... because we humans can only work for a future we can imagine.

I arrived here as a migrant at the end of 1985. Since then I've studied and worked in number of different jobs, and I've ended up as a bilingual welfare and community worker at the Migrant Resource Centre.

I got my initial training through one of the Federal Government's labour market programs even though I didn't speak English very well at the time. These programs have been cut by the new Government and that's a pity because lots of people still need the kind of support labour market programs offer. There's a lot more competition for jobs now and while I know competitiveness is meant to be positive word, sometimes it doesn't quite work very positively for some people!

But I have to say I love my job, I love living and working in the western region of Melbourne, and I love this country. I haven't been to many other countries but I read the newspapers and talk to people who come from Europe and Asia and I've also been back to Vietnam to visit my family, so I have some kind of assurance that Australia is still the best place to live in! People smile more often here than in other countries. The housing and roads here are good, and the environment is wonderful. People who are concerned about environmental destruction might contradict that but we still have a very good environment to live in here compared to other parts of the world.

ISSUES THAT CONCERN ME MOST

The thing I've noticed most in the ten years I have been here is the constant change, particularly in government policy. I am not against all changes and changes are not always bad, and there is no perfect system anyhow. For example, after I'd been working for a few years in social services, there was a shift in policy and my employer encouraged me to do more community work. We set up new community structures and empowered people to set up their own groups and I started to see wonderful things happening. Soon much of my work involved community-government liaison and I felt what I was doing was very valuable. But the most recent round of policy changes means there are less welfare services now, less aid for people who are disadvantaged, and less aid for migrants. Welfare services can no longer adequately serve the needs of new arrivals who don't speak English, and the Migrant Resource Centre, which was founded by the Department of Immigration, can't respond adequately to the settlement problems of the new arrivals.

Right:Digital composite based on the Painting the future real interviews and created by Csaba Szamosy from images contributed by project partners, Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. People in the photo include some of those associated with the St Albans Migrant Resource Centre.

Whether you like it or not, the western region of Melbourne is a very multicultural place with a very large proportion of the population speaking a language other than English at home. Mainstream services are supposed to serve the needs of all people, not just those who speak English, but unfortunately the services for non-English speaking people are being lost and other mainstream services see our Centre as a 'dumping ground' for Vietnamese clients.

My job is to provide daily services relating to immigration issues and orientation to the new arrivals, but on top of that I'm now having to respond to general community needs as well. I'm supposed to refer people to the appropriate services and those services are supposed to use their own resources to deal with Vietnamese people's problems -- which should include an interpreter service. But often people get referred back to me for all sorts of things I'm not trained to deal with, such as mental illness or child protection. They want me to be the contact point for them and it makes it very hard for me. It is impossible for me to provide direct services for all the Vietnamese people who don't speak English in the City of Brimbank!

Even those professionals whose job it is to provide information to the Vietnamese community think they can do it through me, that when they're dealing with me, they're dealing with the whole Vietnamese community! But what annoys me most is when someone rings up and asks me to drop what I'm doing because a Vietnamese boy or girl is crying in the primary school or something. I get very upset by that because it means that not only has the community confused my role, but the service provider is also very confused about what I'm here for. I think it's quite normal for children to cry in primary school from time to time when they don't want to be there, but because the kids are Vietnamese, they're meant to be my responsibility! Or someone might be involved in a car accident with a Vietnamese person so they come in here and expect me to solve that problem too! I think that's too much!

I don't think the issue is lack of the funding. I think people are reluctant to deal with things they find difficult. They say 'Oh I don't want to deal with this client because of the cultural differences.' But I see very clearly that people use the word'culture' as an escape route so they don't have to relate to people as human beings. I really get very agitated when I hear people say 'I can't deal with that person because of the culture'. To me, that is a very convenient excuse to do nothing. Residents of Vietnamese background have a right to be provided with services and service providers should make sure they have the appropriate training to do their job properly.

I don't want to highlight the needs of Vietnamese people over any other ethnic group. I'm not saying the Vietnamese are different or that they should have more attention. We don't want to be treated differently. But the thing I want to promote is the need for the broader society to accommodate all new arrivals and make them feel part of the change. I think the service providers should be more humane in their treatment of all new arrivals, more tolerant and more sincere in what their doing. As for me with my work, I just do my best to overcome all the different kinds of problems I'm confronted with every day.

Another issue that concerns me is unemployment. A few years ago most of the factories in the West began closing down because of the recession and thousands of people lost their jobs. I'm not an economist so I don't know why all the factories closed down. I don't know why we lost our own market. I don't know what the relationship is between Australia's migration program and the economy. I have no idea. I know a little bit about the mechanics of economics though, and to me, the more people we have, the more people will eat, the more people will wear clothes, and so the more jobs we will have. But that kind of argument doesn't seem to impress people and I don't know whether it works or not. Certainly amongst the new arrivals like the Vietnamese people I'm working with, the unemployment rate is very high, especially amongst people with low English skills.

Most of the people in the West are from migrant background and of course we use English -- English language is the office language and the language of the mainstream culture. One of the good things about living in the west is that around Footscray and St Albans people don't need to speak English to shop, they don't need to speak English to go out as a group, and they definitely don't need English skills when they go to see their doctor. On the other hand I am a bit worried also about the fact that in some of the schools, such as St. Albans High, Vietnamese students speak Vietnamese in the school yard and mix with Vietnamese; where I'm not sure whether they can all speak English after they finished High School and I don't know what their employment opportunities will be if they can't speak English well.

There are unique difficulties at schools like St Albans because some of the students are new arrivals who started school in year 7, year 8, or year 9. Back in Vietnam they might have been doing okay, but here even the mathematics is done in a different way. And often they don't have enough support and resources to cope with the study, they have less educational assistance and less support than some other schools. They are given a six month language program when they arrive but afterwards they are sent back into the mainstream

I'm not against speaking Vietnamese. I think it's good to maintain the language. But if students speak Vietnamese all the time, it means they'll lose the ability to compete with the other kids, and this is illustrated by the fact that four times more high school students failed VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) English in the West, than in the Eastern part of Melbourne. Some Vietnamese people send their children to private schools and work ten, maybe fifteen hours a day to pay the school fees. And I know there's a lot of Vietnamese kids who are very successful in college but what percentage this is of the total, I don't know. What I see in my job are the young Vietnamese who came here as children and still can't speak English when they're in high school. But I think there should be more support for schools where there is a higher population of students who have had their education interrupted through immigration, or because of their refugee status, or because they arrived here without their families. Some kids succeed and make it to their last year of school and become very successful no matter what, but some kids don't and for those kids, life can be very difficult. Sometime they find the situation quite impossible so they drop out and end up being unemployed, even homeless.

Some of the young people I see through my work are also experiencing a real identity crisis. They don't know whether they are Vietnamese, or Australian. They don't know who they are. They're also suffering from racism in the school and on the streets and in the neighbourhoods. If we don't do any thing about the needs of these young people, they'll be left behind. When you're happy, you see lots of opportunities in your life. Everything seems possible. But when you're down, you don't want to do anything. I think everyone can relate to that. And some of these young people kill themselves.

Sometimes I feel very sorry for young people. I know some older people say 'in our generation we didn't even have enough to eat, and we didn't even have a bicycle to ride, and young people now dye their hair red and they don't want to go to school, they don't want to work, they want this and they want that'! But you have to be in their blanket to understand how they feel. I think young people have it more difficult than the older people. In my generation you didn't have people going around telling you the world is going to end in the year 2000, for example. In my time, we didn't have people who are so confused about their role -- men's role, women's role. On top of that, if you live in Victoria, you are forced to make a decision on your future career when you are in year 10. In my time we had fewer lifestyle stresses and you could be positive about the future. We could look forward it. I sympathise with young people now because of the confusion other people project onto them .

I don't want to focus on this because we're talking about the future, aren't we? But I do believe young people in the West are going to suffer a great deal from government cuts to support services. I think you can already see stresses in the community . People seems to behave differently in the West now. Even the bank officers behave differently, they seem less considerate than bank officers in other places. The people in the supermarket seem ruder than in the other places. People here don't thank you for your services as often as they did three years ago, ten years ago, or as often as people in other suburbs. And people are poorer than they used to be. They have less income and there are more people who are unemployed. Or that's how I feel it is and a lot of my friends feel the same way. Professionals and other people who have more income automatically move to other suburbs.

Another thing I've noticed is that people in the West are not as vocal as the people in other parts of Melbourne. Sometimes I think that if Mr Kennett (Premier of Victoria) had wanted to build a Grand Prix track somewhere in the western region instead of at Albert Park in the richer part of Melbourne, nobody would have said a thing! You could build as many Grand Prix tracks as you want! Sometimes I think you could even build a nuclear plant here and nobody would say any thing!

Part of the problem is that the sitting Labor politicians feel very comfortable, very safe, so they don't have to work that hard. They think that they don't have to do anything because people will vote Labor any way, so the party puts its money into the areas where they imagine there are swinging voters. The Liberals wouldn't put any money into us because they think people in the West will never vote for them, so what's the point! That's basically what the problem is!

But I often think I should do more. I try as much as I can to get people involved in the process of initiating change but it's very hard, especially with Vietnamese people because, without the language skills, they don't know what's going on. I'm in a privileged position so I can voice things, but I think everybody should make an effort. If you are of the first generation of migrants and you're a parent, then this is going to be your last country, the place where you die -- but for younger people, it's their future. It's their country. People shouldn't be confused about where they belong, about whether they consider Australia to be their home or not. If they're not sure, then they need to work it out, to work out whether they're going back to their country-of-origin or staying. You have to work it out for yourself because you can't leave the thing unresolved. You have to think about it hard enough to work out your identity and where you belong -- if not for yourself, then for the younger people.

I read in a novel how a Chinese American went back to China and immediately felt Chinese. Well, I have to disagree with that because things change so much. Sometimes people who have lived in Australia for most of their lives still don't feel part of this community, and say 'I still feel I belong to Vietnam' and so on. But I think they would find it very hard to be part of the community they left ten, twenty, forty years ago. I think 'back home' would have changed so much that they would not feel at home there either.

Another issue that concerns me greatly is prejudice. The people who came here after World War II from southern Europe and worked in the factories often suffered from negative feelings in the community and I think there is still a lot of prejudice. There's a kind of resentment that's being promoted by media outlets such as the local newspaper and I find that it's very harmful to our children, to our future, and very harmful to the country. Everywhere you look around the world you see evidence of conflict and wars. There's been bloody war between one race and another race in Europe and there's lots of conflict in Malaysia, in India, conflict in Pakistan or Fiji, for example. We see it on television, we see it in the newspapers. We see the evidence. So I think that we should make every kind of effort to keep our communities as harmonious as we can so we can avoid that kind of conflict here in the future .

I think that different ethnic groups in the community should put their heads together to work for a better future instead of being so accepting of people's prejudices, and what is written in the newspapers -- like the newspapers blaming Vietnamese kids for the drugs in the schools, for example, or blaming so-called 'ethnic gangs' for various things. Journalists often look at issues from a very biased point of view instead of with an open mind, and often what they say can be wrong.

I'm also very concerned about the public debates around the issue of multiculturalism in general. To my understanding, multiculturalism is about equal access to the community's resources. Sometimes multiculturalism is interpreted as promoting a very tribal kind of culture but, to me, it promotes togetherness.

In some parts of urban Victoria where the early Anglo section of the community settled, you don't see many 'ethnic' people and so it sometimes seems that multiculturalism is more about excluding ethnic communities from mainstream culture. Some people in mainstream Australia complain that multiculturalism costs them money, that implementing multicultural policies costs the tax payers too much. They talk about how we should be a 'melting pot' like America. But other people feel quite threatened when they see everyone looking the same, acting the same and feeling the same. I feel this myself. It's very scary. To me, it's important that people remain different.

Some of the commentators who have been saying we should be a 'melting pot' like America claim that multiculturalism in Australia is not working. They say it's okay for us to retain our cultural identities so long as it's in the private domain, that it's quite acceptable to be 'multicultural' in your kitchen, but you can't be multicultural in Parliament house, you can't be multicultural in a corporate meeting or in public!

An alternative to a melting pot is a salad bowl where you have all the different kinds of vegetables tossed together and yet they each retain their difference. We have lettuce, we have celery, we have tomato and cucumber -- each of them is different but together. And people can remain different but together too. I prefer this vision of multiculturalism

To me whatever you do, your culture is a part of your life, and people should have equal access to education, and to an equal say about what is going on in the community no matter what cultural background they're from. You can be Vietnamese but you also need support to learn to the best of your ability, and to get a job, without having to worry about your ethnic background. Cultural diversity is something people should promote and be reminded of because it gives colour and vitality to life. But it shouldn't mean that if you identify as Vietnamese you can't be any thing else. That you can't be an executive officer, you can't be a politician, you can't have some kind of say in deciding what goes on.

I know that working with people from different backgrounds can sometimes get really very challenging. People understand things differently and have limitations to their listening skills. But I'm very positive about multiculturalism and I think if it is promoted and encouraged, other people will see it positively too. But multiculturalism should be reflected everywhere. I talked to one of the real estate agents recently and learned that 50 per cent of people who now buy new houses around St Albans are from Vietnamese backgrounds, but to look at the buildings and street names you'd never know! Why don't we have some of the Vietnamese memories reflected through the street signs, for example? I don't mean street signs in Vietnamese but Vietnamese street names to make people feel welcome, like it's their place. The present names are quite alien to many of the people who live in St Albans. We have an Alfrieda Street, we have a George Street, we have a Queen Street, we have all these very European and very English names. But we should have some Vietnamese names and some southern European and Maltese names too by now to reflect the backgrounds of the people who live here.


MY VISION OF THE FUTURE

We can't change history but we can change the future, can't we? We should have a respect for the history, but even the history itself was interpreted differently, so it can be changed. There's been some kind of development in the way people see the past in this country. As for the future, if you focus on the positive, you're going to see things positively. If you focus on the negative, you're going to see things negatively, whatever you're ideas are. But I would like to see the future of the West as a community of harmony. Everything is propaganda in a sense, and what I'm trying to say is that we should promote positive propaganda so people will be less racist and we can have greater harmony in the community. And so young people can believe in the future.


Protected by copyright, 1996

Back to St Albans
Back to the Bioregion
About the project
Imagine The Future

[Page history: created and first published on www.ecoversity.org.au as part of Painting the future real (1995-97), the prototype for Redreaming the plain (1998-2002); taken off-line in 1998 and re-posted in a slightly modified form in July 2004 as a web archive. For more information contact redreaming@rmit.edu.au.]