Australia and the "Boat People"

Abstract

Australia is being forced to hard decisions about its future. More than 3,500 war refugees from Southeast Asia have sailed to northern Australia in the past two years. About 2,500 fled to Darwin harbor from East Timor after the invasion by Indonesia in 1976, and more than 1,000 Indochina refugees have trickled down to Australia's north coast in twenty-nine small boats.The arrival of these people poses far more important questions than their relatively small numbers would suggest. Perhaps for the first time Australia is asking how it could become a multiracial society that includes significant numbers of Asian settlers. The “boat people,” as these refugees are called, have hammered home the fact that the Australian mainland is geographically closer to Indonesia than to the southern island state of Tasmania, though many Australians continue to think of their country as being in “Euro-merica.“