The Country I Was Given

When I was a boy in Adelaide, before I reached Grade 5, my mother was a dressmaker, and a well-known one. Women came to the house for fittings, and because I was a messy little tacker, a German housekeeper came two or three times a week to keep order around the work, and again whenever a client arrived. She spoke English well. She never spoke it to me. She spoke to me only in German.

I learned it the way children do, without trying. The earlier you learn a language, the easier it comes, and the younger you are, the more you absorb it whole. Then both my schools taught French, which almost nobody in Adelaide used, and the German slipped away.

Or so I thought. Years later, I flew to Wales to see my son. The plane stopped in Munich, and those of us going on to Manchester had to stay aboard. The cleaning crew came through, and one of them said a few simple words to me. I answered him in German before I knew I had done it. Nothing clever. A few words. But I sat there afterwards and thought, where on earth did this come from? People tell me if I lived in Germany I would have it back inside six months. A language given to a child does not leave. It waits.

I tell you this because Pauline Hanson stood at the National Press Club and called the many languages of this country a problem.

She warned of ‘the growing language problem which is a function of immigration’. She asked, ‘How can you generate social cohesion if people can’t speak the language?’ She wants one cultural umbrella, and one tongue beneath it.

The Australia I grew up in was never under one umbrella. And the faith she claims for this country celebrates the thing she fears.

The Australia I Grew Up In

One of my mother’s closest friends worked in fashion too. She and her husband were Hungarian refugees, and they each spoke six or seven languages. As a boy I was amazed by it. They had carried whole worlds across the sea. They changed the spelling of their surname to make it easier for Australians to say, a small kindness offered to their new home. I loved visiting them.

Once a year we took The Overland to Melbourne. Before the train we always stopped at a Greek restaurant we loved, and over the years we came to know the owners. When they moved their kitchen to Glenelg, the seaside suburb near us, we followed them there. You do not follow a menu across a city. You follow people.

A special treat was the local Chinese restaurant, where I learned to hold chopsticks. My father cooked his own version of a Chinese meal on Saturday nights, not truly Chinese, but ours, and good.

None of this was a threat to my childhood. It was my childhood. German in the sewing room, Hungarian over afternoon tea, Greek before the train, Chinese on a Saturday night. The cohesion Hanson worries about was sitting at our table the whole time.

German in the sewing room. It was not a threat. It was home.

What The Census Shows

Hanson drew her alarm from the 2021 Census, and the Census does not say what she says it does.

She pointed to 872,000 people who speak English ‘not well’ or ‘not at all’. True. It is also 3.4 per cent of the population. The other 96.6 per cent speak English well or speak only English (ABS, 2022). She named the one in four who speak another language at home as a fracture. Yet a language spoken at home is not the loss of English. About 85 per cent of those people speak English well too (ABS, 2022). They are bilingual, like the housekeeper who gave me German and kept her English.

And the drift she fears runs the other way. In Australia, the move to English is all but complete by the second generation, and the third generation is close to English alone (Macquarie University, n.d.). The languages fade unless fresh arrivals renew them. The threat she names corrects itself by the time the migrant’s child reaches school. In fact, our school system has specialist English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) teachers, and sometimes even a unit in a primary or high school providing a whole class with EAL/D support.

A Gift Still Waiting

Here is what the data misses, and what the German crew member over Munich drew out of me. A language given to a child is not a problem to be managed. It is a gift waiting in you for decades. The housekeeper, who would speak only German to a messy boy, handed me something I did not earn and never fully lost.

Hanson sees the many tongues of Australia and counts a cost. I see the gift my mother’s housekeeper gave me, the worlds my Hungarian friends carried, the kitchens we followed across a city. Multiply those by millions, and you do not get a fractured country. You get a richer one.

Many Tongues, One Spirit

The faith Hanson claims for this nation has a founding day, and on it God did not impose one tongue. He blessed many.

At Pentecost, the Spirit fell on the followers of Jesus, and people from across the known world heard them: Parthians and Medes and Elamites, visitors from Rome, Cretans and Arabs. The wonder was not one shared language. It was the opposite. ‘Each one heard them speaking in the native language of each’ (Acts 2:6, NRSVue). ‘In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’ (Acts 2:11, NRSVue).

Read it against the older story. At Babel, humanity built a tower to make a name for itself, and ‘the Lord confused the language of all the earth’ (Genesis 11:9, NRSVue). The many languages began as a scattering. Pentecost does not reverse it by restoring one tongue. It redeems it by giving understanding across all of them. God meets each people where they are, in the language of their own home.

The end of the story matches the beginning. John sees before the throne of heaven ‘a great multitude … from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’ (Revelation 7:9, NRSVue). Not one culture under one umbrella. Every culture under one God.

So when Hanson demands a monocultural Australia and reaches for our Judeo-Christian inheritance to justify it, she holds the tradition backwards, reaching for the single tongue of Babel, the one God scattered into many. The Christian story opens at Pentecost with many tongues blessed and closes in Revelation with many tongues gathered. The umbrella she wants is not in the book she cites.

Pentecost blessed many languages. It did not impose one.

The Country I Was Given

The multilingual Australia Hanson fears is the one I was raised in. German in my mother’s workroom. Six languages over a Hungarian afternoon tea. Greek before the train and Chinese on a Saturday night. It did not break the country. It made the country, and it made me.

The Census says we speak English and keep our other tongues as treasures. Pentecost says God speaks to each of us in our own. Read the data, and the threat disappears. Read the gospel, and see how the many languages are a blessing, not a problem. The housekeeper only ever spoke to me in German. I am still grateful.

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Sources

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022, September 20). 2021 Census highlights increasing cultural diversity. https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/2021-census-highlights-increasing-cultural-diversity

Hanson, P. (2026, June 17). Address to the National Press Club [Speech]. National Press Club of Australia, Canberra.

Macquarie University. (n.d.). Linguistic shift and heritage language retention in Australia. https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/linguistic-shift-and-heritage-language-retention-in-australia/

Biblical quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue).