The New Blokes

When the immigrant ship Castel Felice docked in Melbourne one breezy day last week, 63 suntanned German girls paraded down the gangplank. Like 74 "flying fraeu-leins" who arrived by chartered plane a few days earlier, they were marriageable girls brought in from West Germany by the Australian government at the demand of members of a powerful new Australian pressure group: bachelors, among the thousands of European immigrants, who have a hard time finding someone to marry in a sparsely settled land where men still outnumber women.

Fourteen years after a war in which the country narrowly escaped being overrun by the Japanese, Australia's "populate or perish" program has brought 1,400,000 European settlers to its shores. Half of them are "New Australians" (meaning Continental Europeans), who are changing the look and sounds of a nation whose people are rugged in their insularity and proud of the common bond of their British Isles origin.

Strictly Continental. On Sydney buses and Brisbane trams, German and Italian accents now mingle with the cockney-like drawl of Old Australia; a ticket taker at Melbourne's Flinders Street station is apt to be a shawled Lithuanian woman who speaks no English at all. In the heart of Sydney's roistering Kings Cross district, now a maze of cosmopolite cuisine and chatter, Old Australians crowd into the posh Chelsea restaurant to be attended by an Italian headwaiter, a French chef, Hungarian, Czech, Yugoslav and Bulgarian waiters. A Melbourne food store that once sold two kinds of bread--dark or white--now sells 97 varieties.

Since the war, the Australian economy has expanded nearly threefold, and "production would not have been possible without the immigrants, who make up half our 19,000 employees," says an executive of General Motors-Holden's, the G.M. subsidiary that makes 50% of Australia's vehicles. Half of the country's steelworkers and almost two-thirds of the workers on the billion dollar Snowy Mountains hydroelectric irrigation complex in New South Wales are, as fellow union members call them, "new blokes." Although some have slowed their work to the notorious prewar "Australian crawl," the overall impact of ambitious immigrants has been to force the Old Australians to hump harder. Eager, gifted immigrant children are grabbing top honors in Melbourne and Adelaide high schools. In Queensland, Italians have become a major factor in the sugar-cane industry. Two Dutch immigrants are marketing a new plastic film to seal the bottom of sheep-station ponds and thereby save the precious water in the outback from leaking away. Australia's world-beating teenage swimmers, John and Ilsa Konrads, were born in Latvia.

The political effect of the New Australians is just beginning to be felt. In last year's elections, when the parties campaigned in half a dozen languages, most of the newcomers, as satellite refugees from Communism, backed Conservative Premier Robert Menzies. But some of Menzies' aides shudder to think what would happen to their own fortunes if the Continental Roman Catholics joined up eventually with Irish Catholics among the Old Australians, who traditionally vote Labor.

A Weird Mob. Some immigrants find the bland phrase "New Australian" as offensive as the "dago" and "hunky" it was designed to replace. "I've been here eight years," complains a Greek, "and they still call me a bloody New Australian. When do I become an old one?" But barriers are breaking down: immigrants now hold 20% of all Australian jobs, and are neighbors of the old in suburban streets. Some 80,000 bachelor immigrants have found native-born wives. They're a Weird Mob, a breezy book about an Italian newcomer's discovery of

Australian brotherhood, is a 160,000-copy national bestseller.

Strengthened by the immigration and the sense that they have been strong enough to absorb it, Old Australians are developing a new tolerance and a new national assurance. For whatever the oddity of their new neighbors, the Old Australians count on them to help their nation survive as a Caucasian island on the edge of a vast and alien Asian continent.

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