Australia the immigrant nation — a measure of success
‘Marrying out’
Measuring the success of Australia as an immigrant nation was more difficult to determine, and a source of endless debate among the disputants. Objective measures were scarce but one central index was the degree of intermarriage between migrants and the host society (which included, naturally, many immigrants). ‘Marrying out’ was an indicator of the degree of melting in the multicultural pot. By the third generation about 70 per cent of Chinese, Indian and Lebanese in Australia were ‘marrying out’, not much less that the 80 per cent among southern and northern Europeans. This was a greater degree of admixture than in the United States where, for instance, the Chinese still tended to marry fellow Chinese. Intermarriage in the second generation was considerably less evident, but significant ethnic intermixing and upward mobility was undoubtedly happening. Pauline Hanson’s nightmare of a nation of tribes was not being realised. In 2000 the demographer Charles Price announced that ‘the typical Australian’ was now an offspring of a mixed ethnic partnership, 60 per cent of the population being now ethnically mixed. He calculated that while 90 per cent of the population had been Anglo-Celtic in 1947, their proportion had fallen to 74.5 per cent in 1988, and to 70 per cent by 1999.
Source for text above: Eric Richards (2008) Destination Australia, UNSW Press, pages 342–343
Hotwords: disputants, host society, melting in the multicultural pot, admixture. upward mobility, a nation of tribes, demographer
Inquiry questions
Consider:
- The meaning of ‘Marrying out’ — intermarriage between migrants and the host society (which included, naturally, many immigrants).
- By which generation of a migrant family is intermarriage more likely? Why?
Back to Sequence 1 The Globalising World: Changing policies and Australian identity — History Year 10
