The Finnish Migrant Community in Post-war Melbourne: ”The only thing that spoke English was the radio”

With the exception of a handful of historical and demographic studies, Finnish and Australian scholars have written little about Finnish immigrants in Australia. 2 All previous works have generally focussed on uncovering facts and figures but have not addressed the question of Finnish ethnicity in Australia. This article is an attempt to explore some of the questions studies of Finnish migration and typical writings on large ethnic groups have left unanswered. How did Finnish ethnic community develop in Melbourne despite Finns’ apparent absorption into Australian society? Why did they choose to maintain their cultural heritage after moving, from their perspective, to the end of the earth? How did they define their Finnishness? Or, put in more general terms, how does a person or a group become ethnic if not by their visible difference? As the existence of the Finnish Church and Society indicates, Finnish immigrants in Melbourne have formed an ’ethnic group’; i.e. a social group defined by its members’ shared descent, history, culture and experience.3 Their ’ethnicity’, or sense of common origins and history, has been unlike most others’, however, as it has not been manifested through conspicuous cultural or physical difference. Finns have had little impact on Australian culture, cuisine or politics, and as an ethnic group they have been virtually invisible to the rest of Australian society. Because of this, typical studies ethnicity focussed on large and conspicuous migrants groups contribute little towards understanding the development of Finnish-Australian migrant ethnicity. 4 To explore Melbourne’s Finnish immigrants personal experiences of ethnicity, ten oral histories involving six men and eight women were collected for this study. The majority had migrated to Melbourne in the latefifties, some in the early-seventies, and all were active participants in the Finnish ethnic organisations. It is important to note that as this study is based on the stories of this limited group, it refers only to a small minority of all Finns living in Melbourne. It is not concerned with immigrants that arrived at other times, or with second-generation Finns. Most importantly, the experiences discussed in the thesis are indicative only of the 10–15% of Finns in Melbourne that participate in the Finnish ethnic organisations, not of the hundreds that never or seldom attend them. On the basis of the immigrants’ memories and the supporting evidence from written sources such as the Finnish-language newspaper Suomi, the defining factors of their Finnish ethnicity become clearer. To an extent these factors emerged in sequence as the immigrants settled into the new country. The following three sections of this article will explore the boundaries based on linguistic and social exclusion from the Australian society, Finnish ethnic organisations, and on perceived personality attributes that distinguished the immigrants’ from Finnish people in Finland. Overall, the Finnish post-war immigrants’ story indicates that ethnicity is not only about shared national origins, but also about shared experiences of migration, exclusion and difference