Customer Reviews

The Changing Face of Australia: A Century of Immigration 1901-2000

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kate Walsh, curator of the Migration Musuem in Adelaide, South Australia, has assembled a remarkable photgraphic record of Australian migration history over the last hundred years. Over five hundred photographs are accompanied by very informative narratives which convey the rich and varied history of migration to this land where four in ten persons today are either born overseas or from foreign born parents.

The highlights of an often chequered history of Australian immigration are vividly brought home by some very personal stories drawn from family albums, community organizations,and library archives. A group of Italian settlers from the Aeolian islands pose for the first annual picnic for Melbourne frutierrs in 1906. In another photo, six young Australians of German ancestry are photographed in a detention camp in Germany where they were held during the First World War together with British prsioners. There is the snapshot of one Australian solider from Darwin's Chinese commnity who was shot several times in New Guinea by fellow Australian soldiers during World War Two who mistook him for a Japanese. A photo from the 1960s shows the generational differences between adult members of a Spanish commnity in Whyalla singing and dancing to flamenco music and the younger Spanish girls who were kept in pants and never owned a flamenco dress. Photos of Malays and of Greeks show the diverse specialist skills which were attracted into Australia's pearling industry. The chronicle of the 1970s and 1980s reveal the changing composition of immigrants, with Asian and African faces increasingly showing up in the photos.

This book is a remarkable and informative piece of historical research judiciously combined with a rich portfolio of images of a nation which has become vastly transformed in a hundred years.