White African migrants in regional Queensland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2014.25Keywords:
Movement for Democratic Change campaigns, white Africa migration, regional Queensland, diverse cultures and experiencesAbstract
During the political tension that accompanied the Movement for Democratic Change campaigns and the related farm invasions in the year 2000, international journalists converged on Zimbabwe. In one of the reports on this complex human tragedy, Times journalist Daniel McGrory noted that the Australian High Commission was receiving 400 visa inquiries a day, and that ‘brochures for Kangaroo Island and [the] Darling Downs are in many a farmhouse’. It seems surprising that this particular area of regional Queensland would appear significant enough to be mentioned in The Times, and this raises the question of why it might have been a chosen destination for white Africans. The reasons that white Africans migrate to Australia are well documented, but the question of why some choose to settle in regional Queensland is intriguing. Such migration supports the contention that regional areas are not moribund or isolated from external forces, but that they are shaped by the active movement of peoples with diverse cultures and experiences.
References
In 1980, majority rule ended the white-dominated government of Rhodesia. The terms Rhodesia/Rhodesians will be used with reference to the period before this, while Zimbabwe/Zimbabwean will be used for the period afterwards.
Daniel McGrory, ‘Fearful farmers seek a place in Australian sun’, The Times, 2 July 2000, http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/2jula.html#link13.
There are different frameworks in which the construct ‘white’ can be understood, but here this self-identifying term is used to refer to people of European ancestry who have lived in Africa.
James Forrest, Ron Johnston and Michael Poulsen, ‘Middle class diaspora: Recent immigration to Australia from South Africa and Zimbabwe’, South African Geographical Journal 95(1) (2014), 54–5; Julie Kalman, ‘Mansions in Maroubra: Making a Jewish South African home in Australia’, History Australia 11(1) (2013), 175–96; P. Eric Louw and Gary Mersham, ‘Packing for Perth: The growth of a Southern African diaspora’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 10(2) (2001), 303–33; D. Lucas, M. Jamali and B. Edgar, ‘Zimbabwe’s exodus to Australia’, paper presented at the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific Conference 2011, Flinders University, 1–22, http://www.afsaap.org.au/Conferences/2011/LucasJamaliEdgar.pdf. See also Eleanor Venables, ‘The women from Rhodesia: An auto-ethnographic study of immigrant experience and [re]aggregration in Western Australia’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2004); Eleanor Venables, ‘Recollection of identity: The reassembly of the migrant’, Journal of Australian Studies 27(77) (2003), 109–16.
Forrest, Johnston and Poulsen, ‘Middle class diaspora’, 58–60.
Of all Zimbabweans who have arrived in Australia since 1991, 2.6 per cent live in the Darling Downs, 2.6 per cent on the Sunshine Coast and 2.2 per cent in the Rockhampton region. From a total of 898 residents, 146 South Africans were settled in the Darling Downs as a result of the State Specific Regional Migration Scheme. See Forrest, Johnston and Poulsen, ‘Middle class diaspora’, 58.
This can include retirement migration and also those seeking better opportunities. See Michaela Benson and Karen O’Reilly, Lifestyle migration: Expectations, aspirations and experiences (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
‘AS’, interview with author, 10 March 2014, Toowoomba.
This relates to cultural orientation and primary language spoken, as most Afrikaners are bi-lingual. For a study on Afrikaans speakers in Toowoomba, see Hatoss Aniko, Donna Starks and Henriette Janse van Rensburg, ‘Afrikaans language maintenance in Australia’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 34, no. 1 (2011), 4–12.
‘AP’, interview with author, 25 January 2014, Toowoomba.
Haggis argues that white Australia limits those to whom it chooses to offer hospitality. See Jane Haggis, ‘White Australia and otherness: The limits to hospitality’, in Anna Hayes and Robert Mason (eds), Cultures in refuge: Seeking sanctuary in modern Australia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 15–30. For a related study of the invisibility of South African migrants in New Zealand, see Andrew Trlin, ‘“It’s all so different here . . . ”: initial employment and social engagement experiences of South Africans in New Zealand’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21(1) (2012), 57–81.
The 2011 Census reported that Zimbabwe-born residents of Australia were more likely to have higher non-school qualifications compared to the Australian population as a whole (74.5 per cent compared with 55.9 per cent), and that they had a higher rate of employment (82 per cent compared with 65 per cent for the Australian population as a whole) and were significantly over-represented in the professional occupation category. Community information summary: Zimbabwe born (Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship) 4, http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/statistics/comm-summ/_pdf/zimbabwe.pdf.
Louise O’Keefe, ‘Couple sees changes in 25 years’, The Chronicle, 7 July 2009, http://www.thechronicle.com.au/news/couple-watches-city-change-25-years/265999.
Maurice French, Toowoomba: A sense of history, 1840–2008 (Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland, 2009), pp. 427–9.
‘AS’, interview with author, 10 March 2014, Toowoomba. While Afrikaans-speaking South Africans clearly have a different language and culture, bilingual education means they are well positioned to access the English-language Australian world.
The next highest ranking countries of birth are England 2.1 per cent, New Zealand 1.4 per cent and South Africa with 0.6 per cent. Australia-wide, 69.8 per cent were born in Australia. Australian Bureau of Statistics: 2011 Census, http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/317?opendocument&navpos=220.
The University of Southern Queensland is located in Toowoomba, the University of Queensland’s Gatton campus is 30 minutes’ drive away, and medical and nursing students from both Queensland and Griffith University can complete half their studies in Toowoomba.
French, Toowoomba.
Commonalities between white settler societies are discussed by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a discussion of race in Australia see Ghassan Hage, White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (New York: Routledge, 2000). Louw and Merscham point out that the settlement transition is easy due to historical commonalities shared between Australia and South Africa, in ‘Packing for Perth’, 321.
Australia publicly abandoned race-based policies only twenty years before South Africa, yet on occasion Australians criticise white Africans because of South Africa’s history. See Patti McCarthy, ‘How Australians view South Africans’, SAbona: The Mag for South Africans Living in Oz, 10 December 2009, http://www.sabona.com.au/articles_detail.ews?articles_detail.ewdid=418.
Annika Teppo, The making of a good white: a historical ethnography of the rehabilitation of poor whites in a suburb of Cape Town (Helsinki, Finland: Helsinki University Press, 2004), p. 118.
Richard Ballard and Gareth A. Jones, ‘Natural neighbors: Indigenous landscapes and eco-estates in Durban, South Africa’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101(1) (2011), 136.
Pauline Leonard, ‘Landscaping privilege: being British in South Africa’, in France Twine and Bradley Gardner (eds), Geographies of Privilege (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 105.
See Ballard and Jones, ‘Natural neighbors’, 131–48.
In 1904, 6 per cent were urban, but by 1936, 44 per cent were urban. This increased to 76 per cent in 1960. David Welsh, ‘Urbanisation and the solidarity of Afrikaner nationalism’, Journal of Modern African Studies 7(2) (1969), 265–76. See also Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Why did apartheid’s supporters capitulate? “Whiteness”, class and consumption in urban South Africa, 1985–1995’, Society in Transition 31(1) (2000), 36–44.
The way this trope appears in Afrikaans culture is discussed by Jennifer Wenzel in ‘The pastoral promise and the political imperative: The plaasroman tradition in an era of land reform’, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 46(1) (2000), 90–113. On rural Cape farms, it has been argued that there was ‘a close link between white identity, land ownership and a fierce insistence on the farmer’s independence and final authority over all who lived and worked on the land’. Joachim Ewert and Andries du Toit, ‘The micro-politics of paternalism: The discourses of management and resistance on South African fruit and wine farms’, Journal of Southern African Studies 19(2) (1993), 318.
This was deeply embedded within Afrikaans culture during the apartheid era. See Albert Grundlingh and Hilary Sapire, ‘From feverish festival to repetitive ritual? The changing fortunes of great trek mythology in an industrializing South Africa, 1938–1988’, South African Historical Journal 21(1) (1989), 19–38.
Rian Malan, My traitor’s heart: A South African exile returns to face his country, his tribe and his conscience (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p. 94.
Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock, Rhodesians never die: The impact of war and political change of white Rhodesia c. 1970–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 9.
Most were born in Britain, South Africa and other African countries. In 1969, only 40 per cent of the white population was born in Rhodesia, and more than half of the population could establish a non-Rhodesian citizenship. See Godwin and Hancock, Rhodesians never die, pp. 16–17.
These ranged from Salisbury (97,000 white; 280,000 non-white) and Bulawayo (49,000; 187,000), down to Umtali (8,000; 36,000) and Shabani (1,500; 14,000). See Godwin and Hancock, Rhodesians never die, pp. 20–1.
For discussions on white African identity in Zimbabwe, see Dan Wylie, ‘The schizophrenias of truth-telling in contemporary Zimbabwe’, English Studies in Africa 50(2) (2007), 151–69; Elaine Windrich, ‘Zimbabwe lives: Autobiography as history’, Third World Quarterly 28(7) (2007), 1401–11; Rory Pilossof, ‘The unbearable whiteness of being: Land, race and belonging in the memoirs of white Zimbabweans’, South African Historical Journal 61(3) (2009), 621–38; David Hughes, Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race landscape and the problem of belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tony Simoes da Silva, ‘Longing, belonging, and self-making in white Zimbabwean life writing: Peter Godwin’s When a crocodile eats the sun’, LiNQ 38 (2011); Richard Gehrmann, ‘A white African experience of identity, survival and holocaust memory’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 47–8.
Before independence, significant proportions of the white population either had moderate views or liberal political values. Andrew Hartnack, ‘Whiteness and shades of grey: Erasure, amnesia and the ethnography of Zimbabwe’s whites’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies forthcoming (2014), 6.
Hartnack, ‘Whiteness and shades of grey’, 10–11.
‘MT’, interview with author, 15 April 2014, Toowoomba.
Hartnack ‘Whiteness and shades of grey’, 4.
Godwin and Hancock, Rhodesians never die, pp. 17–18.
Paul Moorecraft and Peter McLaughlin, The Rhodesian war: A military history (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2008), p. 146.
‘AP’, interview with author, 25 January 2014, Toowoomba.
O’Keefe, ‘Couple sees changes in 25 years’.
The ten-year moratorium obliges international medical migrants to work in rural and regional areas before gaining full access to the benefits of working in the Australian health system. Melinda Ham, ‘Patients turned to local GP after floods’, International Medical Graduate, 28 April 2011, http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/patients-turn-to-local-gp-after-floods.
The movement of South African doctors has been covered by P. C. Arnold, A unique migration: South African doctors fleeing to Australia (CreateSpace, 2010), p. 13.
Graeme Hugo, ‘Australia’s state-specific and regional migration scheme: An assessment of its impacts in South Australia’, Journal of International Migration and Integration/Revue de l’integration et de la migration internationale 9(2) (2008), 125–45.
‘White Zimbabwean families make their way to country Queensland’, 7.30 Report (transcript), ABC TV, 15 August 2000, http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s163928.htm.
‘White Zimbabwean families’.
Damian Griffiths, immigration agent, in ‘White Zimbabwean families’.
Barb Grey, ‘Locating to rural Australia: Recruitment to farm jobs and rural jobs in Australia’, SAbona: The Mag for South Africans Living in Oz, 14 August 2012, http://www.sabona.com.au/articles_detail.ews?articles_detail.ewdid=168.
See, for example, http://www.meetup.com/Brisbane-support-network-to-Zimbabwe-South-African-migrants.
A New Zealand study also revealed that some migrants felt a regional city was more aligned to South African culture than a large capital city. See Carina Meares et al., Bakkie, Braai and Boerewors: South African employers and employees in Auckland and Hamilton (North Shore City: Massey University/University of Waikato Integration of Immigrants Programme, 2011), p. 60.
‘AP’, interview with author, 25 January 2014, Toowoomba.
K. Vorster, personal communication, 26 February 2014.
Graham Fuller, ‘Australia safe haven for strife-torn Zimbabweans’, Queensland Country Life, 13 December 2000, http://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/general-news/australia-safe-haven-for-strifetorn-zimbabweans/4757.aspx.
O’Keefe, ‘Couple sees changes in 25 years’.
Rumevite News, Spring edition, 2012, http://www.agriproducts.com.au/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=PpY_ew7ljq4%3D&tabid=143.
‘Australia means shorter convos’, The Gympie Times, http://www.qt.com.au/news/australia-means-shorter-conversations/1252257.
Nostalgia can be either restorative or reflective. Judith L. Coullie, ‘The ethics of nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18(2) (2014), 199.
Leslie, 24 June 2012, ‘Ash and Les on bicycles’, http://ashlescycling.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/sunday-24th-june-2012-toowoomba.html.
Leslie, 29 July 2012, ‘Ash and Les on bicycles’, http://ashlescycling.blogspot.com.au/2012_07_01_archive.html.
Godwin and Hancock, Rhodesians never die, p. 9.
John Farmer was born in Bulawayo, and the flame lilies growing in his Toowoomba garden evoke memories of them flowering in the bush in Africa. John Farmer, ‘Response to national flower of Zimbabwe Flame Lily’, National Flower, 17 February 2012, http://nationalflowers.info/2010/04/03/zimbabwe-national-flower-flame-lily.
Michelle Weston, ‘We have arrived’, in Anne Dashwood (ed.), Words from Toowoomba: An anthology by Toowoomba Wordsmiths (Toowoomba: Boogie Books, 2012), p. 42.
‘White Zimbabwean families’.
See Brady Albrand, ‘We grew up colour blind’: White South Africans’ belonging in regional Queensland’(BA(Hons) thesis, University of Southern Queensland, 2013), p. 30.
Anthony Brand, ‘Couple tells of assassination claim’, The Gatton Star, 4 March 2012, http://www.gattonstar.com.au/news/couple-tell-assassination-claim-mugabe-zimbabwe/1293200.
Susannah Guthrie, ‘On the up:Vampire Diaries’ Rick Cosnett’,The New Daily, 12 April 2013, http://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/2013/12/04/vampire-diaries-rick-cosnett/#./?&_suid=139220095339309422763059519293.
Leonard, ‘Landscaping privilege’, 112.
Sheila Macdonald, Martie and others in Rhodesia (London: Cassell and Co., 1927), p. 2.
