Ethnic hotspots
August 21, 2008, the Australian:
... Sydney's Hurstville ... where 43 per cent of the locals speak Chinese... At this rate, Hurstville will be entirely Chinese-speaking by the middle of the 2020s...March 2008, Welcome to Australia Street:
... Arabic is spoken at home by 40 per cent of the population in Chullora ... in the city's southwest.
... Chinese speakers have invaded Hurstville about twice as fast as Arabic speakers have moved into Chullora.
... Cabramatta ... where 35 per cent of the locals speak Vietnamese at home...
... Melbourne CBD ... now has 29 per cent of people who speak Chinese at home.
The truly extraordinary feature of Melbourne's new Chinese residents is the speed with which they have arrived...
... this group, as early as next decade, will have the wherewithal to display their success in new housing designed to reflect not Australian aspirationalism, but middle-class Chinese and Arab ideals.
H/T: NewSouthWailsWhen we surveyed an average street in Hurstville, NSW, we gained a unique insight into the cultural mix that is Australia today ...
It's 7pm on Australia Street in Hurstville, a fast-growing suburb in the south-west of Sydney. At Number 11, Chinese-born Solan Tan and his Japanese-born wife Emi are steaming prawn dumplings for their young son Toshi, who is playing on his bike in the road. The family can smell the smoky aroma of marinated lamb and sweet potatoes wallowing over the fences from the Maori family at Number five who are cooking a Hangi - a traditional meal cooked in their garden over hot stones. Meanwhile, it's impossible for Toshi not to hear the gentle din of different languages and accents drifting out of the open windows and terraces - from South Africa and America to Italy and Sri Lanka, almost every continent is represented.
When we set out to discover exactly where all the residents in the road were from we expected to find a degree of mixed heritages, but were to be surprised by actually how extremely varied Australia's cultural melting pot has recently become. Except for just four people out of 150 adults living on the street they were all first generation immigrants from 16 different nations around the world.
Yet this is far from an extraordinary street or an unusual demographic but serves as a multi-cultural snapshot of modern Australia today. Since 1945, over six million people from 200 countries have come to live in this country. And what Australia Street represents, according to immigration expert Dr Alison Bashford, from the University of Sydney, is the "realistic picture" of the country's increasingly culturally diverse population. "Migrants have made a major contribution to shaping modern Australia," she says, "But this diversity isn't always correctly represented in things such as adverts and films and certainly does not match the way Australia's image is presented to the rest of the world." ...
Don't forget that Rudd has just put his foot on the immigration accelerator, so expect the Chinese satellite city of Hurstville to be here sooner.
1 comment:
This "Australia street" view essentially portrays our country as one with little underlying coherence in the sense of sustaining a national identity aside from being a desirable place to live and work. According to the "Australia street" view, Australia is nothing more than a home away from home for a range of disparate peoples whose identities are firmly rooted not in Australia but in other countries.
Perhaps those championing the idea of Australia as a "colony of the world" would like to explain exactly why Australia alone or almost alone have an obligation to radically alter its ethnic mix, and to become a sort of microcosm of the world. Why does Australia have to become a multiculti holding pen for the perceived benefit of all the world's races and tribes? Why can't we exist as a real nation?
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