I’m feeling pretty guilty. Last month (around 10 January) when the press and letter writers were going bananas getting stuck into Queensland federal parliamentarian, Theresa Gambaro, for her comments on the need for cross-cultural training for immigrants to Australia, I sat back and said nothing. Well, I was on holidays and it seemed such an effort at the time. But my conscience won’t leave me alone. So here are some belated words of support for Ms Gambaro.
As someone who has specialised for the past 18 years in the issues, both cultural and linguistic, created by migration to Australia, I, from a position of considerable authority, can verify that everything she said was correct. Most immigrants to Australia, whether they are ordinary migrants or refugees or 457 visa workers, get absolutely no information on Anglo-Australian culture, and particularly on Australian customs around politeness and courtesy or around workplace customs. The new arrivals are more or less just tossed in and everyone hopes they’ll pick up enough information to survive. Of course, if they are fluent English speakers they can always ask questions about what’s going on, and get answers they might understand. But not everyone is a fluent English speaker on arrival.
So why would it matter that new settlers be given information on arrival? It matters because Anglo-Celtic Australian culture (the dominant culture of this country) is really, really different from most other cultures. You can tell that that is true by the number of people who suffer culture shock, a well-known psychological phenomenon, when they move to Australia. Even people from other Anglo cultures (UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, etc) regularly suffer culture shock in the first year of settlement in Australia. Even Kiwis (the culture closes to Anglo-Australian culture) regularly suffer culture shock! So imagine what it is like for East Asians and Africans and South Asians and Pacific Islanders and Europeans.
Now, part of the problem is that many, probably most, Aussies are firmly convinced that they don’t have a culture. So why would you need to tell anybody anything? But in fact Australia does have a culture, a unique and, to many outsiders, a mysterious one with all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies that can take years to tease out.
Yes, as Ms Gambaro mentioned, it is a cultural custom in Australia to queue for a service. Queuing is not universal human behaviour and most cultures on earth do not queue. So when people come to Australia and are given no information about local customs they will adopt the behaviour that is the norm in their culture-of-origin. And in so doing, in ‘jumping’ a queue, will get irritated reactions from Aussies that will mystify them. Is this about right and wrong? Well, in this case, it is. Because to Aussies, queuing is about justice. You were there first. You should be served first. Why would you want to change a custom which is about justice? That’s the Aussie perspective. But to the newcomer, unless the difference in this custom is explained to them, they just have no idea what is going on.
With many cultural customs there is often, however, no right and wrong that both sides would agree on. It is merely that the custom in this place is different from the custom in another place.
Body odour is a great example of no right or wrong. In some cultures no one notices body odour. In other cultures they do. In some cultures it is normal, in some cultures it is bad. Theresa Gambaro was correct about body odour being an immigration issue in Australia. In fact, it is a well-known immigration issue in all Western countries. People coming to Australia from rural societies and refugee camps have to be instructed on body and breath odour by employers and employment agencies as a prerequisite for most jobs. Western cultures are obsessed with eliminating body odour and people usually don’t like other people’s body odour intruding on their personal space. Do you? Why pretend otherwise? It’s not about right and wrong. It is about the custom in a particular place. Are we right to impose this Australian cultural custom on other people? Maybe not, but bringing it to people’s attention is essential, particularly if they want most kinds of job.
Ms Gambaro was also reported as saying that ‘it was equally important that immigrants were taught about laws, customs and their rights so they were not exploited’. I agree. The various federal and state multicultural policies are progressively becoming more and more vague about immigrants’ rights and responsibilities, where once, and not so long ago, it was all spelled out more clearly. So there is much confusion among immigrants and Aussies alike about which traditional customs and practices are welcomed in Australia (most of them) and which are not (those threatening freedom of speech and religion, health and safety, or human rights like female circumcision and forced marriage and extreme forms of physical punishment of children).
But there is hope. My personal dream is to have Australians the most culturally sophisticated people in the world. We’ve got a long way to go. We have the potential, given the extraordinary diversity of our population’s origins, but only if we are honest and discerning in the evaluation of cultural customs, our own and other people’s. Some things we are right to impose on newcomers and other things we are not. How to decide? That’s our challenge! Good on you, Theresa Gambaro, for being brave enough to get the discussion started.
And I couldn’t agree more that cross-cultural information for new arrivals benefits both them and the Australian community by improving chances for speedier integration both ways. Let’s see more programs and policies along these lines!
P.S. There are many, more significant cultural differences that new arrivals and Anglo-Australians need to be more aware of because they can cause misunderstandings and even conflict. I’ll write about some of these in future blogs.
