Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull likes to say that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. And while that might gloss over the country’s history of racial exclusion (and the three senators from anti-immigration party One Nation in federal parliament), contemporary Australia can make a good claim on the title.
That’s because Australia has a higher proportion of people born overseas (26 per cent) than other high-immigration nations, including New Zealand (23 per cent), Canada (22 per cent), the United States (14 per cent), and the United Kingdom (13 per cent). In fact, the only country that has a higher overseas-born population is Saudi Arabia (32 per cent) which permits foreigners to work but does not offer permanent residency or citizenship.
Since 1945, when Australia’s immigration department was established, seven million permanent migrants have settled in Australia.
Image used for representation purposes only Source: SBS
Prospector sits in front of his prospectors hut in the gold rush in Australia. Source: Universal Images Group Editorial
Today's Australia
The 2016 census revealed a diverse nation. Nearly half of all Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent who was. More than one in five Australians speak a language other than English at home. The most common countries of birth after Australia were England (five per cent of the population) and New Zealand (2.5 per cent), followed by China (2.3 per cent) and India (2.1 per cent). Since the mid-2000s, Chinese and Indian arrivals have outpaced arrivals from the UK and migration has replaced births as the driver of population growth.
Multiculturalism has been official Australian policy since the early 1970s and it enjoys broad support. Over 80 per cent of people in Australia say multiculturalism has been good for the country, according to the past four years of the Mapping Social Cohesion survey conducted by Monash University.
English Class Source: Picture Post
Ancient origins
DNA evidence suggests the first people to migrate to the Australian continent most likely came from South-East Asia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, according to the Immigration Department's official history. Estimates of the size of the Aboriginal population before European settlement range between 300,000 and 1.5 million: some 600 tribes speaking more than 200 distinct languages.
Today Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people account for 2.8 per cent of the country's 24 million people.
Source: Credit: Getty Images/David Austen/Keystone/Hulton Archive
The 1800s: First modern migrants
Most of the first modern migrants ti Australia were involuntary arrivals: British convicts sent to the penal colony of New South Wales. Until the mid-1800s, the population was dominated by British and Irish people. But the discovery of gold near Orange, NSW, in 1851 triggered a gold rush that changed the face of Australia.
Between 1851 and 1860, more than 600,000 migrants arrived: most were from the UK but 10 per cent came from elsewhere in Europe and 7 per cent from China.
Xenophobic hostility toward the newcomers focussed on the Chinese, whose different work practices were regarded as a threat to wages and employment, according to the Department of Immigration’s history. The tension resulted in anti-Chinese riots which resulted in several deaths, leading to the colonies’ first restrictions on immigration, targeting Chinese people.
Refugee Vietnamese Family Source: Corbis Historical
The potato famine in Ireland in the late 1840s saw some 30,000 Irish migrants settle in Australia, and the push to develop Australia’s outback led to a government decision to bring in 2000 cameleers mainly from India and Afghanistan.
Some 50,000 people, mostly men from Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, were brought to Australia in the late 1800s to work as indentured labourers in the primary industries in Queensland. Mostly brought against their will, many stayed on and built a community.
The 1900s: Federation and the White Australia Policy
At federation in 1901, three million people in the six colonies became the nation of Australia, and the new country’s parliament - made up of white men - defined it as a white man’s nation.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 became known as the “White Australia Policy”, aimed at discouraging non-white migrants. It included a notorious dictation test of 50 words in a European language - immigration officials could choose any language they pleased - which applicants had to pass to emigrate to Australia. Japanese pearl divers and Malay and Filipino boat crew were exempt from the test. But there were thousands of Australians of Chinese, Syrian and Indian background who were forced to apply for documents to exempt them from the test if they travelled.
Since the 1980s, the focus of Australia’s immigration policy has been on selecting migrants who fit much-needed skills criteria, along with family visas. In 2017 the Turnbull government moved to restrict the skilled visa system and tighten requirements for citizenship, including reinstating a tough English-language test. But those changes have been put on ice after it became clear they did not have support in the Senate, leading to a surge in citizenship applications.
حمّل تطبيق أس بي أس الجديد للإستماع لبرامجكم المفضلة باللغة العربية.
