Australia's culture: a census of newcomers on Aboriginal country

Which languages Australians use at home

Australia has no official language. English is the de facto national language, and Australian English follows British rather than American spelling. The census asks what language each person uses at home, and in 2021, by the Australian Bureau of Statistics' count, 22.8% of the population answered something other than English, up from 21.6% in 2016.

What the migrants brought

Each line records a migration. Mandarin speakers were mostly born in China; more than half of Arabic speakers were born overseas, most often in Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt; and Punjabi gained 107,000 speakers between 2016 and 2021, an increase of 80.4% that the Bureau links to arrivals from India. Italian, the language of the postwar Italian migration, still had 228,000 speakers in 2021. In 2021, 3.4% of the population, some 872,000 people, spoke English not well or not at all.

Deaf Australians have their own language. Auslan was the main language of about 6,500 deaf people in 2004, and a small community of about 100 uses Australian Irish Sign Language.

Which Aboriginal languages survive

More than 250 Aboriginal languages are thought to have been spoken at the time of European contact, with many dialects besides. Wikipedia's culture article puts the number that survive at about 70, all but 20 of them endangered. The National Indigenous Languages Survey of 2018 and 2019 found more than 120 language varieties in use or being revived, and counted 70 of those in use as endangered. In 2021, 84% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people spoke only English at home.

The census names the languages that remain. Kriol, an English-based creole of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, had 7,403 speakers in 2021, followed by Djambarrpuyngu with 3,839, Pitjantjatjara with 3,399, Warlpiri with 2,592, Murrinh Patha with 2,063 and Tiwi with 2,053. Tasmania had perhaps five to sixteen languages before colonisation; the last speaker of a traditional Tasmanian language, Fanny Cochrane Smith, died in 1905, and palawa kani is being reconstructed from surviving words.

How the census measures who Australians are

The share born overseas has risen and fallen with immigration policy. It was 17.7% at the first national census in 1911, fell to 9.8% by 1947 as two world wars and two depressions cut migration, and rose again with the postwar programme. By 2021 just over 7 million people, 27.6% of the population, had been born overseas. England was still the most common birthplace, at 927,490 people, but India had moved to second place with 673,352, followed by China, New Zealand and the Philippines.

Ancestry is asked separately and people may give two. English was the most common answer in 2021, given by 33.0% of the population, followed by Australian at 29.9%, then Irish, Scottish and Chinese. The Bureau reads the Australian answer as that of families whose parents and grandparents were born in the country or who do not know their origins, since almost half of those who chose it gave no second ancestry. The number reporting Australian Aboriginal ancestry rose from 144,000 in 2016 to 741,000 in 2021, after the category was added to the census form.

The older migrations are ageing. Some 360,000 Italians arrived between 1947 and 1976, and the Italian-born population peaked at 290,000 in 1971; by 2021 it was 163,000, with a median age of 72. The children stayed: more than 1.1 million Australians reported Italian ancestry in 2021.

How the Dreaming ties law to country

Aboriginal belief rests on the Dreaming, which Wikipedia's account of Aboriginal culture describes as both the time of creation and a present reality: ancestral beings travelled the land and made its features, and they laid down the rules for living on it. Their tracks cross the continent as songlines that are performed in ceremony. The words law and lore are used almost interchangeably for these rules, which govern land and kinship and are learned from childhood. Particular stories belong to particular groups, and some are never shared outside them.

At Uluru the traditional owners, the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara people who call themselves Anangu, call this law Tjukurpa. The Parks Australia welcome written by Anangu describes Uluru and Kata Tjuta as formed by creation ancestors who left marks in the land and made laws to keep, and asks visitors to learn about Tjukurpa while they are there. The Gunditjmara tell of volcanic eruptions at Budj Bim, and radiometric dating published in 2020 placed those eruptions at least 34,000 years ago, which Wikipedia's account notes could be read as evidence of the age of the oral histories.

What Australians believe

Australia has no state religion, and the constitution prohibits the Commonwealth from establishing a church or restricting the free exercise of religion. At Federation in 1901, 97% of Australians gave a Christian affiliation. At the 2021 census 43.9% did, down from 61.1% ten years earlier, and 38.9% answered no religion, up from 15.5% in 2001. The Catholic Church counted 20% of the population and the Anglican Church 9.8%; the Anglicans had been the larger denomination until 1986.

Postwar migration brought other faiths. In 2021 Islam accounted for 3.2% of the population, Hinduism 2.7% and Buddhism 2.4%. The Bureau's case study of Indian-born Australians found Hinduism reported by 51.0% and Sikhism by 22.1% of them. Christmas falls in the southern summer, and Easter and Christmas are public holidays.

How painters and writers found the country

Aboriginal art runs from rock engravings and hand stencils dated to 35,000 years ago to bark painting and body decoration. In the twentieth century it entered the galleries: the landscape painter Albert Namatjira worked in watercolour in a Western manner, and the Papunya Tula movement developed acrylic dot painting. Britannica records that many Aboriginal communities earn income by selling art, and Wikipedia names painting as a large source of income at Yuendumu and other Central Australian communities.

Colonial painting followed British models until the Heidelberg School of the 1880s and 1890s, when Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin painted the bush in the open air. After 1945 Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan, known above all for his series on the bushranger Ned Kelly, took the Outback as their subject. Patrick White received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. The film industry began early, with The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, declined in the 1920s and revived with public funding in the 1970s, when Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max found audiences abroad.

The Danish architect Jørn Utzon won the international competition for the Sydney Opera House in 1957, the building opened in 1973, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2007 as a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture.

How Australia moved from assimilation to multiculturalism

Britannica describes Australian culture until the Second World War as almost exclusively Anglo-Celtic, held that way by a small and persecuted Aboriginal population and by the White Australia policy. The shift came in the 1970s: the Whitlam government formally ended White Australia and passed the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, and the Fraser government that followed resettled Indochinese refugees, promoted multiculturalism as policy and in 1978 set up the Special Broadcasting Service as a multicultural broadcaster.

The policy has been argued over since. In the late 1990s Britannica records a conservative backlash against multiculturalism and minority rights, and Wikipedia's history of Australia notes that the government of the time abolished the Office of Multicultural Affairs and later introduced a citizenship test. Migration continued to grow, and its sources moved to Asia: the Bureau counts China overtaking the United Kingdom as the leading source of permanent migrants in 2011, and more than a quarter of the 3.3 million migrants who arrived between 2006 and 2021 were born in China or India.

How the music carries both traditions

Britannica describes Australian music as two traditions. Aboriginal singing and the drone of the didjeridu belong to ceremonies that re-enact the Dreaming, and bands such as Warumpi Band and Yothu Yindi brought elements of those songs into rock. The colonial tradition produced the bush ballad: Banjo Paterson's words to Waltzing Matilda, written around 1895, made it an unofficial national anthem long before Advance Australia Fair replaced God Save the Queen in the 1970s.

Rock arrived in the late 1950s. Johnny O'Keefe's Wild One reached the national charts in 1958, the year Slim Dusty's Pub With No Beer became a country hit abroad, and the Easybeats, formed at a migrant hostel near Sydney, had an international hit with Friday on My Mind in 1966. The pub circuit produced AC/DC and Cold Chisel, and the television programme Countdown carried Australian pop from the 1970s.

What Australians eat

The base of the diet is British. Britannica calls the traditional British evening meal still common, and Wikipedia's culture article lists meat and three vegetables and the meat pie among the traditional meals, with the barbecue as the characteristic way of cooking outdoors. Vegemite, a yeast extract, is a staple spread; pavlova and lamingtons are the familiar desserts; and ANZAC biscuits recall the rations of soldiers at Gallipoli.

Migration changed what is cooked. Before the 1950s olive oil and pasta were hard to find, and Britannica now counts pizza and pasta among the most popular dishes. Greek, Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese migrants each added their own. Bush foods eaten by Aboriginal people for millennia, such as kangaroo and witchetty grubs, or finger limes and kakadu plums, have returned to restaurant menus, and the macadamia is grown and sold commercially. RECIPESpec catalogues the dishes themselves.

Why the football codes split the country

Cricket is the summer game and is followed in every state. The first recorded match was played in Sydney in 1803, an Aboriginal team toured England in 1868, and the match between a combined New South Wales and Victoria side and an English team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1876 to 1877 is counted as the first Test. The Ashes rivalry with England dates from a satirical obituary for English cricket printed after Australia's win in 1882.

Winter divides by code and by region. Australian rules football, codified in Melbourne in the late 1850s and early 1860s, holds four of the six states: Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, and its Grand Final is played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground at the end of September. Rugby league, which broke away from rugby union in 1908, dominates New South Wales and Queensland, whose State of Origin series is played each year. Soccer has the most players of any football code, and in the second half of the twentieth century many of its clubs were founded by European migrant communities. Public holidays follow the same history: Anzac Day on 25 April marks the Gallipoli landing of 1915, and Australia Day on 26 January the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.