Is the American Dream Alive in Australia? Part V
Cracks in this Fine Social Scene
Congratulations dear reader, you’ve started to wade into the spicier parts of this series, the much anticipated social section. Your reward for sticking with me this far, so let’s dive in. You may have noticed that I’ve been largely complimentary of life in Australia thus far; however, no place is without its flaws and Australia’s flaws are inherently social in nature.
From White Australia to Welcome Mat? Debunking the Aussie Narrative
Coming to Australia, I had few preconceived notions. Australia in general doesn’t do a very good job of advertising its many strengths, I refer to this as “Australia’s PR problem” in my interview on the Brewed Abroad podcast.
Australia does a much better job covering up the dirtier parts of its history and lack of social cohesion than promoting its strength.
Internationally, Australia paints a picture of being a progressive and welcoming land of friendly, laid back people. This isn’t entirely untrue. Australia is much more open to immigration than the US–it’s not lottery based and many types of visas offer a pathway to permanent residency. The popularity of even the non-renewing visa classes, like the working holiday visa, are the national equivalent of welcome mats. Sydney and Melbourne are just as diverse as major cities in the US. In some ways even more diverse, as I met people from parts of the world I had never encountered before in America — Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Malaysia to name a few. Even far away countries that you might not expect, such as Colombia and Greece, have thriving immigrant communities in Australia. The food scene beautifully reflects this reality.
The first thing you hear landing in Australia or visiting any kind of public event is an Acknowledgement of Country; simultaneously a public service announcement recognizing that you are on wrongfully claimed Aboriginal land and an honoring of First Nations peoples and their descendants. Such a statement would be unthinkable in the US, yet it’s almost universally and voluntarily adopted throughout Australia. So perhaps my only preconception was that Australia was taking the best of the American example and extending it into the 21st century, a liberal-leaning melting pot of cultures.
Unfortunately, this rosy picture wouldn’t quite hold true — a reality I was about to discover firsthand.
My assumptions had some flaws baked in: including a limited awareness of Australian history, a misunderstanding of the sheer distinctiveness of the American identity, and a recency bias.
Did you know that for the majority of its history, Australia had an apartheid-like white only immigration policy?
Me neither, and until very recently, not many Aussies would either. The policy was designed to specifically make it difficult for people of Asian descent to settle in Australia; work then leave was the order of the day. Despite it being one of the first laws passed upon the federation of Australia, this policy was not historically taught in Australian schools. The Melbourne Museum had an eye-opening exhibit on the Immigration Restriction Act–colloquially known as The White Australia Policy–where it cited an example of an Asian man who was allowed to come to Australia to work, but was specifically barred from bringing his wife or children with him in perpetuity. There were a few other exhibits in the museum which cited examples of non-white immigrants, who even after marrying Australians, still were not allowed to permanently settle there.
This policy technically ended in 1958; however, it was still legal to discriminate based on race until 1975. Quora is filled with first hand accounts, some from as recently as the 90’s, detailing skilled immigrants experience of being passed over for jobs and promotions because their “non-Australian” experience was deemed as next to worthless. We’re talking about skilled doctors and engineers stuck in entry level positions due to discrimination. For context, a full decade plus after Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act in the USA, racial discrimination was still open and brazen in Australia. Fifty years ago may seem like ancient history for some, but from a social perspective, it’s practically last month. This would’ve been the environment Gen X was brought up in, the majority of whom are the parents of Millennial and Gen Z adults today.
As a child of immigrants, this hit me like a ton of bricks. It felt personal. It reminded me of my mother’s own bitter struggle with immigrant discrimination in education and the workplace.
Much like the genocide and subsequent marginalization of First Nations peoples, I find that Australians today are too quick to sweep parts of their dark history under the rug. Preferring instead to bask in their modern, progressive, friendly image, and tokenized actions, rather than truly reckon with or meaningfully amend for these transgressions. I realize that’s a harsh statement and Australia is by no means alone in glossing over past wrongs, and perhaps the tide is starting to shift. However, my distinct impression is that even in America, native peoples and their cultures are more visible and integrated into daily life than Aboriginal Australians. A bar that is, frankly, not far off the floor.
Self Segregation: Australia’s Achilles Heel
So why do I bother dredging up this painfully dark part of Australian history? The fact is, that it still influences attitudes, and affects Australian society to this day. Especially when it comes to integration, or lack thereof, in willingly self-segregated communities. This is a complex sociological topic and I’m sure there are multiple drivers of why social circles in Australia are largely structured around race, but I believe the following observations are significant factors.
Let’s start by asking this: how diverse are Sydney and Melbourne really?
It’s surprisingly difficult to even get the data; it seems that even the Australian Census is oddly skittish about reporting on race.
Instead, you need to combine the nationality and language section of the census, along with additional data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to get an accurate picture. For context, this is a standard and widely distributed report in the US. Race questions are a standard field, on government forms and in the workplace. I found a recent Quora thread where the author claims to have done exactly this, and the results seem more-or-less aligned to my lived experience of both cities as a whole.
Using Sydney as an example, the top ethnic groups are:
- 60% — White / European
- 18% — Asian / SE Asian
- 7% — South Asian
- 8% — West Asian / Arab
- 7% — All Others
However, you won’t find many neighborhoods that actually look like this. Instead, what you’ll find is each neighborhood has a predominant ethnic group that dramatically shifts when you leave it. For example Chatswood in Sydney, where non-English speakers are the majority and 44% of the neighborhood predominantly speaking an Asian language. Yet right next to Chatswood, you have the neighborhood of Willoughby, where 76% of the residents speak English and no other language, a mere seven blocks cause a reverse of polarity. Having never visited Willoughby and merely passing through Chatswood, I can’t provide too much more commentary on the data; but something tells me these neighbors rarely interact with one another… yet they are hardly unique.
The Central Business District is probably an even better example of this type of self segregation. In Australia, CBDs are both the financial and nightlife hubs of their cities, and if anywhere integration and cohesion should be on display, it should be here. If settlement patterns were driven by non-racial factors, it stands to reason that we should see the patrons of similarly priced venues to be largely representative of the city’s demographics as a whole. However, what you find is a completely different clientele depending on your chosen venue, irrespective of cost or distance. You can literally walk into a bar in the CBD where the clientele is 85% White, then cross the street and walk into another bar where the demographic flips, becoming 85% South Asian for instance. These aren’t isolated instances either. Even in the few venues that were more representative, typically highly rated restaurants in the CBD that served instagram-able fusion food, you will rarely see a mixed table.
Social groups are largely racially homogenous and there was typically no interaction between them, passing or otherwise. It’s as if a set of invisible walls were erected between groups as they were seated.
Interestingly enough, speaking to my Asian friends in Australia, they largely confirmed that they experienced similar walls, even within their own ethnic groups, just along national and linguistic lines instead.
Having lived in American cities of similar or greater diversity, I found my frequent experiences with these racial boundaries odd at first and only grew increasingly more disturbing over time. Back home, mixed groups were more common than not, and the clientele were largely representative of the city’s demographics in most places. Natural and fluid interactions flowed freely between groups. Even visiting famous ethnic neighborhoods, like the SF Mission or LA’s Little Tokyo, you would rarely see even the predominant ethnic group represent more than two-thirds of the people there.
Perhaps this is what people mean when they say America is a melting pot of cultures. Had I taken that for granted my whole life? Is America more segregated across economic lines and Australia along racial ones?
On my way out of Australia, I had a long layover in Hong Kong and the difference in this regard could not be more apparent. I went out on my own in Lan Kwai Fong, a popular nightlife hotspot; and in a beautiful and unexpected way, it felt like a homecoming of sorts. Bars were filled with people of all sorts of backgrounds, mingling and enjoying the venue together. I ended up in a mixed group of locals and expats who invited me to join them at a live music bar. We organically joined other mixed groups already there and listened to a local band made up of Asian, Latino, and Black band members. Granted, visiting a place and living there are totally different beasts. This was a one-off weekend and I can’t guarantee if my experience is entirely representative of HK or not.
Either way, it was such a breath of fresh air and a beautiful example of what being in a well integrated society can feel like, despite me being the minority there. It stunned me that nothing like this happened during an entire year of living in Australia, despite me actively seeking out such experiences.
Yet here I was, randomly in Hong Kong for less than 6 hours, and I started feeling like I was back home again.
Navigating the Undercurrents: Racism, Identity, & Belonging in Australia
It seemed like all the pieces were there, but why is Australia so different socially from both the US and HK? My two major theories have to do with time and identity. We discussed previously the WAP, (White Australia Policy, not Cardi’s version) the influence of which extended well into the 1970s. This, combined with the relatively young age of Australia as a nation, offers a plausible hypothesis.
While most of the world considers the US a young country, Australia is hardly a teenager by comparison. The USA was already a fully independent nation before the first white inhabitants made permanent settlements in Oceania; Australia itself did not become its own sovereign nation until 1901 (same year the Immigration Restriction Act was enacted). The Ellis Island era of mass migration in America was in full swing during this time. Lasting from 1892 through 1924 before immigration quotas began to restrict the number of migrants, over 40 million entered the United States during this time. This means that the USA already had a full two to three generations of immigrant integration, especially in cities like New York and San Francisco, before Australia began to receive a continuous wave of non-English speaking migrants. Though one notable exception was the Victorian Gold Rush; which mirrors it’s Californian cousin, both resulted in the founding of two of the oldest and largest Chinatowns in the world.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
— Inscription on the Statue of Liberty
Similarly, immigration to Hong Kong drove the city’s population during the decade after WWII from 600K to 2.5 Million, a third of which were refugees. This was a full generation of integration ahead of Australia, and at a massive scale that transformed the culture of Hong Kong Island… and what a difference even one additional generation makes. Perhaps I’m holding Australia to a bit of an unfair standard in this regard. America certainly faced its own racial issues, especially around immigration in the early 20th century. Even within caucasian communities, the infamous “No Irish Need Apply” signs were used into the 1930’s. Given the sentiment during those days, an event like the Cronulla Race Riots would not look out of place in 1954 America.
The good news is that 80% of Australians support the country’s policy of multiculturalism; perhaps it’s a case of social jet lag on a generational scale. Only time will tell, but for the moment, the undercurrent of racism and resulting self-segregation prevails.
I speculate national identity, or lack of it, also has a part to play in this. America has one of the strongest national identities on the face of this earth, and I fully believe this is the driving force behind our melting pot culture. People come to America to become American, their identity fundamentally changes once they become a citizen, and I can speak from personal experience here. I’m not sure this is the case with Australia.
For instance, Aussies are split even on Australia Day, some going as far as to refuse celebrating it and branding it as Invasion Day, a day to mourn the First Nations genocide. We certainly have a similar sentiment around this with Columbus Day in the US, but Independence Day… is nearly sanctified. It is one of the few days of the year Americans lay down their sharp political and ideological divides. Celebrating being American brings Americans together over their shared values, celebrating being Australian seems to have the opposite effect.
My own (anecdotal) experience speaking with naturalized Australians revealed that the majority of them see themselves as Australian only in a secondary capacity, rather than strongly identifying with their new nationality. I find that even Kiwis that obtain dual citizenship still regard themselves as Kiwis first. It’s notoriously difficult to find hard data to prove this theory one way or another, but I can at least point to two statistics that correlate. The first is that 52% of Australians are either foreign-born themselves or have a parent that is foreign-born. The second is within the census ethnicity questionnaire, where Australians are asked to select up to two ethnicities they identify with. “Australian” is an option, but surprisingly it loses out to “English’’ for the top spot, at just 30% of the population. I wonder if Australia has become a victim of its own success — with high wages and relatively affordable property — as a place to immigrate solely for economic reasons, without an ideological draw to accompany the move. A crisis of mind over heart perhaps?
My hope is that in a generation or two, Australians will fully realize their multi-cultural aspirations. The ingredients are on the table, and a deliciously satisfying soup can be made, but so far Aussies seem to be content with remaining a deconstructed salad. Visually appealing perhaps, but the hard separation between the ingredients isn’t doing the dish any favors. The work still needs to be done and it will largely fall on this generation of Australians to determine if it’s worth putting in the effort to begin dismantling these invisible walls. I sympathize, bridge building requires significant effort. It requires mutual curiosity, it requires openness and investments of time, and no small dose of empathy and emotional maturity. It can seem an especially daunting feat in a world where social media wants to put (and keep) us in homogenous bubbles. Our increasingly digital lives creating fewer and fewer opportunities for organic connection — not to mention atrophying interpersonal skills. However, as someone who was thrust into an multi-cultural world, shortly after birth, and has faced these challenges time and time again (as a natural introvert, I might add)… I can confirm that the proverbial juice is certainly worth the squeeze.
The TL;DR
- The recent multi-cultural appearance of Australia is an exceedingly new phenomenon, it’s history is much less accepting.
- Australians have typically buried their darker past, and are only now starting to confront it.
- On paper, Australian cities are quite diverse; but significant self-segregation exists, within both neighborhoods, social circles, and venues.
- Australia is an exceedingly young country, and is currently grappling with it’s own concept of national identity.
- Aussies of all backgrounds are more likely to identify with their ancestral heritage rather than being “Australian”.
- I’m optimistic about Australia achieving it’s multi-cultural aspirations, but much work still needs to be done
This article is the fifth part of my ongoing series comparing life in the US and Australia. You can read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV here.
The next article will be that last of this series, and quite possibly the most controversial. I give a raw and unfiltered account of my dating experience in Australia. Talk about an explosive ending. Stay tuned.
