Walter Kish

This past week while on a business trip to the Far East, I took a little detour for a few days to visit some old friends in Sydney, Australia. While there, I had the opportunity to become better acquainted with the Ukrainian community in this land “Down Under”.

Unlike in Canada, where those of Ukrainian descent are said to number somewhere near a million or so, the corresponding community in Australia is fairly small and totals somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five to forty thousand. Almost all of these came from the DP camps in Europe after the Second World War. Like their counterparts in Canada, they created political organizations, built churches, started their own newspapers and formed credit unions. They too, unfortunately, became polarized and divided by political, religious and nationalistic differences. Conflicts between the “Melnykivtsi” and “Banderivtsi”, “SUM” and “PLAST”, and Catholic and Orthodox, were every bit as pronounced there as they were here. Even today, the marriage of a Ukrainian Catholic to a Ukrainian Orthodox is viewed as a “mixed marriage” and frowned upon by the older generation.

The end result, as reflected in the current state of organized Ukrainian life in Australia, is a carbon copy of what happened in Canada and the US. With the exception of a small number of dedicated individuals, the younger, native-born generations became alienated or disinterested and drifted away. The only Ukrainian entities that don’t have a doubtful future and can be considered reasonably successful are the Karpaty Credit Union and its neighbour, a pub/club in the Ukrainian Community Centre in Lidcombe, a suburb of Sydney and the center of Ukrainian community life here. I would also be remiss if I did not include the Ukrainian Women’s choir “Sutswittya” under the direction of a transplanted Canadian, Oksana Rohatyn-Wasylyk, a member of the distinguished Rohatyn clan from Sudbury, Ontario.

The last time the Ukrainian community here came together in a big, unified and constructive way was during the summer of 2000, when they did an admirable job in hosting and supporting the Ukrainian athletes that came here to compete at the Sydney Olympics.

I spent some time with Volodymyr Shumsky, editor of one of the two remaining Ukrainian newspapers left in Australia. His paper, “Vilna Dumka”, is not affiliated with any particular organization or religion; the other Ukrainian paper is published by the Catholic church in Australia. Though now past eighty years in age, Shumsky virtually single-handedly puts out this bi-weekly newspaper working out of a room in his house using an old Apple computer that has seen better years. Most of its content, all of it in Ukrainian, comes via the Internet from a comprehensive personal network of contacts that Shumsky has in Ukraine. With less than a thousand paying subscribers and high printing and postage costs, the paper’s financial state is precarious, and it is obvious that this is more a labour of love than a profitable enterprise.

I asked him about incorporating more English content and getting younger Ukrainians involved – such as we have done with this paper. He stated somewhat sadly that though he was all for it, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get anybody from the younger generations born in Australia interested.

It seems that the evolution of Ukrainian communities in the diaspora has followed a consistent pattern regardless of the country or continent involved. The skeptics and cynics would say that the end result of assimilation is inevitable, no matter what anybody did. I would disagree. The similar fates are due to a commonality of misplaced priorities and agendas. Nothing is inevitable. Less political and more enlightened, balanced, and community-centred leadership could have produced a different result.