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Commentary on: Mobilising ethnic communities »
Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.
Text Commentary
Coming out from under...
Late 1960s, 1970s - The evolution of ethnic groups into lobby organisations for their communities
It took nearly a generation after first arrival for ethnic communities to begin to feel confident about taking a public stand on issues that affected them. Here we see a group of Waterloo residents (in South Sydney) in the late 1960s, meeting to campaign against the further development of high-rise public housing. The campaigners wanted to keep their homes (old terrace houses they had refurbished), which were to be demolished, and to retain the mixed community that had developed in the area during the previous twenty years. This group included Italian, Greek and Yugoslav Australians, as well as the older Anglo-Australian community.
At first, like migrant groups everywhere, newcomers to Australia were concerned only with basic survival issues – work, accommodation, links with families thousands of kilometres away. Yet from the earliest days people from the same region or country had sought each other out and formed networks of mutual support in strange and often hostile environments. These might have been informal groups meeting in someone’s home, or a point of contact with a countryperson who had been in Australia longer, or knew English a bit better, or had links to potential employers. Gradually these informal groups became stronger and established organisations to provide community services - like the regionally based “Brotherhoods” amongst Greeks, or the funerary services provided by the mutual Chevra Kaddish for Jews.
By the late '60s and early '70s, a sufficiently large middle class had emerged in some ethnic communities to create a climate in which ethnic organisations could be formed to serve the communities and lobby government. With the Whitlam Government's focus on social justice and community participation, as well as its acceptance of cultural diversity as a philosophical position, the desire of people to organise themselves around certain interests - cultural, business or ethnic - became legitimised. The maturity of several ethnic groups, the relative openness of the Labor government and the move toward a notion of ethnic rights as against "acts of largesse" by governments, all coalesced in the late '60s and early '70s with the formation of various ethnic welfare and lobby organisations. As activist Pino Bosi put it: "We provided the bullets; we provided the powder. They (the Whitlam Government) had the gun."
In 1967 in Melbourne the Comitato d'Assistencia Italiano (Co.As.It.) was established by middle-class Italians to serve the needs of the huge Italian migrant community, achieving ethno-specific funding - known as grant-in-aid - from government in 1968. While its political stand was controversial, developing as it did from a pro-Mussolini predecessor body, and with a social policy in the early days which tended toward the patronising, it nonetheless showed what could be done when communities organised. Co.As.It. and the Australian Jewish Welfare Society - the first ethnic welfare organisation, which had been established during the war - served as models for the Australian Greek Welfare Society, founded in 1972 by young Greek professionals who had been meeting since 1970 in an attempt to establish a welfare organisation for Greeks outside the Archdiocese. A number of cross-cultural organisations, many of them church-based, were also working in the migrant welfare field.
Australia from the Calwell days had encouraged immigrants to become part of the nation rather than guest workers to be exploited then rejected; but the policies of assimilation and even integration, as well as the sheer economic necessity of focusing on basic survival needs, had kept ethnic communities politically quiet. Now they were learning how the system worked under a government which welcomed participation and self-identification. Academics and activists were moving the sociopolitical debate rapidly towards the adoption of multiculturalism or cultural diversity as the template for Australian society. So - the climate established for their politicisation - ethnic communities, engaging with the Whitlam Government, moved toward the formation of Ethnic Communities' Councils.
Further reference:
Jupp, James (ed) The Australian People: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1988.