White Australian Poetry Analysis

It is often said that all non-indigenous Australian poetry is "migrant" poetry. That the process of leaving your place of origin, your "home", and travelling to an adoptive home, defines you as a migrant, regardless of when the migration took place. This line of argument possibly arises out of a desire by the dominant culture - the anglo-celtic in the case of Australia - to create a new language of assimilation, despite a multi-cultural, or maybe post multi-cultural environment. Of course, in the case of Australia many of its earliest non-indigenes were transported rather than migrating by choice and the sense of foreignness was extended to their own cultural space. But later migrations, too, whether voluntary or induced by desperate circumstances at home - such as the migrations from Europe after the second world war or the movement of refugees from Indochina after the Vietnam War and the rise of Pol Pot in

I am skeptical of this label, as migrant differences existed strongly within this so-called dominant culture, especially between the Irish and the English, but it serves as a basic centre against which to "define" migrant presence. Federation in Australia in 1901 brought with it what has become known as the White Australia policy, the desire to keep Australia white and homogeneous: British in politics and culture, with a distinct sense of empire and even more, standard English language usage, allowing for the identity of the Australian strine. This racist policy sat side-by-side with the desire to increase population, especially after the second world war, and underpinned the policy of assimilation: that all new Australians would speak one language and be one people. Whether Greek, Italian, or Polish, or any other nationality, all would strive to be English-speaking Aussies in