Victoria’s Indian community now top migrant group after knocking Brits off their perch
Arrivals from Britain were once Victoria’s traditional migrant source and until recently the largest foreign-born community. See who’s taken over the No.1 position.
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Blimey, Indians have taken over from the Brits as Victoria’s biggest migrant community.
An extraordinary influx of arrivals from India in recent years has displaced the UK-born - our traditional immigrant powerhouse.
And Chinese-born residents are not far from overtaking them either.
At the 2016 census in Victoria, there were 209,767 British-born, 169,802 India-born and 160,652 China-born people.
But based on net migration data over a three-year period, a total of 58,730 Indians arrived compared to only about 8000 Brits, meaning the Indian-born have prevailed in number.
While the Indian community is maintaining a lot of its cultural traditions here, sport is giving young members a path to integration with the Australian way of life.
Many are playing Aussie rules in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, with Indian migrants like Nagarjuna Vajrala an Auskick co-ordinator at Berwick North Junior Football.
Mr Vajrala said that clubs like Melbourne, which has a base at Casey Fields, had done a lot of footy promotion in local schools and other centres, which attracted Indian community members.
“So these kids go home with footy knowledge, they go home with a ball or maybe a scarf or a jumper, and that gets them connected to the game,” he said.
“It’s about the colours, it’s about the friends they make at school, it’s about kicking the footy around at school, its such an easy game to get used to.”
Mr Vajrala said that while Indians loved cricket, they wanted a sport to do over the long winter months - and footy was ideal.
AFL general manager for inclusion and social policy, Tanya Hosch, said football was a game for everyone, and in 2019 13 per cent of AFL and AFLW players had multicultural backgrounds.
“But we need to grow the size of the cultural diversity in our game, so our multicultural programs will play an important role in engaging with future generations of diverse talent to ensure this number is more reflective of our community,” she said.
In 2011, the British migrant community was almost twice as big as the Indian community in Victoria.
But from 2011 to 2016, the number of Indian-born grew by 58,000 while the UK-born group fell by more than 3000 due to low migration and the death of older community members.
It’s believed that the Chinese-born could be level-pegging with the Brits now amid high migration rates.
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