Bird of paradise

I met Carly for lunch today on St Kilda Road and spotted this beauty outside her place of work. Apparently this plant was introduced to Australia from South Africa which is apt as, after a sandwich and walk in the park, I visited the Immigration Museum in central Melbourne. The museum houses a really interesting and very well presented overview of 100 years of immigration to Australia. I got the rundown on the Scottish contribution to this country, in lowland Scots, which made me happy and sad at the same time.

Luckily, I didn't have to sit the Diction or Language Test to get into the country when I arrived a few weeks ago. The test was a method which enabled immigration officials to exclude individuals on the basis of race without explicitly saying so. The test would be no less than fifty words long, and the passage chosen could often be very difficult, so that even if the test was given in their own language, a person was likely to fail. Although the test could theoretically be given to any person arriving in Australia, in practice it was given selectively on the basis of race. Jewish political activist Egon Erwin Kisch from Czechoslovakia, who was exiled from Germany for opposing Nazism, arrived in Australia in 1934. The Government of Joseph Lyons went to extraordinary lengths to exclude Kisch, including using the Language Test. He was fluent in a number of European languages, and after completing passages in several languages, finally failed when he was tested in Scottish Gaelic. The officer who tested him had grown up in northern Scotland, but did not have a particularly good grasp of Gaelic himself. In the High Court case of R v Wilson; ex parte Kisch the court found that Gaelic was not within the fair meaning of the Act, and overturned Kisch's convictions for being an illegal immigrant. The failure to exclude Kisch brought the Language test into widespread public ridicule.

Good to see that things have changed and Australia is now a far more welcoming place!