From this year onwards, I shall write a personal column on the theme of “The World Through Australian Eyes”.
Why? After living in Australia for more than 30 years, and promoting the integration of Chinese into the community in my life and work, I realize that I have become one of the few people who are in the minority without even realizing it. I am neither a “local Aussie” nor a “white Aussie” who was born here and knows nothing about immigrant life, nor a new immigrant who does not know about the mainstream social system and life. I am also not a Chinese who thinks that he/she still belongs to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia, but I am an Aussie who has already settled down in Australia and has made it my home, and who will finish the road of my life with the next generation and my friends here. Therefore, I would like to share with the readers how to look at this society and the world from this perspective. I believe that although we come here from different times and places, we all see the world through the eyes of an Australian at the end of the day.
Chinese Aboriginals
For the first time ever, we celebrated Australia Day this past year. The reason for this is that last year, we published several stories about Chinese Aboriginal people, and it made me realize that Chinese and Aboriginal people can intersect.
If a Chinese comes to Australia and marries an Aboriginal woman, the next generation will be Chinese Aboriginal. In big cities like Melbourne or Sydney, where there are many Chinese, the chance of intermarriage between Chinese and Aboriginal people may not be high, because there are not many Aboriginal people living in these cities. However, in some small towns in Western Australia, the situation is different. In Kimberley, in the north of Western Australia, there are some people from the Pacific Islands living there, and occasionally there are some Chinese settlers and intermarriage with Aborigines is not uncommon.
Mr. Zhou Xiaoping, a Chinese artist who has lived among the Aboriginal people for many years, and Peter Yu, a Chinese Aboriginal, ANU professor (the professor’s father was from Guangdong and his surname is Yau), started to conduct research on Chinese Aboriginal people a few years ago to understand their lives. They have received funding to interview many Chinese Aboriginal people and record their history in the book “Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia”, which will be published in April this year and will be exhibited at the Australia Chinese Museum and the National Museum in Canberra. I believe this is very meaningful.
I have put together a booklet of stories from last year’s issue of Sameway Magazine in the hope that it will be of interest and that a celebration will be held on Australia Day to promote it. Initially, I planned to hold the event at an English-speaking church in Box Hill, but the elders of the church thought that Australia Day was the day of the British invasion of the Aboriginal people and that it was inappropriate to celebrate the day, so they did not agree to hold the event there. As a result, we changed the venue to the local community arts centre instead. However, I think most immigrants are in favour of celebrating Australia Day.
Australia Day or Invasion Day?
Why? Yes, the British came to Australia and took away the land of the Aborigines, which is not a civilized act today. However, in the society of that time, in the stream of history, was it not the norm of the whole world? In the 3,000 years of Chinese history, has there not been invasion, killing and extermination for any dynasty or anywhere? This is the process of mankind moving from barbarism to civilization, and the ancestors of every person in existence today experienced the same kind of uncivilization, so why is it that only the descendants of the British at that time have to apologize to the Aborigines today? Hasn’t the same thing happened among the Aborigines for more than 60,000 years?
Those who think that the British came to Australia and hurt the Aborigines and want to apologize are assuming that the world is a good place and that it was the British fleet that landed in Australia and did bad things. They think that the world would be a better place without these crimes, and they also think that it is necessary to admit, apologize and make corrections, but they have never thought that this is a complete denial of Australian society today.
The British-style civilization we live in today is based on the aggression of these first colonists. Most of the people who have chosen to migrate and settle in Australia are those who have recognized the society that has been built up by the implementation of this system on this piece of land, so how can we regard this day as a day of aggression under such circumstances? What is more, today’s immigrants are more willing to celebrate Australia Day to build up a sense of identity with the country rather than to memorialize the pain and suffering of the Aborigines. Finally, how many of today’s immigrants have met, known, or lived with the Aborigines?
For immigrants from China, is it not enough to see the harm done by the invaders to the different inhabitants of their homeland over the past 3,000 years of Chinese history? Isn’t the blood of the invaders and the invaded mixed together in the Chinese people today? So, which of us has to apologize to whom? If someone thinks that Genghis Khan, who turned the Han Chinese into slaves of the Mongol Empire, was the most powerful leader of the Chinese people, or that the Manchurians, who ordered the “Yangzhou Ten Days Massacre and the Jiading Massacre”, were also part of the Chinese nation, can we distinguish between the ones who hurt and the ones who were hurt? I can only say that each of us carries the dishonourable history of mankind, and at the same time, we are also the ones who are harmed, and each of us possesses both identities at the same time. So can we use this as a reason to refuse to unite all of us today to build a multicultural Australia?
Australians failed to understand multiculturalism
Since the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Act in 1973, the White Australia policy has changed and the Australian society has become multicultural. However, this does not mean that everyone in Australia has accepted this change. A change in a person’s behaviour does not just happen in the mind, but it is the result of long-term experience, reflection and practice. Often, it takes a long time for some slight changes to occur.
A bureaucrat who implements policies in the government may agree that immigrants have the same rights as those born here, but it does not mean that he has the ability to understand the difficulties and constraints that immigrants’ backgrounds impose on their lives here, and so he often overlooks them, not noticing whether the immigrants are simply unaware of or do not understand the relevant policies. For example, a person who does not know English does not understand the posters in a casino calling on people troubled by gambling to seek gambling counselling and therefore does not go to a counsellor. This does not mean that immigrants do not have such a need, but that those who implement the policy have overlooked the limitations of immigrants. Similarly, the Premier, who held press conferences every day at noon to explain the spread of the new COVID-19 epidemic and the responding policies, had not considered that the vast majority of non-English-speaking immigrants did not receive this information from the mainstream media and were not prepared for the epidemic.
I am currently attending an English-speaking church in Box Hill city centre, and the congregation is full of very educated and godly believers who actively welcome the Chinese to attend the church. However, they do not understand why hundreds of Chinese line up at the church every week to get free bread and supplies but have no desire to attend the Sunday service. Unbeknownst to them, these people in the queue can only engage in simple social conversations, but there is no way to communicate with them in-depth, and these people have never been to a church service before, so they will not participate in their services. Without breaking down the barriers of contact with them in their lives, it becomes very difficult to share their faith.
Therefore, I believe that not only immigrants need to take the initiative to integrate into Australia, but also native Australians need to deliberately change their lifestyle in order to accept immigrants from different cultures.
Multiculturalism is also mainstream
In the last issue of Sameway Magazine, I wrote about an interview with Julian Hill, the Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs, and one of his insightful comments was that “the multicultural media is part of the mainstream media”, and in the same way, I believe that the multicultural communities are also part of the mainstream community. This means that moving into a multicultural society is a change that all Australians are taking the initiative to make, not just the newcomers.
During the Lunar New Year, many Chinese communities have Lunar New Year celebrations, and I’m glad to see more Anglo-Saxons will be invited and accept invitations to participate, as it shows our diversity. Similarly, we would love to see Chinese people attending mainstream or other ethnic community events.