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Asian Australia
| Article
# : |
14872 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
4,177 Words |
| Author
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Particia Braun
Patricia Braun is a free-lance journalist and photographer
based in New York City. |
Fourteen years ago Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam promoted a new vision of Australia as a multicultural society, one which was pulling away from an exclusively British past. Previously, white Australia, founded two hundred years ago by Great Britain as a penal colony, had paid little heed to its non-European minorities. In fact, a carefully managed immigration policy had, since World War II, brought 3.5 million people, mostly Europeans, to Australia. The aim of the policy, while not racially exclusive, was to increase the population without changing its predominantly European composition--or at least without changing it very quickly.
If Australians needed any evidence that their ambivalent policy toward non-European immigration had to change, it was provided by the Vietnam War. The arrival of the Vietnamese refugee "boat people" was not part of any policy. They had not been processed, thousands of kilometers away, by immigration officials. They simply arrived, uninvited, by the thousands. Though there had long been a small Asian minority presence in the country, the composition of Australia's population was now to irreversibly change.
The first wave of Asian immigrants dates back to the Australian gold rush. Chinese workers began arriving in great numbers in 1855 and 1856, when the income of alluvial gold diggers was sinking to that of unskilled manual workers. By then gold was being found at such depths that operating teams of four to six independent alluvial diggers were being replaced by gold-mining companies, employing diggers as wage earners.
The gold diggers came from southern China, generally bound to some overseer
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