16: Italians in Australia: The Impact of a Recent Migration on the Culture and Society of a Postcolonial Nation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe Italian immigration and settlement in Australia, and to show how the Italian presence is helping to shape Australian society in a period of rapid change.' Since British colonization in 1788, Australia has been a country of immigration. Apart from the 2 percent of the population who are Aborigines or Torres Strait Islanders, the whole population are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The largest waves of immigration were from about 1850 to 1890, and then from 1945 to the present. The first wave was mainly of people from Britain, whose settlement provided the basis for the construction of Anglo-Australia as part of the British Empire. The second wave has been much more diverse, consisting not only of Britons but also of eastern and southern Europeans, and then, increasingly, of Asians. There was some Italian immigration before World War 11, but most came between 1950 and 1970. Italian community formation is thus much more recent than in the Americas. Today, Italian-Australians are still the largest non-British group, but they are declining in numbers, and may soon be overtaken by Asian groups. The Italian presence coincides with two major changes. The first is the growth of ethnic diversity and the resulting search for a new national identity, no longer based simply on British heritage. The most obvious symbol of this is the emergence of multiculturalism as an official 342