Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Melbourne's Multicultural Midcentury
In 1901, one of the first things the newly created Australian government did was to pass le-
gislation with the express wish to protect its security and assert its sense of identity as a
member of the British Empire. The so-called White Australia policy restricted the entry of
non-Europeans, and was followed a couple of years later by the Commonwealth Natural-
isation Act, which excluded all non-Europeans from attaining citizenship, and limited both
citizens' and non-citizens' ability to bring even immediate family to Australia. This subse-
quent piece of legislation was particularly devastating to Victoria's Chinese community,
which maintained strong family and business ties with China. Victoria's early history of di-
versity came to an abrupt end.
Although the state's loyalties and most of its legal and cultural ties to Britain remained
firm, the 1920s did herald change, as small Italian and Greek communities settled in both
the city and the state's agricultural heartland, part of a renewed spirit of expansion and con-
struction at the time. They set about establishing food production companies, cafes, restaur-
ants, fish-and-chip shops, delis and grocers; the efforts of these small-business pioneers
were to prove an inspiration for a new generation of migrants in the 1940s and '50s.
During Melbourne's years as the capital, the city's population of just over half a million people was the
largest in Australia, and in the British Empire it was second in size only to London.
Close to a million non-British immigrants arrived in Australia during the 20 years after
WWII; at first Jewish refugees from eastern and central Europe, then larger numbers from
Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Lebanon. With the demise of the
blatantly racist White Australia policy in early 1973, many migrants from Southeast Asia
also settled in Victoria. These postwar migrants also embraced the opportunity to set up
small businesses, adding a vibrancy and character to their new neighbourhoods, such as
Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Brunswick and Footscray. Melbourne's cultural life was
transformed by these communities, and diversity gradually became an accepted, and treas-
ured, way of life.
