"Welcome to Australia Mate!"

In recent times we have been blessed with the advent of reality television. Among some of the more interesting in this genre, are the shows that deal with a modern family leaving behind all of the advantages of the 21st century and moving into a home which represents an earlier part of our history. This could be 18th century England or perhaps an American frontier community.

There are historians of the period who provide the participants with all of the training necessary to ensure that they understand the conditions to which they are going and can assist them with information about how things are done in that time frame prior to their commencement in the setting. After that they are on their own.

The viewers of the series then see the situation unfold as people used to 21st century appliances have to cope without them and adopt the clothing and the customs of a bygone age. There is a sense of seeing another universe, another reality, another time. We feel with the people in the show as they try to cope with all of the strangeness that they encounter and all of the hardships that they have to cope with.

Yet we keep remembering all through the show that at least these people can speak the same language, the customs, while 'quaint' perhaps by modern standards, are understood and the way in which things are done, while certainly more primitive than they are in the 21st century from whence the participants come, they are not so far removed from their own world as to be totally alien.

Amazingly, when we receive refugees or migrants from other countries in which the conditions, customs, language are all radically different to our own we expect them to fit right in.

I sometimes wish there was a reality television show that could demonstrate for us how really difficult this can be.



Imagine a family that comes from an area in which there is only subsistence farming or nomadic herding of livestock. Where the homes are either mobile structures or mud brick dwellings. Where electricity and running water are not available, where gas cooking - if it exists at all is from propane gas cylinders, otherwise it is back to collecting dried dung or branches of trees to supply the fuel for the fires on which to cook. Imagine the lack of transport besides the trusted donkey, the wooden cart or old fashioned "shanks pony".

If you were in that family and were dropped into a modern developed nation and into a large capital city like Sydney or Melbourne how would you feel? How would you cope?

What would you do with all these strange things that exist in your new home?

Things like a bed with a mattress, cupboards, TV, Microwave, Fridge, electric hot plates, a kettle, etc.?

Many families with say three children given a three or four bedroom accommodation have been found filling at least two of the rooms in the place with all of the things they have no idea how to use because they have never had them before. They then exist in the remaining space and have a hard time with showers, sit down toilets, toilet paper, and a whole lot of other things that we take for granted, but which they have never seen much less used.

In addition to all of the above these people do not speak the language, cannot find the foods with which they are familiar and cannot get jobs in our society because all of the skills they have learned are irrelevant in our society. One of the biggest problems is that even their labour is no longer as useful as it once was, because we have moved from an industrial to a post industrial society and so we can no longer put these people to work in unskilled labouring jobs with as much ease as we used to be able to muster.

In short, life for these folks is tough! Indeed, if we had a reality TV show for the people back in their country, this would be their version of "Survivor".

At what point are we going to realise that the refugees that we are now receiving into the country from the 'Horn of Africa" or the Middle or Near East or South East Asia are no longer the Europeans who share so many of our cultural historical and religious values and customs, but may be people for whom what we have in Australia is as alien as their situation would be for us?

Once we realise the difficulties that we are putting them through, we may actually want to do something about it. The question is, are we skilled enough to know how to intervene and how to be good neighbours?

In the past, we had the Department of Immigration employ welfare and social workers in resettlement and migrant services teams to assist the process. Now we don't have these services. In the past, we had organisations like the Good Neighbour Council which provided some of the assistance that is being referred to. Now they have gone.

So while Australia may be a paradise that we can enjoy, we are actually making it difficult for people to integrate into our host society, because we somehow expect them to not only make the huge leap from their undeveloped countries to our way of life, but we also expect them to be grateful for the experience.

I think we may need to reconsider how we say "Welcome to Australia mate!"

What do you think?