Welcoming the Stranger - No Complaints

The Welsh have been arriving in Australia since the First Fleet.  However, only with the 19th century mining boom did significant numbers of Welsh settlers come to Australia, first to the copper mines of South Australia in the 1840s, then to the gold mines of Victoria in the early 1850s, and later to other parts.  By the turn of the century there were 12,000 settlers of Welsh descent spread throughout Australia.

The chapel (Protestant Churches independent of Anglican control) and the Welsh language provided a sense of cohesion and identity to emerging Welsh communities at this time.  Despite anglicising pressures, the Welsh language and culture have survived in Australia.  The modern countrywide Eisteddfod movement (Welsh festival of literature, music and performance) has its origins in the cultural traditions brought to this country by Welsh settlers.

Sharing life in a new land with an extended family or a local Welsh community may have been quite common 100 years ago, but such was not Andrew’s family story.  Andrew Morse was 14 years of age when he left Wales, to come to Australia with his parents, sister and two younger brothers.  That was 32 years ago, but he still feels the pain of leaving friends and extended family; he was at the stage of beginning to make deep and lasting friendships.  It hurt a lot to leave his maternal grandmother.

Andrew recalls that they did not expect a difficult transition, as they spoke English and expected cultural similarity.  And yet he remained an outsider at his first school in Melbourne’s east, making little progress in establishing friendships.  He recalls that had he been into sport he may have made it but, as things turned out, his first year at school in Australia was not easy.  Then, while his sister won a place at the Mac. Robertson Girls’ High and his two brothers at Melbourne High School, he missed out and his parents decided to send him to fee-paying Trinity Grammar, where he found support in a house system with mentoring by older boys.  It was so much easier to make friends and he enjoyed his years there.  The school had devised a way of making new students feel welcome.

Andrew’s ancestors, as in the case of so many Australians, had roots in a number of places.  Moving on was already part of his family tradition.  His great grandfather came from Ireland in search of work and found it looking after horses.  His son, Andrew’s grandfather, married a woman of Huguenot descent, whose ancestors had come to Wales to escape religious persecution in 16th century France.

While Andrew experienced some difficulty at first, his mother went from strength to strength.  In Wales she was already a nurse with post-graduate studies and, before leaving, was assured of a teaching position at Preston Institute of Technology, which was later absorbed into Victoria University.  She went on to do a Masters in Clinical Psychology and later a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne, which allowed her to move on to the role of dean at Victoria University and then at Wollongong University.

However, his father struggled to find work equivalent to what he had in Wales as an engineer with British Telecom.  It took him five years to find something at the same level.  In the meantime, he took on the jobs he could find and, with what he earned, covered the cost of repaying the house mortgage (at a time when interest rates were around 17 to 18 percent), the fees for Andrew and also for his mother while studying for her Master’s degree, and the cost of feeding and clothing the family.

Part of feeling welcome, particularly for an adult, is finding a job in accordance with one’s qualifications.  For many, especially men in the days when the male was considered the main bread-winner, the job and identity went hand in hand.  The male needed the job both to be who he is and so to feel welcome.

Moving on will always be part of the human experience.  Andrew now wonders how it will be for his youngest brother, Jamie.  He moved to Korea to marry a Korean woman.  He learnt to speak Korean and eventually got a good job.  He was promoted and then sent to company headquarters in Doha.  Obviously, there is more to settling in a new land than feeling welcome, but the welcome certainly helps the stranger adapt and also have a go at life in that land.

Fr Peter Woodruff SSC first went to Peru in1968 and is now based in Australia. He recently wrote a doctoral thesis on the impact of Andean migrants on Lima, the capital of Peru.