I watched a pretty interesting documentary called
Australia bihotzean, about the Basque diaspora in Australia. And accompanying the doco, you can also read a fascinating history of the Basque diaspora in Australia, in English:
Australia: Vasconia and the lucky country.
I knew there were Basques in Australia, I met some of them in Sydney of course, but it was only until I came to the Basque Country that I heard tell of a community of Basques up in Queensland. But it was mentioned off hand and I filed that bit of information away. When I came to Lekeitio however I started hearing about Basques who lived in Australia and I met the guy who runs a pub here, Basque born and bred, but whose dad had lived in Australia for something like 15 years.
So the son has converted the pub into a place to watch Australian rugby matches, like yesterday morning when I went to watch the NZ and Australia match which NZ handily won. The pub was full of Lekeitio men cheering on Australia and I was like...what is going on here?
The documentary explains how mostly from the 50s onwards, Australians hired Basque workers to come work on their sugar cane plantations, to cut and burn and transport. This was hard work.
In fact, in the 19th century Australians had used virtual slave labour, Pacific Islander people that they hired (or kidnapped) to work on these farms, and at the beginning of the 20th century in accordance with the official White Australia Policy, they unceremoniously deported almost all of them in order to maintain Australia's "racial purity".
Well that policy needed modification post-WW II due to labour shortages. The White Australia Policy would be completely abolished in the early 70s, allowing non European immigrants to come, but first the doors were opened to non British European immigrants, like the Basques, Italians, Greeks etc.
In the post war immigration, there were two great sources of Basque immigrants. Some came from Bizkaia, from the area around Gernika including Lekeitio. Other Basques were recruited from Nafarroa. Several thousand Basques in total came to Australian towns to work and live. Unassuming town names like Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr hold a fascinating Basque history...they also came to the big Australian cities of Brisbane and Sydney too, some helping to build the Sydney Opera House!
Here's a frontoi in Trebonne where Basques would play pelota:
Basque sugar cane cutters:
One of the prominent people in the doco is Amaia Urberuaga Badiola, who was born in Australia but to parents from Lekeitio who came to work the sugarcane and stayed. At home she only spoke Basque. Amaia left Australia when she was 17 to see Europe, and went to the land of her parents, to Euskal Herria, Bilbo precisely. And she was surprised to see that no one spoke Basque in the street!
This was still 3 years before the fall of the dictatorship, but to give you an idea of how rare Basque was in Bilbo, people I talk to tell me that in the 70s and 80s if you heard someone speak Basque in the streets you would turn your head around, because the chances were high that it was a relative or someone you knew! Today Bilbo is still a bastion of Spanish but they say it's getting better...
Back to Amaia. It's truly bizarre to hear an Australian who speaks in the 'broad' Queensland accent to the Australians and in the next sentence speaks in the 'itxita (closed)' accent of Lekeitio to the Basques.
And she's not alone. In the documentary you meet quite a few Basques who were either born in Australia and moved to the Basque Country later, or were born in Australia and stayed there their entire life. In the doco they meet the mayor of Ingham, Ramon Jaio, speaks Basque. They actually put Basque subtitles when he speaks because logically he learned Basque from his parents and it was their dialect he learned, as a heritage language. Indeed it's doubtful he has ever read anything in Basque in his life.
Together with some linguistic adaptations to their Basque. The Basque baserria (farmstead) did not survive the transition to Australia, instead being called farma, instead of the denda, they would go to the xopa (shop)...
The host of the program is another son of the Basque diaspora, Julian Iantzi, but from a different and more well known destination for Basque immigrants: the USA. He was born in California, because his father who comes from Lesaka in Nafarroa went to work as a sheep herder/rancher in the 60s. For the documentary he helps organise an expedition of fifty Basques to Australia, some of the original immigrants and others family members. For some people it's been decades since they stepped on Australian soil.
After mechanisation in the 70s and given the improved economic situation in Spain, most of these Basques went back home and brought their children with them. Some of them fearing for the assimilation of their children into the Australian culture, and it's hard to argue with that. By this point, two or three generations after the initial Basque immigration, very few of the children of the Basques who stayed, still speak Basque. But most of these immigrants came never wanting to stay in Australia. They wanted to take advantage of the higher wages in Australia and even for the adventure. Back then families were large and sending off one or two brothers in a family of seven meant two less mouths to feed.
Even people who stayed for a relatively short period of time, only five or six years, express positive feelings and memories about Australia. It's kind of strange to be on the receiving side. To be looked at as foreign. To Europeans back then, Australia was seen as a land of economic opportunity, wide open spaces and open (perhaps too open) social and sexual mores.
On Friday I was bought multiple rounds of beer just for being an Australian. Imagine flying around the world in order to escape my Australian provincialism and falling into a Basque town that sent some of its sons and daughters to Australia?
