Today’s lesson will examine the changes and continuities of Australian migration policies, the experiences of Australian immigrants during the 1950s and 1960s, and the hardships experienced by migrants.
During this lesson you will develop your empathetic understanding and source evaluation skills.
Watch the video for an introduction to this lesson.
Lesson 1 - Hardship of migrants (Part A and B)
Duration: 7:19
Colloquialisms are the words or phrases that we use in informal speech. Colloquialisms are often figurative. They might use symbolic, analogous or metaphorical meanings. Some of the items in the interactive are even more challenging to decode as they rely on rhyming slang.
This pair matching game contains Aussie slang words and their meanings.
Before we begin today's lesson, can you match each term with its definition?
Take note of the matching term and definition as you go.
Answer these questions in your workbook:
How easy or difficult did you find it to match the definitions?
How difficult do you think it would have been for a newly arrived migrant from a non-English speaking background to understand Aussie slang?
How would this difficulty have impacted their lives?
Understanding shifts in government policy can help historians to explain the rate and pace of change.
Read the information below to develop your understanding of how important events and policy changes impacted Australia's migration patterns during the 1950s and 1960s.
The targets for the numbers of people migrating to Australia that had been set by the government were unable to be met by just British migration. In response, the government established assisted migration schemes with a number of European countries during the 1950s and 60s. This meant that the Australian government covered some of the cost for migrants to travel to Australia. The schemes started in 1945 and ran up until 1982. In addition, in response to the Hungarian Revolution 1956, and the brutal Soviet response, the Australian Government offered asylum to 14,000 Hungarian refugees. By 1961, approximately 9% of the population were of non-British origin, comprising predominantly Italians, Germans, Dutch, Greeks and Poles.
New legislation was passed in 1966 with The Migration Act (1966) that established “legal equality between British, European and non-European migrants to Australia.” (PM Malcom Turnbull speech to parliament in 2016). This was a significant change to the race-based policies that had been in place since 1901. After the implementation of this policy, non-European migration numbers gradually increased from around 750 arriving in 1966 to almost 2,700 arriving in 1971. The next wave of refugees to arrive in Australia were 6,000 Czechs fleeing the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Create a brief annotation of each of the listed dates, using information you gained from the texts to explain what happened and what was the effect.
In 1971, almost 2700 non-European migrants arrive in Australia and the significance of this is that that is up from 750 in 1966 and this is as a consequence of the Migration Act 1966.
What is assimilation?
In your workbook write:
a dictionary definition
a paragraph description of the Australian policy of assimilation.
Don't forget to hand in the work you completed today!
Your teacher will have told you to do one of the following:
Upload any digital documents you created and any photos you took of your written work to your Learning Management system (MS Teams, Google Classroom for example).
Email any digital documents you created and any photos you took of your written work to your teacher.
Make sure you keep any hand written work you did in your exercise book or folder as your teacher may need to see these when you are back in class.