Public Library Services to Ethnocultural Minorities in Australia: A State-of- the-Art Survey

The major task confronting all Australians is not to decide whether Australia is a multicultural society. We haue a multicultural society. The first challenge is to make it work.’ THE HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN peopIe has been mainly one of immigration. World War I1 provided an impetus for massive migration to Australia by peoples of almost all parts of the world, although once the wave of immigrants displaced by the war had subsided, the preferred countries of migrant intake were Britain and countries in northern Europe.* In 1973, a policy of nondiscrimination in the selection of migrants was introduced, making the Australian society one composed of diverse ethnocultural minorities3 Currently, more than 20 percent of the Australian population of 14.5 million were born overseas, and as of 1976 almost 1.5 million of these had been born in non-English-speaking countries (see table 1). Although this diversity of nationalities has always made a significant contribution to the economic, scientific and cultural growth of Australia, it was not until the 1970s that this contribution was fully recognized, and the long-held policy of assimilation into the host society was replaced by a policy of integration. More recently, “the growing assertiveness on the part of the ethnic communities for better access to their share of the national cake”4 has contributed to a further change in policy from integration to multiculturalism, when the federal