I tell the story of nearly five decades of Indian migration to Australia from the late 1960s to 2015, through the eyes of the migrants and their families. Placing the stories of early and recent migrants side by side shows five dramatic changes.
The first major change is the marked increase of Indian migrants, shifting from the earlier professionals to a dominance of student migrants. The Indian migrants who came to Australia between the 1960s and mid-1990s were professionals, mainly from the metropolitan cities in India. Some were multiple migrants . They were born in India but moved to Australia after a prior migration to Malaysia, Singapore, Kenya or the UK. I was one of the India-born multiple migrants to Australia who came in 1986. I had migrated to Malaysia at marriage in 1967 to a Malaysian of Indian origin. I moved to Australia 19 years later with my second husband, also a Malaysian Indian, and my younger son, 15 years old. Like the other early migrants, my husband and I were professionals with a graduate education.
The early migrant group who arrived between the late 1960s to the mid-1990s grew with family reunion. There was also a second generation who were born in Australia or who arrived before they were 12 years old and so had a significant period in Australian schools.
The story of Indian migration to Australia is one of rapid increase. The India-born in Australia almost tripled between 2004 and 2014 in response to the Australian policy focus on education and skills as pathways to migration. By mid-2014, they numbered 397,200 persons, comprising 1.7 percent of the Australian population. They were the fourth largest overseas born group, after those born in the UK, New Zealand and China. 1
In the 1960s, Indians, if they thought of Australia, saw it as a far away empty land. But in 2015 Hindi and Punjabi are routinely heard on the streets of Melbourne. There are more India-born migrants in Melbourne than those born in Greece or Italy. The 2015 queen of Moomba, a popular Melbourne festival, is a Bollywood actor, Sharda Pallavi, born in Australia of Indian parents. Australia has become part of overseas scenes in Bollywood films such as Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Salaam Namaste (2005), Chak De India (2007), Crook (2010) and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013). Australia is still exotic, but reachable.
A large group of the recent migrants, those who came to study and hoped to settle, came with temporary rather than permanent residence visas. But the migrants who came after the mid-1990s differed from the earlier arrivals in important ways. The recent migrants come from metropolitan cities and also from regional cities and villages. They are younger, more often male and single, rather than migrating with their nuclear families. This large intake of young males meant the India-born group in 2011 now has the youngest median age of all overseas groups at 31. The sex ratio also favors males with 125.2 males per 100 females. 2 But like the early migrants, the recent migrants are predominantly from the Indian middle class, because a certain level of skill and competency in English are required.
These demographic changes in the population of Indian migrants to Australia are accompanied by changes in the global position of India , the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and shifts in the Australian migration policy. India in the 1990s emerged as a significant Asian country with a more market-related global economy. The middle class in India is growing in wealth . The new information technologies make for more affordable, instantaneous communication and frequent travel. And Australian migration policy has moved toward temporary permits rather than permanent residence visas. These changes have led to differences in the way early and recent Indian migrants to Australia experience money, migration, communication and family.
The second major change is the transformation of the nature of global money flows and the characteristics of money as a currency of care. For the early migrants money went one way from Australia to their families in India or their home country. This reflected the better economic position of the migrant part of the transnational family and the continuation of the norm of money as a currency of care. Recent migrants have had to pay to migrate , and money flows two ways between migrants in Australia and their families in India.
The third major change relates to communication within the family across borders. Many of the early migrants, particularly those without siblings or parents in Australia, felt a sense of loss, of partial one-way communication with their natal families in India. Migrants visit ed their families in India perhaps once every five or six years. It was unusual for family members in India to visit those in Australia. Recent migrants and their families in India however communicate and visit frequent ly. They speak with their families at least once a week, and sometimes as often as four times a day. The fluidity and instantaneous nature of communication makes for a feeling of co-presence in the transnational family sited across borders. They are part of the everydayness of family life even though life is lived across borders. This frequent communication shapes the perception of the quantum of money.
The fourth change is that the norm of mobility replaces the assumption of settlement . The early migrants came with permanent residence visas and the expectation of settling. The recent migrants hope to settle, but the large group who have come to study, are on temporary visas. They experience a precarious mobility during the substantial period between the application of permanent residence and the outcome. The default is returning to India or a move to another country.
The fifth change is re-imagining family in India and Australia. There was a narrowing of the extended family for the early migrants, combined with diffusion as their children and other kin migrated to different nodes of the Indian diaspora. For most in the second generation, the family was nuclear rather than extended and transnational. Many of the recent migrants, however, plan if possible for a temporary or permanent extended family household. This reimagined joint family if possible means grandparents fly in to help with the care of the children. And when the grandparents require care, they have the option of settling with their children in Australia.
In the rest of the chapter I give the demographic, methodological and conceptual context of the study.
Early Indian Migrants to Australia
The history of Indian migration to Australia traditionally goes back to the arrival of lone males from British India in the first half of the nineteenth century to work as laborers, camel drivers and hawkers. There has recently been an increased interest in their stories. 3 The early well-established Sikh settlement of Woolgoolga in New South Wales traces itself back to a few Punjabis arriving around 1880s. 4 Recent discoveries of Indian DNA in the Aboriginal population have led to speculation that early Indian history in Australia could go further back and needs to be reassessed. 5
In 1901, under the White Australia Policy migration to Australia was restricted to Europeans. The Australian Census shows the Indian population was nearly static moving from 6644 persons born in India in 1911 to 6774 in 1933. 6 With the independence of India in 1947, a number of Anglo-Indians and India-born British citizens migrated to Australia, bringing the numbers to 8160. 7 The first Anglo-Indian migrants came in 1947. Their arrival was initially questioned as they were not of “pure European descent.” 8 After 1947 Anglo-Indians talked of “going home” and some eventually moved from Britain to Australia. In the 1981 film 36 Chowringhee Lane, the niece of the Anglo-Indian teacher, Violet Stoneham, kept urging her aunt to join her in Australia.
The easing of immigration restrictions from the late 1960s to 1973 led to the formal end of the White Australia Policy. There was a slow increase in the numbers of India-born who nearly doubled from 15,754 in 1966 to 28,656 in 1971. 9 Of these, perhaps only 30 percent were of Indian descent. 10 So it was an estimated 10,000 people of Indian descent who met the migration criteria of having qualifications for employment and the ability to integrate.
Indians who migrated between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s were mainly doctors, teachers and other professionals from varied parts of India. 11 In the Sikh temple in Blackburn I sometimes hear this group of migrants hankering for that period. They comment that in those days when Australians thought of Indians, they thought of doctors. Now when they think of Indians, they think of taxi drivers.
Indian Migrants Quadruple, 1996–2011
The number of persons born in India quadrupled in Australia between 1996 and 2011. Student and skilled migration since 2001 accounted for much of the increase. This has contributed to Australia’s characteristics as a migrant nation. In 2011, close to half of Australian’s population was either born overseas (26 percent) or the children of at least one parent born overseas (20 percent). It has also been part of the move from European-led migration to Asian migrants who now comprise one-third (33 percent) of the overseas born population. Persons born in India comprised 5.6 percent of the overseas born population and were the fourth largest migrant group in Australia after the UK, New Zealand and China. 12
This increase in Indian migration has changed the color of Australian cities. Melbourne in Victoria attracts the largest number of the India-born. They more than tripled from 29,000 people in 2001 to 105,000 people in 2011. The India-born population in 2011 in Melbourne accounted for 3 percent of the city’s population, making it the second largest migrant group after those from the UK (150,015). The India-born are now more numerous than those born in China (90,000), Vietnam (66,691), Italy (66,556), New Zealand (62,627) or Greece (47,666). 13
Australia however is a minnow in the wider picture of Indian emigration. Indians in Australia accounted for 1.8 percent of the 27.1 million persons in the Indian diaspora in January 2015. 14 Australians are part of the “Other” category that sent only 2 percent of remittances. 15 Australia however has an important media presence particularly in Punjab through billboards advertising education and through songs and film. There is a buzz around tourism in Australia as offering something new and different from going to London and New York. This has seemingly overcome the negative publicity around the racial assaults on Indian students in Australia between 2008 and 2010 (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1
India-born migrants in Australi...