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.

This clip is from a conference keynote delivered in Mackay in regional Queensland for service providers in September 2011.

I’m trying to figure out how I can get back to Finland for another Summer School. They run an intensive Finnish language course which really appeals to me, not that I have any illusions about being able to learn much Finnish in three weeks. It is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in the world to master, for English speakers. On a par with Cantonese. But the brain researchers tell us that learning a new language in later life is very good for preserving the brain’s function. So what more motivation could I need?

This conference is targeted at all service providers who have clients drawn from the immigrant communities in the Mackay area, both newly arrived and longer-term residents.

Day 1: Thursday 15 September

There will be three plenary sessions, a keynote from me on issues of belonging and identity and how local individuals and organisations can support the settlement process, one on visas by Stephen McLean from the Department of Immigration, and one from Sally Stewart of QPASTT on torture and trauma.

There are four fabulous 1.5 hour workshops run by experienced and skilled presenters: Aydan Inal, Cultural Support Coordinator from MDA, Greg Turner, Education and Development Coordinator from the Transcultural Mental Health Centre, Ric Thompson from Inclusion Works, and Robert Lachowicz from the Refugee and Immigration Legal Service.

Plus there will be a 1 hour cultural panel with three or four recently arrived settlers to Mackay talking about their experiences.

Day 2: Friday 16 September

The second half day is a skills workshop in Overcoming Language Barriers conducted by me, Margaret Bornhorst. There are a number of components to this workshop: the languages spoken in the Mackay region; how to conduct an interview using a professional interpreter; how to improve your ability to understand English through a ‘foreign’ accent; and how to modify your English so it is more understandable to people who are new to the language or new to Australian English.

To get a copy of the conference flyer, contact the conference organisers: Lara Payne (4961 9596)or Natasha Syed Ali (4957 2626).

This conference is heavily subsidised and so is very inexpensive to attend and therefore exceptional value. Because participant numbers are limited you will need to book soon. You can register by calling this number: 3234 0235.

A late summer Sunday in Helsinki, August 2011

But I’ve been interested in Finland for a long time. Years ago at university studying languages I became aware of the non-Indo-European origins of the language, Finnish, and the people. The Ural Mountains in Central Russia, in fact. I knew that Finnish and Estonian had a distant connection with Hungarian going back perhaps thousands of years when they were all part of the same migratory group out of the Urals the reasons for which are lost in the mists of time. I also learned that Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are impossibly difficult for English-speakers to learn.

But my interest in Finland was reallly sparked when, while working for Multicultural Affairs Queensland running training programs in Mount Isa, I discovered that at one stage of Mount Isa’s history (1960′s and 70′s), the Finns made up 15% of the total population of this remote mining town. If you want an insight into how this came about, there’s a terrific Finnish blog I’ve just found called Finns Down Under which quotes from a book of the same name. (The book is available in English translation (but I haven’t got it yet), and the blog gives some excerpts in English.)

That’s when I started researching the history of the country and became so impressed by a range of Finnish cultural qualities that I approached the History Department of the University of Queensland to do a research Masters Degree on the history of the Finns in Australia. Nothing came of that, but my interest in Finland has endured.

I expect my experiences studying here to feed into my work in two ways. Firstly I am a newcomer to a world where all the place names and, more importantly, all the foods in the supermarket (!), are in languages (Finnish and Swedish) that I don’t understand. Finnish words bear absolutely no relationship to any languages I have studied, and even Swedish is so far away from German that knowing German doesn’t help much. In other words, I’m having a kind of personal migration experience comparable in some ways to that experienced in the early days of arrival by immigrants to Australia.

Secondly, I’ve always perceived the exploration of the cultures of the world as a search for elements that I would like to see in my own culture. No culture is perfect. All cultures can be improved. We don’t have to just accept the culture/s we were born into as immutable. And there are many things about Finnish culture that I admire and would like to see more prominently displayed in Australian culture.

The best book on Finland and the Finns is the one by Richard D. Lewis which I’ve listed in the non-Fiction section of my book recommendations panel on the right side of this blog and in the book section of my website: Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf. Yesterday a Finnish woman told me she thought this book captured the Finns better than any other book she had read.

Finland and Helsinki, its capital, are also very beautiful. I’ve bought a video camera and am madly filming, hoping that some of the segments will be able to be posted here or on my website.

But it isn’t!

At 11:00 on Wednesday 3 August I’ll be delivering a one-hour session for the Australian Institute of Management’s Open House held at AIM House in Spring Hill, Brisbane. Anyone who runs a business in Australia will benefit from this session. The session is called The Exciting Culture/Language Challenge for Queensland businesses.

I guarantee that every business person will take away at least one really good idea from this presentation.

These sessions are booking out fast, so better register now!

When I started designing and delivering the first (as far as I know) cross-cultural health programs delivered in Queensland hospitals in the mid 1990′s, the only detailed community profiles with a health focus that I could find were those that had been developed in Western Australia. At that time, W.A. had a Multicultural Access Unit headed by a talented anthropologist called Sandy Hopkins who collected health-related cultural information on a range of new immigrant communities. It was clear from the materials that Sandy had consulted members of those communities in compiling those profiles.

At that time, it is important to point out, it was still considered politically incorrrect to identify or describe any real examples of cultural difference in cross-cultural training, for fear of creating dangerous stereotypes in the minds of Anglo-Australians. I, always thinking this was ridiculous (how do you prepare people to handle cultural differences if you don’t tell them about any?), searched for information that gave details of differences in health attitudes and health practices of different ethnic communities. I was overjoyed to discover Sandy Hopkins’ folder which I was able to buy and share with Queensland health practitioners for many years.

This latest production from Queensland Health, Community Profiles for Health Care Providers, is very impressive. It covers 18 ethnic communities and is available for downloading as individual pdfs or as a complete document. Its introduction is a must-read and is very careful to point out a number of imporant things, including the diversity within individual communities and the effect on communities of acculturation over time.

The subsections for each community are as follows:

• historical and demographic information
• communication
• the health of that community in Australia
• health beliefs and practices
• social determinants of health
• utilisation of health services in Australia

These community profiles will be useful to a much wider range of service-providers than health professionals.

Congratulations to the team at Queensland Health Multicultural Services who have made this splendid resource available.

Margaret Bornhorst’s workshop: The Exciting Culture/Language Challenge

This two-hour workshop gives practical information on why and how your organisation can not just cope with, but benefit from, the explosion in cultural and linguistic diversity that Queensland and Australia are experiencing. Our population is now made up of people from more than 200 birthplaces representing every corner of the planet … and it’s continuing to grow! This diversity has serious implications for the management of staff as well as for customer service.

The workshop:

• identifies the range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds now calling Queensland home
• presents the business case for embracing this diversity in multiple ways
• identifies the precise customer service skills all your frontline staff need now, and how those skills can be acquired
• looks at how you can get the most from the knowledge and skills of your multicultural workforce, and at how to optimise harmony and communication between staff from different backgrounds.

For more information about TLC, or to register, go to the MDD Tactics website.

Such a long struggle, such a wonderful outcome. Now the hard work really begins in South Sudan.