Australia's Media Industry: the voice of many Multiculturalism and the role of media

Contrarily to what most of the people might think, multilingualism in Australia has not been the mere consequence of European settlements. Rather, it must be said that aboriginals, way before the arrival of Europeans, were already using several different languages and bilingualism was already a quite common practice.
Indeed, Europeans at first tried to impose monolingualism, since a very significant number of those first settlers came from England, Wales or Ireland. (Clyne & Jupp, 2011)
Their purpose though had been made difficult by subsequent migration waves coming from other parts of Europe and Asia that brought, in the second half of the 19th century, scores of people to Australia attracted by the so-called gold rushes.
Thus, at that time, many community newspapers in languages other than English were already published and bilingual education was promoted. (Clyne & Jupp, 2011)
Such trend almost came to an end during the first seventy years of the 20th century, when massive immigration between the two world wars and after the end of the second of those, seemed to lead to an uncontrollable situation.
In the 1950s and 1960s the Australian Government fostered and facilitated immigration in order to make the population grow and increase workforce. This had been done allowing personal sponsorships without paying much attention to professional or languages skills. Australia in fact, used to set a migration target to fill every year. In twenty years, between 1951 and 1971, almost two millions of people moved to Australia, a quarter of whom came from south Europe. (Birrell, 1995)
That, despite the attempts of governments to assimilate newcomers into the Australian culture, produced the formation of ethnic communities, due to the incapacity and sometimes impossibility of interaction between Australians and migrants. So, community shops as well as cultural and religious associations started to be founded.
However, toward the end of the century, multiculturalism and multilingualism had been appreciated again and drove governments to work on a national multicultural policy aimed at allowing Australian citizens to keep their original culture and traditions and acknowledging the values of diversity and pluralism.
In 1998, Stepan Kerkyasharian, chairman of the Ethnic Affairs Commission of New South Wales, at the annual conference of the federation of Ethnic communities’ councils of Australia, delivered a speech in response to a paper entitled “Multicultural Australia: the way forward”2 released by the National Multicultural Advisory Council. During that speech, Stepan Kerkyasharian reasserted the centrality of multiculturalism in the debate about the Australian national identity. Moreover, Kerkyasharian stated that multiculturalism in Australia had been until then absolutely successful and therefore invited the federal government to enrich the national legislation with norms specifically apt to underline the importance of a multicultural policy.
So, at the dawn of the third millennium Australia could proudly show the world its society in which multiculturalism had favoured social cohesion, enhanced cultural life and entailed a decrease of racism in favour of principles of equality.