Turkish Cypriots in Australia: The Evolution of a Multi-hyphenated Community and the Impact of Transnational Events

Abstract

Turkish Cypriots in Australia have in the aftermath of the Second World War constructed a relatively small but complex immigrant community presence characterized by their individual and evolving multi-hyphenated identities as Turkish Cypriot Muslim Australians. Like many other communities, during the past seven decades since the late 1940s, they have been impacted by a series of momentous transnational events in Greece and Turkey as well as on their conflict-ridden homeland of Cyprus. As with the United Kingdom,¹ the Turkish Cypriot community in Australia has not received the scholarly attention that it merits except in recent times, with Serkan Hussein’s pictorial community monograph to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the community’s arrival in 1947,² the work of Christopher Sonn and his student Lütfiye Ali,³ and the more recent Master’s thesis at La Trobe University of Fatma Yuksel Adal⁴ on Turkish Cypriot women in Australia. In the 1988 and 2001 editions of The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins,⁵ the Turkish Cypriots, in contrast to their more numerous Greek Cypriot counterparts, did not rate a separate entry and are dealt with, almost perfunctorily, in the Greek Cypriot entry⁶ where Charles Price, one of the doyens of early Australian immigration research, notes correctly that their ‘large-scale migration to Australia, in short, is mainly a post-war event, closely linked to civil tension and disturbances in Cyprus itself’.⁷