The Snowy Mountains Scheme and Multicultural Australia
Dr James Jupp FASSA
Director, Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University
Australia was not a multicultural society in 1947 when the first post-War Census was held. Indeed it recorded the lowest proportion of immigrants at any time since 1788 (among the non-indigenous) and for any time after 1947. This reflected the virtual ending of immigration in 1930 due to the world depression, and its suspension altogether between 1939 and 1945 because of the world war. The area in which the Scheme was developed was almost uninhabited but the wider district was also very monocultural, with nearly all of its population being Australian-born, with no recorded Aboriginal presence and with the handful of immigrants being derived from the British Isles. The major "ethnic" division was between Protestants originating from Great Britain and Catholics originating from Ireland. The latter had been strongly represented in southeastern New South Wales for the preceding century.
The Scheme required large inputs of labour in an uninhabited region. These were initially provided from immigrants and especially Displaced Persons, who began to arrive in Australia in late 1947. These were, in many cases, housed at Bonegilla to the south of the Snowy Mountains, though requiring a tortuous rail journey through Goulburn to Cooma, which at the time had no sealed road connection to anywhere else. The Bathurst camp was almost as accessible and many workers came from there.
Two-thirds of those who worked on the Snowy between 1949 and 1974 were born overseas. These can be divided into those who were contracted overseas on the basis of their skills, who were mainly Germans and Norwegians; those who had come to Australia as assisted immigrants and, being non-British, were bound to work for two years at the direction of the Commonwealth; those who had come to Australia as British or Irish assisted immigrants and could freely choose where to work; and those who had come as Displaced Persons, were housed in reception camps such as Bonegilla, Greta or Bathurst, and were bonded to work for two years as directed by the Commonwealth. Polish DPs were already working on the Tasmanian hydroelectric development before the Snowy was launched. Many others, both Australian and overseas-born, had no obligations to the Commonwealth and chose freely to come to the Snowy, mainly because of the high wages which were paid. This seems to have been the case for most Croatians, as they did not come to the Scheme until the DP program was drawing to a close.
As part of the post-war reconstruction settlement, the Labor government agreed with the ACTU that all migrant workers would be paid at award rates and would work under award conditions, joining an appropriate union. In the Snowy this was usually the Australian Workers' Union, then the largest in Australia. While management was normally Australian-born or American, the rest of the workforce was drawn from a wide variety of countries, with most of which Australia had no historic connection. A breakdown of 1413 wages personnel as late as 1967 showed that, while two-thirds were "British subjects" (including Ausrtalians), there were still 169 Yugoslavs, 116 Germans, 42 Italians, 35 Austrians, 27 Greeks and 25 Poles. But this was late in the project and the earlier workforce was much more varied.
Australians were monolingual and the only widely taught language in schools was French, which was irrelevant for most migrants. German became the lingua franca for central and east Europeans while Italian was used for southern Europeans and had a presence in Australia already, though mainly in north Queensland. Linguists have not studied the "pidgin" which must have developed on the Snowy but is now lost. As future migrant employment situations also involved the bringing together of many different language groups, the Snowy experience might have been a useful guide. Translating and interpreting services scarcely existed at the time, finally being based on the Telephone Interpreter system started by the Department of Immigration in 1973 when the Snowy project was ending, and confined then to Melbourne and Sydney. The first official enquiry into interpreting and translating needs was not conducted by the Department until 1972. Services for non-English-speaking (NESB) migrants were not radically improved and rationalised until the Galbally report of 1978. Perhaps fortunately, the better educated east Europeans were normally educated in two or three languages and ad hoc interpreting was often possible between one migrant and another. Free English classes were provided by the SMA during the first six months of employment, a rare example of the practice of "English on the job".
Censuses in 1954 and 1961 show clearly how the ethnic character of areas such as the Snowy River shire and Cooma were rapidly changed, as was Wodonga in which Bonegilla was located. However, this was transitory and the immigrants in most cases did not remain in the region. Many moved down to Canberra and Queanbeyan, where a major building program was providing for a rapidly expanding population. The permanent impact on Cooma and Albury was not as significant. This behaviour was to be repeated in other situations. Before 1939 most European migrants went to rural and remote areas. With rare exceptions such as Griffith, this did not happen to the post-war migrants who settled overwhelmingly in the major cities despite often being sent to remote locations to work out their two-year employment bond.
Official policy in the 1950s was still assimilationist and the term "multiculturalism" did not come to Australia until the Scheme was being wound down and Bonegilla being wound up.
The experience of the Scheme showed that even a predominantly male workforce, drawn from former enemies and living in isolation, did not create major social problems or serious violence. Practices such as English-language tuition were pioneered and the SMHA had a better record of labour management and qualification recognition than many other Australian employers. The schools at Cooma and Cabramurra were among the first in post-war Australia to educate a multilingual intake. The basic contradiction was that in isolating immigrants at Bonegilla and on the Snowy the official policy of rapid assimilation could not easily be implemented. What emerged instead was a sense of being "ethnic" which was to influence the formation of the ethnic movement in the early 1970s. The preservation of a range of distinct national groups long after the Snowy was completed and the DP workforce had aged into the 50-75 year age range, suggests that total assimilation would not have been achieved under any circumstances.
THE REGIONAL IMPACT
About 100,000, mainly men, worked on the Snowy between 1949 and 1974 and about 350,000 migrants passed through Bonegilla over the same period. Two-thirds of the Snowy workers and the great majority at Bonegilla were from non-English-speaking countries. Such a sudden impact on thinly populated and remote areas had not been experienced since the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. The population on the goldfields, while it was predominantly British, was drawn from many countries. Some communities remained behind like the Swiss Italians of Daylesford or the Chinese of Bendigo. Most dispersed or returned home and later migration restored the predominantly British and Irish character of rural areas of Victoria. Nevertheless, the population of Victoria rose from 77,000 in 1850 to 617,000 in 1865 and Melbourne overtook Sydney as the largest Australian city until the depression of the 1890s.
The permanent impact of the Snowy Scheme is less obvious. The numbers were smaller and the possibility of rural settlement was very limited. We do not know exactly where the workers dispersed to, but Sydney and Melbourne seem obvious choices. Some, like the Norwegian tunnelers, undoubtedly returned home on completion of their contracts. Figures for the Snowy area are not available, but the New South Wales Norwegian population rose from 723 in 1947 to 1,263 by 1971 and then fell back below 1,000 to reach a low point of only 871 by 1996. The Displaced Persons did not have the option of returning home until the collapse of the Communist systems in the early 1990s, by which time most were too old and too settled in Australian family life to want anything more than a nostalgic return holiday. Their major communities were established in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide and in Wollongong and Newcastle. Of these it is reasonable to assume that many in Melbourne and Sydney had worked on the Snowy, but this is less likely for other locations.
One thing is very clear from the Census figures - not many remained in the immediate vicinity. Albury-Wodonga is one of the least multicultural cities in Australia. Cooma never again became as monocultural as in 1947 and neither did the Snowy River shire. But both came to depend on snow sports and recreational fishing and these attracted different migrants, especially Austrians and Germans. Some businesses were created around Cooma - a Hungarian vineyard, an Austrian bakery, a German restaurant - but the Chinese or Lebanese restaurants were not a product of the Snowy migration. Ten years ago a Cooma resident told Brad Collis that "the Australians are the workers - the migrants own and run businesses" but this may be an exaggeration (Collis 1990, p.275). Virtually all the entertainment and catering businesses which lived off the Snowy workers have disappeared. Cooma is not an expanding town and it does not attract many migrants from anywhere, although many there shown as "Australian-born" in more recent Censuses are the children of migrants from the Snowy, most of whom are now elderly or have died. Certainly places like Jindabyne and Thredbo owe their recent expansion to the roads, ski runs and lakes that the Snowy Scheme made possible. But only a handful of Snowy workers remain and many newcomers have arrived in recent years. Equally, the very cosmopolitan area around Griffith owes its success to the redirection of the Snowy waters to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. Its increasingly multicultural population did not come off the Snowy or from Displaced Persons, but directly by free migration from Italy and, more recently, from Polynesia, India and many other places. Although over 16 per cent of its population in 1996 was from overseas, very few were from eastern Europe.
The most obvious impact, although it is hard to quantify, was on the Canberra region. Canberra and Queanbeyan have overseas-born proportions close to the national average and far higher than for the great majority of provincial towns in New South Wales. Both have expanded rapidly and Canberra now dominates south-eastern New South Wales, a marked contrast to 1947 when it was not much bigger than Albury or Wagga. Between 1947 and 1976 the population of the ACT increased eleven-fold. The huge building boom which this created attracted migrant workers, including many Displaced Persons and former Snowy employees. As elsewhere in urban Australia, Italians, Germans and Greeks are numerically prominent .There has been a large Asian input in the past twenty years, who could not, of course, have come off the Snowy Scheme which predates the ending of the White Australia Policy. However, the east European impact is marked, and more so than in most other Australian cities.
Most newcomers into the Canberra region in recent years have come from elsewhere in Australia, from English-speaking countries or from Asia. Few of these would have been on the Snowy. But a core of east and central Europeans created a network of social clubs and religious institutions and many of them certainly passed through Bonegilla, Bathurst or the Snowy. Canberra has two Polish clubs, two Croatian clubs, and Serbian, Austrian, German, Slovenian and Lithuanian clubs, all with their own premises, as well as Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian and Macedonian churches. Most of these were already in being by 1975 although their current premises expanded with the city and the prosperity of the communities. The two Croatian clubs, in O'Connor and Deakin, were already completed by 1969. By 1975 there were seven Ukrainian societies, three Croatian, one Czechoslovak, two Estonian, one Hungarian, one Latvian, two Lithuanian, one Macedonian, five Polish, one Russian, two Serbian and one Slovenian in Canberra and Queanbeyan. All these communities were well represented on the Snowy, where some of their activists had worked as Displaced Persons. No similar concentration could be found anywhere else in Australia outside the capital cities and certainly not in south-eastern New South Wales.
THE SNOWY AND MULTICULTURAL AUSTRALIA
The experience of the Snowy Mountains Scheme was to prove a microcosm for what came later - the establishment of Australia as a permanently multicultural society based on international migration. At the time politicians presented this experience in ways acceptable to the Australian public, if not to the exceptionally monocultural inhabitants of the region. Many local people reacted as previous generations had done to aliens with hostility, incomprehension and bursts of well-intentioned friendliness, for which they congratulated themselves. Rural Australians knew very little about the world in the late 1940s, except perhaps as soldiers. Until 1949 they were British subjects and for many years later they still preferred the British to all other foreigners, although with some ambivalence. Consequently the post-war Labor government through its Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, had to promise that for every foreign immigrant there would be ten British. This never happened and certainly never happened on the Snowy where two-thirds of all employees were of non-English-speaking background.
As became a common experience, relations between workers were relatively friendly regardless of origins, while relations between neighbours were less so and between strangers much less so. Only the Serbs and Croats continued their feud, as they have done ever since with disastrous consequences in former Yugoslavia. Reminiscences recall that Germans worked well with their former wartime enemies, except for the Poles. The clue to all this is that soldiers share common experiences. Indeed many ex-enemy former soldiers seem to have been accepted into the Cooma RSL club. Those who found it harder to forgive were those, like the Poles, Croatians and Serbs, who had witnessed massacres of civilians on a scale not seen before in this century. Australians could not understand all this because they had never had that experience.
The expectation that migrants would become "real Aussies" in a short space of time was only realised in a minority of cases. Most Europeans who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s still speak English with an accent and some find it hard to make themselves understood even today. They were never taught English effectively as the current English as a Second Language programs
were only in their infancy. The first social activity of many who left Bonegilla or the Snowy was to set up ethnic organisations to preserve their languages and cultures and pass them on to their children. Ukrainians, Croatians and Latvians have been especially successful in this regard. East European DPs formed the core of the ethnic organisations which became influential by 1974 and some survivors remain the most important advocates of multicultural policy into the present. Integration into an effective labour force worked rather well on the Snowy. Total assimilation did not. Nor is this surprising as non-Australian workers outnumbered Australians in the camps and hostels and were often treated with hostility or indifference when they ventured into the "mainstream". There is less evidence that either the churches or the unions made comparable efforts. An International Club was formed in Cooma, as well a branch of the Good Neighbour Council.
So the record is complex. There were fewer murders than in some quiet suburbs today and fewer deaths than on the roads. The SMHA used the qualifications and experience of some but grossly neglected others - "in the main it refused to recognise qualifications from other than Australian, British or American universities and institutions, an attitude that severely hindered, and even destroyed, the careers of many migrants" (Collis p.201). In this it did not differ from most other employers. Even today the non-recognition of overseas qualifications is a frequent grievance despite machinery for recognition which simply did not exist, other than for skilled tradesmen, in the late 1940s. These were catered for by "on the job" training by the SMHA. The pecking order of Australian, British and American management, skilled northern Europeans and labouring others, was largely preserved as elsewhere. British migrants were free to choose the Snowy. German craftsmen were deliberately recruited in Germany and Norwegians were contracted from Norway. But other Europeans were passed through the large migrant camps and sent to the Snowy as labourers without having much choice of destination or occupation. The tradition that Australia did not need educated migrants had already been set in the 1830s when assisted passages were only available to agricultural labourers and domestic servants. Frank Kunz found, in his survey of DPs, that resentment against being classified as unskilled was the most strongly felt grievance even after thirty years. However, many were given a very useful training in crafts and skills which equipped them for employment once they left the Scheme.
The positive side was, of course, that European migrants were able to save enough to start new homes and families once their two year bond was completed. They could not have done so in their homelands which were in ruins or under Communist control. They showed to those who cared to see that major construction and industrial projects could not be completed without them. There was no way in the post-war economy that Australians alone could have built the Snowy, or the steel industry, or the motor industry, or have built Canberra and the suburbs of the growing cities. Migrants were not just people with funny clothes and funny food. In "selling" the Scheme, migrants were presented as productive workers, whereas in much Good Neighbour and Immigration Department propaganda they tended to be presented as quaint "folk".
COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?
It is often argued that the Snowy Scheme could not be built today for ecological, budgetary or conservationist reasons. It could also not be built today, in the same way, because the large reserves of bonded and newly arrived immigrant labour are no longer there. Despite increased mechanisation in mining, construction and related industries, this type of massive public works still needs heavy manual labour, if to a much lesser extent than fifty years ago. There is no bonded or directed labour involved in the immigration program today nor have there been any assisted passages other than for refugees since 1982. The whole emphasis of the currently smaller program has moved away from manual workers to highly skilled professionals and business migrants. Immigrants might fill labour gaps by temporary entry or employer nomination, which is common for highly skilled workers. There is a higher level of unemployment than in 1949, when there was virtually none and the national labour force is much bigger and better qualified. But despite "work for the dole" schemes it is improbable that public opinion would allow the direction of the unemployed to remote and dangerous jobs and locations. Most of the Snowy workers did not have a political voice. They were without the vote and had very limited influence upon their unions. They were accepted with great reluctance by many Australians and governments put a great deal of effort into "selling" them to the public. One major factor in gaining acceptance for immigration was the role of immigrants in building the Snowy. They were the pioneers of a multicultural society. But nobody knew this at the time!
REFERENCES
- Collis, B. Snowy:the Making of Modern Australia. Sydney, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990.
- Jupp, J. Arrivals and Departures. Melbourne, Cheshire-Lansdowne, 1966.
- Kobal, I. Men who built the Snowy. Sydney, The Saturday Centre, 1982.
- Kobal, I. The Snowy: Cradle of a New Australia. Rydalmere (NSW), Author, 1999.
- Kunz, E. F. Displaced Persons: Calwell's New Australians. Sydney, ANU Press/Pergamon, 1988.
- Martin, J. Refugee Settlers. Canberra, ANU Press, 1965.
- McGoldrick, K. Snowfraus: the women of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Sydney, Kangaroo Press, 1998.
- McHugh, S. The Snowy; the people behind the power. Melbourne, Heinemann, 1989.
- Saravanja, D. The Snowy and Croatians. Newtown (NSW), Author, 1999.
- Sluga, G. Bonegilla "a place of no hope". University of Melbourne History Department, 1988.
- Unger, M. Voices from the Snowy. Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 1989.
- Wigmore, L. Struggle for the Snowy. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1968.
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