Absolutely every one of my relatives speaks English with a noticeable accent.
My father jokes that after 50+ years here he still sounds "fresh-off-the-boat."

With the recent revelations of DIMIA policy and process, I tell my family that this is no laughing matter.

The mindset of DIMIA, and by extension Australian society, is clearly to begin from a starting point that anyone ‘other’ = ‘illegal immigrant.’
There seems very little capacity in this government, or in the wider community to accept that accented English or non-anglo features, could begin from a point of Australian and then widen into diversity.

At my work, when anyone with an accent phones, I will be called because I am the only ‘foreigner’ who has family who speak English as a second, third, fourth or fifth language. Therefore, it will be clearly for me or understood by me.
It wouldn’t occur to anyone that my grandmother is in fact an accomplished linguist who speaks two languages fluently and three others conversationally.
No, accented English in my little workplace corner of Australia is a deficit and
a difficulty to be quickly moved onto Suki the foreigner.

In DIMIA, with these new revelations we can see that similar thinking occurs. Foreign is difficult, send it away…

I am so sad and angry that after all this time my beautiful family, and many like us, are still made to feel other, inferior and unwelcome.

Image from here

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 11:33 am and is filed under Personal, Welcome to my country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Click to leave a comment.