Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Changing Face of Australia

D. Bretherton and N. Balvin (eds.), Peace Psychology in Australia, Peace Psychology Book Series, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1403-2_4, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 I was born in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne Australia – sometimes known as the green belt, other times the white belt. By the time I was old enough to develop some kind of memorable social understanding I recall hearing that Greeks or Italians were sometimes referred to as Wogs. We would watch Acropolis Now, an Australian sitcom created by the writers of a hit stage show Wogs out of Work. Little did I know at the time that the term ‘Wog’ historically referred to an illness, insects or grubs and that it had been a derogatory label applied to Australian immigrants from Southern and South-Eastern Europe, a term that had been successfully reclaimed and was now owned by the very communities that it once targeted. Some years before watching Acropolis Now, I vaguely recall visiting a Vietnamese refugee centre in Nunawading Victoria. We met a family whom we had been matched with to help them adjust to Australian culture. I remember they were all sick at the time from the boat trip to Australia. Not long after, the term ‘Asian Invasion’ became a popularised response to immigration from South East Asia. In 1996 Pauline Hanson pushed this agenda further claiming we were being ‘swamped by Asians’. Apparently, to Hanson, multiculturalism was a failed ideology and we could never really live with other races in peace and harmony. Now in the twentyfi rst century as Australia builds stronger economic links to Asia, Asian Australians are considered no less Australian than anyone else and the Pauline Hanson’s of this world have re-targeted their concerns onto Muslims and refugees from the Horn of Africa. Over the past 200 years Australia has moved from its early immigration of white European settlers to incorporate new waves of immigrant groups (see http://www. immi.gov.au/media/publications/statistics/federation/ for historical immigration trends; see also Chap. 8 , Pederson, Fozdar and Kenny in this volume). Each one has created a splash, a period of adjustment. But each one has fi nally found a way to the