| Paweł Strzelecki • Karl Kruszelnicki Peter Luczak • Michael Kasprowicz • Yvonne Strahovski • Michael Klim • Samantha Stosur • Mia Wasikowska • Natalie Gruzlewski • Alicia Molik |
| Total population |
|---|
| 163,802 (by ancestry, 2006) 52,254 (by birth, 2006) |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide |
| Languages |
| Religion |
|
Predominantly Roman Catholic with Protestant and Jewish minorities. |
Poland has been a source country of immigrants to Australia, in particular in the post-war period. Immigration from Poland has long tapered off, with Polish Australian population now part of the mainstream Australian community.
Contents |
In 2006 52,254 Australian residents declared they were born in Poland. Cities with the largest Polish populations were Melbourne (16,439), Sydney (12,514), Adelaide (5,859) and Perth (5,142).[1]
The Polish-born Australian resident population predominantly were Australian citizens (90.3%), Christian (82.4%) and used Polish at home (70.0%). Around 78% arrived in Australia before 1990 [2].
In addition, in 2006 163,802 Australian residents declared they had Polish ancestry, either alone or in combination with one other ancestry.[3]
A significant group of Polish-Australian residents may be today the expatriate community of Polish descent from many countries, like the United States, Canada, France, and Great Britain, where numbers of members of the Polonia are counted in millions or hundreds of thousands. A well known example of this is kind of Polish Australian is the Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee, a South African with partially Polish origins who has recently immigrated and settled in Australia.
The first Pole known to have arrived in Australia was Joseph Potaski, who was sent there as a convict from Great Britain in 1803. The first settlers from Poland arrived in South Australia in 1856 and settled in the Clare Valley region in a place later called Polish Hill River. The first mass migration happened in the late 1940s when large groups of displaced persons who could not return to a free Poland migrated to Australia after World War II, including soldiers from the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade ("rats of Tobruk"). Between 1947 and 1954, the Poland-born population increased from 6,573 to 56,594 people.
In the early 1980s there was further Polish migration to Australia. The emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement and the declaration of martial law in Poland at the end of 1981 coincided with a further relaxation of Polish emigration laws. During the period 1980-91 Australia granted permanent entry to a large number of Polish migrants, many arriving as refugees who soon got a reputation for being hard working. In 1991, an independent, voluntary organisation was established to inform the Australian public about issues related to Polish history, politics, society and culture. The immediate trigger for establishing The Australian Institute of Polish Affairs (also known as AIPA) was strong public interest in the historic changes that swept Central Europe in 1989 and led to the collapse of communism.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||