The importance of coffee

As it transpires, I’ve chosen to write the next essay on the shift from the exclusionary White Australia Policy, towards Assimilation, and that whilst assimilation is a dirty word today, it acted as a coping-mechanism for Australia’s part in the post-war global migrations of people, and was a necessary stepping-stone towards cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. From John Murphy’s Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia:

…if the idea of assimilation was partly a reassurance that the ‘way of life’ would never change, it was also a transitional strategy, while the vast social and cultural transformation resulting from migration began to work its way towards more diverse imaginings of national identity.

And from Gwenda Tavan's 'Good Neighbours: Community Organisations, Migrant Assimilation and Australian Society and Culture 1950-1961':

As a transitional doctrine, assimilation allowed Australians to make sense of, contain, and ultimately accept social and cultural change, by gradually, if equivocally, incorporating the reality of an ethnically mixed population into popular conceptions of the Australian nation.

I also like this exposition on the importance of coffee in the reverse-assimilation project:

This sense of cultural change and diversification partly explains the iconic status of espresso coffee in the period, as a happy contrast to appalling coffee substitutes made of chicory essence and boiled milk. Italian coffee bars were represented as a ‘romantic whiff of continental life’ with ‘the last word in décor and style’.