ethnic press With over one in five Australians born outside the country, and two in five

having an overseas-born parent, links to the wider world are integral to the national

landscape. With over 150 national-origin and 200 language groups, Australia has a very

complex language, information and communication pattern, and our ethnic or diasporic press

plays a crucial role in the survival and maintenance of multicultural social relations.

The ethnic press performs a number of overlapping roles, ranging from providing

information in the heritage language on settlement and adaptation to Australia, to sustaining

contact with countries or languages of origin, and building or rebuilding community. If we

think of nations as ‘imaginary communities’, then the press sustains the imagination and

refreshes the sense of identity and association among its readers.

Studies of the ethnic press going back over half a century have documented the nature

of the interface formed between settlers, the dynamics of their countries of origin and the

wider society. During periods of conflict, some papers have been closed down or come under

security censorship – such as the German press (the oldest, Die Deutsche Post, est. 1848)

during World War I, and the German and Italian press during World War II. As the digital

media have flourished and the makeup of immigrant communities has changed, the ethnic

print media have had to reposition themselves in acknowledgement of the technical

transformation and the new capacities of online media, and the changing needs of

communities.

In an analysis of the ethnic press by Ata and Ryan in the late 1980s, 16 language

groups were examined. Four broad functions, drawing on a study by Gilson and Zubrzycki

some 20 years earlier, were proposed: the maintenance of cultural identity, communication of

Australian news, orientation to Australia and acting as a brake on assimilation. The tension

between opening Australia to immigrants and protecting them from Australia showed in the

emphasis on nostalgia for older communities, on the focus in some communities on struggles

in the homeland and on building an ethno-Australian identity based on commitment to the

new land. In the 1980s, the Arabic and Vietnamese papers were deeply involved in homeland

politics, while the Polish sustained a dogged anti-communism. The Jewish press was not so

much ethnic as politico-religious, with a focus on support for Israel.

The first Italian papers were developed for émigré political activists at the turn of the

20th century. While they did not last long, as more Italians arrived new outlets were

established – though they were hampered by the rural dispersal and low literacy of Italian

workers, most of whom spoke dialect. By the 1920s, the Italian language press had expanded,

supported by the new Fascist government. Anti-fascist papers were more popular in the

remote mining camps and canefields. Sydney’s weekly La Fiamma (1947– ) grew by the

1960s to a circulation of 44,000. Melbourne’s Il Globo (1959– ) began as a weekly, then went

daily in 1978. It bought out La Fiamma in 1985 as Melbourne became the bigger of the two

Italian communities. Both papers focused on sustaining community and advertising the

passing of former migrants.

Long-time Il Globo editor Nino Randazzo was also a political activist, elected in

2006 as Senator from Africa, Australia and Asia to the Italian Parliament. Randazzo had been

a strong advocate of defending the reputation of Italo-Australians (against the common Mafia

stereotypes) and promoting a wider multiculturalism. With the advent of digital access, the

papers retained their hard-copy circulation, with Il Globo selling 30,000 copies, while it also

offered an online service, including an English-language magazine designed to appeal to the

second and third generations.

The Greek-language press has been more controversial. In the 75 years to 1989, some

24 Greek-language papers were launched in Australia, beginning with Australis (est. 1913 ) add bracket

and still available as Vima Tis Ekklisias.

By the 1980s, the spread of papers reflected a range of allegiances. Many of the

papers had first appeared when the Australian government released restrictions on publication

in ‘foreign languages’ in 1956; by 1989, three publishers controlled most of the outlets. The

Media Press group, run by Theo Skalkos since the early 1960s, grew to some prominence in

the 1970s as the printer of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, especially the Australian. By the

1990s, Skalkos had spread out into more than 80 magazines and papers in 40 ethnic

languages, and began Greek radio and television programs. Media Press was placed in

receivership in 2003, leading to the closure of his Greek Herald and Al-Barak (Arabic)

mastheads. Skalkos was declared bankrupt in 2005, after huge defamation payouts were won

by the Greek Archbishop and many prominent Greek identities; he was taken to the Fair

Work Commission in 2012 where he was found to have underpaid a journalist on his Serbian

masthead Novosti (1963– ) for 10 years.

The primary focus of the Greek press has been the maintenance of Greek language

and culture, and the sponsoring of philo-hellenic activities and discussions. The left of centre

Neos Kosmos (1957– ) now focuses its activities through the online edition, gearing itself

towards later-generation young Greek-Australian readers. Government advertising of

services for older Australians provides a significant part of the income supporting some of

these outlets.

The ethnic press have undergone some profound transformations, partly because the

earlier communities have aged. In 2013, the NSW Community Relations Commission listed

over 140 different daily, weekly and monthly newspapers in over 40 languages across

Australia. Its own service provides daily summaries to clients in 11 languages. There are 22

Indian papers, 13 Chinese, 10 Arabic and Korean, nine Turkish, eight Vietnamese and seven

Greek outlets, with languages ranging from Armenian to Urdu. Such diversity reveals quite a

complex pattern between and within language groups.

Two contemporary examples, the Arabic and the Chinese press, represent important

but very different challenges to the press in Australia. The Arabs are drawn from a

multinational background, with religious differences, and a diversity of countries, regimes

and political struggles. By 2012, the Arab spring of the previous year had torn apart the takenfor-

granted crescent of conservative dictatorships, and opened up a future of deep uncertainty

with many Australian reverberations.

The study from 1986 selected three Lebanese Arabic papers – El Telegraph (1970– )

(then 10,000–15,000 circulation with a total Lebanese population of 56,000) and two weeklies

of the left and Christian right. With the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, the papers moved

from local communal news and information to a much more active engagement with the

homeland and partisan identification. El Telegraph tended to report stories on both Muslims

and Christians – by the mid-1980s, the left was strongly supporting the Palestinian cause

against Israel, while the Maronite supported the Israelis and the South Lebanon Christian

army. However, El Telegraph advised its communal writers not to submit copy that might

stimulate sectarian unrest and hostility.

A generation later, the largest-selling Arabic language newspaper was still the

Bankstown-based El Telegraph, founded by controversial Australian Labor Party politician

‘Eddie’ Obeid. Obeid came to Australia at the age of six, left school early and moved through

a number of businesses before the newspaper found its platform. The growth of El Telegraph

paralleled the rapid rise in the population, first of Lebanese Arabic speakers (whose numbers

rose rapidly after the civil war in the mid-1970s), then later of Iraqis (mainly asylum seekers

and refugees, both Christians and Muslims). While Obeid comes from the majority Christian

Maronite community, the paper, under editor Tony Kazzi, serves both Christian and Muslim

congregations. The editorial line focuses is that readers are now part of Australian society and

need to adapt and integrate.

El Telegraph sold some 35,000 copies three times a week, increasing to five days a

week in 2012. The paper reached around 25 per cent of the Arabic-reading population, about

half of whom are Muslim and 20 per cent Iraqi. In 2010, Obeid sold El Telegraph to the

Australian Middle East Media (AMEM) group, which ran the bilingual weeklies Al Anwar

(launched in 2006 as a news magazine) and An-Noujoum (1998– ).

In November 2011, the AMEM group also opened a partnership with the Lebanese

government National News Agency, while building its online presence. El Telegraph also

offers an online presence, but only in relation to Australian news, most of which is translated

directly from agencies or the mainstream Australian press. Thus the digest function (covering

at least 10 Arabic papers each day) can only be accessed through the print version. El

Telegraph has also sought to build its Iraqi following, in part by drawing on unofficial

stringers incarcerated in immigration detention centres around the country. It has thus been

able to report on activities and issues inside the centres, often providing information for

families and the wider community not available in the mainstream media.

The Arabic press is thus pan-ethnic and language based, facing strong competition

from the online media, and cable and satellite television such as the Qatar-based Al Jazeera

and the Saudi-based Al Arabiya. However, unlike many English-language papers, El

Telegraph has increased its circulation and coverage in the print version.

The Chinese-language press reflects another pan-national audience with far longer

ties to Australia. The first Chinese-language newspaper, the English and Chinese Advertiser,

appeared on the Victorian goldfields in about 1856. By Federation there were major Chinese

newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney, with the first Chinese-backed paper being the Chinese

Australian Herald (1894–1923). These served a threefold purpose – to provide information

and rally engagement with political issues in Australia, especially Federation; to provide

homeland information; and to rally political support for various parties in China. As the

Nationalist revolution developed in 1911, a significant number of papers were set up.

However, as the White Australia policy cut deeply into the numbers of Chinese readers, the

newspapers declined. It was not until after the settlement in Australia of significant numbers

of mainland Chinese after the Tiananmen events of 1989 that there occurred a resurgence in

Chinese-language press. The first outlets primarily served the Hong Kong and Taiwanese

communities, using traditional vertical print and elaborate characters; later publications

served People’s Republic of China (PRC) immigrants, set horizontally in simplified

characters.

A critical change has resulted from the PRC government policy of supporting those

outlets that reflect its viewpoint. While the papers (especially the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao,

est. 1977) have their own publishing strategies, PRC pressure and influence have been

significant. As the Chinese relationship with Australia is complex on many levels, the

Chinese press walks through these issues with great delicacy, apart from the Falung Gong

paper Epoch Times (2001– ). The range and impact of the Chinese press is difficult to gauge,

because few have their circulation audited, and many readers access them online. The

Australian Chinese Daily (1987– ), started by Hong Kong immigrants, shifted from Chinese

vertical style to Western horizontal format in 1990, commencing colour printing in 1997 in

time for the Hong Kong handover to the PRC. It publishes 20,000 copies daily, but its

website, providing access to news specifically relating to Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, as

well as Australia, receives many more hits.

The Australian New Express Daily (ANED, 2004– ) has particular links to both

Australian and Chinese political life; it parallels the Guangzhou paper New Express Daily.

Launched by millionaire publisher Dr Chau Chak Wing, ANED is closely linked to (but

separate from) the Chinese government and does not carry any content critical of the Chinese

government. The paper employs English-language editorial consultants to improve

journalistic standards. Although it is not audited in Australia, ANED is generally regarded as

the third largest Australian-Chinese paper after Sing Tao and the Chinese Herald, though

circulation becomes a less meaningful criterion of impact with web-based delivery. The paper

has little independent local coverage, taking its content from the mainstream press, wireservice

feeds and media releases. However it does provide a ‘getting to understand Australia’

section.

The expansion of globalisation has significantly transformed the form and

consumption patters of the ethnic press, as well as the patterns of mobility and inter-country

movement for readers. The broad functions identified in the 1960s and explored further in the

1980s remain a crucial part of the contemporary dynamic. However, whereas ethnic media

once provided an almost sole portal into events in the countries of origin, the current media

environment has become more pluralistic. In such a competitive context, the ethnic press has

had to find new modes of attracting and retaining audiences, to provide value for advertisers.

Some may have other sources of funds.

El Telegraph is a long-established paper that is adapting to the times and optimising

its advantages. Its editorial focus remains the process of its readers’ integration into Australia.

ANED reflects a much more recent emergence, with less attachment to the integration

process, and more acceptance of the constant global mobility occurring in the Chinese–

reading population. Both have woven their hard-copy editions into the continuous 24/7 world

of internet media; both have struck a relationship with their heritage national government

news service as a key source of home country news. While both are clearly commercial

exercises, the commerce and ideology have become inseparable.

REFs: A. Ata & C. Ryan (eds), The Ethnic Press in Australia (1989); G. Gilson &

J. Zubrzycki, Foreign Press in Australia (1966).

ANDREW JAKUBOWICZ

Continue reading “Ethnic Press in Australia” →

Talk to Randwick Rotary 1 March 2016

As Australia once more fails to “Close the Gap” and opposition remains to Recognition, what can a local community such as Randwick do to help end the war against Black people with a just, lasting and positive peace? Why might we talk of this as a War? If we want peace, what do we the nonIndigenous people of this country need to do? Remembering the past and commemorating history, re-embedding the Indigenous stories of this place into our landscape and perceptions, and working for a proper Peace Treaty could be part of the way forward. This talk is deliberately provocative but also hopeful and open, inviting non-Indigenous people to own our history of this place and our treatment of the invaded peoples, through looking for dialogue and resolution.

My parents arrived in Australia as refugees from Poland through China in 1946. From my earliest days in Bondi I can remember thinking about the Indigenous people who had lived where we lived, whose lives had ended as finally as that of my grandparents in Poland under the Nazis. Like most White Australians I knew few if any Indigenous people as I grew up. My father owned a drycleaning business in Taylor’s Square where a couple of his pressers were Aboriginal men. He’d tell me as the dry came on in the north, that they’d soon be on the road and he’d see them next year when they returned.

As I grew up through the 1950s and 1960s my knowledge of Indigenous Australia was sprinkled with stories of the Never Never and spare paintings of the Centre. Yet I really learned almost nothing about their struggle for survival, the resistance and the terrible toll the European invasion had taken of the original owners. Every story we heard was wrapped in a cloak of inevitability that what had occurred was the way things needed to be. Yet one thing was so self-evident to us, that the violence of the past was over, and that there was no longer any question that Australia was White. We had no sense of the stolen generations, yet even less of the earlier generations who had died of disease, of violence, or of heart break. Later at university I was a photographer with the Redfern All Blacks at the Casino Knockout in country NSW, and researched issues of racism especially in the media.

Some years ago when I started thinking about why Australia seemed unable to resolve its Black history I had recently returned from one of my visits to Poland. Poland was for my family its particular killing field. My grandfather had died of disease and hunger in the Litmanstadt ghetto. My grandmother had been poisoned in a gas truck at Chelmno, my great grandmother shot in the head in the Warsaw ghetto. Even though the Polish army was defeated in a few short weeks by the Nazis and Soviets in 1939, the war against the Poles continued for many years. Their intellectuals were rounded up and executed, their culture was banned, their children were stolen. For Polish Jews the future was to be inevitably the end of their race, accelerated in places like Treblinka and Auschwitz by industrial extermination. In Prague Hitler turned the synagogue into an anthropological museum for the artefacts of a disappeared race. I could feel resonances with the fate of indigenous Australia.

So what does a post-war war look like? Much I fear like the experience of many Indigenous Australians. The recent Closing the Gap report and the discussion of it, help plot the landscape of our War against the Blacks.

Young black men are far more likely to be gaoled than to go to university, usually for offences of resistance or as a consequence of chemical warfare injuries (alcohol and drugs). Indigenous people will die ten or more years younger than non-Indigenous. Indigenous languages are under attack everywhere and culture is disappearing. Chronic diseases will attack Indigenous people in far greater proportions. Young women will bear many more children, who will often sicken. Children will drop out of school in far greater proportions. Youth suicide is by far the highest in Australia if not the world; killing yourself before the enemy gets you?

This is a picture of a people under sustained and continuing attack. In the past the biological warfare of disease and the chemical warfare of alcohol and refined sugar had torn Indigenous communities apart, leaving piles of bodies around campsites all over the Sydney basin. The billabong at Coogee (the rugby oval), which was a meeting place for tribes and a great place for hunting and ceremony, would have seen tragic scenes as diseases ravaged the local people. I wonder what the first White people might have found as they hacked their way through the bush and waded over the sand hills.

Yet resilience and survival are also everywhere – no Indigenous peoples have ever surrendered, despite the belief of many White people that the war is over. As you can tell, I think the war continues, low intensity (for White people), high impact (for Indigenous people).

So the challenge for non-Indigenous Australians is, what do we want to do about this war? We have broadly, three options.

We can just put up with it because the cost isn’t impossible and the outcomes are manageable (for the moment); we can keep the pressure on, more interventions, more attempts to privatise Indigenous lands, more seizure of children, more young men in gaol, more beaten women, more drug dependence. Destroy language, erode culture, fragment and decimate tribes. Oh and every year declaim our wonderment at the long heritage of Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile keep looking in Indigenous communities for potential contributors to the national economy, educate them, build them up into successful Indigenous people. Rescue them from war zones.

We can try to win the war, by forcing the Indigenous population to capitulate everywhere, because the war has to stop. That would be costly and difficult to achieve, given over 200 years of war has not achieved that outcome. It’s also not clear what “capitulate” would mean – probably the annihilation of communities by widespread seizure of children, dispersal of family groups, and the redevelopment of homelands and land rights areas. Push assimilation to the hilt, and reprogram Indigenous people as nuclear family consumers. Mainly though force Indigenous people to concede that indigeneity means nothing and colour is not an issue worth worrying about.

Currently the main protagonist of the “get over it” perspective is Melbourne commentator Andrew Bolt. His attack on Adam Goodes whose war dance infuriated him, comes from a place where it’s the Black insistence on difference that’s the problem. For Bolt Indigenous should just fade away, the war is a war by Blacks on Whites, and they should just stop it. He does not see any of this as a resistance to the White control of Black lives. Rather he frames it as resentment, dependency and failure. That’s why he and his mates hate the idea of reconciliation and are appalled by the movement for Constitutional Recognition. Some Indigenous activists are also unconvinced that the Recognition outcomes proposed mean very much other than a symbolic capitulation by Indigenous Australia to the invasion and their consequent dis-enfranchisement, a soft variant of the second option.

The Third option is/are peace treaties, declaring an end to hostilities. This is the most difficult, because it requires White recognition of indigenous suppression, and the political desire to change the conditions that produce the disadvantage. Moreover it requires all Australians to surrender some of their booty to the common good, never an easy ask of our property ravenous society. Think only of the savaging that Bob Hawke received when he first tried to bring in national land rights legislation in the 1980s (to which he succumbed) , or John Howard saying that he was on the side of the pastoralists against the Indigenous people in the debate over the Wik amendments in the 1990s. Reflect on the huge hostility to any recognition of Indigenous people in the constitution, yet their continuing marginalisation for over a century in that same founding document.

I believe that such hostilities are best resolved by local communities declaring peace, until every community across the country has made its local and individual peace. This would provide a bedrock foundation for a national resolution. We know how hard peace negotiations are, but with all such things there is a need for trust building.

Last year I approached Randwick Council to suggest it might take an initiative to recognise the local Indigenous people through a memorial on or near Coogee Beach. I noticed that there was a memorial for a mayor and local member (Hyman Goldstein whom it should be recognised was probably murdered at suicide point), three memorials to Coogee residents murdered in Bali, and a memorial to a digger and lifesaver as part of the Great War commemorations. The beachfront is a narrative of memory. Yet no narratives exist there of the residents of previous millennia, the Indigenous folk whose home this was.

I met with the then mayor Ted Seng and Development officer Gary Ella; they referred to a war memorial for Indigenous diggers to be built at Maroubra. As our conversation developed we spoke about the possibility of a speaking memorial, digital points created along the coastal walking path from Watsons Bay to La Perouse, that could tell stories of the Indigenous people of the area that walkers could encounter on their smartphones as they followed the route (a real possibility with amalgamation). We talked of how important it would be to open a dialogue with Indigenous residents, to research the history accurately, and to involve Indigenous people in the design and ceremonies associated with a memorial at Coogee. I thought one could be erected near the former billabong or along the creek that drained it out into Coogee Bay, nearby to and paid for by the Pavilion. Regularly we could perhaps hold an annual story telling and smoking ceremony as important as the Bali memorial ceremony or even Anzac Day.

Recognition and reconciliation as pathways to building trust and securing peace require strong community input and support. This is the point that I am thinking that Rotary and other community groups could start to own our local track, putting into place small steps that might build recognition into our daily lives, signifying the permanent place Indigenous people have in the life of our locality. There is not a good Indigenous history of Randwick. One should be commissioned. There are few signs of the Indigenous people – they should be recovered and named and celebrated. We cannot remake the people whom were destroyed so that we could all live here. But we can recover their spirits and their resilience and resistance to the fate into which some of our forebears had hoped to consign them. And in doing so, we may help to end the war.

  From Fairfax

I am first generation. When I say that now, despite my years of privilege, I still get goosebumps. I have inherited gratitude. People in Australia were and are sometimes vile about Jews but they don’t betray them to the authorities. They don’t shoot them in the back of the head. This is not to forgive anti-semitism in any respect, because it is at the heart of genocide; but genocide only exists in Australia for one group of people; and it isn’t Jews.

Of course, like most of us, I abandoned some aspects of the values of my parents and grew out of hiding my displeasure at the government, even though I know that both my parents would be appalled at my critique of governments past and present. The gratitude should outweigh the analysis. I wonder if my parents would have come around to my way of thinking if they knew how the Australian government treats refugees now.

Australia Day was huge in my family. My parents worked 11 days a week but Australia Day was a serious celebration. We’d go to Nielsen Park in Sydney’s Vaucluse and swim. Or what passed for swimming in my family, breaststroke without putting your face in the water (it is with some pride that my offspring can all swim freestyle and breathe on both sides. Pride and amazement. How do people actually put their faces in water and live?)

So in 1988, when I was pregnant with my second child, I’d planned January 26 events very carefully. Watch boats. Have picnics. Watch Aboriginal dancing. See fireworks. Be extremely grateful. I was. Two years later, we organised a holiday up on the far north coast with another family. The topic of Australia Day came up and they were hugely critical. I burst into tears.

Of course, they were right. And wrong. And I was right and so wrong.

Nearly 30 years ago, when I had that fight with my friends Robin and Neil, Australia Day was still acceptable and it’s become less acceptable now. For me, then, it was a time to celebrate being in country which didn’t kill me or reject me or exclude me in a systematic way. But it marks the day when the colonisers of Australia began to kill, reject and exclude the Aboriginal people. Or, as Stan Grant put it when describing how the brilliant Swan Adam Goodes was treated last year: “I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us . . . we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.”

I doubt there could ever be a day when Aboriginal people could or would celebrate the colonisation of this land or the formation of this nation nor should we ever question the motives of anyone who doesn’t want to take part in a joyless jamboree. Australia Day is connected to the destruction of another culture, this country’s first people, although we must acknowledge that every day, the life expectancy, the education, the health, gap between Aboriginal and whites continues to exist.

As Grant says later in his speech at the IQ2 racism debate last year: “My people die young in this country, we die 10 years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.”

If we move Australia Day, it allows a bunch of martyr rightists to claim Aboriginal activists won. If we don’t move Australia Day, we ignore the destruction of the Aboriginal people.

But we could change Australia Day, make it a time when we can account for ourselves and our progress. January 26 will always be a day of mourning and it could also be a time when we examine the state of the nation and all who live here.

It will also make it possible for those of us who were given shelter here to give thanks for that shelter.

A friend wrote* to me to say he’s had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s Indigenous people. Me too. We have become unwilling parties to the war on Aborigines.

Could Australia Day be reshaped, away from drunkenness and celebrations, towards acknowledgement, reconciliation and peace?

I wrote:  “I’ve had enough of war. My parents survived theirs through luck, guts, and hope – a bit like all refugees then and now. But I’ve had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s indigenous people. Fed up to here and beyond. Australia Day is about two wars – the one my parents escaped that let us be, and the war they entered despite themselves that I’ve inherited. Time to make peace; and what better day than Australia Day to declare we are committed to finding a lasting and effective peace. That means we need to decide we don’t want to win that war through annihilating or crushing Indigenous Australia,  and we don’t want the war of attrition  to roll endlessly into a god forsaken future of misery. We want to end it ASAP.”

This Youtube Vid of a Powerpoint provides a work in progress for a paper under development. The paper is an output of the Cyber Racism and Community Resilience research project, funded under the ARC Linkage scheme. We seek informed and constructive feedback, which can be posted through the Comments link. All on topic comments will be approved subject to basic codes of civility.