The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Online Free PDF

expense of other governments … was in economic terms an expensive and wasteful folly.’
    The folly is not quintessentially Australian. All over the Western world, migrant scientists and engineers drive taxis – have you noticed how taxis always make headlines when stories of migrants’ skills wasting away are told, how taxis have become the signifier of choice? – and world-class musicians scrape by playing restaurants, not concert halls, while people with tertiary education clean the big houses of those without it, and economists count themselves lucky to work as bookkeepers, and people who could, indeed did, head university departments or lead theatre troupes become nannies to the young or carers of the moneyed old.
    You take a dive. You start from scratch. You are at the bottom looking up. That’s what being a migrant is like for most people moving to the West. No one has asked you to come here. And no one here thinks you are fabulous, not straight off the bat anyway. That’s the experience. First-generation migrants everywhere, those lucky enough to get their noses into a professional set-up of any barely tolerable kind, take directions from superiors who have a fraction of their know-how. They bite their tongue, bide their time.
    Socioeconomically it looks something like this: countries are not using the skills or expertise of many of their new citizens even as these same countries pledge half a kingdom and a horse to remain ‘competitive in the global marketplace’; the unemployed or underemployed migrants face a loss of livelihood, status, cultural cachet, skills (which get degraded through non-use), self-respect and authority; these losses, in turn, disfigure social relations and eat away at families and communities.
    Some migrants may not have good, or good enough, English and their skills may be non-transferable. Or their education and experience is simply too different for them to be neatly absorbed. And, fact is, they don’t know how business is done in the new country, they’re blind to the unspoken rules that govern professional relations, they don’t fit easily into an office or a team and they may scare away clients or, say, students. So there are (relatively) rational reasons. It is not all madness.
    Here comes the madness bit: and in it lies another, quieter, sadness, and this one cannot be pinpointed socioeconomically. People come to a new country with deep knowledge of something – the human body, soul, music, machinery, history – and find there is no place for their knowledge and no thirst for it. The thing about knowledge is most people who have it have a fundamental need to use it. Also, to pass it on. Must be some kind of an evolutionary thing. When the knowledge remains trapped inside the person, unused, unrequired, unwanted, when it withers (no, I won’t say like a foetus) away, well, it’s a tragedy for the person and for the culture that let it die.
    People sometimes attempt to define what kinds of rights migrants should automatically be afforded. The right to professional recognition and employment is always up there. But when does anyone ever talk about the right to contribute, to pass on knowledge, to use expertise in a meaningful, socially significant way? When is this ‘right to contribute’ ever seen as that – a right – not some wishy-washy multicultural curry-and-bamboo-headwear construct?
    Migrants’ vast intellectual capital.
    Is it time, yet, to worry about what has been done with it?
    Omar Farah tells me that when government agencies call him to discuss ‘problems within the African community’, he gets cut off whenever he attempts to offer any analysis or advice on how those problems might best be tackled.
    â€˜Government agencies are more than happy for me to be someone who tells them what’s happening in the community. That’s it. Don’t worry about all that analytical