Is it time to revisit "multiculturalism"?

We are told Downunder is a "multicultural" country. We are told this frequently and we are also told we should be proud of it. We are told it makes us tolerant of differences. We are told there are benefits and advantages in being multicultural.

Is it time to revisit this? Is it really true?

I was born some years after WWII. Until then this country had been made up mostly of the original inhabitants and settlers from Europe. Many of the Europeans came from the United Kingdom. There were a few hardly Muslim cameleers in the "outback" and scattered Chinese who were miners, gold prospectors and pearl fishers. There were also some islander sugar cane workers in the north. This state had a good many German migrants and some Italian ones. Perhaps we were a reasonably mixed lot.

Yes, I knew some migrants as a child and not all of them spoke English. My earliest memory of a non-English speaking migrant is the woman who lived over the back fence in the small town I lived in until I was almost five. The family was Polish. Her husband worked as an electricity linesman. How they came to be living there I have no idea. All I remember is her kindness. More than once she dealt with knees and hands scraped by falls. She gave us hugs and told us off in Polish if we fought. How or why they came to be there I do not know but now I can recognise she had been through some sort of very traumatic experience. My parents taught her and her husband English in the evenings.

When we moved back to the city more migrants were arriving from post-war Europe. In my family they were simply accepted. My paternal grandfather was an Elder in the local Presbyterian church and they worked at sponsoring a number of families from Holland. We had neighbours from Italy and Yugoslavia. School registers were being filled with names other than Susan and Peter. 

These migrants had come to work and almost all of them did. Their English might sometimes sound strange to us but they possibly already spoke some and they were learning more. They were "fitting in" even if they spoke another language in their own homes.

Gradually migrants started to share their food traditions. Our Yugoslav neighbour would give us red-dyed eggs at Easter and syrup cakes with an almond on top. It took much longer for the first pizza shop to appear.

It was not until later still we had the first flow of non-European migrants. They came from Vietnam. Some of them spoke some French but most of them spoke no English. Special classes began to appear for them and most of them made the effort to learn English. Those who did not were often too traumatised to cope. Their children became their interpreters. 

Then something changed. There were migrants coming from many countries. Many of them did not speak English. Interpreting services appeared. We now have a "special broadcasting service" which covers more than ninety languages. Some people do not see the need to learn English and may even be actively discouraged from doing so. They can mix in what they see as their own communities. It is especially true of some of the women who come from cultures where their roles are seen differently. We actually encourage this when we "celebrate" their "national" days and other traditions. It is as if they wish to live "here" but keep living wherever "there" is too.

Does all this really make our lives richer or does it divide us? I can stand in the local supermarket with my eyes closed and hear Greek, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese being spoken. People are speaking only to a few, not the many.  Is it really what we want?