Sunday, October 15, 2006

Rural cosmopolitanism

Turns out Shepparton is quite the cosmopolitan country town. In the bus I took back to Melbourne last weekend I was surrounded by Chinese, Italian and Russian speaking passengers. My sister's friends (all mothers in tow to their husband's careers) hail from New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Trinidad. An English neighbor lived in Qatar and Boca Raton before winding up here. A little shopping jaunt Saturday morning took my sister and me to a European deli, a fruit and vegetable grocer with five kinds of pasta imported from Italy, and an Indian shop (Sikh) sandwiched happily between two Muslim grocers. On one of Shepparton's main shopping streets Mustafa's, at left, has a market of Turkish goods, many of which are labeled in Turkish and German.

In fact, it turns out that Shepparton is well known for successful multiculturalism, especially for the settlement of refugees. It has a sizable Iraqi population, another of Macedonians and Albanians, and a new population of Congolese. It makes sense, I guess: refugees from rural areas settle better, and can find work more easily, in an agricultural area than in a city. The Goulborn Valley has long depended on migrant fruit pickers, and seems to be taking well to these populations settling in.

I probably shouldn't be surprised. The latest US census showed that immigrants there no longer head for the big gateway cities, but often go straight to smaller cities and towns. And in Japan I remember hearing that Filipinos and others were being sought to maintain farmlands whose youngsters were bolting to the cities. (Swiss farmers haven't dared think that far.) We tend to hear more about high culture and middle class and suburban trends, but globalization is happening at all levels.