Summary
Desmond Cahill’s extensive analysis explores whether Dutch Australians have assimilated into mainstream Australian society or adapted through a more complex, accommodationist process. Drawing on historical, cultural, and statistical perspectives, Cahill challenges the longstanding stereotype of the Dutch as “the perfect migrants” who effortlessly assimilated and vanished into Australian life.
Cahill contextualises Dutch migration within Australia’s Second Golden Age of Migration (1947–1957), highlighting the rapid and concentrated post-war arrival of Dutch migrants. Unlike southern European migrants, the Dutch largely settled in dispersed, outer-suburban and rural areas. They experienced only mild discrimination and were often praised by Australian officials as ideal immigrants — Protestant, white, and industrious — thus politically useful in countering anti-migrant sentiment.
Key arguments in the article include:
- Cultural compatibility: Dutch social values such as pluralism, pragmatism, and openness to difference meshed well with Australian sensibilities, facilitating integration without requiring the loss of identity.
- High intermarriage and language shift: These are often taken as signs of assimilation, but Cahill contends they reflect accommodation — the Dutch retained their identity privately while contributing to a more multicultural public society.
- Broker role in multiculturalism: The Dutch community acted as a cultural ‘bridge’ that helped Australian society adjust to wider non-English speaking migration.
- Second-generation paradox: Despite a strong start, Dutch-born parents were often better educated than their Australian-born children, and Dutch second-generation educational outcomes lagged behind those of Greeks, Italians, and Poles. Nonetheless, they enjoyed high employment and income stability, particularly in trade sectors.
Cahill uses frameworks from Barth, Cornell, and Yinger (as in the paper below) to show that ethnic group strength is situational, multidimensional, and historically shaped. For the Dutch, the absence of a traumatic settlement experience, their disillusionment with post-war Netherlands, and their capacity for pluralist coexistence shaped their relatively quiet, yet culturally significant, integration path.
Ultimately, Cahill proposes that the Dutch-Australian experience is best described as accommodationist, with elements of amalgamation and cosmopolitanism. Rather than disappearing, Dutch identity transformed — becoming more subdued, symbolic, and adaptive. This pluralist mentality, he argues, contributed meaningfully to the foundation of modern multicultural Australia.
Author Profile: Desmond Cahill
Name: Emeritus Professor Desmond Cahill
Discipline: Intercultural Studies, Sociology of Religion, Migration Studies
Affiliation: Formerly of RMIT University, Melbourne
Known For: Pioneering research on religion, ethnicity, migration, and social cohesion in Australia
Background:
Desmond Cahill is one of Australia’s leading scholars in the fields of cultural diversity, religion, and immigration. His work explores how migrant communities navigate identity, language, belief, and integration in pluralist societies. Of Irish Catholic background, Cahill brings both scholarly rigour and a deep pastoral sensitivity to his research on diaspora communities, including Italo-Australians, Vietnamese Catholics, and Dutch Australians.
He has authored multiple reports for government agencies, including work with the Australian Multicultural Foundation and the Department of Immigration. Cahill has also been an active voice in interfaith dialogue and served as chair of Religions for Peace Australia.
Relevance to Dutch Studies:
In “Lifting the Low Sky,” Cahill applies his expertise to a group often ignored in migration research — Dutch Australians. Drawing from sociology, history, and cultural theory, he assesses how a community with relatively low ethnic visibility has nonetheless had a profound influence on shaping Australia’s multicultural ethos. His nuanced argument dismantles the simplistic assimilation model and offers an insightful alternative rooted in cultural accommodation and pluralist coexistence.
