One of the common ways of viewing Croatian settlement in Australia emphasises conflict and division. This perception is often then offset by a defensive and inward-looking story of ‘success’. Neither approach takes into account the range of Croatian immigrant experiences. Both approaches are one-dimensional and ahistorical, reinforcing stereotypes with recourse to the usual dichotomies (of class in particular). Each approach, in its own way, undervalues aspects of Croatian association that accommodate (rather than exclude) difference and have led to a sense of social cohesion, the accumulation of social capital and a strong affinity with Australian democratic processes. ^[22] (Interestingly, discussions on the link between social capital and active citizenship identify high socioeconomic status as one of the significant contributing variables, which may in part explain why the relationship between ethnic association and activism and social capital is largely overlooked.) ^[23] In order to broaden the base of evidence on which we can draw to amplify our understanding of these important issues, we can identify the examples of and reasons for the emergence of a Croatian civic identity in the Australian context. An obvious way to do this is to look more closely at some of the features of association and activism that have hitherto been treated in only a cursory fashion or, indeed, thought to militate against cooperative social action and against integration. The four features or patterns of Croatian settlement I have chosen to discuss suggest ways in which Croats have mediated a reciprocal relationship between the old and the new, between maintaining elements of their ethnic identity and adapting to their changed circumstances, thereby exhibiting the qualities of active citizenship. Again, it is important to recognise that aspects of this discussion may apply to other immigrant groups, which also displaye high levels of engagement and voluntarism in the same time span.

The first point or paradox of note is that while for most of the period of Croatian immigration to Australia under review here there was no official acknowledgment of the settlers as ethnically or nationally distinctive, there was a high degree of community activism and political lobbying by Croats as Croats. This culminated in their recognition by the Australian Government as a distinct national and language group. ^[24] Before ethnic and multicultural initiatives received financial aid—that is, before Australia embraced multiculturalism in the 1970s—Croats displayed a remarkable degree of flexibility, initiative and determination in setting up a range of structures to meet their social, cultural and welfare needs and did so without material or moral assistance from governmental agencies, either Australian or Yugoslav. They had no administrative or institutional support and relied on the voluntary work of Croats for their success. Thousands of individuals gave their time and skills freely in fundraising for the purchase of land on which they built halls, ethnic schools, sports centres and churches. In many regards, the achievements of the Croatian activists in South Australia stand as representative examples of the immigrants’ resourcefulness in Australia as a whole. ^[25] Approximately 6.9 per cent (3580) of Australia’s Croatian-born live in South Australia. ^[26] The first Australian ‘Croatian club’ was established in Adelaide in 1950 and others followed thereafter in capital cities and regional centres. Through sport, soccer in particular, Croats were able to find a social outlet and to have an impact on Australian sporting culture. The soccer team Adelaide Croatia, established in 1952, was the first of its kind in Australia, enjoyed a number of successes in the state league and still exists today. Adelaide is also home to the oldest continuously running Croatian ethnic school in Australia. ^[27] In addition, there are folk ensembles and local programs in Croatian have been produced for South Australian community radio stations since 1976. There are activities for elderly members of the community (as befits the ageing demographic of the Croatian-born) as well as an Australian-Croatian Chamber of Commerce. While several associations have existed in South Australia since the 1950s and 1960s, others, such as the writers’ group, are recent initiatives and reflect the changing social landscape of community centres across the country. ^[28] The range and intensity of this activity over several decades attest to a desire for broad social and cultural experiences and to the fact that these immigrants place a high value on participation in activities outside the home and workplace and whose benefits could not be quantified or are not measured in terms of direct (personal) material gain. ^[29] David Hogan and David Owen argue that there is a link between ‘levels of social capital and levels of engagement in important citizenship practices, especially “voluntarist” practices within community organisations’. ^[30] Placing the example of immigrant voluntarist practices, not just that of Croats but of many other equally active groups, within this broader context presents us with a view that is different from the perspective of ethnic activism as ‘closed’ and amplifies our understanding of active citizenship. Moreover, privileging association as ostensibly more outward looking and more ‘civic’ purely on the basis that it emanates from the ‘host’ culture is, as we have seen, problematic on many counts.

The second point that invites reflection is the fact that while Croatian women are absent from most of the upper echelons of Croatian organisational structures, they have been remarkably active in community life. The Croatian women’s contribution has generally been deemed a simple extension of traditional female pursuits or domestic duties and as such has not been studied seriously. However, as historians of gender have demonstrated, women who seem to be publicly ‘absent’ from communities in the past have in fact been active in many different aspects of social and cultural life through their sociability and networks grounded in their associational life. For a long time, the wider import of this ‘hidden’ history was neither understood nor seen to be something from which we could learn and this was especially the case for immigrant women in Australia. ^[31]

The raw facts on Croatian-born women in Australia would seem to confirm the findings of general studies of migrant women in the workforce that show they are generally unskilled and poorly paid. ^[32] In Victoria, for example, Croatian women have traditionally been employed in textile industries, in light manufacturing plants and, on occasion, as seasonal farm workers. ^[33] There is not much deviation from this pattern in other states, but Croatian working-class women have had a broader social engagement and have been more active than statistics about their employment history and levels of education might suggest. They established and ran ethnic schools and folkloric ensembles while also providing social support and caring for the welfare of their communities. ^[34] Often, as intimated above, this activism reflected their traditional (gendered) role in Croatian families and the population at large, but it also reflected the kind of associational life not ordinarily identified with working-class women. ^[35] Historians typically describe these as middle-class pursuits whereby women of a certain social standing who do not work outside the home draw on the kinds of skills gleaned in bourgeois households. ^[36] The inherent class bias in analyses of Croatian women’s lives needs to be redressed: their experience amplifies the received wisdom about migrant women in Australia and the evidence of women’s organisational skills exhibited at the time of Croatia’s war for independence (1991–95), for example, invites closer analysis.

During this war, Croatian women supervised large-scale aid projects and major fundraising events. They came to clubs and community centres after long hours of work, bringing their sewing machines with them. Having purchased hundreds of metres of material in bulk, they took to cutting it and sewing children’s pyjamas, tracksuits, sheets and other items for dispatch in sea containers. They organised the collection of non-perishable foodstuffs for the victims of the war and the refugees. They purchased medicines and other necessities of life. They supported and continue to support orphans. ^[37] These actions were the product of goodwill but also of a kind of self-actualisation made more visible by the special circumstances, to be sure, but prepared for over many years by the commitment to voluntarism and the (unstated) recognition of its social and psychic benefits. Anecdotal evidence suggests these values are generally not shared by the waves of immigrants arriving since the 1980s (especially in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia), who equate voluntarism with ‘unpaid work’. A possible interpretation of this difference in attitude may be that there is no longer a need for such intense activism and that recent arrivals have greater scope to pursue a range of professional opportunities. However, one might also consider this attitude a consequence of the erosion of civil and social life under communism and trace it to the perversion of the idea of voluntarism from the first years of communist implantation. In the aftermath of the destruction of World War II, brigades of youth ‘volunteers’ literally built the new socialist state through obligatory participation in construction programs. At the same time, the State did not tolerate ‘social’ or voluntary activities emanating from private initiatives (for example, church-run charitable work) because they were deemed inappropriate in a setting in which the State fulfilled its citizens’ material needs. ^[38] Interestingly, the emergence of non-governmental organisations as representative of different interests in former communist states is often considered one of the markers of the relative health of the democratising process.

The third paradox, which is telling of the general and evolving social and civic experience of Croats, relates to the fact that post-1945 Croatian immigrants have a had very low socioeconomic status in Australian society and yet have been able to achieve a degree of fluency in political processes and lobbying combined with a high level of financial security. Furthermore, they placed a significant value on investing in community infrastructure and in what I referred to above as social capital. Theirs is an impressive financial and cultural legacy of community centres and structures across Australia for use by future generations. ^[39] This is the case in spite of the fact that Croatian-born men and women are less educated and less socially mobile than their counterparts in the population at large. For example, in the 1990s, Croatian-born immigrants living in Victoria were less than half as likely to be employed as professionals than the Victorian population as a whole. ^[40] Nevertheless, Croats, along with other Southern European settlers, do have a very high per capita rate of home ownership relative to the population at large. ^[41] Their early postwar patterns of settlement in urban centres, common to many immigrants, whereby, for example, they moved from inner-city rented dwellings to their own homes either in established working-class suburbs or in newer housing developments, indicated a degree of economic stability and continuous employment. ^[42] The almost complete absence of a professional cadre of Croatian teachers, public servants and white-collar workers relative to comparable immigrant groups invites us to consider the possibility of barriers existing to their social advancement over time arising from the slow recognition of Croats as an identifiable national group with specific needs. Significantly, while an obvious impediment in certain areas of social advancement and mobility, the absence of this professional cadre did not pose a barrier to the establishment of a range of Croatian community groups. One possible explanation for this is that Croats, feeling they had an inferior status vis-a-vis other ‘Yugoslavs’ and other immigrants, expended greater effort ensuring their community structures did well. ^[43] Their collective business acumen and their recognition of the need to plan for the long term have remained unexplored by historians who have interpreted their efforts (superficially) as narrowly nationalistic or insular. ^[44] Moreover, the more recent tendency to focus on Croatian business elites, on the obvious and highly visible—the millionaire ship-builder or the owner of the three-times winner of the Melbourne Cup, for example—has left a story that obscures the collective and individual experiences of the less spectacularly productive but nonetheless socially active Australian Croats. The greater emphasis on the outcomes rather than the process of immigrant community activism explains this imbalance as does the general absence of ethnic associational life from mainstream discussions about the relationship between active citizenship and the generation of social capital.

Finally, we had the paradox whereby Croatia was not an independent country but Croats in Australia were known for having a strong national identity. The partial explanation for this is that their high public profile was the product of their reaction against negative stereotyping. ^[45] One of their chosen methods of political lobbying—in group demonstrations and, where possible, near buildings housing Yugoslav consular staff or other official Yugoslav agencies—led to the conflation of all Croatian nationalist activism (anti-Yugoslavism) as potentially violent and rooted in the politics of collaborationism in World War II. This was the international framework for the teleological interpretation of all modern Croatian history and for the interpretation of the history of Central European and Balkan collaboration as exceptional. It was also the starting point for any analysis of Croatian émigré activities. This framework of interpretation persisted at least up to the fall of Yugoslavia, when some of the boundaries between Croats and Croatian ‘Yugoslavs’ became more blurred or disappeared. ^[46] It is also true that the Yugoslav Government’s attempt at discrediting Croatian activism by referring to it as ‘extreme’, ‘fascist’ or ‘separatist’ in inspiration as well as its crude attempts at ‘neutralising’ Croatian ‘troublemakers’ eventually lost its capacity to undermine Croatian communities as a whole, either in Australia or elsewhere. ^[47] The reality of the situation meant that the media and government-manufactured Croatian ‘type’ was no longer sustainable because it was not rooted in the lived experience of Croats in Australia, or indeed the lived experience of Australians who came into contact with Croatian people. Croats did not exist in a vacuum nor were they simply reactive. They were contesting a negative and one-dimensional interpretation of their identity and positing another in its place. At times, this led to a certain defensiveness on their part. ^[48] On the whole, however, their reaction to the slurs against them led Croats (collectively) to be more outward looking: their behaviour was less ‘conspiratorial’ and ‘nostalgic’ than it was flexible, forward looking and adaptable. For example, a ‘petrified’ backward-looking community trapped in a time capsule could not have achieved what no other Croatian émigré community had achieved: official recognition of the integrity of the Croatian (as opposed to the so-called Serbo-Croatian) language, financial support for Croatian interpreting and translating services and Croatian language teaching in ethnic and public schools, and the establishment of the Croatian Studies Centre at Macquarie University in Sydney. The specific argument Croats had with the official use of ‘Serbo-Croat’ made their lobbying on this score distinctive.