What Culture, Exactly.

The conversation began, as these conversations do, with a general statement of concern. The culture, it was explained, was under threat. Immigrants, and here the word carried a particular weight, were changing things. The sentiment was delivered with the certainty of someone who had not been asked to think about it.

It is a reasonable instinct, if not a particularly examined one. Culture is worth caring about. The question is which one.

The Sunshine Coast Hinterland, where this exchange took place, over a fence that was itself imported from a hardware chain headquartered somewhere in Canberra, has existed as a settled European community for roughly a hundred and fifty years. Before that, the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people had managed the same land for somewhere between six hundred generations and sixty thousand years, depending on which estimate you prefer. Both numbers are significantly larger than a hundred and fifty.

The culture that preceded ours was not invited to stay. It was not consulted. It did not get to vote on the issue.

This is not, incidentally, an argument for open borders or a rebuke of anyone's particular anxieties. It is simply an observation about what the word "culture" is doing in these conversations, and what it is being asked to mean.

Australian culture, as it currently presents itself in Queensland, is a genuinely interesting thing. It includes meat pies, cricket, a flag designed in London, a national anthem written in 1878, a constitution drafted partly in Adelaide and partly in Westminster, compulsory voting borrowed from Belgium, and a federation modelled substantially on Canada. Its defining architectural contribution to the Hinterland is the Bunnings shed. Its lingua franca is English, a language that arrived here by boat in 1788 and was not itself invited.

It is worth noting, too, that the culture described in these conversations is never the culture of Cabramatta, or Redfern, or Inala, or the Greek Orthodox church in Nambour, or the Vietnamese grocers who have been in Maroochydore since the 1980s. Those are Australian cultures, plural, as legitimately assembled as any other. What is being defended, when someone speaks of Australian culture under threat, is one particular version, broadly Anglo, broadly suburban, broadly familiar to the person speaking, that has quietly assumed the title of the whole. It is not a dishonest assumption. It is simply an unthought out one.

None of this is a criticism. Cultures are assembled. They always have been. The Romans did it. The British did it rather aggressively. The Spanish did it on an altogether different scale. Every culture that has ever worried about dilution has itself been a dilution of something older, and that something was a dilution of something older still. It is the nature of the thing.

What is actually meant, in most of these conversations, is familiarity. The preference for what one already recognises. This is a human instinct, and not an ignoble one. It deserves to be named honestly rather than dressed in the language of cultural preservation.

The immigrant arriving in Queensland in 2025 is, statistically, more likely to be Indian, Chinese, or Filipino than anything else, and is overwhelmingly here on a skilled worker or student visa, paying taxes, filling a vacancy, and finding the roads inexplicably narrow. The Muslim immigrant, who tends to feature most prominently in the conversation about culture, represents approximately three percent of the entire Australian population. They are, by and large, already Australian. Thirty-six percent of them were born here.

The culture is not being replaced. It is, as it has always been, in the process of becoming something. That process started well before the current wave of concern, and will continue well after it. It continued through the gold rush, the post-war migration, the Vietnamese arrivals of the seventies, the Lebanese arrivals before that, and the Italian arrivals that gave us the coffee that everyone now considers indispensable to the Australian morning.

The fence is still there, of course. On one side, a concern about culture. On the other, a country that has never, in its entire European history, not been in the middle of becoming something else.

It would be unfair to point that out too loudly. It is, however, worth noticing.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.