lity, cleansed of the bigoted ethnocentrism of the old British ruling class Australia.
Anyone who has lived, as I have, from 1937 to now, has only to reflect on and remember the claustrophobic cultural atmosphere of British-Australia in the 1950s to understand what I mean in this context. It is hard for any young person now to even imagine the tension created in a cinema in 1960 if you didn't stand up for God Save the Queen. p> The most conservative forces in society, which hark back nostalgically to the useful cement provided for the preservation of class privilege by all the ridiculous and unpleasant cultural impedimenta of British-Australia, are at the centre of the sporadic attacks on multiculturalism. Their political motivation in these attacks is quite clear.
Cultural diversity and multiculturalism, incorporated as they are into a new modern, plebian Australian national identity, are a far more civilised human environment for us all to live in.
Those who disagree with me on this can try to reverse these developments, but I don't rate their prospects of success very highly. We have already gone a very long way in this very healthy direction.
I don't intend to spend too much time celebrating the immense advantages produced by all our past mass migrations. They are obvious, and they are most strikingly noticeable in the global city of Australasia, Sydney, where we are holding this conference.
Despite the Sodom and Gomorrah weepings and gnashings of teeth about Sydney that you get from the likes of Miriam Dixson, Robert Birrell and Katharine Betts, the extraordinary and workable cultural diversity of Sydney is the small model of what life will be like throughout Australasia within the next 20 or 30 years.
The constant Jeremiad of the Monash anti-migrationists over the last 25 years about ethnic ghettoes, particularly in Sydney, is emerging ever more clearly as time goes on, as merely anti-migration propaganda. These so-called ethnic ghettoes are, in fact, constantly changing and evolving.
In practice, in Australia, and particularly in Sydney, there are very few "unmeltable ethnics ", to use Michael Novak's term from the United States of 30 years ago. While multiculturalists battles to preserve the useful aspects of discrete ethnic identities, nevertheless the evolving Australian national identity, which is quite real, remains the major cultural force into which the other ethnic identities tend to feed and blend, while the discrete contribution of the individual ethnic identities is often renewed by continued migration.
This whole process is accelerated by an increasing amount of exogamy (intermarriage between ethnic groups). The latest wave of mass migration, the Asian wave, has produced an enormous amount of this kind of intermarriage.
The striking feature of modern Australian society is the way the repeated predictions, over many years, of communal strife, by the likes of Birrell, Geoffrey Blainey and Pauline Hanson, are completely contradicted by the reality of Australian life. The further you get into the diversity in the heart of Sydney, for instance, the smaller the amount of noticeable ethnic conflict, which is far less overt now than it was in the 1940s or the 1950s.
We are well over the hump, so to speak, in these matters. Large-scale violent ethnic conflicts are very unlikely in Australia in the future. Most of us are now too civilised and we - in this context a comfortable majority of the population - will beat all xenophobia and racism, even when it is disguised as nostalgia for the "Anglo-Celtic core culture "back into its cave whenever it shows its ugly head.
The benefits of past migrations, from the point of view of the migrants themselves and of the other citizens of the developing Australian society
Up to the gold rushes of the 1850s, Australia was mainly a series of brutal penal colonies of British imperialism. But, paradoxically, many convicts stayed voluntarily in the colony after their release because in many ways, even then, it was a better place to live than Britain, Scotland or Ireland.The origins of the convicts were relatively diverse. Although most of them were drawn from the English urban underclass around London, about 20 per cent of them were Irish and almost 50 per cent of the smaller number of women convicts were Irish Catholics.
Over the whole period of convictism, about 1 per cent were black convicts from West Africa and the West Indies, and there were also about 1000 Jewish convicts. The gold rushes brought an accelleration of mass migration, from Great Britain and Ireland, China and Germany, and later in the century, a large forced labour component, the "Kanakas" from the "South Sea Islands" (mainly the Solomons and New Hebrides, now Vanuatu).
The gold rushes and the shortage of labour...
