Let’s get a move on. Here’s a map for you.
We fly Qantas out of Dallas for Brisbane. I’m happy for the aisle seat in row 55 and the great meals; it’s a long flight, about 16 hours of Tom Hanks and Blue Jasmine and Oprah’s Butler. I’m slightly anxious, but snug in my crushable down-sweater. An Australian guy spreads into the empty seat between us. Bare feet? Really? Not cold, honey? Later, I learn that this is an Aussie thing to do—the barefoot flight.
In Brisbane, I don’t want to get off the plane and have to go through customs and security again before I get to Adelaide. Sheesh. I’m tired. But my irritation quickly fades when I discover a mom and daughter in the long line in front of me, toting two large cases of tennis racquets—the teenager is on her way to Melbourne to play in the Juniors’ tournament! She’s so excited! And it’s sunny and hot as we wait for the shuttle to the next terminal. No more 23 below. No more snow drifts. I may even take off my socks on the next flight, walk barefoot into Adelaide.
The shuttle to the domestic terminal is filled with Americans also off to the Australian Open. We amateur players quack and quack about when we’re going, where we’ll be sitting in Rod Laver, who we’ll see, and how the temperatures will be above 100 degrees this week. My very first Open! What I’ve always wanted to do! And here I am. I’ll go to Adelaide first to visit my old pal from St. Kate’s and her husband of 40+ years. Then she and I will drive across South Australia and Victoria to Melbourne.
Pat and John are gracious hosts. I have my own wing of their brand-new place, a house of mostly windows, far out of Adelaide on Lawless Lane in Myponga, South Australia. Mornings, I hike out on the road before the 100 degree temperatures descend, a fly veil tied over my head, things pinging the netting around my mouth and eyes. One morning, Pat and I take a ride to the coast and hike down gorgeous stretches of windy beach near Victor Harbor with her women’s group of Myponga Walkers. We take in lunch at a deserted country club. For sure, nobody’s out there swinging clubs on the parched course, but the grilled squid legs and barramundi are to die for. Across the room, there’s a large table of Italians having lunch. I love hearing them, begin to realize there are pockets of Italians scattered around Australia, still speaking their native language.
Later, we visit a friend, Tony, at his vineyard where we trade John’s olive oil for wine. We pass fields of strawberries, giant rotating sprinklers, workers bending down from their canopied pickers to gather the crop. The 5:00 happy hour is full of strawberries and Tony’s wine while kangaroos hop in and out of the rows of John’s olive trees. One night at sunset, John loads me into the wreck of his ute (utility vehicle), and we take off through the grassy fields. Two roos drink at the trough. John steps on the accelerator. We tip and wheel through ruts of red clay. Mamas and babies bounce off into the stands of trees. Big boys continue chewing mouthfuls of grass, jaws in slow motion. What, me worry? That night, thirteen kangaroos! (When I return home and go out to the Wisconsin cabin, at first I see kangaroos rather than deer out in the snow.)
After five days in Myponga, Pat and I head off for the Open. Fires sweep across Victoria as we pack the car; alerts have been posted for the Grampian Mountains along the highway to Melbourne.
When we cross into Victoria, the horizons to our south and east are billowing with smoke, so much smoke that the fires have created their own weather systems. The airborne soot sparks electrical storms that sweep across the wide, open fields and ignite more grass and dry brush. The radio cranks out constant warnings, changes in wind direction, places to seek shelter. We stop for the night at our reserved cabin in a caravan in Horsham, just outside the Grampians. Smoke seeps in every pore of the unit. The AC wheezes with black char. This is not good. Tomorrow’s highway to our bed and breakfast in Maryborough, past Halls Gap and Stawell, has been closed to all vehicles, so we will have to detour north around the blaze. According to the radio, relief centers are popping up all around us as people and livestock flee the advancing rampage. Hopefully, the caravan owner will rouse us and other tenants if the wind turns and the blaze sweeps through the park.
That night, though, we cross the road to we eat supper at a little local hotel. Why am I telling you this? Because over the fireplace and next to our small table, hangs a huge oil painting of some guy reading to chairs of rapt listeners. This must be some Brit. Has to be. And 19th Century. A former British colony, isn’t this? I get up and look at the metal placard on the painting. It’s Robbie Burns reading to a full house of Scots. Robbie Burns! Out here? Pat and I, both English majors in our former lives, laugh and roll Robbie’s name off our tongues in tribute. Here’s R-r-r-obbie Bur-r-r-ns in his ruffled white shirt and knickers, “wee timorous beasties” careening out of their dens as an out-of-control fire tears across the grasslands.
We set off again the following day, leaving the smoke behind as we travel farther north. Our next stay is at a B and B run by two gay guys, Victor and Allen, friends of John from his flower-arranging business in Melbourne. Victor prepares sumptuous feasts for us every night, points out parts of the galaxies visible in this Southern Hemisphere. It’s the Southern Cross up there, not the Big Dipper. By day, we take the train into Melbourne for the Open, join a packed trolley of Open-goers as we strap-hang our way out to the tennis complex.
We have great seats, seven rows up from center court in the middle, right under the sunny crack in the sky roof. The biggies are out here playing in front of us—Nadal, Serena, Sharapova, Ivanovic! OMG! Who would believe it? The ball moves so fast back and forth across the court it’s almost invisible. My first open! And the temperatures have cooled down into the 80’s after last week’s 100’s and cancelled matches. We lather up with sunscreen. The gals behind us from Sydney drink cosmopolitans from pink plastic glasses and hoot and holler. The family next to us feeds us snacks from the cooler. There’s a bunch from San Francisco in the row of front of us, shouting encouragement to a flagging Serena. This is good. I want to be here forever.
The next week, the way back to Myponga is sobering. We drive the Western Highway through the scorched terrain near the Grampians. The bushfire jumped the roadway in many places, leaving blackened fields as far as the eye can see. Seared gum trees pile up in crippled heaps. To our east, farms have been wiped out and a woman killed in her home. Smoke still hangs in the sunshine, a grim reminder of the devastation of the previous week.
The next leg of the journey takes me to a community north of Cairns, Clifton Beach, on the Great Barrier Reef, where I am hosted by Pat and John’s daughter, Trisha. She lives in a gated community in which cute little wallabees jump in and out of the flower beds between the buildings.
Trisha lives three blocks from the ocean front, so every day I take hefty hikes up and down the beach. The heat here is tropical, unlike the dry heat in South Australia; sweat blotches my t-shirts. One day I go north to luxurious Palm Cove, through miles of boardwalk and swamp, never seeing a soul. Another day I hike south along the beach as far as a little river and see a sign, “Achtung!” that warns me that crocodiles may eat me. So what’s the big deal? I don’t see any crocodiles. Families with lawn chairs are picnicking along the edge of the water; kids kick soccer balls; barbies burn full tilt. I could take my boots off, ford the river. But I don’t. On the way back, I talk to the guy who’d been hosing down his Subaru when I first passed. He’s still at work on the car, a border collie circling his flip-flops. I ask him about “Achtung!”and the folks sprawled along the river. “Fools!” he says. “Crocodiles ate two of my dogs.”
Trisha and her work-mate, wonderfully warm Antoinette, have a few days off for Australia Day, so they make sure I take in the sights. We visit Port Douglas one day, and Lake Tinaroo another, where for some reason Antoinette didn’t brush her teeth for three days on Christmas holiday. On January 26th, we drive to the Australia Day celebration on Yorkey’s Knob with Antoinette’s two very polite, 20-something sons. Australia day is holiday of celebration comparable to our Fourth of July. The ocean-front park at Yorkey’s Knob teems with families waving red, white, and blue flags, eating barbecue off paper plates while a bluegrass band plucks away up on stage. Yorkey’s knob? Popular lore has it that Yorkey was an English settler who dynamited fish on the Great Barrier Reef and took them to market. But one day, the blast also took his arm up to the elbow, hence Yorkey’s “knob.” (When I Google Yorkey, there’s no mention of dynamite or his knob, just the label, “Infamous.”)
In larger cities, Australia day also marks a time of reconciliation for Aboriginal Peoples who call the day Survival Day or Invasion Day. On the way home, Antoinette and I talk about her and Trisha’s work helping unemployed people find work in Cairns, many of whom are Aboriginal. At a market booth in Yorkey’s Knob, she’d bought a basket from one of her aboriginal clients. Antoinette also talks about her Italian father who faced such discrimination that he forbade his children to speak or learn Italian. When I get to New Zealand, I hear a similar story from a Maori woman, a tour guide, who learned her native language as an adult since her father, too, was worried about his kids being persecuted. Antoinette, like the Maori guide, is now studying her father’s language. We throw Italian 101 phrases back and forth, front seat to back, while her sons text their pals. (If you want to learn more about the Italians in Australia, see the endnote after this travelogue.)
Next, I spend a tourist day on my own near Cairns. For the first time, I am travelling alone. I know I can manage, but I don’t want to manage. I have been spoiled by Trisha and Antoinette, Pat and John. And today, Cyclone Dylan is blowing in on the coast. Still, the tour-boat people haven’t cancelled the trip out to Green Island and the Great Barrier Reef for snorkeling or glass-bottomed boat adventures. There are only a few of us on the small boat to the island. The crew warns us about the impending storm, advises our downing ginger pills at the bar. Lorraine, an Aussie from Sydney in Cairns for a wedding, makes it a point to strike up a conversation with me, as the ocean, like a giant carwash, heaves water up and over the windows, tosses us around like a kid’s boat in a Jacuzzi. Lorraine tells me that she, too, has travelled solo and really enjoyed it, went to Soweto and got to touch the bed of Nelson Mandela. Then she grabs a barf bag and disappears, her husband and daughter and son in-law summoning the crew who seat poor Lorraine in a row of plastic chairs in the stern. A Chinese woman, on her husband’s arm, also runs to the seats out back, a bag over her mouth. The next time I look, there are five people, then six with bags on their faces, the stewards and stewardesses hurrying back and forth out of the cabin to take care of the seasick. I keep my eyes glued to the front, away from the churning nightmare behind me, breathe into my gut, suck on another ginger tablet.
We arrive. Finally. Green Island is full of the beginning of Chinese New Year, every bench, every umbrella-ed table full of Chinese parents and kids here to celebrate the Year of the Horse. I feel at ease, New York’s Chinatown and Mott Street having been my home in the old days, those New Years billowing with dragons and lanterns. But I am here to snorkel, not to hang out with kids and water wings in the pool. I am here to pull on a full length black body suit designed to cover every inch of me but fingers and face. There are stingers out in the surf—jellyfish that can kill. I dutifully tug on the cover-up over my bathing suit. I confer with the lifeguard before I head out, telling him I am swimming alone and not, as advised, with a swim buddy. He promises to keep an eye on me. Waves pound the shore. Clumps of teensy Chinese girls attempt the surf as well. We laugh as we try to enter the water with our giant flippers, the incoming breakers toppling us over, again and again. I finally get free of shore and roll round and round and round in the brine, other snorkel bodies somersaulting through the ocean bubbles around me, my mask popping off as the sand in my suit exfoliates my body. Later Lorraine tells me that she, too, didn’t see a single fish or seaweed out there in the glass- bottomed boat. O well. We did it. We sit together on the way back. She doesn’t throw up. Her husband relaxes next to her with a beer. I ask her why Australians don’t smile much. She says if they open their mouths, the flies get in.
That afternoon, my next junket will be a Sky Rail trip, up and over the rainforest and slopes that surround Cairns. As our Reef boat bounces back into shore, a steward sits next to me to relay an “urgent” message from the Sky Rail people. Dylan is tossing cable cars around. It’s slow-going. I can cancel if I want. But I don’t. I’ve already weathered Dylan; I can handle him.
At the Sky Rail, a Monica Seles lookalike says, “No worries,” and buckles me into my glass bubble. The ride up and over the rain forest exhilarates. Other gondola riders wave at me on their way back down. The car shakes and shimmies up the cable, crosswinds grabbing hold of it as it grinds to a halt over and over again, then lurches forward. I float over a tremendously green canopy of, among other things, giant ferns, fern palms, and eucalypts. At the far end, Kuranda Station, I have no time,but I jump off and run to see koalas sitting in little trees. The people at home will ask me if I saw koalas sitting in little trees, so I must see koalas sitting in little trees. At the end of the ride and back at the bus stop, the transit agent, an Imogene Coca lookalike, neglects her directing duties to sit down on the bench next to me, so very eager to talk about her travel to New York, Niagara Falls, Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, L.A., Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon. What a great time she had, she says. Too bad her husband doesn’t like to travel. “Five months?” I ask. “You did five months on your own?” And I’m anxious about traveling alone for one day? “Wish it could have been longer.”
Next on my travel agenda is a trip to the Outback. John and Pat have arranged a stay for me with Bill and Rhoda at the Duchess Inn, the last occupied building in the old mining town of Duchess, now with a population of 3. 
Bill and Rhoda are friends of Pat and John from their years in Papua, New Guinea. At Pat and John’s place back in Myponga, there’s a whole wall of pictures from New Guinea. Young John looks tall, hale, and handsome in those photos, not ravished yet by the skin cancer that’s dug trenches in his arms and face, or the TIA that’s slowed his gait. Rhoda, born in New Guinea from English stock, stands with her hands on her hips in these pictures, red hair lifted in the wind, while Bill, a big grizzly bear of a guy, swings a machete. Pat’s kids laugh and lock arms with Rhoda’s kids and their frizzy-headed pals, a soccer ball in the foreground. John, with his degree in agricultural management, was Bill’s boss back in those days, the two of them planting, irrigating, and building houses with the native Papuans.
The flight into Phosphate Hill is two hours from the coast on a plane filled with workers in orange uniforms, ready to go back to the mines after six days at home. When Pat initially told me I’d be taking a flight into the interior of Queensland with miners, I’d pictured a wide-bodied, cargo plane with grizzled, old prospectors ala D. H. Lawrence sitting opposite each other. But the Boeing 727 is full of clean-shaven, polite guys, mostly from Townsville, in their 20’s and 30’s. Later, when I take a day trip with Bill to the mining camps to deliver alcohol, I see swimming pools, cricket fields, grass tennis courts, and when I talk to the girl miners about working conditions and communal meals, I get a thumbs up. In one mining camp, there’s a friendly cook from Warsaw, who talks about his Maori wife and lets me raid his coolers for apples, oranges, and sponge cake. He even invites me out to Magnetic Island for dinner with his wife, but my schedule is too tight. True, these workers only see their families for six days out of 14. But mining accidents are rare because there’s stricter enforcement of regulations than in the U.S. And these workers are well-paid. Australia has worked out an award system for each wage-earner, so some miners make up to 150,000 a year. The “awards” for teachers are considerably less. Academics are seen as less valuable to the economy. Thank goodness, that’s not the case here in America.
(The ghost town of Duchess does not even appear on this map. It’s located south of Mount Isa and Cloncurry and midway between them.)
Bill’s arranged to have Adam sit next to me on the Alliance flight from Townsville to Phosphate Hill and drive me the 60 kilometers to Duchess. Adam’s a quiet guy, just coming back from dropping his daughter off at an Anglican boarding school in Townsville, down the coast from Cairns. One thing I learn from him and his wife Lynette, who manages the Duchess Inn, is that schooling your kids in a remote area of Australia, like the Outback, calls for a lot of planning. When they were smaller, Adam and Lynette’s kids studied at home and Skyped classmates and teacher, sent in their work over the internet, and gathered maybe once a week for one-on-ones with the teacher. Both kids are now in boarding schools even though Adam is unemployed, and the tuition runs something like 30,000 a year.
The road into the Duchess is a bumpy, rocky, red ride through kilometer after kilometer of open range. Every once in a while we spot a clump of cattle eating low brush or galloping away as our truck approaches. No people, no hiding places, homes, or other drivers. And even though it hasn’t rained here in over two years, there’s still a drainage system in place. Deep, plunging arroyos cross the road every mile or so and jar the fillings in my teeth. I grab the door handle each time we dip, plant my legs for the next jolt.
Trying to make conversation, I ask Adam about the rock-looking things that line the side of the road. How did these boulders get out here? Leftovers from an inland sea? Adam explains that the red “rocks” are termite mounds. The white ants saliva-up the soil and then shape it into homes—apartment complexes really, compromised of many chambers. These nests, he tells me, are sometimes used to make clay tennis courts. It’s best to get a deserted anthill with dry, open tunnels, and load it up in a ute, drop it off the back where you want to build a court, then tamp down the antbed soil with a heavy duty compactor. Evidently, a young Patrick Rafter used to play on such a clay court. As Adam talks, I imagine myself as a clay court entrepreneur, retired now from teaching and making a fortune at last, sitting high up on my road roller as ocean liners transport tons of termite hills back to country clubs in the U.S.
Duchess. The town was named for the aboriginal mistress of an Englishman who lived in the Outback and styled himself a Duke. In the early days of the Duchess hotel, when the copper mine was producing and the town flourished, a camel would walk in the front door and have a beer, so the bar became The Thirsty Camel. Evidently, one of Rhoda’s horses still wanders in for an XXXX on tap. I don’t get to see this. The horse may have been put off by the Jillaroos and Jackaroos and ringers who belly up to the bar after a day of herding cattle.
When I arrive at the Duchess, I’m given a Spartan room with air con and a tv and good closet space, a desk and a bed. I am the only one staying in the long rows of motel-like rooms, and the only one using the women’s bathroom next door to my unit. 30 guys are supposed to show up to visit the mines, but they never materialize. Lynette, the barkeep and chief cook, lives somewhere across the complex in a larger cabin so that when Adam stays over, they have their own space. I’m liking that Rhoda’s horses wander across the grounds and that no one cleans up after them. Chickens cluck out back; goats bleat. Beyond them stand the remains of the old Duchess jail and the smokestack from the ore smelter and the bungalow in which the primary school teacher lived before the school closed in 1983.
So it’s just the four of us. Congenial Lynette rolls another cigarette from her 52 dollar a day pouch and talks about, among other things, getting herself to a hypnotist to help her quit smoking; Rhoda, petite, grey-headed and stalwart, shears squares for another quilt to be displayed at Saturday’s meeting of the Cloncurry women’s sewing club; and big Bill’s somewhere out on the roads in his refrigerator truck making meat deliveries. What in the world will I do for four days? Yipes. No cell phone towers. No computer unless I ask to use the one in the private area of the house. No tour guides. I do have the first book of The Hunger Games, which might prove to be an appropriate read out here. Pat’s warned me not to be a whinger, no matter what. After all, Bill and Rhoda are my hosts, and everything here is on the house, except the beer. And I know this is truly a unique experience; most tourists go to Ayres Rock and Alice Springs a hundred kilometers to the south and west for their experience of the Outback, and I don’t want that, do I? Be an ordinary tourist?
I relax into the program. I’ve been on the go for three weeks almost non-stop, and it feels good to just slow down, take in the scene. My laundry never dried at Clifton Beach because of the daily rains and tropical moisture. My things are verging on mold. Here my clothes dry in one hour, and I don’t have to worry about Myponga kangaroos snatching them from the line. It feels good to scrub he black stuff out of my Great Barrier Reef swimming suit and hang it in the hot sun. I sleep a good vacation sleep. Mornings, before it gets really hot, I venture out in my Red Wing boots for long walks with the fly-veil tucked under my baseball cap. One day, I visit an old cemetery up in the hills. The graves date from 1918 to 1924 when about 1,000 people lived in Duchess. I’m sad for the handful of small children, young wives, young miners who died right after the First World War, when the copper mines were producing full-tilt. Now it’s mostly phosphate mining, large deposits of the mineral discovered here in the 1960’s and shipped off to China and the U.S. as a fertilizer ingredient. When I look at a map of this area, there are very few towns, just sprinkles of dots that represent hundreds of mines, past and present, scattered across the landscape.
One morning Bill and Rhoda invite me to accompany them to a medical appointment with the Royal Flying Doctor Clinic in Dajarra, a small town about 60 kilometers from Duchess. I have seen only one Aboriginal person so far on my trip, and Dajarra is home to Aboriginal tribes from Queensland and the Northern Territory, though its population is now a scant 790 people. Most of the talk about the “Blacks” that I’ve heard at the Duchess bar has been racist, where it’s still okay to tell a joke about an Aboriginal woman who dies in a plane crash and whose “black box” can’t be found. In Dajarra, I walk the streets, wanting to see what life is like. I talk to a man in a wheelchair who directs me to the local gas station, so I can buy a new fly veil. The workers at the gas station are Brits—sweet youngsters under 30 who work as they move across the country. I buy some apples and hide them in my bag, not wanting to offend my hosts who serve no fruits or vegetables. The local “museum” down the street is unattended, a house stocked with old clothes and tools. I later learn that some of the relics in the museum have been pinched and sold. The houses in the town are somewhat run-down, the streets empty, no cars, no people, but the school yard is filled with children in bright clothes, jumping up and down. Evidently, they are being taught their native language in the school and also learning how to make boomerangs. I would have liked to have gone into the school and watched the students and listened to their language. As it is, I only get a peripheral view of what life is like for these Aboriginal kids.
At the end of my walk, I return to the Flying Doctor clinic where Rhoda and Bill are getting looked at and re-filling prescriptions. This clinic is only open one day a week because the doctors and medical personnel in Dajarra are always on the move, flying across Australia in their 63 planes to provide primary health care in remote areas. Although the organization, founded in the 1920’s, is non-profit and used to be financed with charitable donations, the Commonwealth now also funds the organization, which tends to about 800 people a day.
On one of the last mornings of my stay at the Duchess, Rhoda comes to fetch me from porch outside my room because a state stock-checker has pulled into the bar and told her that there is a herd of wild camels 12 kilometers out. Rhoda and I hop into her SUV and give chase behind the stock guy’s truck, a speedo ball of dust on the horizon. We catch up with him, finally, stopped along the side of the road, feral camels spilling across the red clay in front of us, fanning out into the desert. I want to hop out of the SUV for a closer look. Didn’t my sister, Gloria, rent Claudia the camel from Menomonie for her Camel Party last December, Claudia’s benign self chewing away while party-goers used her for photo-ops?
Claudia up from Menominee for the Camel Party
But both Rhoda and the stock guy warn me to stay in the vehicle. About twenty Dromedary camels, a few teenagers in tow, mosey across the landscape, chewing on whatever low brush and branches they can find. The stock guy talks about the two-year drought and how the camels’ humps are so very depleted. Rhoda pulls out a camera and snaps photos from her window. Even after years in the Outback, this is a rare sighting for her as well.
Feral Camels
The camels in the Outback are not natives. In the 19th century, they were imported from India to be used as pack animals in the hot climate. The ill-fated 1861 Burke and Wills exploratory expedition, originating in Melbourne, then continuing up through Queensland and past what now is Duchess to the Gulf of Carpenteria, relied on them for carrying cargo. Tons of rum were strapped to the camels’ backs because it was believed that drinking rum would keep the beasts docile and prevent scurvy. The rum was jettisoned along with lots of other supplies as the trek got longer and longer, more and more difficult. What a mail deliverer could cover with a horse in a week took two months with the over-laden camels. On their return journey, starving and desperate, the explorers finally ate the camels (“Burke” 2). Today, there are estimates of more than 300,000 feral camels roaming northern and western Australia (“Australian Feral” 1). They are considered pests, chewing their way through the ground cover that cattle ranchers claim as their own. But I loved seeing these guys, so wild out there, no zoo fences containing their nomadic souls.
After my stay in the Outback, my next stop is Sydney where I’m scheduled for one tourist day before I fly out to Auckland, New Zealand. I do the usual things—get blissfully swept along in a big-city energy that reminds me of Manhattan and take a harbor ride to look at the Opera House and people climbing on top of the Harbour Bridge for 100 dollars a pop. There are some Brits on the ferry, one of them a young woman who will travel to the Outback to work as a horse-trainer. I applaud her sense of adventure. The next morning at 5 A.M. as I leave the Travelodge in Sydney to catch a train to the airport, there’s a Polish guy at the desk. He lets me rattle off Polish goodbyes and thank you’s (Dziękuję!) as I push my suitcase out into the dark and bid Australia a final adieu.
Endnotes on the Italians in Australia
In the early 19th Century, Italian immigrants to Australia were mostly educated people from northern Italy fleeing Austrian oppression on the border. I was reminded of what my ex-husband, Frank, said about his growing up in Spormaggiore, a small town in the mountains of northern Italy along the Austrian border. Even in the 1950’s, German was the favored language in the schools.
As with most immigrant groups in most countries, Italians were at times welcomed and at times feared and stereotyped. Immigration was encouraged because Australians needed laborers in their sparsely populated country. So Italians were often recruited to work the mines and farms. During those times, Italians were seen as white,” frugal, hard-working, sober, and more capable of working in hot climates than English settlers (“Italian Australians”).
On the other hand, Italians were sometimes feared because they might work for less money or become too populous and take jobs from “white” Australians. They were then characterized, in one document, as “small, dark, noisy, and smelly.” In 1901, as Australia was coming together as a commonwealth, it instituted the Immigration Restriction Act, which formed the basis of the White Australia policy, designed to keep Asians and Pacific Islanders out of the country( “1901 Immigration Restriction Act” 1). Because Australia was still a part of England, and England did not want to offend East Indians or its Japanese allies with a blatant display of racism in one of its territories, the new Commonwealth set up a Dictation Test, like the one used in South Africa, to bar non-whites from entering the country. When an immigrant arrived in port, a customs official could administer a literacy test—a 50-word dictation in any European language. So a Chinese person might be asked to transcribe a passage of Scottish Gaelic and, failing to do so, would be barred from entering the country. This dictation test could also be applied to any new arrival whom the authorities wanted to exclude from entry. So an Italian might be given a test in Polish or be required to transcribe a spoken passage such as this one, in which the language consisted of a battery of frequently misspelled words or Australian dialect:
The swagman wrapped his gnarled and desiccated digits round his miniscule ukulele and with prodigious and egregious deficiency of musicology essayed a resounding, cacophonous rendition of “Waltzing Matilda” that caused a phobic frog to hurl itself suicidally into a brackish billabong. (“Australian Migration Policy”)
Needless to say, not many new arrivals passed the test. If you were Italian and got turned away, you took a two-month sea voyage back to the homeland. And after 1932, the test could be applied to any “foreigner” with less than five years’ residence in Australia.
Mussolini and Fascism and Italy’s declaration of war on England, also bred trouble for Italians, along with other migrant groups. Dangerous security threats such as the radical nationalist organization, First Movement, were the first ones to be sent to internment camps around the country. Later in the war, the Australian government interned Japanese residents in large numbers as we did in America. Italian and German migrants were also classified as “enemy aliens.” 20% of all Italians resident in Australia were sent to camps in remote parts of Australia. Many were men, leaving behind wives and children who had to figure out how to support themselves.
After the war, there was once again a labor shortage, and 360,000 Italians were welcomed into the country. Today, Italian-Australians form about 5% of the total population. Most immigrants now come from China (“Italian Australians” 2).
Works Cited (This post-format does not allow correct MLA Works Cited set-up. Here’s a list of the articles I used.)
“1901 Immigration Restriction Act.” Wikipedia. Web. 29 March 2016.
“Australian Feral Camels.” Wikipedia. Web. 29 March 2016.
Marie, Isabelle. “Australian Migration Policy Historical Inquiry.” Prezi. Web. 14 March 2014.
“Burke and Willis Expedition.” Wikipedia. Web. 29 March 2016.
“Italian Australians.” Wikipedia. Web. 14 March 2014.
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