Catalan-Australian Identities: a Melburnian Journey

ABSTRACT

What does adopting an Australian identity mean? This is a personal journey, as we come from a Catalan background. It is a reflection on contemporary Melbourne life, paying special attention to immigration waves and ways of life in our new country. However, to integrate experiences and everyday memories into a general framework, we will offer a preliminary comparative scheme between both cultures. We will explore the system of cultural reproduction, differential multiculturality, the emergence of political rights, and the institutional creation of cultural and political identities in both countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• Catalan culture
• Australian culture
• democracy
• rule of law

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank Lisa and John Zeleznikow for opening their family archives and sharing their personal memories with us. We thank Mari Kirkpatrick and Daniel Mckintosh for careful comments and proofreading. Peter Gerrand, Patrick Keyzer, Savitri Taylor and David Wishart reviewed this article and gave us very useful insights and suggestions. The projects PRO2018-S05 IEC-2019 on Catalan political pactism, and the PhD HDK17 Society, Culture, History (Legal Anthropology), Universitat de Barcelona, furnished the research framework for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article was first presented at the International Seminar on Immigration and Democracy: the cases of Australia and Catalonia, organised by the Centre of Australian and Transnational Studies in the University of Barcelona, on 30 and 31 of May 2019. COVID-19 has had a huge impact. In the last version of the article, we have acknowledged it when necessary.

2. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Sydney: McMillan, 2001 [1966]); Jock Collins and Meg Smith, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-war Immigration (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1988).

3. Nina G. Schiller, “Long Distance Nationalism,” in Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World Vol. 1, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2005), 70–80.

4. Robert Mason, “‘No Arms Other than Paper’: Salvador Torrents and the Formation of Hispanic Migrant Identity in Northern Australia, 1916–50,” Australian Historical Studies 41, no. 2 (2010): 166–80, 166.

5. The Museum Archives furnish a detailed explanation. Museums Victoria Collections https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/1688810. Accessed 17 July 2021.

6. See Avram Zeleznikow and Masha Zeleknikow, eds., Scheherazade Restaurant. 35 Years in Acland Street (Melbourne: Eva de Jong-Duldig, 1992).

7. Arnold Zable, Café Scheherazade (Melbourne: Text Publishing Books, 2003).

8. John Zeleznikow, “Life at the End of the World: A Jewish Partisan in Melbourne,” Holocaust Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 11–32. Also John Zeleznikow [with Arnold Zable], “Refugees’ Restaurant Provided a Welcoming Taste of Home for Survivors of the Holocaust,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 17, 2016, retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/national/refugees-restaurant-provided-a-welcoming-taste-of-home-for-survivors-of-the-holocaust-20160817-gqu9z5.html.

9. Robert Mason, ed., Legacies of Violence: Rendering the Unspeakable Past in Modern Australia (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).

10. Mobo Gao, “Early Chinese Migrants to Australia: A Critique of the Sojourner Narrative on Nineteenth-century Chinese Migration to British Colonies,” Asian Studies Review 41, no. 3 (2017): 389–404.

11. These new communities have flourished partly because the national Commonwealth Government funds the States to support non-government schools, which are typically operated by religious denominations. We owe this observation to Patrick Keyzer.

12. The accurate findings of the Royal Commission were made public in its Final Report (December 2017). “As of 31 May 2017, of the 4,029 survivors who told us during private sessions about child sexual abuse in religious institutions, 2,489 survivors (61.8%) told us about abuse in Catholic institutions. The majority (73.9%) were male and 25.9% were female.” Retrieved from https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/religious-institutions.

13. Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017). Final Report, December 2017, retrieved from https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report.

14. In the suburbs, milk bars were general stores that offered newspapers, bread, soft drinks, and ice creams. They were places in which people socialized.

15. Jock Collins, “Globalisation, Immigration and the Second Long Post-war Boom in Australia,” Journal of Australian Political Economy 61 (2008): 244–66, 248.

16. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 3417.0—Understanding Migrant Outcomes—Insights from the Australian Census and Migrants Integrated Dataset, Australia, 2016. Released July 18, 2018, retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/3417.0Main+Features22016?OpenDocument.

17. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, all states and territories had positive population growth over the year ending 31 December 2020. Queensland had the highest growth rate (1.1%). Victoria had the lowest growth rate (0.01%). Retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population.

18. “Cash-Cows.” Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/cash-cows/11084862.

19. Andrew Markus, “Attitudes to Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Australia,” Journal of Sociology 50, no. 1 (2014): 10–22.

20. Alex Oliver, Lowy Institute Poll, June 20, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/2018-lowy-institute-poll.

21. Vivienne Chew, Melissa Phillips, and Min Yamada Park, COVID-19 Impacts on Immigration Detention: Global Responses (Sydney: International Detention Coalition and HADRI/Western Sydney Univ, 2020) https://doi.org/10.26183/swc5-fv98.

22. “With the COVID-19 crisis, a new dimension of discrimination has been added to ethnic minorities—in this case, Bangladeshi Australians who are mostly Muslims. They are now looked upon as the ‘other quarantined’ or ‘detained Australian citizens.’” Nahid A. Kabir, “Australian Muslim Citizens,” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies 5, no. 2 (2020): 4–28, 4.

23. Lockdown policies, the closing of internal and external borders, and economic and political decisions at Federal and state level related to the pandemic have affected population growth and business models in some sectors. Especially in Victoria, tourism, retail and catering industry, hotels, restoration, and higher education (universities) are facing a severe crisis that is changing city life.

24. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend [1958] (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 183.

25. Banjo A. Paterson, “The Old Australian Ways,” Rio Grande, 1902. In Song of the Pen. A.B. “Banjo” Paterson Complete Works (1901–1941), ed. Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie (Sydney: Landsdowne Press, 1983), 142–43.

26. Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda. Woman and Identity in Australia—1788 to the Present (Sydney: SWUP, 1999).

27. Baron Alder, “The Australian Legend Fifty Years On,” Quadrant 52, no. 9 (2008): online.

28. Geoffrey Stokes, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7.

29. Frank Bongiorno, The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2015).

30. We thank Patrick Keyzer for bringing up this fact. See Paul Daley, “Australia’s Frontier War Killings Still Conveniently Escape Official Memory,” The Guardian, June 8, 2018, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/08/australias-frontier-war-killings-still-conveniently-escape-official-memory.

31. Geoffrey Stokes, “Citizenship and Aboriginality: Two Conceptions of Identity in Aboriginal Political Thought,” in The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 160.

32. See for example the organised visits (as alleged experience of justice) and Kelly souvenirs at the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was executed on November 11, 1880.

33. Commercial, corporate and branding nationalism are expressions pointing at the diverse strategies and tactics of economic social groups focusing on the nation (or country). These expressions have different origins, variations, and usages in social sciences (mainly history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and cultural studies). For instance, “cultural branding” was coined twenty years ago by Martin Chanock “to describe the ways in which cultures were being created, represented and promoted.” Cf. “Some Reflections on a Research Journey in Law and Society,” Law in Context: A Socio-Legal Journal, 36, no. 1 (2019): 21–28, 25. “Commercial,” “corporate,” and “branding” were applied to nationalism earlier, in the twentieth century. In the last ten years, they have been widely used in economics, business, and communication studies to describe this cultural promotion or “sale.” See, for example, Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic. “Nation Branding in the Era of Commercial Nationalism,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 598–618. For the case of Australia, cf. Jillian Prideaux, “Consuming Icons: Nationalism and Advertising in Australia.” Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 4 (2009): 616–35. For Catalonia, see footnotes no. 34 and no. 35, and Mariona Lladonosa-Latorre and Mariona Visa-Barbosa, “Talking the Nation over Advertising: The Case of Catalan Commercial Aadvertisements,” Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2021): 63–82.

34. Viviana Narotzky, “Selling the Nation: Identity and Design in 1980s Catalonia,” Design Issues 25, no. 3 (2009): 6–75, 64.

35. Enric Castelló and Sabina Mihelj, “Selling and Consuming the Nation: Understanding Consumer Nationalism,” Journal of Consumer Culture 18, no. 4 (2018): 558–76, 566.

36. According to Cabré, a demographic reproduction system combines biological reproduction rates with the effects of immigration flows on the population. Anna Cabré, El sistema català de reproducció (Barcelona: Ed. Proa, 1999).

37. As of January 1^st, 2021, there are 7,716.760 inhabitants in Catalonia. Source: IDESCAT, https://www.idescat.cat/pub/?id=ep. As of December 31, 2020, the population estimation in Victoria is 6,661.700 inhabitants. Source: Australian Government. Retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national-state-and-territory-population/latest-release#states-and-territories

38. “Within the span of a few years, we have seen the spread of family models that just a decade or two ago were considered unworkable or even contrary to the idea of family. We thus observe a proliferation of couples who reject marriage and establish common-law partnerships; we are witnessing a rise in divorce and consequently many children live with their separated parents or stepfathers, stepmothers and stepsiblings; we are seeing the recognition of homosexual marriages, and these couples are legally allowed to have children together; we are looking at how adoptions from abroad and conceiving through fertility treatments have become more widespread; and we are looking at the formation of new models of motherhood and fatherhood in single-parent families.” Xavier Roigé and Joan Bestard Camps, “New Families, New Identities: A Study on the Transformation of the Family in Barcelona,” Revista d’etnologia de Catalunya 40 (2015): 114–18, 114–15.

39. Cabré, 178. See an updated analysis in Anna Cabré, “Les onades migratòries en el sistema català de reproducció,” UAB, Centre d’Estudis Demográfics, Papers de demografia 328 (2008): UAB: 1–10. “On average, the population of Catalonia has doubled every 71 years, a rate that corresponds to one sustained cumulative annual growth of close to 1% over 285 years.”

40. Khoo, following Australian demographer Charles Price (1920–2009). Siew-Ean Khoo, “Intermarriage, Integration and Multiculturalism: A Demographic Perspective,” in Multiculturalism and Integration: A Harmonious Relationship, ed. Michael Clyne and James Jupp (Canberra: ANU Ed, 2011), 101–19.

41. Ibid., 105–106.

42. Maryann Wulff and Michele Lobo, “The New Gentrifiers: The Role of Households and Migration in Reshaping Melbourne’s Core and Inner Suburbs,” Urban Policy and Research 27, no. 3 (2009): 315–31, 315.

43. Khoo, 118.

44. Xin Meng and Robert G. Gregory, “Intermarriage and the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants,” Journal of Labor Economics 23, no. 1 (2005): 135–74.

45. Siew-Ean Khoo, Bob Birrell, and Genevieve Heard, “Intermarriage by Birthplace and Ancestry in Australia,” People and Place 17, no. 1 (2009): 15–28, 20.

46. Anthony Moran, “Multiculturalism as Nation-building in Australia: Inclusive National Identity and the Embrace of Diversity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 12 (2011): 2153–72.

47. Koo, Birrell, and Heard, 15–28, 21.

48. Zarine L. Rocha, Farida Fozdar, Kristel Anne Acedera, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “Mixing Race, Nation, and Ethnicity in Asia and Australasia,” Social Identities 25, no. 3 (2019): 289–93.

49. As stated by Fozdar, it is difficult to assess the rate of “mixedness” in Australia. The Indigenous population makes up only 2.8% of the population (although it went up from 2.3% in 2006 and 2.5% in 2011), and “those claiming Aboriginality have doubled since 1996, and grown from 550,000 to 649,000 between 2011 and 2016 (SBS).” Farida Fozdar, “Pride and Prejudice: Opposing Constructions of Mixed Race in Australia,” Social Identities 25, no. 3 (2019): 408–23, 410.

50. Robert Van Krieken, “Between Assimilation and Multiculturalism: Models of Integration in Australia,” Patterns of Prejudice 46, no. 5 (2012): 500–17.

51. Savitri Taylor brought to our attention the fact that, in formal terms at least, Australia’s immigration policy was non-discriminatory throughout the period of John Howard’s government. According to her, in formal terms, the Howard government simply insisted that immigration had to occur through regular rather than irregular channels. She commented as well that most of those arriving in Australia irregularly were non-white. This was probably a key reason for the extreme hostility towards them (rather than their mode of arrival).

52. James Jupp, “Immigration and National Identity: Multiculturalism,” in The Politics of Identity in Australia, ed. Geoffrey Stokes (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 1, 32–144.

53. Robert van Krieken, 500–17, 508.

54. Robert van Krieken, 512.

55. Although this assertion can also be contested. For example, Savitri Taylor has observed that in the national imaginary, Anglo-Australians are simply “Australians.” Only non-Anglo immigrants who cannot “pass” as Anglos are considered to have a hyphenated identity.

56. Rachel Woodlock, “Being an Aussie Mossie: Muslim and Australian Identity Among Australian-born Muslims,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 22, no. 4 (2011): 391–407, 403.

57. Nola Purdie and Lynn Wilss, “Australian National Identity: Young Peoples’ Conceptions of What It Means to Be Australian,” National Identities 9, no. 1 (2007): 67–82.

58. Linda Briskman and Susie Latham, “Muslims at the Australian Periphery,” Coolabah 21 (2017): 33–46.

59. Rumman Hassan, comp., Australian Muslims: The Challenge of Islamophobia and Social Distance. International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding (2018), 94, retrieved from https://www.unisa.edu.au/contentassets/4f85e84d01014997a99bb4f89ba32488/australian-muslims-final-report-web-nov-26.pdf.

60. Frank L. Jones, “Diversities of National Identity in a Multicultural Society: The Australian Case,” National Identities 2, no. 2 (2000): 175–86, 84.

61. John Hirst, Australian Democracy. A Short History (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin), 253.

62. Hirst, 328.

63. Ralph Horne, Cecily Maller, and Ruth Lane, “Remaking Home: The Reuse of Goods and Materials in Australian Households,” in Material Geographies of Household Sustainability, ed. Ruth Lane and Andrew Gorman-Murray (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 89–111, 96.

64. Gang-Jun Liu and Benno Engels, “Accessibility to Essential Services and Facilities by a Spatially Dispersed Aging Population in Suburban Melbourne, Australia,” in Advances in Location-Based Services, ed. Georg Gartner and Felix Ortag (Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer), 327–48.

65. Aneta Podkalicka and James Meese, “‘Twin Transformations’: The Salvation Army’s Charity Shops and the Recreating of Material and Social Value,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 6 (2012): 721–35.

66. Ratri Y. Lestari and Barbara Ozarska, “Assessment of Reusing and Recycling Wood Waste for Production of Furniture and Furniture Components in Victoria,” in Proceedings on Natural Mathematical and Environmental Sciences for Sustainable Environment, ed. Sasi Gendro Sari (5 October 2015), Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Banjarbaru, 311–21.

67. David Scutt, “Immigration is Speeding Up Australia’s Population Growth” (March 22, 2018). https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australia-population-growth-immigration-dick-smith-2018-3

68. Kristen Lyons, “Torres Strait Islanders ask UN to Hold Australia to Account on Climate ‘Human Rights Abuses’,” The Conversation, May 27, 2019, retrieved from https://theconversation.com/torres-strait-islanders-ask-un-to-hold-australia-to-account-on-climate-human-rights-abuses-117262.

69. The Guardian Australia, The Nauru files https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/nauru-files

70. Sam Blay, Jennifer Burn, P. Keyzer, eds., Offshore Processing of Asylum Seekers: The Search for Legitimate Parameters (Ultimo, N.S.W: Halstead Press, 2007).

71. Savitri Taylor, “Growing Pains: The Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network at Seven Years,” Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal 8, no. 2 (2016): 1–21, 16.

72. Jock Collins, “Rethinking Australian Immigration and Immigrant Settlement Policy,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 34, no. 2 (2013): 160–77.

73. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a national Indigenous consensus position on Indigenous constitutional recognition, which came out of a constitutional convention of 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates. The notion of co-existing or shared sovereignty could be the subject of a future referendum. “Sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.” National Constitutional Convention [Aboriginal] (2017). Uluru Statement from the Heart, retrieved from https://www.1voiceuluru.org/the-statement.

74. Peter Gerrand, “Catalan’s Presence on the Internet (1993–2018),” in The Rise of Catalan Identity, ed. Pompeu Casanovas, Montserrat Corretger and Vicent Salvador (Cham: Springer Nature, 2019), 261–70.

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76. Kathryn A. Woolard, Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989).

77. Pompeu Casanovas, Montserrat Corretger and Vicent Salvador, eds., The Rise of Catalan Identity. Social Commitment and Political Engagement in the 20^th Century (Cham: Springer Nature, 2019).

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