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The time has come for members of the Third Wave of immigrants who arrived in this country to gain their own Voice to parliament and be recognised in the Constitution.
The Australis Statement from the Sea, named after the ship Australis (above) that brought so many migrants to these shores, calls for recognition of Third Wave citizens, the many Wogs, Huns, Balts, Poms, Paddys and other migrants who arrived here after World War II.
Many suffered abuse for their strange cultural practices, their odd surnames and accents, taste in food and clothing and ignorance of the bush and the beach. There has never been an apology to these hard-working families for the loss of culture they suffered as they dropped their own practises and assimilated into modern Australia. They get no recognition in our founding document.
The Australis Statement from the Sea invites all Australians to walk with them on a journey of reconciliation.
We ask for understanding, empowerment and a future of hope, inclusion and justice for all. We call for Third Wave citizens to be given a voice in the lawmaking that governs this continent. A Third Wave voice enshrined in the Constitution and a commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between government and Third Wave citizens, and truth-telling about our shared past as the basis for lasting reconciliation.
We look forward to the coming referendum that will enshrine our Third Wave voice in the constitution.
If we’re going down the apartheid route why not issue everyone with a coloured star. Obviously the “first peoples” get, say, a gold star. Those whose ancestors were early settlers can have a silver star. “Third wave” immigrants , 1970s boat people, Middle Eastern and then African immigrants could have a descending set of coloured stars. Obviously rights could then depend on the colour of one’s star.
The census showed that Third Wave Australians make up more than 50% of the population yet Indigenous Australians and Colonial Australians hold 90% of seats in Federal Parliament. Who is representing the majority born overseas with unique challenges not able to the understood by Australian born politicians? The government need to include a Third Wave voice in its referendum plan. Like the Indigenous Voice it will not be a Third chamber. It will act in an advisory role and help address the power imbalance between those who were born here and those who were not.
When I was a young lad from London, arriving in Oz at the age of 7, I was made to play “football” with some rugby ball, which wasn’t rugby, but something called “AFL”. I was fairly hopeless at it of course, but eventually allowed to play “soccer” which we called “football” back in Blighty.
For this humiliation, and being called a “Pom” 53,192 times, I want compensation. $100K plus a buck a time sounds good. Can I have a bank transfer now for $153,192, or do I have to demonstrate by super-gluing myself to a road?
Way back when this all started I thought to get “square” with the Poms for the potato famine they were accused of causing that sent my ancestors here, and gave two stone axe heads to an archaeologist returning to the UK on the understanding that he kept one but had to bury the other one in a likely spot. The idea was that the buried axe would eventually be found, the news published widely in The Mail online fairly close to their latest climate change predictions and the biggest land rights claim the Galaxy has ever seen would take place to “learn” them that they shouldn’t have been so kind after 1788. One lives in hope.
Good to see we haven’t lost our sense of humour!
March; “Like the Indigenous Voice it will not be a Third chamber. It will act in an advisory role “. And God help any politician who doesn’t obey the Third Wave’s advice.
The gold star is historically a bit dodgy!
Sadly, all my ancestors in the 1800s were the evil “settlers”, although some of their relatives had preceded them as convicts. If they had been convicts I could have become a victim and claimed reparations from that evil government today in London for sending them from their hearth and home to a far away land with no amenities. I wonder how much they would give me. Of course it is Boris Johnson who is responsible for sending them and I hope he will apologise as well as paying up. I am still waiting for the Egyptians to apologise to the Israelis for the rough trot they gave Moses and his ancestors.
A very funny article, but what about the 2.5 wave, the one between 1901 and 1947? They were often East Europeans fleeing the Bolsheviks. Why are you discriminating against them?
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Jokes aside, the Constitution recognises no people or race as being exceptional. The Australian people are not recognised (80% of the population at Federation), Australian citizenship (as a social concept that existed since 1820) was almost recognised but then not; white people are not recognised and neither are Christians.
If the founding stock of the nation don’t recognise themselves in the Constitution they wrote for their benefit then why now should anyone else be?
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Western Australia is not even in the Constitution preamble because we voted late; why don’t we fix that?
In the public service some decades ago there was a whisper getting around about a new means of claiming worker’s comp’. People were calling it ‘negative stress’. Basically it was a mental stress condition caused by having too little work stress to deal with. In other words, one’s job was very boring and way too easy. Pointless even.
It’s a pity that the idea never caught on, as I think it actually does explain most things going on in the world today.
@Marc well written.
As a Second Waver arriving in 1788 – I will walk with you.
“The Australis Statement from the Sea invites all Australians to walk with them on a journey of reconciliation.’
Thank you Marc!
The venerable “Australis” did indeed convey me to these shores; I walked down the gangplank at Fremantle, having embarked at Cape Town; the “roaring forties”and all that! I have always felt at best to be a second-class citizen in Australia, and I heartily support the Third Wave Voice in the Constitution!
Very interesting Marc but two points I believe you got wrong.
First 50% of Australians were not born overseas. 50% of Australians were either born overseas or their parents were.
Second the Third Wave did not commence after World War II but like all migrations began with many little migrations and by those migrations communicating their experiences back to their mother country paved the way for many much larger migrations. I am not talking about the effect of the Gold Rush but the Europeans who came here in the 1930 – 1940 period. These migrants left between the first excesses of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Italy joining the was in June 1940. They should not be forgotten or their role ignored.
Tom Lewis,
You must be no older than 39 then, since the AFL didn’t exist until 1990.
But then there has never been a game called “AFL” . The initials refer to a national league for Australian Rules Football, a game devised mostly by Rugby people, that predates Association Football aka soccer , and bears closer relation to the kicking and handling village games of pre-industrial Europe than the “Eton game” which became soccer does. Australia was in the vanguard of the 8-hour day, 40-hour week movement and that’s why such team games , involving all classes , took off so quickly in Australia, whereas in UK they had been reserved for amateurs and gentlemen who could take time off to play..
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John Singer,
I believe it is correct to state that at least 50% of Australians are descended from at least one person who arrived after WW2. We’re already into the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the early post-war arrivals so it might be hard to get accurate stats.
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That these Australians have no continuous link to pre-WW2 wouldn’t be a bad thing if the history of Australian settlement was taught truthfully and fairly. But it is not, so the majority of Australians alive now have been taught to be both ignorant, seeing post-settlement history as a litany of genocide and massacres, and smug, since “it wasn’t me wot dun it, guv”.
It was an interesting time after the War. I went to school with children whose parents came from Italy, Sicily, Ukraine and other communist countries and we all got on. Judging from the delightful names in the title of the article, there was obviously a reaction to the process from my parents’ generation. One minute they are in a war killing and being killed by Italians and Germans, (plus Australian communists sabotaging the war effort against Japan) and next minute they are “welcoming them to country”. You have to admit that such toleration was commendable in the circumstances. What a lot of the present generation are not being taught is that times were different, and that the new arrivals also had some interesting preconcieved views about Australians and also had names for us. The difference between then and today is that people then accepted each other at face value as fellow humans, not as some “woke” ethnic box to be put in as they do today.
I agree with you. But then that would require the Founders voice … descendants of first settlers and convicts. They built this country and without them it would not exist. Surely they deserve the right to be heard and decide the future of something they built. It will not be an advisory group. It will provide direction and instruction for the advancement and nurturing of country they created
Afraid that if we use the star idea to mock them, they’ll go ‘great idea’ and do it
Founders Voice?. Wot next and wot a abaht those that were not in the founding first wave? We probably need 10 Voices to achieve reconciliation. But wait. I read about a thing that is called a democratic Nation State in which all the citizens, including native born and migrants are all equal before the law and identify with the nationality of that particular state and what they do culturally in private is their business. Let’s try it for a change.
And while we’re at it, shouldn’t women also have a separate Voice, seeing they’ve suffered so much, and have that Glass Ceiling thing to smash through? It couldn’t make things any worse for them. As long as they don’t then ask for sovereignty, or a separate nation.
The mind boggles – the possibilities are endless.