Annastacia Palaszczuk and members of her family (Source: Couriermail)

Would Kirk Douglas be a Hollywood legend if he had kept his birth name Issur Danielovitch? Would Bob Dylan have achieved global fame if he had kept his birth name Robert Zimmerman? Would the current Australian treasurer Joe Hockey have had an equally successful political career if his father had not anglicized the family surname from Hokeidonian to Hockey? It is, of course, impossible to know the answer to these questions but it is fair to assume that the answer to these questions is ‘not likely.’

Anglicizing stigmatized ethnic names is often considered typical of an earlier era of immigration when assimilation prevailed. In The American Language (first published in 1919) H. L. Mencken famously observed that European immigrants were likely to give up their distinctive names in America for ‘protective coloration’ in order to escape ‘linguistic hostility’ and ‘social enmity:’

[…] more important than this purely linguistic hostility, there is a deeper social enmity, and it urges the immigrant to change his name with even greater force. For a hundred years past all the heaviest and most degrading labor of the United States has been done by successive armies of foreigners, and so a concept of inferiority has come to be attached to mere foreignness. […] This disdain tends to pursue an immigrant with extraordinary rancor when he bears a name that is unmistakably foreign and hence difficult to the native, and open to his crude burlesque. Moreover, the general feeling penetrates the man himself, particularly if he be ignorant, and he comes to believe that his name is not only a handicap, but also intrinsically discreditable – that it wars subtly upon his worth and integrity. […] The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary suspicion and difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one handicap. (Mencken 1919, p. 280)

A recent comparison of the earnings of European immigrants to the USA in the 1930s who did or did not Americanize their names has found that a name change during that period was indeed associated with earnings’ gains of at least 14% (Biavaschi et al., 2013).

But is all this of purely historical interest? How do ethnic names fare today after decades of multiculturalism and in a so-called age of super-diversity?

One thing that contemporary research has shown is that ethnic names continue to constitute a barrier at the point of entry into the job market; i.e. job applicants with ethnic names are less likely to receive a response or be invited for interview than candidates with non-ethnic names. For instance, a 2009 Australian study found that fictitious job applicants with Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indigenous names were less likely to be called back than those with identical CVs but Italian names. Fictitious candidates with Anglo-Saxon names had the highest call-back rate (Booth et al. 2009). A similar Western Australian study comparing accountant job applicants with Middle Eastern and Anglo-Saxon names reached similar conclusions (Pinkerton 2013) as did a German study with Turkish and German names (Schneider 2014).

Conversely, changing an ethnic name continues to pay off for some migrant groups as a 2009 Swedish study found: Middle Eastern and Slavic migrants to Sweden who changed their names in the 1990s obtained a substantial increase in labour earnings over similarly qualified migrants from the same origin groups who did not change their name to a Swedish or neutral name (a ‘neutral’ name is one that is not particularly associated with any particular ethnic or national group) (Arai & Skogman Thoursie, 2009).

These studies all focus on the point of entry into the labour market but we do not know much about how ethnic personal names are talked about in everyday life. Do ethnic personal names continue to matter for those who have established themselves? Do ethnic personal names attract disdain, rancor, enmity or crude burlesque in this day and age?

Questions such as these are usually difficult to research systematically but recent events in Australian politics have provided a perfect corpus of reactions to a non-Anglicized and strongly ethnic name, namely the Polish name Palaszczuk.

Annastacia Palaszczuk is a third-generation Australian who was thrown into the national spotlight last weekend as the leader of Queensland’s Australian Labour Party (ALP) and, in an unexpected election outcome, as the likely future state premier of Queensland.

To begin with, Annastacia Palaszczuk is living proof that it is possible to be successful in Australian politics with a non-Anglo name. She has held her electorate, the seat of Inala, a suburb of Brisbane, since 2006, and the name Palaszczuk must be a bit of household name there because Annastacia’s father Henry Palaszczuk preceded his daughter as the member for Inala and held the seat from 1992 to 2006.

However, outside Inala and certainly outside Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk was relatively unknown until last Saturday. In social media, her name became an immediate topic of comments and discussion. These comments provide us with a window into the discursive construction of belonging in contemporary Australia’s multicultural society and I hope someone will analyse this precious corpus systematically. A few preliminary observations include the following.

Difficulty

The predominant theme that emerged was around the difficulty of the name as in the following examples:

Might have to learn how to pronounce Palaszczuk at this rate. #qldvotes

— Tanya Ashworth (@ordinarytanya) January 31, 2015

The whole of Queensland just realised they’re going to have to learn to spell their new Premier’s name. #qldvotes

— Wes Mountain (@therevmountain) January 31, 2015

Solutions to the problem of pronouncing or spelling a difficult name were also offered, such as the following mnemonic or the suggestion to use a nickname instead:

Loved @GrahamPerrettMP spelling lesson 4 name of poss next Qld Premier: It is 'PALA, Sydney Zoo, Canberra Zoo UK' #qldvotes @AnnastaciaMP

— OzLabourStart (@OzLabourStart) January 31, 2015

@therevmountain it's Queensland. They will give her a nickname

— ChristopherPatterson (@Christo45046444) January 31, 2015

Most of the comments related to the difficulty of the Palaszczuk name are good-humoured and self-deprecating. At the same time, the very fact that the name and its difficulty is topicalized points to the fact that for these commentators the name is still remarkable and noteworthy as one that does not index a ‘normal’ or ‘default’ imagined Australian identity. That legitimate belonging is tied to the name becomes even clearer in comments that exaggerate the difficulty of the name through intentional misspellings, silly syllable counts or suggestions that it will be impossible to learn:

Wow! 25 days ago I didn't know the ALP had a leader. #QldVotes #Annastaciawho?

— Nathan Kneen (@nathankneen) January 31, 2015

And then there are the passive-aggressive comments about her name such as this one:

Cate: Dear Annastacia Palaszczuk,

Can we call you Anna? or do you prefer AP? (Couriermail)

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

While comments such as the above are concerned with belonging in Australia, another theme can be observed around authenticity and the fact that the name is not pronounced in the original Polish fashion. Annastacia and her family apparently pronounce their name /ˌpælǝ’ʒeɪ/, as do the Australian media. Commentators were quick to exhort ‘us’ (i.e. the Australian public) or Annastacia herself to learn how to pronounce her name ‘correctly:’

Let's learn to say it properly. Correct Polish pronunciation of @annastaciaMP Palaszczuk's name is Pa-wa-shchook, not Pallashay. #qldvotes

— Marcus Kuczynski (@cuscus1) February 1, 2015

@AnnastaciaMP Just checked the polish pronunciation guide. Your last name is pronounced "Pala-Chook" you ain't fooling any1! #Fail #qldvotes

— Mitch (@HEELAussie) February 2, 2015

Wendy2: Well you don’t pronounce her name Pala-shay to begin with. Why does everyone do that? Has the media been given notes telling them to pronounce it that way? Palaszczuk being a Polish name would be pronounced Palaz-chook. I can’t imagine why Ms. Palaszczuk would not want to use the traditional pronounciation of her family name, some may even suggest a sort of cultural cringe. It makes me think of Keeping Up Appearances’ snobbish character Hyancinth Bucket who insisted on her surname being pronounced Bouquet. How facile and false. (Couriermail)

What’s in a name?

We’ve come a long way since H. L. Mencken’s time when having a non-Anglo name laid migrants open to rancour, disdain, enmity and crude burlesque. Or have we?

Annastacia Palaszczuk and her father have been successful in Queensland politics since 1992. So, after taking the entry barrier, clearly a lot is possible for bearers of a non-Anglo name. At the same time, the chatter about Annastacia Palaszczuk’s name that could be observed on social media in the last few days also demonstrates that a non-Anglo name continues to ‘raise difficulties’ in contemporary Australia. Beyond being remarkable and noteworthy, such names also continue to be the target of cheap jokes and insults.

The latter seem to come more frequently from anonymous commentators in the comments’ sections of newspapers than from identifiable tweeters. This would suggest that there are two forms of stigma now: having a strong ethnic name continues to carry some stigma but openly questioning the legitimacy of its bearer now attracts stigma, too.

Arai, M., & Skogman Thoursie, P. (2009). Renouncing Personal Names: An Empirical Examination of Surname Change and Earnings Journal of Labor Economics, 27 (1), 127-147 DOI: 10.1086/593964

A broken arm in multicultural Queensland (Source:antilogic.co.za)

I recently broke my arm by ignominiously falling in my own living room and landing on my elbow. The force of the impact on the muscles and tendons in my shoulder broke the bone.

When I presented at the nearest emergency clinic, I entered the extraordinarily diverse world of a large Australian public teaching hospital. It was a busy night. After going through several sets of paperwork I was finally given painkillers and sat down to wait. In a blur of pain and shock only partially dulled by medication, I sat through “Four weddings and a funeral”, some hard-sell cosmetics ads and a Christian fundamentalist promo on the TV before the Canadian duty nurse called my name, took another medical history and sent me to another set of uncomfortable seats to await the hard-pressed Anglo-Aussie intern. She sent me on to an Irish nurse who took X-Rays. I left at 4.00 am with my arm in a sling and an appointment at the fracture clinic.

In a hospital outpatient clinic time passes slowly. My initial idle observations of its coming and goings turned into real interest and some serious people-watching (aka ethnographic observation). Let me describe my interactions with Queensland’s multicultural medical doctors.

Recent census data shows that overseas migration now makes up half of Queensland’s population growth, a trend predicted to continue. Reflecting this pattern, 1 in 10 Queensland Health employees comes from a non-English-speaking background. One visit to the fracture clinic of this busy hospital makes it obvious that without immigrant medical staff this hospital simply would not function. I was assigned to a consultant with the Anglo-Celtic name of Robinson but I only ever saw him in the distance, his role seemingly being to oversee the decision-making of the doctors under his supervision. Every one of the people mentioned here evidently had the right to work in Australia and, since they were all relatively young, it would be safe to assume they were recent arrivals or “new Australians”. In mentioning that they were all of non English-speaking background I don’t intend to ‘other’ them but rather to emphasise that my hospital experience was an encounter with Australian multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.

The nurse with the Italian-Aussie accent called me into the consulting area. The first doctor who treated me was a young Malaysian woman in a mini skirt. Call me old-fashioned but I still expect medical doctors to wear white coats. It seems I am hopelessly out of date. She confirmed the nature and extent of my injury, showing me some blurry X-Rays that I could not really make out. At my four-week appointment, I met a jolly Sri Lankan doctor in scrubs. He showed me a CT scanned image of my broken shoulder, this time in graphic detail. He told me I might not regain full range of movement in my arm, instructed me to keep my sling on and my shoulder still and said that I wouldn’t be driving for at least three months. At my six-week visit, my doctor was a suave Egyptian in a crisp, striped shirt, with a dry sense of humour: “Should I see my GP?” I asked him. “If you miss him”, he replied. I suppose laughter is the best medicine. The good news at this visit was that I was not a candidate for surgery. At my eight-week visit, my doctor, of possible Swiss or German origin, gave me the news that the bone had started to heal! I could remove my sling and start active exercise, I could swim but not drive and I could start physio. Judging by her accent, my physiotherapist originates from Singapore. We’ve been working together for two weeks now and I can get my arm up to almost 90 degrees with her help and encouragement.

These medicos, with their variety of Aussie ethnolects, came from an amazing range of cultural backgrounds. While I might have preferred continuity of care from one doctor, the consistency with which I was treated by a range of different doctors was reassuring. While English, which they all spoke perfectly, was the common language, they also all spoke the language of orthopaedics and rehabilitation. I was well looked after and reminded that I am lucky to have easy access to hospital care and services, a benefit that does not apply to all Australians equally.

These thoughts prompted a quick Internet search for some information about multiculturalism and healthcare in Queensland. I found plenty of encouraging material. According to the Queensland cross cultural learning and development strategy, the increasing cultural diversity of the Queensland population means that to be safe, health services need to be culturally appropriate and responsive. One of the eight core Queensland Health targets is culturally competent staff. The Queensland Health guidelines for multicultural health policy implementation also include a language services policy. Yet many people still miss out on health services or access them too late for effective preventative intervention or treatment. The Queensland Council for Social Services recognises that three at-risk groups are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, people in rural and remote areas, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It proposes a number of strategies for training staff to deal with diversity.

But the Queensland government recently abolished some 14,500 public service positions, claiming that cuts will reduce unnecessary red tape and top-heavy administration. Like many Queenslanders, I find it impossible to accept that cutting support services will increase efficiency, improve access to health care or make the jobs of front line staff any easier. For many Queenslanders the future looks uncertain and what it holds for multicultural policy development, an equitable health service and quality health care remains to be seen.

Caroline Tennant Kelly with two of her photos from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement (Source: Sydney Morning Herald at http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-bohemian-and-her-mission-20100416-skgk.html)

In 1924 the first university Department of Anthropology in Australia was founded at the University of Sydney. The founding professor was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a theoretical anthropologist whose aim it was to have anthropology accepted as one of the natural sciences. Not a fieldworker himself he was nevertheless successful in establishing anthropological fieldwork in Australia and soon the new department had dozens of fieldworkers around Australia, in Papua New Guinea and on various Pacific islands. What these researchers expected to study was the social organization, the cultures and the languages of ‘native tribes.’ However, what they found was colonization in full swing: in Queensland, the 2^nd or 3^rd generation of post-contact aboriginals were mostly living in new social formations on missions and reserves.

And so these new fieldworkers abruptly faced a set of ethical questions for which they were unprepared. Should they seek out the small number of remaining groups who continued to live ‘in their natural state’? Or should they concentrate on studying the much larger numbers of aboriginal people living on missions and reserves, often with little regard to traditional group and clan affiliations? Should they seek out the testimony of elderly aboriginals born before colonization and focus on researching pre-colonial life? Or should they record ongoing transformations in the lives of these people? Should they concentrate only on the romanticized ‘full-bloods’ or also consider the experiences of the increasing number of ‘half-castes’? Was their role merely to record what they observed or should they speak out about the abject living conditions they observed? Who were their non-academic partners? The aboriginal people who they studied or the administrators who controlled access to the missions and reserves (as, at that time, most aboriginal people were wards of the state)?

Let me give you two examples. One of Radcliffe-Brown’s supervisees, Ursula McConnel went to Aurukun in 1927 to conduct ethnographic research among the Wik-Mungkana people on Cape York Peninsula, who today – on May 22, 2012 – are having 75,000 hectares of their land returned from the State of Queensland. In addition to her anthropological research focus on traditional social organization, culture and language, she also found a culture of abuse on the Presbyterian mission: inmates were punished for disobedience by whipping or by being chained to trees; imprisonment without food or water in a small iron shed was a regular occurrence. Other punitive measures included head shavings and chained work gangs. She also observed two women and three men being rounded up a gunpoint, chained together and force-marched a distance of 380 kilometres across the Cape York Peninsula for transportation to another settlement (see Kidd, 1997, pp. 119ff.).

What did Ursula McConnel do? Ignore these abuses as outside her research brief or bring them to the attention of the wider world outside the remote mission? She chose the latter path. The result was a media scandal, the first in a long list of public embarrassment for the Queensland state over its managment of aboriginal affairs throughout most of the 20th century. However, this was not followed by a public enquiry or any material change on Aurukun or any other aboriginal settlement. The only material consequence that followed was for anthropology and McConnel personally: administrators closed ranks against ‘the new science’ and anthropologists found it much harder, if not impossible, to gain permission to work with settled aboriginal populations.

McConnel found her field maligned as ‘ideologically eccentric and administratively naïve’ and was personally vilified as ‘objectionable,’ as having made ‘disloyal and damaging statements’ and as ‘very eccentric and somewhat hysterical’ (quoted in Kidd, 1997, p. 119). Judgements such as these came from the aboriginal affairs administrators but she had no support within her discipline, either.

A.P. Elkin, who became Radcliffe-Brown’s successor as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and who was to dominate Australian anthropology over many years, took a different approach to McConnel: instead of going to the media, he worked behind the scenes, including through lobbying his personal friend, the then-Home Secretary, to achieve a greater influence of anthropology over aboriginal administration. Faced with the charge that anthropologists were ‘not inclined to practicality’ (p. 123) he demonstrated his ‘practical’ approach by making sure that inconvenient anthropologists were cut out from National Research Council grant funding (p. 123).

Privately wealthy, McConnel’s research did not depend on grant funding but even so her career petered out and she never received the PhD nor the university position to which she aspired. The Australian Dictionary of Biography ends the entry about Ursual McConnel as follows:

The importance of McConnel’s scholarly contribution was recognized after her death. […] her publications form the foundations of present-day anthropological research on western Cape York Peninsula. She had devoted much of her life to this endeavour, driven by a sense of duty and justice towards the Aborigines with whom she had worked.

Another anthropologist of the time who had to face difficult questions of professional ethics was Caroline Tennant Kelly. A student of Elkin, she gained permission to conduct field work at the Cherbourg aboriginal reserve (where some of the surviving descendants of the Yiman peope, about who I wrote recently, were relocated). Elkin had assured the superintendent that ‘Mrs Kelly is possessed of plenty of common sense and tact and will not cause any implications on the settlement’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 125).

However, all her ‘common sense and tact’ did not prepare Tennant Kelly for the entrenched and grinding poverty she was to see at Cherbourg. Shelter and food were so inadequate as to be life-threatening and resulting in high mortality rates. Tennant Kelly was particularly dismayed to discover gross financial irregularities at Cherbourg. Under the 1897 ‘Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act’ wages received by aboriginal people were banked by the state. In order to access their own money aboriginal workers had to make a withdrawal application to the local ‘protector.’ Despite the fact that aboriginal people often earned less than a quarter of their non-aboriginal counterparts, the state of Queensland thus held a considerable private fortune. Mix a substantial sum of poorly accounted money with the fact that many aboriginals were illiterate, drug-dependent or ignorant of their (meagre) rights, you can imagine that fraud and financial malpractice were rife in this system.

As Tennant Kelly found, aboriginal people had to justify any expense for which they wanted to use their own money and she was incensed by the humiliation involved. Examples listed by Kidd (1997, p. 179) include permission denied for buying *two* pairs of trousers, on the grounds of ‘extravagance;’ permission denied for a ticket to visit the Brisbane Exhibition on the grounds of ‘lack of effort;’ or permission granted to purchase a coat on the grounds that the applicant was ‘a very careful boy.’

Tennant Kelly considered state control of aboriginal wages a form of economic slavery and started a national campaign to expose Queensland’s handling of aboriginal wages and savings to national scrutiny. Similar to McConnel’s experience a decade earlier, her lobbying did not affect policy in the short run but made her powerful enemies. The aboriginal protection board and even senior politicians lost no time in playing the gender card: ‘the activities of women Anthropologists [have] not been very satisfactory or harmonious,’ stated the superintendent (Kidd, 1997, p. 125). As McConnel before her, Tennant Kelly was personally attacked for spreading ‘beastly lies’ and even for her appearance: ‘It is no wonder she was taken for a half-caste. She dressed like a Native, sat under the trees with natives, often with her arms around them, her hair was always untidy’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 128).

How did fellow anthropologists react to the new scandal? Elkin stood by his student: ‘We are up against vested interests and cannot hope to obtain any desirable reform without drastic change in Government policy’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 135). McConnel, too, weighed into the debate but not with solidarity as one might have expected. She wrote a private note to the Superintendent, stating that Tennant Kelly was ‘not a fully qualified Anthropologist’ and suggested she could act as consultant on ‘any project concerning anthropological co-operation in aboriginal affairs’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 135).

Despite Elkin’s support, Tennant Kelly’s academic career, too, was going nowhere and, during the war she shifted her attention towards issues of migrant integration and Jewish settlement in Australia. She ended her working life as a town planner and died a recluse in 1989. Of course, all that changed with the rediscovery of her field notes, photographs and letters in 2010 and she now ranks as one of the pioneers of Australian anthropology.

Reading about the experiences of Ursula McConnel and Caroline Tennant Kelly as well as those of other anthropologists of their generation, I could not help but ask what would I have done? The questions of the relationship between research and activism raised by their experiences are uncomfortable ones. Our professional ethics make a clear distinction between research and activism and they are both guided by different sets of expectations. However, in the field the distinction between research and activism is largely artificial as these researchers found.

Speaking out about matters which were strictly speaking outside their field of expertise, these researchers were immediately personally vilified and maligned as putting their politics before their research. However, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and A. P. Elkin, too, made political choices: to largely ignore fieldwork in favour of theory, as Radcliffe-Brown did, or to lobby behind the scenes and through established channels of government, as Elkin did.

What would you have done?

Kidd, Rosalind (1997). The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs – the untold story University of Queensland Press