Australia… A Monoculture?

Sydney’s swish Lower North Shore suburb of Blues Point is named after Billy Blue, a convict described in the official records as ‘a Jamaican Negro sailor’.

There were at least 8 to 15 people of Jewish heritage (mostly convicts) on the First Fleet that arrived in Australia in 1788, as well as numerous Irish, these latter who contributed to Australia’s first major civil insurrection at the so-called ‘Battle of Vinegar Hill’ in 1804.

And where would Australia’s wine industry be without the “Old Lutherans” who fled to South Australia in the 1830s and 1840s, to escape religious persecution in Prussia?

And where would Queensland sugar industry be without the South Sea islanders who were black-birded in to work on the cane plantations there in the latter decades of the 19th century?

And where would Australia’s pearling industry be without the Japanese divers who were such a critical part of the workforce from the late 19th century until World War II?

And probably some of Australia’s best-known Muslims would be the ‘Afghans’, the camel drivers who worked in outback Australia from the 1860s to the 1930s.

And why do so many country towns have either a Chinese restaurant and/or a Greek café?

And in the late 19th century, masses and religious services in Spanish and Portuguese were conducted at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, alongside nearby St Francis de Sales in Surry Hills.

And part of our ‘queer’ contribution – apart from a Governor, a bushranger and a Nobel Laureate, amongst other notables – would be Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, an extravaganza of gender- and sexual-diversity, which has a global reach via TV and the Internet, brings tens of thousands of tourists, and does wonders for our economy.

And where did such ‘everyday things’ as Capuchinos, Pho, Tapas, Sushi, Baclava, Tofu, Papadums, Tacos, Bobotie, Shiro or Buticha, and Roti (sorry, everyone else, that’s probably enough), where did they all come from – certainly not Woolloongabba.

And all this, layered over the past few centuries onto the cultures that had inhabited ‘Terra Australia’ for at least 65,000 years.

Oh Pauline, why such towering ignorance?

“Please explain”. — Garry Wotherspoon