Have its builders built in vain?
By Gary Scarrabelotti
Over coffee Sixtus made a startling remark, or so it struck me in the moment.
“Australia has a history all of its own, unlike any other,” he said.
(“Sixtus?”, you ask.
Yes, Sixtus. Another friend. I introduced Primus and Secundus in Café dissidence. Though they may be few, I am fortunate in my several friends.)
Now, to the point about Sixtus and his remark. It seized my attention because of who he is – learned, cultivated, modest: a man from outside the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic world who calls Australia home.
“That’s it, exactly!”, I said to myself.
We do have a history of our own,“unlike any other”: a near-empty continent at the bottom of the world and its hard beauty; a late in time settlement by Europeans; a one of a kind society combining an egalitarian soul in a social democratic body; for a time, a wonder of the World for its freedom, broad franchise and widely shared prosperity.
Given that now faded reputation, wisdom would recommend meditating on the lessons of our experience and building on the good that has been achieved. But, instead of confirming our national identity and accomplishments, we seem to be bleeding them out.
On a later morning, over the same table, Sixtus seemed unusually sombre. I had raised a matter that, I believe, had been exercising both our minds for some time but which, until this particular conversation, neither of us had named: “mass immigration”.
“I am worried,” said Sixtus after a troubled pause, “that Australia is losing its character.”
Numbers
Prompted in part by those conversations, I’ve been digesting census data on the growth and ethnic make-up of our population. The numbers are cold, hard, impersonal. They signify without capturing the experience to which they point: in our case, that of living inside a society undergoing a planned — but never consented to — demographic and cultural transformation.
Let’s take the place where I live, Canberra.
My time here goes back to 1969, though I didn’t finally settle down in this place until 1986 with my late wife, Marian.
Back in ‘86, Canberra was a city of a little over 250,000 [i] inhabitants. Spread out under the inscrutable olive-blue gaze of the Brindabella range, the place felt more like a large country town than Australia’s national capital.
For all its bush townishness, however, Canberra had a stronger “ethnic” character than you’d normally find West of “the Great Divide” and it was distinctly European in quality.
What was striking back in those days, was the presence within the Canberra community of Greeks, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Croats, Serbs, Poles and Ukrainians. A great number of them came here from out of the post-War migrant workforce that played an outsized role in constructing, during 1949 to 1974, the remarkable Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, some 120 kilometres due south of Canberra.
The Snowy workforce peaked at around 100,000 men in 1959 and a lot of these migrant giants among workmen gradually moved into the Canberra district.
Here they entered, literally, into the material foundations of the town they adopted as their own. The men who built the Snowy and their families went on, fittingly, to take a significant place, as entrepreneurs and tradesmen, in the building industry that straddles Canberra and its cheek-by-jowl New South Wales neighbour, Queanbeyan. Today, that European “piccolo mondo” is being silently submerged.
When Marian and I made Canberra home, 24 per cent [ii] of the locals had been born overseas compared to the Australia-wide figure at the time of 21 per cent.[iii]
In 2021, by which time Canberra’s population had reached 452, 510, the born overseas category had hit 29.8 per cent. That 5.8 percent growth in the born-overseas (BOS) number says nothing, however, about how the liquefacient current of immigration was reshaping our local community. What once was, by ancestry and heritage, a decisively European city — in our distinctively Australian integrationist style – was losing its defining qualities.
Tough truths
As I say, numbers are unfeeling abstractions, but we need, in any case, to deal with them.
Over 1986 to 2021, Canberra’s population rose by 80 percent and its BOS numbers by 121 percent.
You can already see what’s happened: Canberra’s population growth rate has been outstripped by the rate at which its born-overseas population has been growing. More than that, the ethnic make-up of its BOS inhabitants has changed decisively.
Back in 1986 people born in Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Continental Europe and North America made up 17 percent of the total Canberra population (TCP) and 72 percent of the BOS group.
Thirty-five years later, the collapse in this culturally European migrant contribution to Canberra’s demographic was unmistakeable.
According to 2021 census data, Canberra’s European migrants – or Euros, as I’ll call them — had shrunk to 9.6 per cent of TCP and to 32 percent of the BOS population. To express the change in other terms, the Euros fell from 176 per 1,000 Canberra population in 1986 to 96 per 1,000 in 2021.
Part of the explanation for this shrinkage is that, while the city grew, the Euro element remained static. While Canberra’s population rose by 80 per cent during 1986 — 2021, the Euro input fell by 1.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, other streams of immigrants, sourced from outside the European world, flowed into Canberra to take up the Euro slack.
One group, already well-established in 1986, were the South-East Asians (SEAs), a segment of the Canberra scene that, by the time we got to the 2021 Census, was dominated by Vietnamese and Filipinos.
During 1986 — 2021 the number of SEAs rose by 242 percent, far outstripping the city’s growth rate. But over 35 years, that change in our local “ethnic mix” – from 22 per 1,000 to 41 per 1,000 – didn’t register as discomforting. Perhaps that was because, the Vietnamese and Filipinos — most notably among the SEAs — fitted so easily into our world: the Vietnamese, because of their get-up-and-go character; the Filipinos because of their easy-going dispositions and decidedly Christian culture.
What has been, however, worthy of astonished remark, were injections of new streams of immigration that did not gain traction until some point in the late 1990s. It was from around that time that an influx of Indians and mainland Chinese began to take hold.
I single out, for the moment, mainland Chinese because Chinese immigration into Canberra from other Chinese sources — Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan – has provided only a modest contribution to our migrant picture since 1986, albeit one filled with sturdy characters markedly sympathetic to our Australian world. Mainlanders, however, have been a numerical phenomenon of a different order. Their numbers rose from 0.29 percent TCP and 1.2 percent BOS in 1986 to 2.8 percent of TCP and 9.42 percent of BOS in 2021.
“Hmm, so is that a problem?” you ask. “Looks like small beer.”
Well, let’s capture that in raw figures: mainland Chinese went from 717 in 1986 to 12,720 in 2021 – an increase of 1,674 percent.
“Ah, but,” you demur, “Canberra’s total population near doubled over that time. Among 452K Canberrans, that 12,720 is no big deal.”
OK. So, let’s render the Mainlander case in n/1,000 terms: in 1986 there were 3 mainland Chinese immigrants to every 1,000 Canberrans; in 2021 there were 28 – an increase of 833 percent. Now, maybe that “833” is a smaller number than “1,674”, but it represents remarkable growth nonetheless.
Le Deluge
Now, if you’re beginning to wonder whether such figures could possibly point to some notable phenomenon, you might be interested in what comes next.
In 1986, Indians made up 0.4 percent of the Canberra scene and 2.6 percent of the BOS; in 2021 they were 3.8 percent of TCP and 12.97 percent of the BOS.
In raw numbers, that’s 958 Indians in Canberra in 1986; in 2021, 17,510 – an increase of 1,728 percent.
If, once again, we reformulate that into n/1,000 terms, that’s a boost from 4 per 1,000 in 1986 to 39 per 1,000 in 2021 – an increase of 875 percent.
Indians, however, were not the only people migrating from the Indian subcontinent: we need to take into account the Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Bhutanese, Sri Lankans and even folk from the Maldive Islands.
Back in ’86, 1,776 migrants from this ‘world’ had made their way to Canberra. In ’21 there were 34,380 — an increase of 1,835 percent. Or in n/1,000 terms, that’s a leap from 7 to 75 per 1,000 Canberrans – a 971 percent increase.
Nothing to see here?
Now, let’s step back and take a wider look at the stats. Let’s consider all Asian immigration into Canberra.
For the purposes of this article, I define “All Asian” as covering the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia, China (plus Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), Japan and the two Koreas.
“All Asian” migrants, thus defined, represented in 1986, 3.59 percent of TCP and 14.8 percent of the BOS – or 36 “All Asians” per 1,000 Canberrans.
Come 2021, the picture is strikingly different. By that time, “All Asians” had shot up to 15.9 percent of TCP and to 53 percent of the BOS group – or 159 per 1,000 Canberrans. That’s a 342 percent increase.
Implication?
Well, if we just stick to the numbers, by the time we had reached 2016, the “All Asian” contribution to Canberra’s population had surpassed the Euros. In that year Euros had fallen to 109 per 1,000 while the “All Asians” had risen to 131 per 1,000: a watershed year for the Canberra I had known. And bear in mind this: I have understated the case. In the discussion above, I have not mentioned immigration into the city from the Middle East, Africa or Latin America. I have softened the blow. Clearly, our distinctly European character – our meld of Aussies and Euros – is being dissolved, perhaps beyond recall.
Remember now that I am only discussing a census data series that came to a close in 2021. The next census isn’t due till 2026 – and what a story that’s surely going to tell! In the meantime, we have had the eyes to see. Post Covid, the immigration tide, which seemed to peak and recede during the ‘crisis’, has returned, this time at the flood.
Coda
Beyond the task of reporting here a statistical account of Canberra’s repopulation, I’ve drafted and re-drafted many a sentence trying to capture, in an equitable spirit, what I see, what I hear and what I experience in our Canberra streets and shopping malls, at the local stores and medical centres, in our hospitals and public parks. Yet, how can one be cool, calm and collected about the upending of a world that has been one’s own? It’s beyond me. So, I’ll give up the attempt.
Let me conclude, then, by donning the mask of mildness and conjuring words that could have sprung naturally from my measured friend Sixtus: the authentic Australian cultural ‘blend’ cannot survive the solvent effects of further mass immigration.
***
Note: I express my gratitude to a young friend, expert in point of Excel, without whose help this article could not have been illustrated.
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