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When I first heard of the Punjabi community in Woolgoolga more than 30 years ago I was curious to know how Indian migrants had managed to establish themselves in what was then a white Australia. To answer this question I embarked on anthropological fieldwork in the village and recorded the fascinating story of their community development.' In this book I charted the very successful establishment of the Punjabi settlers whose banana farming and canecutting jobs provided the economic base for their community life. Regular commuting by the settlers to their home villages in the Punjab and their arranged-marriage alliances with partners from India sustained close contact with life and relationships in the Punjab. This continuing contact with their culture and customs also provided a secure foundation for their adjustment to different social and cultural attitudes in Australia.
But divisions and tensions also existed in Woolgoolga both between Indians and European Australians and within each cultural group. The legacy of white Australia, with its anti-Asian sentiments, was evident among some European Australians and among the Punjabis there were already two main factions coalescing around two temple groups. These differences animated Woolgoolga village life as well as generating the odd social strain or hostile reaction in daily life.
The anthropologist, however, is trained to see difference as a focus for interest and analysis, not hostility. And although visual differences are perhaps the most immediately perceived, other differences gradually emerge to contrast with the familiar. But what is familiar to the European-Australian anthropologist can be interpreted by the "other" as strange and misguided. Particularly with respect to family relationships, it was a salutary experience to have Punjabi women question me about Australian behaviour. For instance, they were genuinely shocked about the way we send our old folk to nursing homes away from the family environment.
Again, the question of marriage produced puzzled reactions. Women whose marriages were arranged could not see how I could possibly have chosen my husband wisely. I was asked: wouldn't it have been easier and safer to have let my parents make the choice? And as for child rearing, my practices with my then sevenyear-old daughter, who was with me in Woolgoolga, were grounds for the women's concern. Indian children did not sleep alone, and my daughter happily slept with Indian children when we stayed with an Indian family. But apparently she had described her room at home in Sydney and when this information circulated among the women and children I was asked, in a very concerned but non-accusatory way, how I could be so unkind as to let my child sleep alone, not only in a separate bed but in a separate room.
This information, the women told me, contradicted what they knew of me as a good mother. I have used these experiences to illustrate to students and others how what seems natural and normal to us may resonate differently with people from other cultural backgrounds.
Back then, assimilation/integration was Government policy with respect to migrant settlement. As I witnessed, and as was recorded on the ABC television program on the opening of the First Sikh Temple in Australia in 1968 and in other media outlets, Punjabi settlers in Woolgoolga experienced a considerable amount of racism at the hands of many European Australians who, among other criticisms, accused the settlers of not assimilating. It was clear that difference generated a lot of hostility.
Yet many of the Punjabis made every effort to become assimilated settlers, or at least to acknowledge Australian ways. The First Sikh Temple itself was a modest building, like a hall that could have accommodated a local Australian organisation. It did not shriek difference. And the Sikh men of those days mostly wore European clothes, were clean-shaven and had cut their hair, all substantial gestures for Sikh men to make. The women, who did not work outside the family environment, retained their Punjabi dress but occasionally dressed Europeanstyle and tried very hard not to antagonise their non-Punjabi neighbours. I well remember one young bride inquiring about Australian wedding customs and then adopting the custom of carrying flowers at her own wedding as a gesture towards the host society.
The settlers told me of the racism they experienced, but what impressed me most was their general lack of resentment or bitterness. They clearly drew a great deal of confidence from their own cultural traditions. They shrugged off any discriminatory behaviour, worked hard, concentrated on their banana farms, saved to buy or build new houses for their families and encouraged their children to be educated in order to grasp the opportunities Australia offered. One young man was already a teacher and another was studying medicine. Today, many of the young people are tertiary qualified.
Anti-Asian sentiment has not disappeared from Australian social life, despite the passing of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975). During the 1980s, debate raged with the intervention of the historian Geoffrey Blainey, who bemoaned the "Asianisation" of Australia and who depicted multiculturalism as divisive.' Then, in the 1990S and still today we have Pauline Hanson and her followers who sing a similar tune. Australian society has not yet rid itself of many of its discriminatory practices, its major institutions remain Anglo-morphic, there are gender inequalities and the gap is widening between the haves and the have-nots. We have a way to go before we celebrate our capacity to include the "other".
Yet those who come to settle here and who are categorised as "other" have a capacity to symbolically include the vicissitudes of settlement in a new place while celebrating their achievements. This can be illustrated by what I call a "Woolgoolga story of origin". When I questioned Punjabi household heads 30 years ago about the earliest members of their families to enter this country, they told me that their grandfathers came first. "Everybody had a grandfather" I was told, and they all came to Australia in 1901. As one man put it: a villager in the Punjab heard from some British officials that there was work in Australia and told his brother he was going there. The brother asked him to wait a while and he would come too, after he had made arrangements with his family. A cousin and some other distant kinsmen then heard of the proposed trip and asked for a further delay while they also made preparations to leave; and so it went on until they were all ready.
Thus a collection of grandfathers boarded a boat and they all set sail and arrived in 19°1, that is, just before the Immigration Restriction Act of that year, otherwise known as the White Australia Policy, became operative. Upon my further questioning, older men admitted that some grandfathers had perhaps come earlier, in the 1890S or even before, but the year 1901 was firmly implanted in their minds as the time of initial migration. Thus the Indians' origin story makes subtle reference to Australian discrimination against non-Europeans but also affirms their legitimate entry before restrictions began and therefore asserts indirectly their right to be here.
The story is stated in kinship terms. It alludes to certain obligations between people and to the rights and duties of those closely related. In this sense, it records Punjabi custom and reflects the moral unity of the Indian community, despite any factional cleavages that have arisen. Kinship and marriage links, which remain important to the settlers today, have provided the basis for cooperation in farming ventures, in building temples and for contracting new alliances to reproduce established social relations. The origin story both encapsulates an account of Indian settlement in Australia and, by alluding to the White Australia Policy as it does, it celebrates the very year this country first excluded them.
When I returned to Woolgoolga in 1990, 20 years after my original fieldwork, and again briefly in 2001, 30 years later, there were many changes in the village and in Australian society generally. First impressions were of startlingly visible signs of difference and, ironically, I discovered much less racism. Government policy with respect to immigrants stressed multiculturalism not assimilation, anti-discrimination legislation existed, the community had expanded and the new large Indian-style Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara had been built to replace the smaller one opened in 1970. Many Sikh men now wore their hair long and turbaned and their beards had grown. For Sikh ceremonies, some donned Punjabi dress. Women still wore the sa/war and kameez at home but when working outside the house they often dressed European-style.
Visually, the village in 1990 (and in 2001) looked more Indian than 20 years earlier. Not only did the Guru Nanak Gurdwara stand out on the hill, but also the Indian restaurant opposite and the Raj Mahal building further along the highway signalled without doubt a migrant settlement. And down by the beach on a bench there regularly sat a group of elderly men, with their beards, turbans and Punjabi dress, warming themselves and chatting in the sun. Despite all these visual assertions of difference, I was told repeatedly that, although racism had not entirely disappeared, it had diminished over the years. A great deal of difference had been accommodated by both Sikh and European Australians, although it did take a while before the Returned Services' League accepted Sikh men in turbans.
Perhaps the most interesting change for me after 20 years was the extent to which many of the young women I had met as schoolchildren in the 1970S were now tertiary trained and working outside the home. I met women trained in law, as teachers, social workers and nurses, and women with business and office credentials all working in the wider world, either full-or part-time, but all still attached to their community through family and traditional ties. In multicultural Australia they had thoroughly assimilated through education into the workforce. They had also married and raised their children with no need of institutional child care. Family members were there to help.
Some women also worked locally picking blueberries, which gave them a modicum of economic independence, and many of them drove cars, a sight I had certainly not seen in the 1970s. Others met in small women's groups, a practice that consolidated confidence, and women gathered at the temple to be taught the religious chants.
By contrast, some of the young men I met in 1990, who had also been exposed to tertiary education, had eschewed the professional path and returned to Woolgoolga to become banana farmers, having confronted not only racism but the common Australian class prejudices of the private-school boy against the stateschool boy and the snobbish attitudes of city people for those who live in rural areas. Even so, young Sikh men coming out of a country state school, and perhaps sensing unjust disadvantage by their positioning, fortunately had alternatives to professions in their farms, which also gave them economic independence. Moreover, they saw in their Sikh religion a haven and resource for another kind of development. When I commented on how many young men now wore beards, turbans and Punjabi dress on Sundays and during celebrations, I was told these young men had become "spiritual" and were very active in gurdwara affairs. These strengthened links with the traditional Sikh culture of the Punjab have undoubtedly sustained many settlers in Woolgoolga. But the downside of this commitment, including the time and energy devoted to it, testifies to a possible lack of active participation in Australian local, industrial and state organisations that might benefit the settlers and give them a chance to have a firmer voice in this country's multiculturalism.
Although their world had expanded, some young people did admit that village tensions still affected them. Generational differences created problems, as they do for other Australians, and so did differences between those who grew up in Woolgoolga and those introduced to the village more recently as brides and grooms. The newcomers, I was told, often expected considerable material comfort and did not always appreciate the hard work the older settlers had contributed to family prosperity. Australia's failure to recognise overseas qualifications also disadvantaged some migrant newcomers. There is clearly further accommodation to be made on all sides but the story of the past suggests we can perhaps be optimistic about the future.
1 Marie M. de Lepervanche, Indians in a White Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984. See also Marie M. de Lepervanche, "Sikh Turbans in Resistance and Response: Some Comments on Immigrant Reactions in Australia and Britain" in S. Chandrasekhar, ed., From India to Australia, Population Review Books, La Jolla, California, 1992.
2 Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, Australia, 1984.