In a 70-page illustrated booklet just published by the Foreign Affairs Ministry in its series of talks on Malta’s relations with states, keynote speaker Henry Frendo notes that for Maltese-Australian relations to prosper, outreach must go “beyond the confines of first generation migrant settlers.
In spite of efforts to retain the language use among younger generations it was increasingly difficult to meet this challenge
“However important pastizzi, imqaret, qasstat, bigilla, the family, the festa, the parish, the brass band, or Kinnie and Twistees remain – and they do – updated, creative, proactive, intellectual and cultural supports become all the more necessary,” he says.
Frendo, whose Insitute of Maltese Studies at the University runs courses on culture and identity as well as migration, underlines research findings pointing to religion being more of a core value in the retention of a Maltese-Australian identity than language.
But, he adds, as the world became more globalised and secularised, the role of traditional religion among future generations was not too clear.
In spite of valiant efforts to retain Maltese language use among younger generations of Maltese-Australians, Frendo writes, it was increasingly difficult to meet this challenge. Certain changes being enforced on the customary standard language, known to Maltese and Gozitan migrants, did not help.
Some 200,000 Australian residents claiming Maltese ancestry today was equivalent to half Malta’s entire population.
In recounting the history of these relations – between “peoples rather than states” – Frendo mentions as many as four early Maltese settlers landing in Sydney Cove and Botany Bay, well before individual adventurers in Victoria by 1838, and the organised groups for northern Queensland’s cane fields mainly by 1883.
Frendo recounted a touching anecdote concerning his own wife Margaret in 1984 when most of the mothers-to-be at the Catholic hospital in Cairns in the far north of Queensland could not speak Maltese but were conscious of their Maltese ancestry: they would go to visit her “to see a real Maltese”.
His study recounts Maltese-Australian cooperation experienced repeatedly in wartime, as well as the ongoing highly commendable initiatives and contacts in a wide variety of fields, from the humanities and the arts to businesses, from publishing to folk-singing in a spirit of communality. Frendo stresses that dual citizenship rights since 2000, and improved technologies of communication, together with the recently formed diaspora council, could rise to the challenge of retaining and indeed furthering the better of both worlds, syncretically.
The publication depicts reciprocal visits by the highest dignitaries from both countries, politicians and ecclesiastics, since the 1950s, and comprises short addresses by the outgoing Foreign Affairs Minister Tonio Borg, the permanent secretary John Paul Grech and the outgoing Australian High Commissioner Anne Quinane, whose grandfather, Private Patrick Joseph Quinane of the Australian Light Horse Regiment, was one of the many wounded ANZACs cared for in Malta in 1915.
His is one of the many evocative photographs gracing this new book.