Life in Australia Videos, then and now

This video about life in Melbourne (which is really a love story) was made by the Department of Immigration in the mid 1960s to entice migrants to come from Great Britain.

Not enough Britons were coming though, despite the obvious attractions shown off in the video, not least of which was booty shaking dance parties (at 17:20), so the government had decided that other Europeans had to come to make up the numbers, first northern Europeans, then southern.

There had been a trickle of non-European immigration up to this point, but it didn’t get really going until South Vietnam fell to international communism, when a lot of refugees from Vietnam were accepted, the “boat people”, many of whom were actually ethnically Chinese, and, in the same fateful year, 1975, the Lebanese Civil War got going, and later Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser decided that Muslims from the Beqaa Valley would make excellent law abiding and upstanding citizens, and imported thousands of them into south west Sydney – people, even current government ministers, are still scratching their heads about this decision. The Australian women, one as young as 14, who were victims of the Lebanese gang rape campaign in Sydney in 2000, may also have an opinion.

Speaking of Sydney, they had their own version, with a narrator even, probably scenically and otherwise better:

(Who knew that we actually manufactured things like electronic equipment and clothing back then, instead of just engaging in property market speculation and having the world’s vastest archipelago of independent cafes serving artisanally brewed coffee.)

By the 2000s, immigration became a free for all, we no longer discriminated, lost our sense of discrimination. In terms of refugees, the policy became if there is a war going on in whatever shithole you’re from, then we’ll take you, some of you, and later you can bring the others. The Immigration Department is somewhat schizo for want of a better word, in that it is particularly pedantic and thorough with applicants for most categories of visa, like spouse visas, but if it’s refugees they’ll pretty much take anyone, as long as they keep their mouths shut about any fervent desire to kill infidels they may have, and remember to delete the gory or illegal videos off their phones.

Both of the Life in Australia videos here give a mostly idealised view of life of course, as they are long form advertisements. In terms of housing they mostly show you the nice, probably geographically middle rung suburbs, and although in the Melbourne one there are inner city tower blocks in view, but not the slummy back streets nearby.

Because of all the immigration Melbourne ever expands, (Sydney can’t so much, being hemmed in by mountains and ocean) to places like, say, Pakenham, which would have been farmland when the video was done, and Pakenham is where you can buy a three bedroom house today for median price only about $450,000, which is a bargain, given the Melbourne median is 800 odd, and in the areas shown in the video, over a million.

So Pakenham is populated by people who can’t afford to take on a gigantic mortgage, even on two incomes, and most of them are Australians, lots of young families. There are also a lot of immigrants of course, many of them are often kind of innocuous if smelly or inscrutable, and then there are some number of Africans, mostly “Sudos”, and here are some taking exercise in a local neighbourhood park last week:

The people in the Department of Immigration videos above, if they could see the kind of things that go on in places like Pakenham, and this is just one of so many that we couldn’t possibly keep up with, would be perplexed about it all no doubt, and wonder what on earth happened to their city, and country, what sort of madmen had taken over and allowed this to happen.

It’s all very interesting and there really is no going back to what was, the numbers are just too great, but there are things that can be done to prevent further disintegration, like an immigration moratorium, if any sort of political will could develop for that but as of now everyone is just too terrified of being called the “r” word, and all of this stuff is just going to get worse for the foreseeable future. Whatever the forces that have driven us to this point are, in this country they are likely to just have to burn themselves out in some way, so we can start again some day.

If it helps you can watch this other video, which comes from some game:

You need to watch the whole hour to get the full effect though.