Ex-Sydneysider STUART PEARSON looks at Bathurst and its future from the perspective of a new resident.
On Australia Day, my wife and I attended the citizenship ceremony at the Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre. It is something we do every year.
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I was struck by the sheer number and diversity of people wanting to swear their allegiance to Australia. Bathurst Regional Council general manager David Sherley said there were 40 people undergoing the ceremony from 18 countries - one of the largest groups from the most varied background he had seen assembled in 15 years.
It got me thinking how the face of Bathurst has changed and continues to do so.
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For more than 40,000 years, only Wiradyuri people lived around Bathurst. When they first settled in the Central West of NSW, megafauna still roamed the land, including Diprotodons and sheep-sized echidnas.
The megafauna eventually died out, but the Wiradyuri remained, silently criss-crossing the country in a seasonal pattern of movement. Over thousands of years, the First Australians gradually changed the landscape from thick woodland forests into open savannah country through fire management practices, creating the perfect habitat to hunt game species, such as kangaroo and emu.
Then, just over 200 years ago, the first Europeans appeared across the Blue Mountains and the world of the Wiradyuri changed completely, utterly and devastatingly. Within one generation their numbers diminished greatly, but even so, their presence never completed vanished.
For the next generation, the land around Bathurst was populated by people born in the United Kingdom or Australians born from UK parents. Then, in 1851, gold was found at Ophir, near Bathurst, and people from all over the world rushed to the region.
The inflow included thousands of prospectors from China. At one stage in the early 1860s, there were more Chinese males living in the Bathurst region than white men.
The Colonial administration responded with harsh measures restricting both trade and immigration, which resulted in the rapid decline of Chinese in the region. By 1900, the face of Bathurst had returned to being almost exclusively white with the number of First Nations and Chinese people reduced to numerical insignificance.
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That's the way it stayed for the next half century, until the Federal Government progressively opened our borders to people from different countries, races and religions.
In the 1954 census, the Bathurst region had a population of 21,094 people, of which only 3.6 per cent (759) were born outside Australia or the UK. At the last census in 2016, the population of Bathurst born outside Australia and the UK had risen to 14 per cent - a figure that represents about 6000 of the population of 43,206.
The fastest growing groups are from New Zealand, the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent.
If you have a look at the accompanying photograph of the 2020 naturalisation ceremony, you'd have to conclude that immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka continue to arrive in increasing numbers.
The more diversity there is in Bathurst, the more entrepreneurial, dynamic and exciting this city becomes. I'm all in favour of a multicultural society and I hope that these new citizens will be made as welcome to Bathurst as I was.
