Last weekend my wife and I went to Cabramatta in western Sydney with my friend Peter and his friends for lunch.  Although I have lived in Sydney for many years I had never been to Cabramatta before and I had heard that it was a great place to have Vietnamese food.
 
Cabramatta has the mixed reputation as being the centre of heroin distribution and Vietnamese culture in Australia.  Up until recently, smack was sold to junkies, fairly openly in the streets there.  Once a few of the tabloid television shows started running stories about how easy it was to buy heroin in Cabramatta the police finally got their fingers out and started to do something about it.  Heroin dealing has now gone underground, and is no longer a common scene on the Cabramatta streets.
 
Cabramatta has become almost a tourist attraction, because of its large Vietnamese population and the plethora of Asian businesses and restaurants.  On Saturdays Cabramatta is very busy as the streets fill up with people who have come to buy Asian vegetables and eat at the restaurants.

It came as quite a surprise to me when I asked several of the locals for directions to an automatic teller machine, that none of them could speak English very well to the point that they couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand their replies.  It would seem that the Vietnamese population in that area of Sydney is so large, that people can live there without having to learn English. 
 
Now this isn’t going to be a rant about “foreigners must learn English if they want to live in Australia” because I know what it’s like to live in a foreign country that speaks a different language than I do. 
 
I speak enough French, Spanish and Japanese to get around, but not enough to have anything other than a childlike conversation in those languages. I think that many people don’t realise that when one learns a second language that it is so difficult to have mature conversations with any depth and that is why many non-English speaking immigrants in English-speaking countries tend to stick with their own kind so that they can speak their own language.  I lived in Japan for a year and had a Japanese girlfriend at the time so I learnt enough Japanese to be able to get by, but I found it far less taxing to speak English with native speakers as I could express myself more fully, easier.
 
Every day I accompany my wife to the train station when she commutes to and from work because there are quite a few unsavoury characters about, plus I don’t like the idea of her walking home alone at night.  The area that I live in is mainly populated by blue-collar Caucasians with a sprinkling of Southeast Asians and Sri Lankans, and it is in the process of being gentrified as the price of home ownership is sky rocketing here in Sydney forcing first-time home buyers further westward.  It’s very interesting to see the division in education, when one looks at who is standing on what platform at the train station in the morning.  The people on the platform heading east into downtown Sydney are all in office clothing reflecting in general a higher level of education than those people standing on the westbound platforms, heading out into the more industrial areas.  In general, the people heading east tend to be from a broad ethnic background, look cleaner and well groomed than the mainly caucasian people heading westward who are generally scruffy and display far more jail tattoos than I’m comfortable with.  The contrast between the people occupying the eastbound and westbound platforms is quite stark and to me it displays a cultural polarization. 
 
There seems to be a shift in Australian culture at the moment, with the population becoming better educated and employed in white collar jobs but there still is an element that seems to be in love with the whole concept of being an “outlaw”. A sort of white-trailer-trash-biker aesthetic.  I think many of you would know what I mean.  Homemade tatts, long greasy hair with long beards and black grease under the fingernails, with of course, the obligatory earrings.  To me that whole scene is so anachronistic, and it belongs to a section of Australia, that looks backwards rather than into the future direction that Australia is heading.
 
In the past, I used to see Australia as a cultural backwater but lately; I feel that we are at the forefront of cultural policy.  For the last 30 years Australia has had the forward thinking  policy of “multiculturalism” in which we have seen a shift from a predominantly Anglo-Celtic culture to a far more ethnically diverse culture. Thirty percent of the people who live in Sydney weren’t born in Australia.
 
There are many people of Anglo-Celtic background, who are concerned by the racial and cultural shift happening here in Australia as they feel that many foreigners come from less than ideal philosophical backgrounds and that they will somehow contaminate Australian culture and degrade it in the process.  I think that what a lot of these people don’t realise is that most of the people who have come here to Australia, did so because they thought Australia had something to offer that their homeland didn’t and they don’t necessarily have an agenda to change Australia into a version of their homeland.
 
One of the distressing things I’ve noticed is how some people think that because they are white they are somehow better than people who aren’t. 
 
One evening while I was waiting for my wife at the train station, I saw an old Sikh man make the mistake of asking directions from a dirty and scruffy tattooed youth with bad teeth and the mandatory sports clothing with logos plastered all over them (so beloved of white-trash).  The old Sikh asked his question to which the youth replied loudly, “WHAT?!” The old man would repeat his question to receive the same loud WHAT?!” This cycle happened four or five times until the youth exploded with “WHY DON’T YOU LEARN HOW TO SPEAK FUCKING ENGLISH?!” Then he just stormed off yelling racist epithets at the old man. The poor old shocked Sikh came up to me and then asked his directions again.  Sure enough, his accent was very thick and not that easy to understand but I hung in there and was able to help him out. 
 
The whole experience left me feeling very embarrassed, as I have never been treated in the way that the old man had been treated when I’ve been overseas in countries where I don’t speak the language.  I would say that in general, when I’m overseas, everybody I’ve ever asked directions from has been universally helpful and polite.  It really pisses me off that some ignorant lowlife scumbag thinks he’s better than someone else just because he is white. There are many people of an Anglo-Celtic background here in Australia who would do well if they took the time to learn about other cultures.  In no way am I saying that foreign cultures are better, but I am saying that we should be eclectic and take the best from every culture.