Has the invisibility of Dutch immigrants in Australia then led to the vanishing of their influence on Australian culture now?
Amid the flood of new faces during the post-World War II immigration boom, many Dutch migrants arrived in Australia. Yet unlike people of other nationalities with whom they had shared the journey, they met with comparatively less racial prejudice and cultural resistance. To the Australian people, the Dutch migrants looked Anglo-Celtic and even after they opened their mouths, their language sounded Anglo-Celtic. While the less open-minded, pre-immigration Australians were distracted with more distinctive racial groups, the Dutch went largely unnoticed. They were the invisible immigrants.
So where are they now and what has become of their culture?
Up the steps and through the fly screen door of a red brick veneer project home in Padstow, I find the beginnings of the answer. Bep van Kouterik ushers me into her hallway and I am followed by Opa (my grandfather), holding the door frame and his walking stick for support. The interior of this typical suburban home of the southern hemisphere, was, as Damon a third generation Dutchie would later say in sum, "O.Ding on Dutch".
Damon's description of his grandparent's home, suburbs away in Penrith, suits Bep's and almost every other home I visited:
"You couldn't move 'cause the couch is like in a circle... so you can talk across the table... you've got the big huge rug on the floor and the T.V.'s on a weird angle in the corner... and they've got like the pictures on the wall of the old churches and that... And little ornaments, little nick nacks and shit. You have to be Dutch to pick it".
Listening to Damon I became aware of cultural distinctions I have grown up with and consequently take for granted. My Oma (Co, née Postma) and Opa (Johannes Mul) migrated in 1956 bringing my then twelve-year old father (Johannes Mul) with them on a ship called the Johan van Oldenbarneveldt. I understand scatterings of Dutch and have always considered those rituals of interaction with my Dutch family nothing out the ordinary...
Fringes on the lampshades hung in dark corners/ lounge chairs in a chatty circle/ solemn autumn patterns on the wallpaper interrupted now and then by a china plate depicting some town or other where someone's brother was married/ on the bookshelf a crowded village of psuedo-Delft salt and pepper shakers.
Bep tells me about the Oustralian butcher's shop years ago. When she immigrated in 1952, all they sold was "devon and shoulder hem".
Bep van Kouterik: "It was very hard... we came out of a country that was like Oustralia here now. Because in Holland there was everything and when we first came here...
Opa: There was nothing.
Bep: There was nothing.
I ask: Do you think the Dutch brought anything to Australian culture?
Bep: No. I don't think - no. The Greeks did.
Opa: The Dutchies were good too. There were a lot of Dutch builders.
Bep: But the Italians all had vegetable gardens and we got all the vegetables from them.
Opa: ...Dusseldorf build err the centre in Bankstown. Oh yeah they were mostly in the building business.
Bep: They liked the Dutch coming here because they were good trade people too.
In negotiating the perimeters of this discussion I have encountered the prickly problem of defining culture both conceptually and politically. For the purpose of this discussion I define culture as being those attributes which a group has in common and which distinguish that group from another social body. I also suggest that anything existing outside Holland is no longer Dutch but, if found in Australia, Australian. For this reason I am tracing the Dutch influence within Australia which, unlike the Italian influence, is far less prevalent and has been diminishing for years.
According to Thomas Schindlmayr in his introduction to Community Profiles 1996 Census; Netherlands Born, (Dept. of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Feb. 2000), the Dutch settlers during the 1950s were second only to the Italians in number. Beginning in the 1800s as only a trickle, the number of Dutch born living in Australia reached its peak of 102,134 in 1961.
"The Dutch were seen as model migrants given their cultural and linguistic affinities with the Australian population." (p.6)
Ad Veenhuis migrated with his wife, Riek, and their four-year-old daughter Marion in 1961. They were the first people to build in their street in Padstow in 1964 and have lived in the same home since.
Ad Veenhuis: They used to say sometimes "where you come from?" or whatever and you say "Padstow".
"No I mean where what country, you know" But you didn't like to say, but you didn't like to be picked out as being different. You wanted to be them: an Oussie and part of it.
The Dutch migrants, in terms of dated, imperial notions of assimilation, certainly have become "part of it". Of all 'groups in Australia, both first and second generations of Dutch origin have experienced the highest rate of language shift to speaking English only.
In 1996, 62% of first and 95% of second generation Dutch spoke English at home (Schindlmayr, 2000). Bennett, in Dutch Overseas: Studies in Maintenance and Loss of Dutch as an Immigrant Language (Amsterdam, 1997), expresses optimism that the Dutch language will be maintained by some of the second generation. However, the Dutch passed on may be just symbolic language maintenance that transfers small elements of the language to allow the second generation to identify themselves as part Dutch, rather than a language usable for daily communication. Perhaps the strongest trace of the Dutch language, as noted by many of my second and third generation interviewees, is found in names. While many were Anglasised; Johannes became Jo, Carla changed to Caroline and Mr and Mrs Mul are now known as the Mills, names are the most telling signs of a Dutch ancestry.
Of the second generation Dutch I spoke to, almost all expressed an interest in maintaining their Dutch heritage and/or one day visiting the Netherlands. Yet what there is of Dutch heritage to be maintained or even revisited is and has been rapidly eroding.
Eager to "mix in" with other Australians upon arrival, Riek and Ad Veenhuis "spoke English straight away". Forty years later, Ad and Riek speak English to each other at home for fear of slipping back to their mother tongue when they are older and their daughters (two of whom were born in Australia) get little opportunity to practise Dutch as their husbands and children don't speak the language. Bep's eldest, John (46 yrs. old) speaks Dutch fluently while the youngest (42 yrs. old) will answer only in English when spoken to in Dutch. Bep, like Riek and Ad, did not maintain traditions such as Sinterklaas (Dutch Christmas) because their "kids might think it's silly, you know?". Likewise, Damon had "never heard of it" as his grandparents had also sought to discard their Dutch otherness.
The Hegelian theory goes: the other always falls victim in the encounter, where the mastering self has an appropriative movement towards the other. Here the paradigmatic myth is the struggle of heroes and of course the relation is negative since the other must die (Mueke,1997).
In all my conversations with Dutch born Australian citizens, I was told of only one incident of overt cultural resistance (misdirected as it may have been). A few months after arriving, Ad Veenhuis was talking with a friend in Dutch on Sydenham station. Suddenly, Ad tells me, a drunk sitting near them jumped up yelling "You bloody Italians you killed my brother in the war (and what have you)". Ad's friend wanted to thump the drunk but Ad understood that to him (and many more sober Australians) "we were all seen as intruders".
Today the situation seems suprisingly to have been reversed.
Ad: Those days everything was in English, there was no other choice. Not like now- a-days
when the council or the garbage bin or all kinds of notice, it in Arabic and Chinese and in this and in that and all - stupid!
Opa: That's what I say - you never see it in Dutch.
Riek: Yes but we can be proud of that because we are bright enough to learn the language.
When the Dutch migrants left their homeland they sailed into their own desert of transversality. They found suddenly that their familiar ways were without context and that in this new space they had to make many choices about what to salvage of their own culture and what to throw over board. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance (Bauldrillard in Mueke, 1997).
In No Road: bitumen all the way, both Mueke and Bauldrillard refer to Virilio's notion of the aesthetics of disappearance which is only achievable on the road, at speed. Staring through the windscreen, Mueke watches the parallel lines of the road converge but never meet.
In the discussion of Dutch and Australian culture, I would argue that these parallel lines merged officially when what was 'Dutch' on Dutch soil was grafted to Australian culture. With the passing of time (i.e. speed - and intermarriage), traces of the fusion disappear. Yet the process of transplantation was, in the case of the Dutchies, unnaturally quickened by both the scramble of the Dutchies to be on the friendly side of the self/other fence and the Australian government's hurry to get them there. They found soon after however that like Bauldrillard's desert, these terms are constantly shifting. Mueke states that otherness is maintained in the relation between self and other, otherness does not reside in the thing itself, in its attributes or essence (Fremantle, 1997).
The type of exchange which Héléne Cixous espouses is one in which each one would keep the other alive and different. Here the other is not effaced and turned into more energy for the 'Empire of the Selfsame' (Mueke,1997). Yet I'm not sure that this clever and poetic theory worked for the Dutch migrants. Much was lost in the translation. Including, quite literally, an expression for the atmosphere surrounding athe traditional Dutch pastime of chatting and drinking coffee in a warm living room with a group of friends. The word is gezellig and the feeling, I imagine, is something akin to when the family gathers around Christmas dinner with candle light in their eyes. In this example, Australia's encounter with the other has negated and silenced difference rather than kept it alive and different.
Towards the end of my interview with Bep, I am offered a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits is placed on the coffee table. One biscuit per cup, my Dutch father advised me once. Holding my black, bitter coffee which my Opa says is a sign of my Dutchness (but I think has more to do with my studying habits), I gaze at a snow-covered woodland in an ornate "gold" frame. Bep tells me how she cheered for the Oustralians in the Olympics "but when that Dutch girl won... well yes in your heart you're still Dutch."
A few streets away in the living room of Ad and Riek, Squiggly Gums grow over a motionless billabong in the same ornate frame.
Ad: Now (Riek) said it many times, like with the Olympics too now - she tells everybody else -
that she's an Oussie, more Oustralian than Dutch because we live here longer.
Riek: No. No. No, no. When Oustralia plays against any other country I am really
fanatic for Oustralia. But if it is Holland and Oustralia I think: let the best man win!
Many of my second and third generation interviewees expressed a desire to know more about their parents and grandparents culture by revisiting the tangiable sites of memory such as places and photographs. Yet culture is a living thing not inherent in buildings and pictures until meaning is brought to them. The Dutch influence on Australian culture is vanishing as there are fewer and fewer people who say - this is how and this is why. Without people who live the culture, customs simply vanish or are absorbed into the 'Empire of the Selfsame'.
Later when we got back, Opa showed me an envelope filled with papers; invitations to meet the Dutch Queen, various photographs, his first Driver's Licence and a newspaper (literally singular) one page of yellowing paper which had collapsed into four segments from being folded all this time. I almost said, "Why don't you put it in a plastic sleeve to preserve it?" What was I thinking? Then it would cease to be his.
Bibliography
Schindlmayr, T. (2000) Introduction in Community Profiles 1996 Census; Netherlands Born, Dept. of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.
Bennett, J. (1997), Dutch Overseas: Studies in Maintenance and Loss of Dutch as an Immigrant Language , Amsterdam.
Mueke, S. (1997) No Road: bitumen all the way, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Western Australia.
Stewart, K. (1996)A Space on the Side of the Road, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey.
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