Wollongong's Multicultural Character: A City Shaped by Migration

Wollongong's multicultural character, shaped by the successive waves of post-war migration that the steelworks attracted first from southern Europe and then from Asia and the Pacific, provides the city with a cultural diversity and a food scene that the industrial history has bequeathed to the contemporary city in the form of community organisations, places of worship, cultural festivals, and the ethnic restaurants and grocery stores that reflect the cultural backgrounds of the migrant communities that chose Wollongong as their Australian home. The diversity that manufacturing-led migration created in Wollongong is one of the less-visible but more significant ways in which the industrial era's social legacy sustains value in the post-industrial period.

The Lebanese community of Wollongong, one of the largest per capita concentrations of Lebanese Australians outside of Sydney, has shaped the city's food culture through the Lebanese bakeries, the grocery stores stocking the Middle Eastern ingredients, and the restaurants serving the authentic cuisine that community members and adventurous diners seek. The community's presence in Wollongong dates from the mid-twentieth century migration that brought Lebanese families seeking the manufacturing employment that the steelworks provided and that has grown through the subsequent family reunion migration that established communities attract.

The University of Wollongong's international student community adds the contemporary migration layer to the multicultural character that the industrial era created, the Asian and South Asian student population that the university attracts contributing the cultural diversity of the higher education migration wave to the community mix that the workers' migration built. The interaction between the established multicultural communities and the student communities creates the cultural dynamic that sustains the city's continuing diversity even as the manufacturing employment that created the original multicultural communities has declined.

Wollongong's multicultural food market, the Crown Street Mall Saturday market and the community food events that the multicultural community organisations host, provide the public cultural expression of the diversity that the city contains. The shared food culture that emerges when communities of different origins settle in the same city and eventually share each other's culinary traditions is one of the most socially cohesive products of multicultural urban life.

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