Will The Citizenship Test Really Help New Arrivals Fit In?

The Age

Tuesday August 28, 2007

Larry Schwartz

Australia can be baffling, even if you've been here for half your life.

MY SYMPATHIES are with those facing a new citizenship test. Just don't make it retrospective or I'm in trouble. I've been here half my life and am still discovering aspects of landscape, institutions, identities, history and nuance of language.

I don't remember a test in the mid-1980s when I gladly relinquished ties to apartheid-era South Africa in favour of this country.

An illustration of this continent on the back cover of each of three booklets issued to prospective migrants in the early 1980s showed white sea and dark lines dividing states and territories.

There was no way of knowing if this Australia was big or small relative to other places. Black lines indicated major air routes and broken lines railway tracks, with nothing in the prominence of place names to differentiate between the scale of cities.

The booklets, each about 30 pages, contained most of the detail I studied (OK, perused) into the night before an interview with a consular official who decided eligibility for permanent residence. Here I found clues on how to cope.

"This booklet outlines the essentials of life in Australia," claimed an introductory note to the first. "It deals with the immediate concerns that confront you on arrival: your job prospects, the types of home you might choose, the education of your children, your health and welfare and social security of your family."

A note further along claimed: "Newcomers may have some advantages over longer established Australian residents. On arrival, at least, they are more mobile, not having established ties that keep people in one spot. Almost by definition, they are likely to be more adventurous and more enterprising than the average person. At the same time, they have the disadvantages of being newcomers."

"D-what?" I said softly to myself the first time a news editor sent me out to cover an event in Sydney's northern beaches suburb of Dee Why. A woman rang to say her pet wombat was missing. A what bat? Some kind of sporting equipment used to hit a ball?

Someone rang to talk about mufflers - we called them exhaust pipes where I came from. A jumper - we called them jerseys - must be an athlete, or perhaps an energetic child. Spoutings were gutters.

The 2006 census shows more than one in five Australians were born overseas. My problems seem trivial compared with those of people who struggle with English and who are now forced to reckon with a multiple-choice test in English.

Green, red and orange lights were displayed on robots where I come from, not traffic lights.

Had I done my homework, I would have heard of explorers Dirk Hartog, Abel Tasman, William Dampier; James Cook's 1770 landing at Botany Bay or Governor Arthur Phillip's arrival in 1788. I knew nothing of industry, business, agriculture, flora and fauna. The Tasmanian tiger? Never knew it ever existed. Bandicoots and bilbies, pygmy possums and feather-tail gliders? Not in my neck of the woods.

Australia was "off the map" where we grew up. Who even thought this remote continent was the world's largest island? Who'd want to settle here? It seemed further isolation. I had not imagined I'd end up here.

"A commitment to Australia and the Australian way of life enriches the lifestyle of all Australian citizens," said an official booklet distributed at a National Gallery of Victoria Citizenship ceremony.

I think Neil Murray, a whitefella of Scottish descent who once lived at Papunya and co-founded the Warumpi Band, told me that a lot of people had come to Australia but few had arrived. He was talking about our relationship with this country's indigenous heritage.

"If we use non-Aboriginal anthropological terms of say 60,000 years and we ask how big is 200 years, we know it's not very big," filmmaker and musician Richard Frankland once told me.

I'd welcome a citizenship test if I thought it would help newcomers, including those as little informed as I have been, to an understanding of, and engagement with, the full extent of our cultural heritage.

Larry Schwartz is a senior writer.

© 2007 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home