Fil-Oz in Blacktown: A Cultural Geography

Abstract

Chapter 5 demonstrates the interrelationships between the growth of the Filipino community, the history and peopling of Sydney’s suburbs and print culture’s role in facilitating this expansion. First, a demographic profile of Filipinos in Australia sets the tone in addressing the concern of the chapter; a brief history of Philippines-Australia waves of migration in the past 130 years foregrounds the profile. Second, the chapter introduces the suburb of Blacktown in New South Wales, the area with the highest population density of Filipinos. I argue that the intimate relationship between Blacktown and the community’s active print production is related to spatial formations being grounded in culture and that cultural formations move within the rules of place. The specificity by which ethnicity, and I must say, class, shapes cultural practices and thus the geography where these practices are carried out, is significant in establishing the rootedness of imagining a ‘Blacktown for Filipinos’, and ‘Filipinos for Blacktown’. Third, I historicise Australia’s relationship to its own ‘minority’ print culture which informs us of the deeply racialist outlook of the society in the past. Taking in consideration both the peopling of Blacktown and Australia’s ‘ethnic’ print culture, I then focus on Filipino-Australian newspapers: their history, the personalities, the uses, the politics and the ‘costs’ of ethnic media. The original research done in this chapter—from the profiling of ‘Blacktown Filipinos’ to the oral history on Filipino-Australian newspapers—will be the first literature to be published on the topic.