The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page A

of passwords whispered to guards at fortress gates. The ones I remember being particularly baffled by – we arrived, my mum, dad and me, in Australia in 1990; my sister stayed in Europe – are ‘it’s my shout’ (oh, the stories I could tell you …) and ‘bring a plate’ (likewise), though perhaps most puzzling of them all was a single word, unhyphenated and modestly prefixed: ‘overqualified’.
    Where we were from, you couldn’t be too educated or too experienced for a professional, skilled job. Not so in Australia, it turned out, not for new arrivals anyway. My father’s periodic removal from his résumé of his Ukrainian/Soviet PhD in hydraulics – a bizarre ritual of self-administered shrinkage, necessary, he was told, to get a ‘foot in the door’ – has been replicated across decades by migrants to this country. Particularly by migrants from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe: the non-West guild. Melbourne writer Ralph Johnstone has told of two Somali men, Abdulkadir Shire and Ali-nur Duale, who in the course of seventeen years of ‘downskilling’ crossed out any hint of their respective Masters in petrochemical engineering and PhD in applied entomology from 300-plus job applications. Still no joy. Because who could be less employable than an overqualified alien?
    Ridiculous business, this practically standing on your head not to appear too smart to prospective employers. As a migrant you are already up against it, what with the language barrier and the close-to-zero social capital and the sometimes not actually owning a pair of employment-ready pants to wear to a job interview. And then, crazily, you are compelled to hide your goods. Most people routinely inflate their capabilities in CVs (‘selling themselves’, it’s called) whereas these PhDed migrants – my father, once upon a time – have been doing what, precisely? As far as I can tell they have been doing the Great Australian Undersell. The smaller you make yourself, the bigger the chance of the square peg that is (sort of) you fitting the round hole that is Australia’s jobs market. So there’s logic to it. But it is a pretty brick-like logic.
    Read Egon Kunz’s Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians and you will see something similar happening in the years after World War II. Of the 170,000 migrants who come here via Europe’s displaced persons camps – men and women, known as DPs – the ones with university degrees and professional qualifications end up suffering the most. First, two obligatory, humiliating years as ‘labourers’ or ‘domestics’. Then a shit fight to get their qualifications recognised, and to be employed, however peripherally, in their ‘field’. Most won’t make it. And who, of all of them, has the hardest time? Doctors. Kunz wrote a separate book, The Intruders , on their experiences. Some doctors remember being told in their first months in Australia that European degrees were worthless here and, anyway, could be bought on the black market back home and, besides, none of them were real doctors .
    The names of the countries and continents breeding New Australians with worthless degrees have changed since then. But the tradition of some of our most educated migrants being made to feel acutely unwelcome persists.
    â€˜Overqualified’, as a phenomenon, is in fact a bittersweet corrective to the lament that neo-liberalism has engulfed Australia’s public policy thinking. That everything, including migrant intake decisions, must be justified in terms of current or projected economic benefits. If you look at the history of the overqualified, deeper forces, subterranean and otherwise, than economic rationalism are always at play, and as Kunz makes plain, ‘The throwing away of eighteen or more years of formal study which the doctors brought with them, and which was provided at the