First steps

It has been a little over two months since i came to Australia for the first time. I was excited to move to a different country with a very different history of emergence than from my home country of Norway.

To be honest I did not really know that much of Australian history before my first lectures in "Introduction in Australian Society". Of course I knew about the Aboriginals and the colonization of Australia by the British Empire, but not much of the details of the on-going discrimination of the indigenous population centuries of after the first fleet of European pioneers set foot on Australian soil. Neither have I heard much of the Australian multiculturalism nor how it emerged as immigrants from all over the world settled down in this strange country.

This week we were at the Melbourne museum to learn more about the indigenous population of Australia and what happened after the European colonization. I had some idea of the quarrels between the immigrants and the Aboriginals, but not to which extent and which could be described as a struggle for survival.

I don’t really know if the Australian multiculturalism is something substantial different from other countries with a similar course of history, as for example the US.

The colonization by the Brits, and other European countries, have been going on throughout centuries and in that sense I would not say that the initial colonization of Australia was that unique. The colonization and discrimination of an indigenous population is something Australian history shares with several others. What might differentiate the multiculturalism in Australia from other countries, such as the US, is that it might be more prominent than in other countries and constitutes the identity of Australian nation to a greater extent.