, including universal suffrage, vote by ballot, and
annual parliaments.81 Its influence was slight, however. Most
South Australians did not come from the ranks of the northern
industrial workers and the hand loom weavers which made up
the
strength of English Chartism. Rather they embodied the
‘virtues’ of rural provincial life in southern England. Of the
initial group of South Australian immigrants in the late 1830s
to early 1840s, over 75 per cent had come from England but
less than 5 per cent from countries north of Derbyshire. The
south-western counties of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset
accounted for 15 per cent, the towns of Gloucestershire,
Wiltshire, Dorset, and Hampshire had provided a further 20
per cent, while the remaining 35 per cent had been distributed
through the ‘home counties’ surrounding London.82 Most
appear to have come to Australia from a rural background but
via a life in a provincial town for a while. In South Australia,
they were to try and create a countryside mirroring rural
England.
81
strong. In England, as in Australia, such people were
concerned not so much with restructuring the social system
emerging out of industrialisation as accommodating to it.
82
Self-help did not only mean provision of institutions for
mutual aid. Intellectual and moral improvement were
involved also. Education and its practical application became
the ideal of the self-made man. Mechanics institutes were
established with an aim to educate the artisan class. In
practice, such institutes were frequented more by clerks and
others of the lower middle class aspiring to better themselves
than by the practical working man. In New South Wales, the
great supporter of adult education during the 1830s and 1840s
was Henry Carmichael, who had been deeply influenced by
Jeremy Bentham, the English apostle of utilitarianism.
Carmichael established the Sydney School of Arts in 1833,
the aim of which was the ‘diffusion of scientific and other
useful knowledge as extensively as possible throughout New
South Wales’.88 By 1836, Carmichael was complaining that
‘so few of the mechanics of Sydney’ for whom the institute
was intended were actually members.89
83
society. This sense of moral vigour helped strengthen the
campaign against the ‘abomination’ of convict transportation.
The campaign also demonstrated the growing colonial
consensus that the Australian colonies had so changed
because of free immigration that they could no longer be
regarded as a dumping ground for ‘criminals’. Even James
Macarthur, a representative of the landed class which had
much to lose if convict labour disappeared, argued against its
retention not
only because it was economically inefficient (as well as
potentially increasing the influence of emancipists) but also
because it tainted society and widened the gap between
England and the colonies.92
84
hitherto succeeded in discharging by means of Transportation,
upon her Colonies, since it would remove, by anticipation, the
very causes of these evils, and transmute them into the seeds
of the greatest blessings, supplying the Colony with all the
labour required to develope its resources, and yielding to
Great Britain in return an incalculable increase of national
influence and commercial prosperity.93
85
The tie of family rather than individualism was the mark of
nineteenth century Irish emigration to both North America
and Australasia. In part, this was a reflection of the continuing
rural nature of Irish society. It has been noted of the Irish
emigrants to the United States:
Of all emigrants the Irish have done most in the way of family
self help. One Irishman would no sooner find wage labour at
the high colonial rate than he would save money to bring out
his friends and family. Thus the migration gained momentum
and the newcomers found friends to receive them in the new
lands.94
86
Note: During the years 1843, 1846 and 1847 assisted
immigration was suspended.
87
small. In comparison to Protestant divisions and size, the
Roman Catholic community seemed strong and gained added
cohesion from the bigoted response of others in the new
Australian community.
88
3
89
1851 437,665 not known
British Emigration
90
source: W.A. carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles.
Londen: P.S. King, 1929, p.215.
91
or what they are going to do; beg of hard-hearted shipbrokers
to grant them the favour of a berth in their last-advertised,
teak-built, poop-decked, copper-bottomed, double-fastened,
fast-sailing, surgeon-carrying emigrant ship.5
Gold had been found in both New South Wales and Victoria.
But the rich lodes in Victoria attracted most new arrivals. In
the years from 1852 to 1860, 290 000 people migrated to
Victoria from Britain and Ireland. This was over half the total
British emigration to Australia and New Zealand in these
years.6 Although assisted immigration continued many paid
their own passage (about four-fifths of the immigrants to the
Antipodes in the 1850s were not financially assisted).7
Having arrived in Australia these immigrants of independent
means often moved freely throughout the colonies, attracted
to new gold finds.
92
religion flourished on the gold fields. By 1861, one-quarter of
the Victorian population, and more than one-third of adults,
were attending church regularly.8 The great beneficiaries of
this increase were the evangelical sects, particularly the
Methodists with their stress on individual salvation.
93
Throughout the nineteenth century there was a continuing fear
in British society regarding the ‘overcrowded professions’.
The 1840s had appeared just as gloomy for the middle class
professionals as for many lower in society. In his Parent’s
Handbook, which appeared in 1842 as a guide for those
concerned over the future of their children, J. C. Hudson had
observed:
94
There were too many applicants for too few posts. According
to the Quarterly Review, some lower middle class families
had been ‘educating their daughters for governesses as a
mode of advancing them a step in life and thus a number of
underbred young women have crept into the profession who
have brought down the value of salaries’.15 The fate of these
unfortunates attracted the attention of Maria Rye, a spinster,
aged thirty-three, and the oldest of nine children of a London
solicitor. In 1862, she helped found the Female Middle Class
Emigration Society, the first in a line of a number of
philanthropic emigration societies designed to assist single
women of respectable background. According to Miss Rye,
the constant advice she received was:
95
they had come. Letters and newspapers remained the main
way of keeping in touch with relatives and events ‘back
home’.
96
Those governesses who did emigrate could earn more money
than in England but often only by undertaking more menial
work. One governess, sent out in 1864, wrote home:
97
Gold brought not merely the British-born to Australia. Until
the 1850s the numbers of immigrants from outside Britain
were only a small minority in the colonies. Amongst the
convicts perhaps 2.5 per cent or about 3000 had been born
outside Britain, mainly in other parts of the growing British
Empire, such as Canada, India, the West Indies and South
Africa.19 The German settlers of South Australia were the
first major group of non-British, but most of these remained
in small contained rural communities even when they moved
across colonial borders into Victoria and New South Wales.
The gold rush generation were far more diverse in
background.
98
contributed to the intellectual life of Melbourne. Sigismund
Wekey, a Hungarian refugee after the revolution in his
homeland in 1848, arrived as an assisted immigrant in
1854. During the 1850s and 1860s, he served as secretary to
the Philosophical Institute of Victoria. He travelled widely,
managed a mine, became involved in a dispute over patents
and later returned to Budapest where he died in 1889.22
99
to look overseas for better opportunities. Most would come to
Australia from the provinces of Fujian (Fukien) or
Guangdong (Kwantung) where there was already established
a tradition of migration on either a short-term or
labour-contract basis. Some paid their own passages to
Australia, or borrowed from friends and relatives; many
others used the services of an emigration agent who provided
passage on the basis of a labour contract requiring the
emigrants to work to repay their passage money with interest.
100
nearly all of us left our native land at the solicitations of
Europeans, to seek abroad that prosperity which we could not
find at home, on the assurance that we should receive the
protection of your laws. . . since our arrival, we have been
subjected to a series of insults and oppressions from the
ignorant, the cruel and the malicious.26
101
built against Asian migration by the late nineteenth century.30
Conferences of the colonial premiers held in 1881 and again
in 1888 agreed first to extend the poll tax system and then to
limit the actual numbers who could actually arrive in any of
the colonies. By so doing they were reflecting the racial fears
expressed by a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly
during the gold rushes:
102
A great fear had been laid in the Australian psyche. It would
remain here for over a century.
By the early 1860s the Victorian and New South Wales gold
rushes were over. In the following decades other discoveries
in Queensland and Western Australia would bring further
hopes of easy wealth. Few, however, of the 1850s gold rush
generation had become rich. Some turned to the legendary
Australian way to quick
riches—bushranging. John Gilbert, born in Hamilton, Canada,
had arrived with his family in 1852. After a period of loose
living on the goldfields, he joined up with the New South
Wales bushranger, Frank Gardiner. After several years and
numerous hold-ups and robberies, a policeman shot him in
1865.32
103
of the 1850s and early 1860s there was a sharp drop in the
marriage and birth rates of the late 1860s and early 1870s. By
the mid-1870s, the Victorian population was made up
predominantly of the middle aged and their children. In most
aspects of life, the generation which arrived during the 1850s
would preside over the affairs of Victoria for at least the next
three decades.
104
League’s free and secular and universal education; John
Mill’s yeoman proprietorship, have all become realities here,
while they are for the most part still nothing more than
aspirations in England.35
105
musician, also migrated to Melbourne in 1865. He was to
achieve fame as a pianist and composer.40
106
In girls’ schooling, governesses and ladies’ academies taught
the basics of an ‘English education’ through the study of
English literature, grammar and history. The ‘polite
accomplishments’ of music and art were reinforced through
the role of European women in mid-nineteenth century
cosmopolitan Melbourne.42
107
energetic man who ascribed to the ‘broad’ church view of
Anglican theology embracing a range of doctrinal positions.
The son of a Sheffield cutlery manufacturer, Moorhouse was
part of that generation of late nineteenth century churchmen
who believed that Anglicans had to come to terms with the
social problems posed by industrialisation. He provided new
vigour to the Church in Melbourne and improved the quality
of his clergy by insisting on a three-year training period, and
preferably a university degree.44
108
came of age not only in the late nineteenth century but also
well into the twentieth.
Even those who might benefit by the new ideas were often
deaf to their message. Throughout Australia, but particularly
in Victoria, the labouring population was represented by a
trade union movement dominated by skilled tradesmen, men
who in the 1850s had fought for the eight-hour day and higher
wages but who now had become moderates. The trade
unionist Benjamin Douglass reflected such trends. Arriving in
Victoria in 1855 as a bricklayer, he soon took up the cause of
the eight-hour day. An active organiser of trade unions in
Victoria during the 1860s, and a protectionist in politics,
Douglass was President of the Melbourne Trades Hall
Council in 1884–86 and chairman of the 1884 Intercolonial
Trades Union Congress. By the 1890s his earlier radical
opinions had changed and he revealed himself as an opponent
of strike action. When he died in 1904, a member of the
Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers noted, ‘the men who
109
were mixed up with the eight hours’ movement in the early
days were different to what they are new’.47
110
feature of most was the provision for resident Australians to
nominate relatives and friends as immigrants and contribute
towards the cost of their passage. Families were thereby
reunited and the ties of kith and kin maintained. Over the
whole period 1860–1919 about 38 per cent of Australian
immigrants who received government assistance were
‘nominated’.50 The system was used primarily in the colonies
of New South Wales and Victoria where patterns of
settlement and family ties stretched back over at least a
generation. In other colonies, there was more selection of
immigrants with specific economic purposes in mind, most of
which were principally rural in nature.
111
miners53 and the discovery of tin and zinc in the rugged west
of Tasmania gave a stimulus to the economy of the island
colony). Both Tasmania and South Australia lost population
to the other colonies. Until the gold rushes of the 1890s
Western Australia would remain an isolated outpost with few
attractions for immigrants. In order to obtain labour, Western
Australians turned to another source. From 1850 to 1868,
almost 10 000 convicts were sent to the West from Britain.54
With restricted opportunities elsewhere, the majority of free
immigrants looked to rural and commercial opportunities in
New South Wales and Queensland.
112
Sources: C.M.H Clark, Select Documents in Australian
History, vol 11, 1851–1900, Angus and Rebertson, Sydeny,
1977, pp.664–65 and Gordon Greenwood and Charles
Grimshaw (eds) Documents on Australian International
Affairs 1901–1918, Nelson, Sydeny, 1977, p.421.
113
countrymen who had arrived in the 1850s as shepherds for the
squatters on the Darling Downs. By the 1890s, German-born
Lutherans and their children made up 10 per cent of the
Darling Downs population.56
114
price of land, see Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance,
Sun Books, Melbourne 1966.
115
For the majority of Australian immigrants, the ‘push’ of the
home situation was probably as important as the ‘pull’ of a
new, expanding colony such as Queensland. Economic
conditions in late nineteenth century Britain often fluctuated.
During the 1860s and early 1870s conditions improved for
most of the British working class, but those in skilled
occupations appear to have benefited most. Through trade
unionism and collective bargaining, skilled craftsmen were
able to improve their pay and conditions. In comparison, the
‘Bob Cratchit whose skill went not beyond letters and
ledgers’61 and members of the overcrowded and gentlemanly
professions had an insecure existence. As a result, emigration
was still a tempting prospect for that ‘middle stratum of
society’ which the discovery of gold had stirred to emigrate.
116
U.K. Emigration to Australasia Occupations per 10,000 Adult
Males63
117
find decent homes in which to live. . .Let anybody who is
curious to know leave the main roads and the more populated
villages where there are resident gentry. . .Let him examine
the hamlets for himself—those of the stamp of Cratfield by
Halesworth for instance—and ask for a few particulars from
the parson or from any old fellow whom he meets upon the
road. Then, in nine cases out of ten, he will hear that there
used to be more houses than there are now, that so many have
fallen down and never been rebuilt and that certain young folk
have gone away because they could find no cottage decent
enough to
live. . .There are the dwellings that look so pretty in summer,
with roses and ivy creeping about their crumbling stud work
and their rotten-thatch, but which often enough are scarcely
fit to be inhabited by human beings.65
118
their fathers, while almost half had gone down the social
scale.68 As in the early nineteenth century, immigration
seemed to hold most attraction for those seeking both to
escape poverty and to improve themselves. Above all, a better
environment was one theme upon which emigrant annuals
played:
One of those who left Britain for Australia in 1879, was the
twenty-three year old Edward Hufton who had been
employed in the steel industry in Northern England. After
being unemployed for fourteen weeks, he decided to emigrate
to Australia with his wife and her young sister. They paid £4
($8) each for a government assisted passage on the three and
a half month journey to Australia. Within two years of his
arrival in Australia, Hufton was employed as a lecturer
assistant at the newly expanding University of Sydney. He
remained in this post until his death in 1917 at the age of
sixty-one.70
119
Glebe Point Road, Glebe, 1882. Most late-nineteenth century
immigrants settled in the growing Australian cites. Suburbs
like Glebe provided terrace housing for a burgeoning Sydney
population in the 1880s.
120
England. The Adelaide branch sent word in 1876 that ships
were arriving ‘at the rate of one or two per month with from
four to nine of our trade in each ship, of course, not all our
members’.72 The miners also sent back reports and from time
to time the Trades and Labour Councils petitioned the
government to stop assisted immigration.
121
coal, the life in mining villages, and the outlook of the
management were imported direct from England. Throughout
the nineteenth century the majority of the union leaders had
begun their working lives as pitboys in the old country. The
leading mining companies had their headquarters in Britain
and the managers received their training there.75
122
Irish-born residents helped their own kin to emigrate by
sending money back home. In the six years from 1875 to
1880, the Irish in Australia remitted to Ireland over £250
000.78
123
south-west edge of Leinster. One in five come from Tipperary
alone.81
124
centred on its Kimberley holdings, but despite better times, it
still struggled to revive its earlier fortunes.83
The story of the Duracks held lessons for others. With much
of the good land already taken by the squatters and earlier
settlers, most immigrants were not prepared to take the risks
involved in moving into the outback. The discovery of gold
did lure some to Western Australia in the 1890s. The vast
majority of few arrivals, however, stayed near the cities and
towns where there was at least hope of a job. As a result,
immigrants helped stimulate the building boom which marked
late nineteenth century urban growth. In Queensland, the
colony of vast empty spaces, the greater population increase
in the 1880s took place in Brisbane or the other urban centres
along the coast or in the near inland.
125
In the main, however, the controllers of urban economic
growth were the banks and financial institutions. Most of
these institutions were dominated by those now-respectable
pillars of society who had arrived in the gold rush days.
Backed by British investors and connections, by the 1880s
these men were beginning to supplant the squattocracy as the
men of wealth.
126
Taking Stock
127
The Australians of the late 1880s were still fairly confident of
their future. Most were also proud of their origins. The
patterns and associations of the past were still strong. The
squatters’ earlier romantic vision of Arcadia in Australia had
not been fulfilled, but they themselves lived on in the legend
of ‘the pioneers’. Their legacy became the high culture of
Australia, for many of their children and descendants became
the twentieth century poets and artists striving to understand
the Australian experience and environment in a way which
had eluded their colonial forbears.88
I just finished up my letter last mail telling you the ball was a
great success. Since then we hear that everybody has been
talking about it & saying it was the nicest & best arranged
ball they had ever been at, & that everything had been thought
of,
the flowers also were greatly admired, in fact they liked
everything apparently, the champagne, too, was so good. We
opened up more rooms than they have had before so that they
could circle round, & arranged seats in every possible place
for sitting out, & we had nearly 500 people, quite a hundred
128
more than has ever been before, & there was far less crush
than there has been before. . .89
At the other end of the social scale, the legacy of the convict
days still remained. Ned Kelly, the last of the bushrangers,
believed that he spoke for many of his kind in his published
letter of 1879:
129
condemnation many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue
to Saxon yoke were flogged to death and bravely died in
servile chains but true to the shamrock and a credit to Paddys
land. . .90
130
homeland. Crucial for most was the prospect of available
employment. In the four decades of economic growth after
1850 jobs had been generally available. In the early 1890s the
economic climate changed. For the first time since the 1840s
the Australian colonies experienced a serious depression.
Governments stopped assisting immigrants and few were
prepared to pay their passage when work was scarce. The
number entering Australia from Britain fell from 29 981 in
1889 to a low of 7899 in 1893, rising slowly back to just over
10 000 by 1899.92 Even after the worst was over, economic
recovery was slow. As a result, in the early years of the
twentieth century more people left Australia than entered the
country. If nothing else, the depression showed that economic
conditions could be of prime importance in deterring
migrants.
131
Australians fought in the Boer War. Yet there were
generational differences over the war. Amongst politicians
who were native-born or pre-1870 immigrants, support for the
war was high; amongst the more recently arrived far less so.
The reason was to be found not so much in a test of loyalty to
Britain as in what Australia had offered the different
immigrant generations. Most employers, managers or higher
professionals were to be found amongst the native-born or
pre-1870 immigrants; post-1870 immigrants were more likely
to be manual workers.94
132
C. Watson, Andrew Fisher and W. M. Hughes). For all three,
and for most Australian ‘nationalists’ of the late nineteenth
century, the hope was to find a means of creating a ‘New
Britannia’ which would revive disappointed hopes and cloak
them under the guise of a common brotherhood.
133
electoral equality, equality before the laws, equality of
citizenship, equality of primary education, equality of
opportunity, so far as may be, and all the time declares a
trumpet tones that every human being who enters the world
has a right to be there and therefore has not only a right to
those things of earth necessary to civilised existence but also
a right to those things of the mind and soul whose rational
employment alone elevates man above the beasts of the field.
And here the Labor Party only recognises man — it knows
naught of sexual, social, religious and fiscal differences. Its
texts are taken from the Book of Human Kinship and the
Keynote of its discourse is Love.96.
134
4
AN IMPERIAL DOMINION
Natural resources and their development are a fruitful theme
for discussion. It is clear, however, that this development
cannot be achieved without adequate manpower. Hence it
comes that of all the problems which lie before Imperial
statesmanship none is more important and fascinating than
that of migration.
135
parliament: the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. After
1901, non-whites could only enter Australia on a temporary
basis under a permit. Justifying the policy, the Bulletin, so
often seen as the prophet of Australian nationalism, wrote in
1901:
136
Source: C. E. Carrington, The British Overseas, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p.507.
137
depressed. Migration to other countries, such as the United
States, failed to match the high levels of previous decades.
When world trade revived in the early twentieth century, it
was accompanied by a marked shift in emphasis in British
emigration. The United States no longer held its previous
overwhelming attraction. The great nineteenth century exodus
from Ireland was over. The United States itself was emerging
as an industrial civilisation which held attraction for southern
Europeans who, like the Irish previously, were escaping rural
poverty. For city-born Englishmen, however, the
opportunities were now presented as lying elsewhere. The
new frontier of North America was western Canada.
138
welcoming immigrants once again. In certain areas,
particularly rural districts, the depression had been left a
shortage of labour. A number of states began schemes for
land settlement. Western Australia, after an influx of
population in the gold rushes of the 1890s, embarked on a
policy of encouraging wheat growers. In New South Wales,
attempts were made to break up the large estates and put
small farmers on the land. Equally significant were the
beginnings of large-scale manufacturing in Australia. By its
policy of national
protection introduced in 1907, the Commonwealth
government helped the growth of industry. The state
governments responded by increasing financial assistance for
immigration.
139
foreign countries’.8 The issue was revived at the 1911
Imperial Conference. It was decided to appoint a Royal
Commission to investigate the resources of the British
Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South
Africa, and to report as to how best to develop them both in
the interests of each and the Empire as a whole.9
140
Scheyville Agricultural Training Farm, 1912. The
Dreadnought Scheme, inaugurated in 1909, brought out to
Australia adolescent boys for agricultural training. Many
were sent to Scheyville Agricultural Training Farm, just
outside Sydney. W. F. Schey, Director of Labour in New
South Wales, and after whom the farm was named, took a
personal interest in the scheme, often visiting the boys on the
farm.
141
One contemporary commentator wrote of conditions just prior
to the war:
142
should look overseas to a ‘well-organised Community’ in the
colonies where there were new opportunities, and particularly
prospective husbands. In the process, she would also be
carrying forward the civilising mission of English
womanhood which had lain behind much of the nineteenth
century efforts to encourage female emigration.15
143
Pre-war tensions elsewhere in Britain were sometimes
imported into Australia. Throughout the late nineteenth
century the chapel and the union had played an important part
in the lives of coal-miners, particularly those in Wales.
Associated with their religion was a loyalty to the tradition of
English Liberalism. In 1909, the Miners Federation of Great
Britain decided to transfer its allegiance from the Liberal
party to the newly founded Labour party. On the eve of war,
the miners were becoming restive. So it was in Australia. As
before, leadership and aims in the Australian labour
movement often had overseas origins. As the biographer of
Albert Willis noted:
144
begun when he entered the Welsh pits as a boy of ten . . .
there were various opportunities offering in this new land, but
it did not occur to him to explore these avenues, for coal was
never far from his conversation. Representing the British type
of trade unionist at his best, Willis soon became prominent in
the affairs of the local miners’ lodge before shifting to the
South Coast of N.S.W., where there was a higher percentage
of Welsh miners.19
145
young immigrant who arrived in Western Australia in 1912
later recalled of his last days in England:
146
Arrivals from Scotland, 1911. In the three years prior to
World War I, New South Wales received over 50 000
immigrants. The hope was that many would settle on and
develop the land but most came from British cities.
147
Survey Sample of First Four Battalions of 1st Division
A.I.F.26
148
born in Britain or the British Empire. Two-thirds of them
were aged between twenty and thirty, but few were under
twenty, an indication that most of these immigrants had
arrived as young men in the years prior to 1914. Judging from
this sample, young immigrants were represented
disproportionately amongst A.I.F. recruits. (At the 1911
census, the overseas-born, both male and female, made up
only 6 per cent of the 20–24 age group, and 11 per cent of
those aged 25–29.)27
Not all recruits joined for the love of the Empire. Some recent
immigrants were disappointed by what they had found in
149
Australia. Enlistment for those meant a more secure
occupation and the opportunity of a trip back home. Two days
before landing at the Dardanelles, a young Englishman told
his parents:
The crisis of the war also tested the White Australia policy
itself. Who was European and who was Asiatic had been a
problem for the administrators of immigration before 1914.
They had come to accept a small group of settlers from Syria
(in reality ethnic Lebanese) as essentially white Europeans.32
150
Less tolerance was shown towards other Mediterranean
settlers, even though they were British. A few male labourers
from the British colony of Malta had come to Australia before
the war. The union movement condemned them as ‘cheap
labour’ and others called them ‘coloured’, ‘semi-white’,
‘black’ and even ‘Oriental’. In 1916, anti-Maltese feeling led
the Hughes federal government to turn back a shipload of 200
who had tried to land from the French mail boat Gange.33
Blighty is a failure
Take me to Australia.34
151
voting for Ireland, not Australia, on Saturday’35 wrote a
pro-conscriptionist pamphleteer in 1916.
152
July 1917, a British committee appointed to consider the
possible migration of ex-servicemen reported:
Since the outbreak of war, from every part of the Empire the
children or grandchildren of those whose enterprise or needs
caused them to leave the United Kingdom in past years have
rallied to the support of the Empire in this day of decision and
struggle for existence. They have risked their fortunes with
those of the Mother Country. They have shed their blood with
her blood. They have shown that, though seas separate the
Empire, and, in some respects, the interests of one part may
differ from those of another, it is still one and indivisible; that
together we stand, or together we fall. In short, it has come to
153
be understood that the man or woman who leaves Britain is
not lost to the Empire, but has gone to be its stay and strength
in other Britains overseas. The only risk of losing such an one
is when the new home is shadowed by some other flag.38
The end of the war in Europe allowed many of the plans for
extended Imperial migration to come to fruition. As a first
step, the British government initiated an emigration scheme
for ex-servicemen. Men with war service could lodge
immigration applications with a dominion government. If
accepted, the British government would pay their passage.
The scheme operated from April 1919 to the end of 1922.
About one-third of applicants were accepted and a total of 82
196 men and their families sailed for some parts of the
Empire.39 With the onset of post-war recession in Britain,
emigration for some was the only alternative open. After
surviving the four years of war one young soldier, aged in his
154
twenties, found himself unemployed. Finally, he came to
Australia with his wife, a woman who, as a young girl of
fifteen, had worked during the war in a munitions factory
twelve hours a day for only six shillings a week.40
155
The Act came at a propitious time. After almost a century of
unrestricted immigration, the United States decided to
institute a quota system. Legislation passed in 1921 and 1924
was intended mainly to deter southern Europeans but it also
placed a limit on the number of persons of British origin who
could become permanent residents of the United States. For
British emigrants, the Empire was becoming the most
welcome haven. The pre-World War I peaks of Empire
migration were not reached again. Nevertheless, the trend was
fairly clear. The typical British emigrant of the nineteenth
century had left for the United States; those who departed in
the 1920s were more likely to be going to Canada or
Australasia.
156
Source: C.E. Carrington, The British Overseas, p.505.
157
Of the 282 000 British immigrants who entered Australia in
the years 1922–31, 212 000 received assistance under the
Empire Settlement Act.44 Most arrived in the period 1921–27.
New South Wales
and Victoria received about a third each and half the
remainder went to Western Australia.
State
Victoria 56,024
Queensland 16,314
Tasmania 1,993
A.C.T. 24
158
170,529
159
I didn’t know what I was coming to, and I had no experience
of the land, but I was young, and the world was my oyster. I
was going to Australia whatever happened. I arrived in 1926
when I was seventeen and a half and went to a training school
in New
South Wales. There were about a hundred or more of us. It
was a really good scheme; most of the personnel on the
training farm were English, Irish or Scottish. You got a
week’s training on this and a week on that. A fortnight
dairying, a week ploughing, a week in the orchard, in the
garden. We were all new chums of course.48
160
followed careers in over eighty different occupations. About
half served in World War II while three-quarters had married
Australian-born wives. One Dreadnought boy who had
arrived in 1912 had over sixty descendants seventy years
later.50
161
according to one historian, ‘the establishment of 478 farms at
a cost of £14m [$28m] . . . there is no doubt that the amount
of organization and expenditure was disproportionate to the
achievement’.54 Many of the prospective settlers had come
from modest middle class backgrounds in Britain. They had
some justification for believing that they had been misled
over prospects available in Australia:
162
to buy too, but when people knew you were buying the prices
went up.
163
a centre during the 1920s for the dissemination of official
information for prospective British immigrants. Much of the
information was often misleading.
164
Albert Fullick, third from the left, an immigrant from London
who came out under the ‘Big Brother’ scheme. Pictured here
with his adopted farm family, ‘just home from work’, he later
deserted farming and settled for a period in the Northern
Territory.
165
England, have vanished. Not one or two of them, but
dozens.58
166
Manufacturing trade Total
15,682
167
under the terms of the Empire Settlement Act. As the
dominions industrialised, it would become more difficult to
sell British goods there. Harmony of interests between the
mother country and the rest of
the Empire was proving hard to achieve. The onset of the
worldwide Depression in 1929 made the task even more
difficult. With almost one-third of its own workforce
unemployed, Australia could not afford to import even
industrial skills. At the same time, the Depression revealed
the long-term need for a self-sustaining economy based on
expansion of Australia’s manufacturing sector.
168
Similar trends can be discerned in the labour movement.
When Australia elected its fourth Labor Party prime minister
in 1929, he was, unlike his three predecessors,
Australian-born. The first son of Irish parents who had arrived
in the 1860s, J.H. Scullin had spent most of his life enmeshed
in the experiences of the local labour movement in Victoria.
His Australian patriotism was coloured by the events of
World War I, particularly the Easter uprising in Ireland and
the split in the labour movement over conscription.
Throughout the 1920s he criticised the policy of Empire
migration as designed to worsen unemployment in Australia.
One of his first acts as prime minister was to abolish the
scheme of government assistance for British immigrants. As a
result, the number of assisted immigrants entering Australia
fell from 13 000 in 1929 to 2700 in 1930, 275 in 1931 and
only 175 in 1932.67
169
Source: R. T. Appleyard, British Emigration to Australia,
Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1964, p.5.
170
The dream of a self-supporting British Empire was over. By
the early 1930s it was becoming obvious that economic
priorities were
overwhelming the hopes to build a nation of common British
background. Australia would have to look beyond the British
Isles if it wished to sustain a large program of immigration.
171
Scandinavians in particular chose brides from the wider
Australian community, and tended quickly to lose their group
ethnic identity.
172
United States to many who wished to go. America’s loss was
Australia’s gain. Despite a quota system imposed by the
Australian government to restrict so-called ‘cheap labour’,
Italian immigration rose sharply from 163 in 1919 to an
inter-war peak of 7884 in 1927.77 From 1921 to 1930, there
was a net gain of 23 928 Italians in Australia. There were now
settlements in Fremantle, the Riverina and North
Queensland.78
173
Most inter-war Italian immigrants had to rely on a friend for
support because government regulations required them to
have a sponsor. One young Italian, recently discharged from
the army and disturbed by economic chaos in post-war Italy,
was typical of many
who came to Australia in the early 1920s, following the trail
of relatives and friends:
Obviously the times were bleak, and it was while I was with
the Ufficio Municipale that I conceived of the idea of
emigrating to a young country capable of offering me better
opportunities for the future. I thought of Canada, New
Zealand and Australia, but I had no friends or relatives to turn
to in either of the first two countries. My eldest brother,
Angelo, however, had a friend who had emigrated to
Australia a few years before and with whom he had been
corresponding regularly. My brother’s friend lived in
Lithgow, N.S.W. and worked at Hoskin’s Steel Works.
174
fact Angelo was to follow me about two years later,
sponsored by me.)80
175
Source: W.D. Borrie, The Italians and Germans in Australia,
p.78.
176
three-quarters of whom were working in oyster bars, fish
shops and restaurants.82
177
on shift work in a South Australian country town, ‘The beds
they occupy never get cold. As soon as one man leaves his
bed, it is occupied by another of his fellows, and it is
practically always in use. How can we expect such people to
adjust themselves to our standards of living’.86 The general
conclusion drawn was that ‘the private life of these Southern
Europeans is far below the standard of the private life of our
people’ and that they were ‘quite unsuited, because of their
former environment and general outlook on life, ever to
become worthy citizens’.87
178
As a result of the affray, which was still continuing early this
morning, one man, a Montenegrin, was killed . . .
179
understood, was that ethnic concentrations, so often adopted
by the Irish, Scots, Germans and others in the nineteenth
century, was a natural way of smoothing the difficult path of
transition from one culture to another:
180
Southern Europeans . . . Had British-Australians invariably
welcomed Southern Europeans with open arms the same
separatist forces would still have been at work. What pre-war
British-Australians failed to realize— and in many cases still
do not realize— is that ethnic group settlements were not
directed against British-Australian culture but were an
inevitable and necessary accomplishment of migration to a
new land. Necessary, because arrivals in a strange land cannot
strip themselves of their old world overnight; they need
companionship with people of their own kind, people who
speak the same language; people who can come into the home
with understanding and help when there is trouble, people
who have the same background and experience and can
therefore appreciate reminiscences, jokes, and familiar
hospitality. Such companionship is quite essential to the
normal immigrants’ sense of security and happiness; any
attempt to interfere with it will, in the opinions of competent
psychiatrists and in the experience of other countries of
immigration, add to the difficulties of adjustment and increase
the dangers of mental instability, alcoholism, and even
suicide.91
181
more wealthy eastern suburbs of those cities.92 By the early
twentieth century other Jews from central and eastern Europe
were also arriving. Some came because of persecution, others
for more personal reasons. Judah Waten, one of Australia’s
most successful writers, has left an account of his own
family’s experiences. They were Jewish immigrants who
arrived before World War I. His mother had urged that they
leave Russia; his father came reluctantly. In Australia, they
adapted quite differently:
182
was no great obstacle to business. You could buy and sell— it
was a good land, Father said.
It was different with Mother. Before she was one day off the
ship she wanted to go back.
Nor was she any better disposed to her relatives and the
small delegation of Jews who met her at the ship. They had
all been in Australia for many years and they were anxious to
impress new-comers with their knowledge of the country and
its customs. They spoke in a hectoring manner. This was a
free country, they said, it was cultured, one used a knife and
fork and not one’s hands. Everyone could read and write and
no one shouted at you. There was no oppressors here as in the
old country . . . Mother never lost this attitude to the new
land. She would have nothing of the country; she would not
even attempt to learn the language. And she only began to
look with a kind of interest at the world around her when my
sister and I were old enough to go to school. Then all her old
feeling for books and learning was reawakened. She handled
our primers and readers as if they were sacred texts.93
183
By the 1930s, events in Europe added to the Australian
Jewish community and brought here other non-Jewish
Europeans. Persecuted in Germany, many looked for homes
overseas. They were joined by others from central Europe
after the German invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia in
1938.
184
turn towards a more cosmopolitan society. If so, few
Australians at the time were prepared to recognise
or accept such a change. In a society now dominated by the
Australian born, sure of their identity as Australians distinct
from the home culture of Britain, new influences were
generally unwanted. ‘Australia for the Australians’ was the
catch cry for most. Mateship did not allow for a diverse
Australian culture.
185
5
A MULTI-CULTURAL SOCIETY
To the average Australian whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, terms like
‘assimilation’, ‘integration’, ‘homogeneous’ or ‘pluralistic’
society are probably meaningless. The concept I prefer, the
‘family of the nation’, is one that ought to convey an
immediate and concrete image to all. In a family the overall
attachment to the common good need not impose a sameness
on the outlook or activity of each member, nor need those
members deny their individuality and distinctiveness in order
to seek a superficial and unnatural conformity. The important
thing is that all are committed to the good of all.
186
defence. For the first time in their history, white Australians
faced possible invasion. A small nation of only seven million
persons was seen to be vulnerable. Prime Minister John
Curtin told the nation in December, 1943 that a population of
twenty million was essential to Australian security; several
months later he increased the number to thirty million.2 From
out of the wartime experience there emerged a commitment to
increasing the population. In August, 1945, the acting Prime
Minister Francis Forde made the first major statement on
Australia’s post-war immigration policy:
187
schools and hospitals. ‘Economic development’ as a basis for
security and prosperity joined ‘defence’ as the twin aims of
immigration policy. Industrial and agricultural growth within
Australia were to complement one another as the basis for a
balanced economy. Announcing that Australia would receive
30 000 immigrants in 1947, the Minister for Immigration,
Arthur Calwell, hailed them as:
The post-war search for new citizens still began where it had
all started—in Britain. Although the war had strained official
ties between the British and Australian governments, it had
not shaken the belief that the Australian heritage was still
predominantly British.
188
Commonwealth nations (as the Empire now became known).
More generally, war had disrupted lives. Many were prepared
to start afresh. A contemporary noted:
The war itself has been the first and in many ways the most
important influence in overcoming inertia. . . the war has
operated as an uprooting force upon minds as well as upon
bodies; it has cut violently across settled ways and compelled
people, willy nilly, to start new lives. Thousands of young
folk started their adult civilian careers upon demobilisation.
Thousands more decided not to return to their former jobs and
sought something ‘more interesting’ or ‘with more of a future
in it’. To them, going to a Dominion does not seem a sudden
break; they have in any case to resettle—what they have to
decide is where.6
189
Shortages in Britain continued into the 1950s. Not
unnaturally, dissatisfaction remained a feature of British
social life in the decade following the war. To many,
emigration seemed the answer. Opinion polls taken on six
different occasions between 1948 and 1957 indicated that as
many as 42 per cent and no less than 28 per cent of the poll
sample would emigrate if given an opportunity.8 In the 1940s
interest in emigration often followed periods of severe
shortages or international crises such as the Berlin airlift. In
the 1950s the Suez war made many Britons think of leaving.9
190
Reginald Morgan, a British migrant, working in Naval
Dockyards near Melbourne. As in the 1920s, British industrial
skills were an important contribution to Australian post-war
economic growth. Engineering talents in particular were at a
premium.
191
Source: Australia and the Migrant. Proceedings of the 1953
Australian Institute of Political Science Summer School,
Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1953.
192
Those who arrived from Britain during the late 1940s and
1950s came here at the beginning of an economic boom. They
helped start that boom. The first group contained many
building workers who were themselves housed in camps no
longer required by the army while their labour reduced the
backlog in building. The annual completion of new homes
soon rose to 80 000.16 The exceptional immigrant found in
the expanding economy opportunities to make a fortune. Alan
Bond began work in Western Australia in 1952 at the age of
fourteen as an apprentice signwriter. By 1957, he had formed
his own sign-writing company. From there he branched out
into property development and soon became a millionaire.17
Different
opportunities awaited these new arrivals depending on their
backgrounds. On the other side of the continent, John Ducker,
an English boilermaker, arrived in 1950. He took work in a
foundry and became a shop steward for the Federated Iron
Workers Association in 1952. By 1961 he was an organiser
for the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council and by
the late 1970s, secretary of the Trades and Labour Council,
President of the New South Wales Labor Party and
Vice-President of the Australian Labor Party. In 1979, he was
appointed to the New South Wales Public Service Board, a
position with high salary and great power.18
193
Permanent Arrivals from United Kingdom in Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, 1948–195719
194
The problem of refugees began before the outbreak of war.
During the war, Australia received a number of Jewish
refugees and others who had been interned in England. In
1940 over 2000 German ‘aliens’ were transported to
Australia. Amongst these were many intellectuals and
professionals who later played an important part in the artistic
and academic life of Australia. As one young refugee of the
time has recalled of his experiences on board ship:
195
certain of the distressed peoples of Europe. Approval has
therefore been given for the admission of a limited number of
these people, provided they are nominated by relatives in
Australia who are in a position and willing to accommodate
and maintain them.22
196
from 3690 in 1948 to 6800 in 1952.25 Contributing to a
discussion on post-war migration, Neville Wills, manager of
B.H.P.’s Commercial Research Department, pointed out:
197
The arrival of ‘New Australians’. During late 1947, the first
group of post-war refugees landed in Australia. Some
Australians greeted them with suspicion and even hostility.
The Commonwealth government initiated short courses of
instruction in the somewhat naive belief that this would lead
to early assimilation into the main Australian community.
198
After serving their compulsory two-year labour contract they
had to re-do university courses before being allowed to
practise.27 Such injustices gave rise to ill-feeling. In the
words of Dr Laszlo Benyei of the Australian Council of
Churches:
199
its remoteness from troubled Europe, or in the belief that
economic opportunities were greater in an undeveloped
country.30
200
of creating a favourable image in the eyes of Australians.
Choir-singing and folk-dancing best served this purpose,
since the impact of these arts was not diminished by the
barrier of language. After it was established in 1960, the
biennial Adelaide Festival of Arts provided a special occasion
for new arrivals to advance their claim to recognition by these
means.31
201
The success of individual refugees depended much on how
well their former lives had prepared them for the expanding
capitalist economy in post-war Australia. It would seem that
those from northern or central Europe had a better chance in
this sense than many of those from Poland, the Ukraine or the
Balkan areas. One
example of success amongst the Baltic immigrants is Arvi
Parbo. He came to Australia in his twenties, upgraded his
qualifications here, and joined Western Mining Corporation
in 1956 as an underground surveyor and technician. In the
mining boom of the 1960s, his company was in the forefront.
By 1968 Arvi Parbo was General Manager of Western
Mining, later becoming chairman and managing director.33
The Hungarian, Paul Strasser, who arrived in Australia in his
late thirties, pursued a more individualistic entrepreneurial
line. During the mid-1950s, he founded the companies of
Finance Facilities and Parkes Development. His interests
quickly expanded from building development projects to
mining, oil exploration, hotel and motel chains, meat
processing and merchant banking.34
The maladies and weaknesses of our Church life did not arise
on this continent. We brought them here with us from Europe,
and perhaps even from the lands we were born in.35
202
Denied access or often unwilling to participate in Australian
social institutions because of the barrier of language, many
immigrant groups became obsessed with conflicts within their
own local community. One issue in particular provided a
bridge with the general Australian community. Fear of
communism led many former refugees, particularly those
from the Baltic countries, to take an active part in Australian
politics. The Association of Captive European Nations was
formed in New York in 1954 and branches were established
in Australia soon afterwards. It denounced Soviet
Communism, making its aim the ‘restoration of
self-determination and personal freedom to the peoples’ of the
‘captive nations’ of eastern and northern Europe.36 Many
former refugees co-operated with those who were organising
resistance to communism in the Australian trade unions. One
of the results of this activity was the formation of the
Democratic Labor Party and its affiliated body, the New
Australia Council.37 Some Australian-born resented such
overt political activity amongst migrants. Others were pleased
to recognize that some of the refugees of the 1940s were
coming to play an active part in the political as well as the
economic and social life of the nation.
203
1952, Howard Beale, the acting Minister for Immigration
announced that the federal government would reduce its
projected intake of immigrants from 150 000 to 80 000 a year.
Half would arrive from the United Kingdom. Of the other
half, 20 000 would be ‘landing permit holders’, most of
whom would be relatives nominated by southern Europeans
living in Australia. The remaining 20 000 would come under
agreements signed with a number of European
governments.38
204
Source: Commonwealth Department of Immigration
(Immigration Planning Council), Australia’s Immigration
Programme for the Period 1968 to 1973, Canberra, 1968, p.
17.
205
industrial growth has been centred in the cities. As in the late
nineteenth century, urban growth in Australia has been much
the result of continuous immigration.
Major
non-metropolitan
206
Newcastle 10,881 16.87
207
interrupted by the war, was soon re-formed. Even in the
period of the high numbers of British and refugee settlers in
the years 1947–51, Italian nationals constituted the second
highest proportion of the non-British European-born.44
208
years, emigration from Greece was slight. In 1945–49, civil
war disrupted Greece. Only 8952 permanent arrivals from
Greece landed in the years 1946–52. Many of these were
families of the 15 000 Greeks who had settled in Australia
prior to the outbreak of the war.50 Because of the 1930s
Depression and then the war, some families had been waiting
a long time. One Greek woman who arrived in 1951
recounted:
209
opportunities. One Greek male who arrived in 1955 was fairly
typical:
I had two brothers here and one sister. There was not very
much work in my country. There were only ten men who
owned big business, and there were some farmers, butchers. .
. I worked five days, but the boss only paid me for two and
would promise to pay me the rest next week. So I end up with
half pay for a whole week. . . In Australia I get paid for the
week every Friday and I don’t have to wait.54
210
Croatian folklore group, Zagreb, Shell National Folkloric
Festival. By the late 1970s, the cultural pluralism of Australia
was most readily identified through the folklores of the
various immigrant groups. Dance was a popular way of
taking overseas customs to the people, and also preserving
traditions amongst the young.
211
Initially, most Greeks moved near to where jobs were
available. As before 1939, the early post-war immigrants
determined places of settlement for later arrivals. The assisted
Greek immigrants of the years 1953–56 left the reception
camp of Bonegilla in Victoria for different parts of Australia.
Large communities from the regions of Sparta, Messinia,
Pontus and Macedonia ended up in the Melbourne suburbs of
Prahran, Yarraville, Fitzroy and Collingwood. In Sydney,
Mytileaneans, Cretans, and Peloponnesians established
homes, cafes and clubs in the suburbs of Surry Hills and
Redfern.55 Others, longer established in Australia, moved into
the nearby but wealthier eastern suburbs of Sydney. Values
have thus sometimes become related partly to money and
social position. Wealthy Greek-Australians have supported
archaelogical ‘digs’ in their homeland; the factory workers
are more concerned to preserve the structure of family.56 As
with the ‘D.P.s’, Greek migration to Australia has also been
marked by internal conflicts in both the community and
religious life.
212
railways. After driving a cab, he moved into real estate,
opening his own agency at Paddington. By 1978, his real
estate agencies employed 32 people.58
213
War was superficial, and it might be said that the nineteenth
century ended only in 1930 in the Netherlands. The economic
depression of the thirties, the development of Nazism, and the
Second World War had a profound effect on the Dutch
people. These events shattered a picture of the world which
the Dutch had made for themselves during the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth. The feeling of
living in a world where people are safe, where a man can
form a picture of his future life when he is 20, where things
are going well and will certainly go better in the future, have
gone. Perhaps the Dutch, and especially the young people,
have become more sceptical; they have certainly become
more restless, more mentally mobile and active, more inclined
to take chances when they offer themselves, without thinking
too much of the petty problems of the near future and of the
past, and less afraid to burn their boats. This postwar
mentality is more compatible with emigration than the former
one.61
214
Dutch homes are mostly neat and trim in appearance, and
inside are extremely neat and tidy. Many homes are furnished
in the traditional Dutch style with dark-coloured furniture and
a dark reddish-coloured thick tapestry pinned in a triangular
fashion over the mantlepiece. Easy chairs are spread around
the room, and there is usually a sideboard on which coffee
cups are stacked ready for use; a distinctive Dutch habit is to
place teaspoons in a cup on the sideboard. The heavier tones
in furnishings are usually in the homes of older Dutch
families, younger couples prefer light-coloured furniture with
a small coffee table in place of the sideboard. There are
usually many small souvenirs and national symbols spread
around the room—these mostly are plates or objects with the
name of the town in Holland engraved on it. In the better
class homes there are very small brass or copper objects
placed around the room. Other popular objects include pieces
of ‘Delft blue’ chinaware, wooden cuckoo clocks, on the
tapestry a number of objects are tacked on, e.g. clogs,
windmills and other reminders of Holland. Another
distinctive Dutch feature is the number of wall lamps which
give a soft glow. As further decoration many people hang a
thick tapestry on the walls on the lounge or entrance wall.
Two or three families visited had furniture which they had
shipped out from Holland, in this case the furniture was made
of a very strong oak wood.63
215
institutions, they sought cheap housing in inner-city areas
near their employment. The difference between northern and
southern European employment pattern was also significant
in this respect. Coming from an already mature industrial
society, albeit still in the process of recovering from the war,
many Dutch and German immigrants brought with them
industrial skills needed for developing the post-war
Australian economy. They were able to enter highly paid jobs
and thus to save to buy a house in the better suburbs.64
Marriage patterns were influenced not only by ethnic and
family loyalty but also by social circumstances in Australia.
Many southern Europeans were in low-paid jobs, and
three-quarters of them lived in inner-city ethnic
concentrations where their native tongue was normally
spoken and there were few opportunities to mix with
Australian girls. In contrast, British and northern and eastern
European immigrants were often out in the suburbs, were
more fluent in English and had more money to attract a girl.65
216
Net Australian Immigration 1 July 1947–30 June 196968
217
1968, when about 5500 Czech refugees came to Australia.67
Somewhat more peaceable was the move from China in the
1950s and 1960s of a sizeable community of Russians, many
of whom had originally left their homeland following the
1917 Revolution. After the Chinese Communist victory in
1949, and with deteriorating relations between Russia and
China in the 1950s, these ‘White Russians’ had moved once
again. Unlike many other refugees they generally came in
family groups, including grandparents.
218
Then, Britain itself had so many troubles, so many crises.
Whichever government was in power, it warned of hard
times, tightened belts, higher taxes. We knew it would be
ingenuous to expect that none of a nation’s modern problems
would apply in Australia. But, at least, it seemed the problems
might be set in an atmosphere of expansion and hope.
219
The Tatarnoff family of Sydney are part of the 500 000
refugees who arrived in Australia during the forty years after
World War II. Escaping the Russian Revolution of 1917, they
moved first to Harbin, Manchuria and then to Shanghai
before fleeing the Chinese Revolution of 1949 to the
Philippines and then finally to Australia. Other Russians from
Harbin and Shanghai would join them in the 1950s and
1960s.
220
Not all the Britons who arrived in the 1960s stayed. Overall,
of 2 475 000 immigrants arriving in Australia between 1947
and 1969, perhaps one-quarter (including many Britons) left
again, although one-third of these returned later.71 The
expansion of air travel during the 1960s finally conquered the
‘tyranny of distance’ allowing people to move more freely
back and forth between Europe and Australia.
221
Australian trading situation was entering a period of
transition. The minerals boom provided a new source of raw
material exports. Japan and other Asian countries became
important trading partners but Australia’s economic policies
tended to exclude their goods. The Vernon Committee report
of 1965 suggested that the high tariffs protecting Australian
industry, which had provided the economic shield for
post-war industrialisation and the importation of immigrant
labour, were not necessarily in the national interest. This
advice the Menzies Liberal government rejected. Instead, the
course chosen was to continue high tariffs and look overseas
for more immigrants who would come in to work in protected
industries while also providing much of the population base
for economic growth.
222
The growing search for more immigrants led the Australian
government to look even further eastwards. In October 1967
an immigration agreement was signed with Turkey. By 1971
almost 10 000 Turkish immigrants had arrived. Most were
unskilled and many had trouble adjusting to Australia.
Moreover a press campaign suggested that this was the
beginning of large-scale Asian immigration to Australia, even
though it was intended as an extension of European
migration.75
223
into Australia had reached 10 000 a year. It was a sign of new
developments both in immigration and throughout the general
Australian community.76
224
indicated that 60 per cent of overseas qualifications held by
those born in English-speaking countries were recognised
within Australia. In contrast, only 40 per cent of
qualifications held by those born in such areas as the Middle
East, Greece and Yugoslavia received recognition. Quite
often, registration of trade and professional qualifications
depends upon the ability to speak fluent English.77 Thus, just
as the D.P. doctors could not practice here after the war, so
even those recently-arrived non-English speakers with skills
had to forgo their training. Like their unskilled fellow
countrymen, they often had to take what work was available.
As a result, while the Australians and British-born moved up
into the tertiary sector, the factory labour force became
increasingly composed of mainly non-English speaking
immigrants.
225
The salaries of Australian-born and immigrant Australians,
1979. Because of their imported skills, many immigrants from
Northern Europe and Britain by then earnt more than the
Australian-born. In contrast, many Southern Europeans were
still confined to low paid industrial jobs.
226
as it was in the nineteenth century, is not so much how long
immigrants have been here as when they arrived. Thus, by the
late 1970s, northern European male immigrants, many of
whom had arrived in the prosperity of the 1950s, were
earning on average a higher salary than the Australian-born.
The actual time of departure and arrival is therefore as
important for later success as specific skills, even within
particular immigrant groups. The small but influential
Hungarian community is one notable example of a group who
in a short time has come to occupy important positions in
business, the arts and academic life. However, there have
been marked differences amongst Hungarians, depending not
only on social background but also on the time and manner in
which they left their homeland. Of the earlier generation of
pre-war Hungarian immigrants it has been said that their
qualifications could have been an actual disadvantage, when
compared with latter arrivals:
227
They entered the professions, or went into business, but the
fact that they had possessions which they could lose inhibited
them in their business undertakings; the legendary business
successes were not made by them, but by the penniless
immigrants of later vintage who had nothing but someone
else’s money to lose.80
The story of the Hungarians also shows how those who are
able to dispose quickly of their preconceived notions of social
arrangements can succeed. Twentieth century immigrants are
coming into a society already formed. The ‘cultural baggage’
of the nineteenth century immigrants has now become part of
the Australian way of life. For those migrating from societies
foreign to the modern industrial nation which Australia has
become, it is not so easy to understand that their institutions
and attitudes can not now be easily transplanted to a new
land. The change from a fairly simple rural background to a
sophisticated urban society in part of the cultural transition
228
many have to undergo. Equally significant are the new
economic conditions which apply even to those who try to
take up their previous pursuits. Turkish tomato growers at
Shepparton, Victoria, may not understand legal contract
arrangements entered into with the local canneries. They may
prefer verbal agreements and handshakes, trying to impose
their traditional ways on the local environment. Even those
who understand contracts often have them revoked because
they fail to fill the agreed quotas, or sell on the open market
when prices are high.81
For those who do not have the language skills, the luck, the
‘proper connections’, or the understanding of the workings of
Australian society, the path to social mobility has been to
enter the workforce at the lower end. Those who do so hope
to ensure a better future for their families (a hope sustained by
the experience of other immigrant societies, particularly the
United States where a longer history of different immigrant
groups suggests that, while newcomers often remain in
low-paid positions, their children do climb part of the social
ladder).82 It is primarily in order to help their family that so
many immigrant women have gone into the workforce.
229
suburb of Kemblawarra near Port Kembla, by the 1970s only
2.3 per cent of women workers were professionals (including
teachers) and 20.8 per cent were production workers. In
contrast, in nearby Windang, an area more populated by the
Australian-born, 11.1 per cent of women workers were
professionals, and only 7.4 per cent were production
workers.84
230
While the numbers of overseas-born factory women are high,
some immigrant families, even when faced by economic
necessity, are reluctant for their women to go out to work. As
a result, they forgo two incomes in order to maintain cultural
habits. This tendency appears most clearly where there is a
strong focus on the immediate family and the role of the
woman in the home. It is less pronounced where individual
immigrant families take a wider view of their place within a
larger ethnic community. Thus, of immigrants arriving
1969–73, only 54 per cent of married Italian women and 42
per cent of married Lebanese women were in the workforce in
1973, but 73 per cent of Greek married women and 67 per
cent of those from Yugoslavia were.85 For those who are,
there is often little assistance from either management or the
unions. One young Yugoslav has said:
Some of them don’t know what the union is. If they do, the
women there thought if they say anything, the union will fire
them. And mostly nobody asked them, because they thought
they won’t help them, so what’s the use? A woman, my friend
Olga, went to complain about gloves to the union man, so
then he went and had a fight with the leading hand about it.
The leading hand was very angry, nobody got any more
gloves, and the leading hand was more angry with Olga and
more hard on her in future after that. The union man can’t
help her at all. We were all women working there in that
section. You have to wear gloves because you cut yourself
very much. Some tools were specially sharp and you had to
push very hard. Sometimes the metal piece is too big for the
tool. If your gloves were cut in the first part of the day, then
after that your hands get cut. Nobody told us why no more
gloves — not the union man, not the leading hand. We heard
231
after that maybe the material to make the gloves was too
expensive.86
232
a strike at General Motors Holden in 1964, while in 1973
Greek workers rioted at the Ford plant at Broadmeadows,
Melbourne. At Mt Isa, the long strike of 1964–66 revolved
around the militancy of the strong Finnish community.88
By the 1970s many in both the trade unions and the labour
movement were beginning to question the general social and
economic costs of immigration. As the original architect of
the post-1945 program, the Australian Labor Party had begun
to shed some of its old shibboleths, but also its early post-war
commitments. The ALP, under its new leader Gough
Whitlam, had come to accept that its egalitarian philosophy
could no longer accommodate the racial discrimination of the
White Australia policy which it had supported for so long.
Many in the party now believed that Australia’s immigration
policy should be non-discriminatory, but unlike the post-war
Chifley Labor government, the Labor party had now come to
doubt whether either the fears of invasion or the hopes of
prosperity built around immigration were any longer justified.
Apart from difficulties in the workplace there were also the
strains on such social services as education and health which
seemed to be the direct result of the post-war years of
unrestrained growth. The election of the federal Labor
government in 1972 led to the first major post-war decline in
government efforts to attract new immigrants.
233
non-English speaking immigrants in particular. There was
also now talk of a new policy of ‘multiculturalism’.
234
While Grassby and the Labor government of 1972–75 helped
invent the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ for Australian
consumption, the new federal Liberal administration under
Malcolm Fraser from 1975–83 was responsible for the major
development of policies. New programs were aimed directly
at identifiable ethnic communities and their leaders. The most
important initiative was the review of post-arrival programs
and services which the Melbourne lawyer Frank Galbally
carried out in 1977–78. From out of the Galbally Report
emerged new provisions for the development of English
language classes for both adult migrants and their children.
There was also encouragement for ethnic radio and a new
television channel which could present programs in a number
of languages. The Fraser government also established the
Australian Institute for Multicultural Affairs to help monitor
migrant services and programs for ethnic communities.91
235
spoken to the pupils and by them, all day and every day, in
every activity, in school and out of it.92
236
The policies of multiculturalism first developed in the 1970s
were often designed to assure migrant parents that it was now
possible for their children to integrate into the occupational
structure through extended schooling, yet also maintain faith
with the language and culture of their former homelands.
Thus government grants were now extended not only to
support community languages in state schools but also to
support the ‘Saturday schools’ which had grown up within
many ethnic communities.94 A few ethnic communities also
took advantage of the post-war reintroduction of state aid to
non-state schools to set up their own full-time educational
institutions. But diversity could extend only so far. In
education, as in most other areas of social and institutional
life, uniformity was imposed through the role of the state,
particularly in the area of examinations and credentials. By
the 1980s few saw multiculturalism as leading to the creation
of separate state and institutional structures based upon
ethnicity.95
237
By the mid-1970s, the large-scale migration from Europe and
Britain to Australia seemed to be becoming a feature of the
past. Western Europe was turning inwards to create its own
common market. Europeans would come to Australia as
tourists, but compared with the 1950s and even 1960s, fewer
and fewer wished to remain permanently. Even those of
‘British origin’ were more likely to be coming from across the
Tasman than from the British Isles. From 1974 to 1978 New
Zealand ‘lost’ a net 62 000 citizens to Australia and a further
74 000 in 1979–84. At the 1981 census, with 6 per cent of the
overseas-born, New Zealanders constituted the third largest
overseas group in Australia after those born in the United
Kingdom and Ireland (38 per cent) and Italy (9 per cent).96
Many of the New Zealanders were probably tourists,
spending a short time across the Tasman. Some were
undoubtedly ‘economic refugees’ seeking new opportunities
as the New Zealand economy began to experience difficulties
following the entry of Britain into the common market.
238
the actual practice and prospects of multicultural policies in
Australia.97
239
Growing international attention and the threats from the
Malaysian and Thai governments to turn back a possible
flood of refugees led to the United Nations holding an
International Refugee Conference in July 1979. Australia and
other Western governments acted to expedite applications for
immigration. In 1982 agreements were also reached with the
government in Vietnam allowing Vietnamese in Australia to
sponsor their relatives as immigrants.98
240
Nevertheless, with little understanding of English and most of
their overseas qualifications not recognised, many initially
ended up on the assembly lines of Australian factories. In
1981, 70 per cent of the Vietnamese employed in Australia
were concentrated in process work or were tradesmen or
labourers, compared with only 28 per cent of the total
Australian workforce.100
241
A citizenship ceremony, January 1980. Naturalisation has
often been regarded as a test of loyalty by the
Australian-born. As with earlier refugee and immigrant
groups, many Vietnamese want to accept and be accepted in
their new homeland without necessarily losing their sense of
cultural identity.
242
Australia had associations from the old days of the British
Empire. Indian settlers in Australia after the passage of the
1901 ‘White Australia’ Act had been generally confined to
the north coast of New South Wales in the small settlement of
Sikhs at Woolgoolga. After the independence of India in 1947
the Australian government had been prepared to accept a
number of Anglo-Indians. These numbers increased from the
mid-1960s and they were joined by other Indians, some of
whom were students who had come to Australia. In 1947
there were 8000 Indian-born in Australia;
by 1981 their numbers had grown to 42 000, of whom
perhaps three-quarters were Anglo-Indians.104
243
1986 it was estimated that the number of Chinese in Australia
was between 150 000 and 200 000. The vast majority had
arrived since the 1960s, and Chinese immigrants now greatly
outnumbered the Australian-born Chinese. They had come
from a variety of areas throughout Southeast Asia and the
Pacific, including New Guinea, Malaysia, Vietnam and Hong
Kong. Unlike the predominantly Cantonese-speaking
migration of the nineteenth century, these new immigrants
represented a variety of dialects and cultures of South China.
Only the Hong Kong Chinese share a linguistic background
with old-time Cantonese in Australia.106
244
Permanent Settler Arrivals by Place of Birth 1972–87108
245
younger and more immediate family members. Moreover, the
report suggested that, as a concept, ‘multiculturalism’
was generally misunderstood within the community and was
thus a virtual failure as a policy.
To the historian many of the issues were not new. For two
centuries immigration has been at the heart of both the
economic and social transformation of Australia. From an
economic analysis immigrants have been the basis of the
growth in both population and the workforce. As such they
have been part of the ‘human capital’ which has developed
the natural and other resources of Australia. During the
nineteenth century many of Australia’s immigrants were
young, unmarried and relatively unskilled. Over the twentieth
century, the skills of immigrants have increased, particularly
when compared with the Australian-born. At the same time,
however, the immigrants since World War II are more likely
to be accompanied by dependants, leading to the need for the
housing, schools and hospitals which are part of the capital
investments of the modern Australian cities.110
246
While both Australian-born and those from overseas have
benefited and also suffered from the effects of economic
growth induced by immigration, the question of social
relations between different waves of immigrants has always
been problematic. The creation of Australia’s social and
political institutions in the nineteenth century did not take
place without debate and conflict over the nature of the new
society being formed. Tensions between British-Protestants
and Irish-Catholics remained institutionalised, and not least in
the schooling of the young, until well into the twentieth
century. Since 1945 the major Australian social institutions
which the nineteenth century immigrants created have had to
confront a range of different cultural expectations. Much of
the debate has focused on the public sphere of social life. But
it is at the level of personal choices in terms of marriage and
partnerships that the most dramatic changes seem to be
occurring. In this respect, immigration which helped change
the Australian social as much as its physical landscape
in the nineteenth century is now leading to the creation of a
new Australia. The rather simplistic concept of
‘multiculturalism’ belies the complexity of changes. Cultures
are never static. There is always a dynamic of change,
particularly in immigrant cultures. According to the analysis
of the demographer Charles Price, by the mid-1980s
Australians who could claim direct descent on both their
maternal and paternal lines from the predominantly British
and Irish settlers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
made up less than half the Australian population. Those with
direct descent from non-British settlers over the twentieth
century were about one-quarter of the population. But the
fastest growing group, 4.8 million or 30 per cent of the
population, were those of mixed descent of nineteenth and
twentieth century immigrants — English-speaking and
247
non-English speaking immigrants, Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal.111
248
NOTES
Abbreviations:
HS Historical Studies
repr. reprinted
2. ibid., p.18.
3. ibid., pp.19–23.
5. ibid., p.20.
249
6. L. Radzinowicz, History of the English Criminal Law,
Vol.1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1948,
pp.25–28.
250
15. C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History
Volume 1 1788–1850, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1977,
p.17.
18. ibid., p.14. The available statistics are calculated for the
period 1788–1851.
19. ibid., p.17. See also J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial
Society in the Nineteenth Century, pp.108–33.
251
24. Brian H. Fletcher, Landed Enterprise and Penal Society,
Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976, pp.210–16.
252
34. A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, Faber and
Faber, London, 1966, p.171.
253
45. R.S. Neale, ‘The Colonies and Social Mobility’, in R.S.
Neale (ed), Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1972, p.119. See also J.J.
Auchmuty, ‘The Background of the Early Australian
Governors’, HS, Vol.6, No.23, 1954, p.302.
254
Savoy Military Prison and the New South Wales Corps’,
JRAHS, Vol.63, Pt.4, 1978, pp.248–62.
255
61. David Denholm, The Colonial Australians, Penguin,
Sydney, 1979, p.168.
2. ibid., pp.323–94.
3. ibid., p.147.
256
6. Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, Methuen,
London, 1969, p.198.
257
16. L.F. Fitzhardinge, ‘Moffitt, William’, in Douglas Pike
(ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.2: 1788–1850.
258
26. D.S. Macmillan, Scotland and Australia 1788–1850,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967, p.74.
259
35. Alexandra Hasluck, ‘Peel, Thomas’, in Douglas Pike (ed),
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.2: 1788–1850,
pp.320–22.
260
44. C.E. Carrington, The British Overseas, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p.501.
46. ibid.
261
55. Alex G. Scholes, Education for Empire Settlement, for the
Royal Empire Society, Longmans, London, 1932, p.168.
262
65. D. Van Abbe, ‘Kavel, August Ludwig Christian and
Fritzsche, Gotthland Daniel’, in Douglas Pike (ed), Australian
Dictionary of Biography, Vol.2: 1788–1850, pp.33–34.
263
77. ibid., p.90.
264
88. Cliff Turney, ‘Henry Carmichael’ in Cliff Turney (ed),
Pioneers of Australian Education, Vol.1, Sydney University
Press, Sydney, 1969, p.70.
2. ibid., p.666.
265
4. ibid., p.38.
5. ibid.
6. ibid., p.44.
7. ibid.
8. ibid.
9. ibid., p.47.
266
16. ibid., p.1.
267
26. G.R. Serle, The Golden Age, pp.331–2.
268
38. ibid.
41. G.R. Serle, The Golden Age, p.351. See also Geoffrey
Sherington, R.C. Petersen and Ian Brice, Learning to Lead,
George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987.
43. K.J. Cable, ‘Mrs Barker and her Diary’, JRAHS, Vol.54,
Pt.1, 1986, p.81.
269
48. James Jupp, ‘Migration from London and the South East’
and ‘English influences on Australian Culture and Sport’ in
James Jupp (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Australian People,
pp.392–6 and 454–60.
270
57. Peter Corris, ‘White Australia in Action: The Repatriation
of Pacific Islanders from Queensland’, HS, Vol.15, No.58,
1974, p.238.
271
66. J.R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities,
London 1969, pp.327–30 cited in R. Duncan, ‘Late
Nineteenth Century Immigration into New South Wales from
the United Kingdom’, Australian Economic History Review,
Vol.XIV, No.1, 1974, p.62. See also H.J. Dyos, ‘The Slums
of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, Vol.XI, No.1, 1967,
pp.5–40.
272
76. Robin Gollan, ‘Curley, James’, in Douglas Pike (ed),
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.3: 1788–1850, pp
507–08.
81. ibid.
273
87. James Lyng, ‘Racial Composition of the Australian
Population’, in P.D. Phillips and G.L. Wood (eds), The
Peopling of Australia, Melbourne University Press,
Melbourne, 1928, repr. Dawson’s of Pall Mall, London, 1968,
p 147. For a fuller view of the composition of the non-British
in early twentieth century Australia, see J. Lyng,
Non-Britishers in Australia, Melbourne University Press in
association with Oxford University Press. London and
Melbourne, 1935.
274
95. N.B. Nairn, Civilising Capitalism, Australian National
University Press, Canberra, 1973, pp.61–62.
An Imperial Dominion
4. ibid., p.252.
5. ibid., p.306.
8. ibid., p.244.
275
10. See The Story of Kings ley Fairbridge By Himself, Oxford
University Press, London, 1927, and Ruby Fairbridge,
Pinjarra, Oxford University Press, London, 1937.
276
20. ibid., pp.303–13.
277
29. L.L. Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First A.I.F.
1914–1918: Some Statistical Evidence’ HS Vol.15, No.61,
1973, p.744.
278
settling within the Empire ex-servicemen who may desire to
emigrate after the War (Cd. 8672) p.2 quoted in Gordon
Greenwood and Charles Grimshaw (eds), Documents on
Australian International Affairs 1901–1918, pp.710–11.
279
49. G. Sherington, ‘Immigration Between the Wars’ in James
Jupp (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, p.94.
280
59. Colin Forster, Industrial Development in Australia
1920–1930, p.86.
62. ibid.
281
association with Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1939,
p.27.
282
82. C. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, pp. 166–7. See
also H. Gilchrist, ‘Greek Settlement until 1940’ and N.
Mistilis, ‘Greek Community Life in Sydney’ in James Jupp
(ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, pp.507–11 and
518–22.
86. ibid.
87. ibid.
283
92. See C.A. Price, Jewish Settlers in Australia, Australian
National University Press, Canberra, 1964.
A Multi-Cultural Society
4. ibid.
5. ibid., p.35.
284
7. Susan Cooper, ‘Snoek Piquante’, in Michael Sissons and
Philip French (eds), Age of Austerity 1945–51, Penguin,
London, 1964, p.37.
9. ibid., p.95.
14. ibid.
285
21. Wendy Lowenstein and Morag Loh, The Immigrants,
p.63.
286
30. Jean I. Martin, Refugee Settlers, Australian National
University Press, Canberra, 1965, p.50.
39. ibid.
287
42. O. Bonutto, A Migrant’s Story, p.109.
47. ibid.
288
51. Eva Isaacs, Greek Children in Sydney, Australian
National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p.29.
289
62. I.H. Burnley, ‘Social ecology of immigrant settlement in
cities’, p.178.
290
73. Australian Population and Immigration Council, A
Decade of Migrant Settlement Australian Government
Publishing Service, Canberra, 1976, p.111.
291
81. Information from unpublished research carried out at the
University of Wollongong by Dr E. Kellermann and Ms L.
Fahey.
292
in Australia, Routledge Kegan and Paul, Melbourne, 1988,
pp.237–305.
293
98. P. Kelly, ‘Settlement of Vietnamese Refugees’ in J. Jupp
(ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, pp.833–4.
294
104. R. Jayaraman, ‘Indian Society and Culture and
Australia’ and G. Moore, ‘Anglo-Indians’ in J. Jupp (ed.),
Encyclopaedia of the Australian People, pp.543 and 549.
295
113. A 1983 speech cited in Katherine Betts, Ideology and
Immigration, p.159.
296
FURTHER READING
General
Books
297
Crowley, F. K., Australia’s Western Third, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1967.
298
Lyng, J., Non-Britishers in Australia, Melbourne University
Press in association with Oxford University Press, London
and Melbourne, 1935.
299
Price, C.A. (ed), Australian Immigration: A Bibliography and
Digest No. 2, 1970, Department of Demography, Australian
National University Press, Canberra, 1970.
Article
300
Britain’s Overseas Penal Colony
Books
Articles
301
Auchmuty, J. J., ‘The Background to the Early Australian
Governors’, Historical Studies, Vol.6, Pt.2, 1960, pp.97–111.
302
The Formation of Colonial Society
Books
303
Waldersee, James, Catholic Society in New South Wales
1788–1860, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1974.
Articles
304
Victorian Britain Overseas
Articles
305
Cole, Douglas, ‘“The Crimson Thread of Kinship”: Ethnic
Ideas in Australia, 1870–1914’, Historical Studies, Vol.15,
No.56, 1971, pp.511–25.
An Imperial Dominion
306
Ferenczi, Imre (ed), International Migrations, Volume 1,
National Bureau of Economics, New York, 1929.
307
Articles
A Multi-Cultural Society
Books
308
Australian Population and Immigration Council, Immigration
Policies and Australia’s Population, Australian Government
Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977.
309
Department of Immigration, 1788–1978 Australia and
Immigration, Australian Government Publishing Service,
1978.
310
Lewis, Roy, Shall I Emigrate? Phoenix House, London, 1948.
311
Zubrycki, J., Settlers of the La Trobe Valley, Australian
National University Press, 1964.
Articles
312
INDEX
A.C.T., 109
A.I.F., 102–03
Abercromby family, 20
Abrahams, Ester, 9
Africans, 153
Annandale, 9
Anti-transportation movement, 54
313
Appin, 29, 34
Archer family, 32
Architects, 35, 62
Arnold, Thomas, 48
Aspendale, 147
Australia Club, 48
Backhouse, Benjamin, 62
314
Baltic peoples, 135–36, 139–40
Balmain, 53
Baptists, 19
Barker, Mrs. 71
Barossa Valley, 45
Bathurst, 26
Bega, 32
Bishop Barker, 71
Bishop Moorhouse, 72
315
Blainey, Geoffrey, 165
Boer War, 88
Bonegilla, 146
Boulder, 117
‘Bounty immigrants’, 41
Brentnall, Frederick, 77
316
Builders, 67, 84, 133, 140
Bundaberg, 77
Bushrangers, 69, 86
Cabramatta, 165
Camden, 16
Camden Park, 35
Campbell, Robert, 17
Canada, 36, 60, 93, 96, 134, 138, 149, 164, 170
Cardinal Moran, 88
Carmichael, Henry, 53
317
‘Chain migration’, 33, 53–55, 63–64, 81–82, 118–21, 124,
133, 143–45, 147
Chartism, 49–51, 63
Chippendale, 53
Clark, Manning, 29
Clark, Marcus, 74
Clyde Company, 32
Cobb, Freeman, 66
Collingwood, 146
Collins, David, 13
Colquhoun, Patrick, 5
318
Commissioner Bigge, 28
Congregationalists, 19
Conscription, 105
Coorparoo, 77
Corfield, H.C., 74
Curley, James, 81
Dalgety, Frederick, 35
Darwin, Charles, 72
Dickens, Charles, 60
319
‘Displaced Persons’, 136–39, 165
Doyle, Andrew, 12
Douglass, Benjamin, 73
Drysdale, Anne, 32
Duke of Wellington, 16
Durack, Darby, 83
Durack, Michael, 83
Durack, Patrick, 83
Dutch, 147–48
Elizabeth, 147
320
Elizabeth Bay House, 35
Eureka Stockade, 66
Evangelicalism, 18–19
Fairbridge, Kingsley, 96
Fairfield, 144
Faithful, William, 10
Finnish, 160
Fisher, Andrew, 88
Fitzroy, 146
321
Fowles, Joseph, 28
Frankston, 147
Fritzsche, Gotthand, 45
Fujian (Fukien), 66
Gardiner, Frank, 69
Germans, 44–45, 75, 85, 101–02, 117, 123–24, 125, 147, 149
Gilbert, John, 69
CTOiilburn, 83
322
Governor Arthur, 26, 28, 38
Governor Bligh, 20
Governor Darling, 26
Governor Franklin, 48
Governor Hunter, 11
Governor King, 12
Graziers, 17
Greenway, Francis, 35
Griffith, 103
Gulf of Carpenteria, 12
Hahndorf, 45
Harris, Alexander, 43
323
Hawksley, E. J., 51
Henty, James, 30
Higinbotham, George, 62
Holroyd, 141
Hudson, J.C., 62
Hughes, W.M., 88
Hufton, Edward, 79
Illawarra, 26, 34
324
Imlay, Peter, George and Alexander, 32
Indians, 93
Ingle, John, 13
Innisfail, 121
Ireland, 10–12, 32, 40, 82, 105; family feuds, 25; land
holdings, 10, 82; population, 4, 94; post-famine, 82;
‘protestant ascendancy’, 10; 1978; rebellion, 10–11
Irish, 29, 32, 40, 44, 55–56, 82–83, 86–87, 115, 123; ‘chain
migration’, 55–56, 82–83; convicts, 10–12, 25; farmers, 83;
gold diggers, 62; in Victoria, 82; lawyers, 62
325
Italy, 118, 143
Japanese, 93
Johnson, Richard, 20
Jones, David, 36
Jones, Richard, 17
Kable, Henry, 7
Kalgoorlie, 121–22
Kavel, August, 45
Kelly, Ned, 86
Kemblawarra, 157
Kimberleys, 83
Lakemba, 121
326
Land grants, 8,13,16, 30, 32, 33, 43, 46
Land speculation, 84
Lansdowne, 35
Lapstone, 35
Lawyers, 62
Lebanon,163
Leichhardt, 143
Lennox, David, 35
Levey, Solomon, 35
327
Lieutenant Johnson, 8
Liquor consumption, 20
Liverpool, 35
Lord, Simeon, 7, 17
Luddites, 25
Macarthur, James, 53
Macarthur family, 35
Major Grose, 13
328
Malta, 104, 146
Maroubra, 147
Mechanics Institutes, 53
Melbourne Club, 48
Melbourne University, 71
Mellish, 23, 24
Merchants, 17–18
Moffitt, William, 27
329
Multiculturalism, 160–61, 163, 170
Munro, James, 84
New England, 31
New South Wales, 12–13, 17, 23, 26, 30–32, 95, 100,
108–09, 114, 117; population, 17, 39, 75, 85
Newcomb, Caroline, 32
North Carlton, 43
330
Northern Europeans, 117, 143, 149, 153
Paddington, 146
Parkes, Clarinda, 41
Parramatta, 16, 35
Parramatta factory, 9
Peel, Thomas, 35
Penrith, 144
331
Port Arthur, 26
Port Macquarie, 26
Port Phillip, 32
Prahran, 146
Pyrmont, 54
Queensland, 12, 31, 32, 34, 83, 109; Germans, 75, 117;
Italians, 117–19, 141; population, 75, 76, 83, 85; urban
growth, 83
Redfern, 146
Redfern, William, 11
Redmond, Edward, 11
332
Refugees, 124–26, 134–40, 150–51
Richmond (NSW), 16
Riley, Alexander, 17
Riverina, 31
Robinson, Michael, 6
Rose, George, 12
‘Rum rebellion’, 19
Rye, Maria, 63
Saigon, 164
Seaford, 147
Scotland, 10, 12, 31–32, 41, 56; criminal law, 10, 62, 74;
population, 4, 94
333
Scottish, 10, 31, 35, 45, 69, 82, 85, 101; ‘chain migration’,
33; crofters, 40; gentry, 31, 48, 71; ‘gold diggers’, 62;
‘martyrs’, 10–11
’self help’, 52
Serle, Geoffrey, 70
Shepparton, 157
Sicily, 144
Sikhs, 166
Singapore, 166
Smith, Adam, 4
334
South Australia, 43, 44, 51, 74, 85; Germans, 109; Juvenile
migration, 44–45, 56, 117; Methodists, 96, 110; population,
75, 85
South Yarra, 62
Spence, W. G. 100
Strong, Charles, 73
Summers, Charles, 70
Summers, Joseph, 70
Swan River, 32
Sydney, 12, 17, 27, 29, 34–35, 144, 146, 151; Greeks,
144–46; housing, 35–36, 52, 80, 142; Italians, 142;
population, 143; temperance societies, 53
335
Taiping Rebellion, 66
Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), 13, 17, 23, 26, 28, 30–31,
38, 48, 74, 109; ‘convictism’, 54; population, 17, 75, 85
Thailand, 164
Tingley, Henry, 26
‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, 25
Toongabbie, 11–12
Trade unions, 73, 81; and immigrants, 81, 99–100, 121, 134,
159–60
Turkey, 153
Turks, 153
Two-fold Bay, 31
Ukranians, 139–40
Underwood, James, 7
336
Unionism, 73, 81, 99–100
United States, 36, 78, 108, 119; immigration, 60, 95; Irish
immigrants, 55, 82, 95
Verge, John, 35
Walker, William, 17
Watson, J.C., 88
337
Wekey, Sigismund, 65–66
Wesley, John, 18
Wesleyans, 19, 77
Western Australia, 30, 32, 35, 83, 100, 110, 114; convicts, 53,
72; land settlement, 34–35, 95, 110; population, 34, 75, 85
Windang, 157
Women, 14–15, 98, 111, 138, 142, 144, 157–58; and politics,
160; assisted immigrants, 37–38, 62–64; convicts, 8–9,
16–17; European-born, 117; governesses, 62–64; proportion
of population, 8, 65, 144; workforce, 157–60
‘Wowserism’, 68
Yarraville, 146
Yass, 26, 32
338
Yugoslavaians, 149, 153, 154, 158
339