The Welcome Wall is a black board showing names of people who crossed the ocean, left their homeland to settle in Australia and "helped to build the nation". It was raised in front of the National Maritime Museum in Sydney a couple of years ago to say Thank you for coming!The real Welcome Wall is then a database with stories, diary entries behind these names. Brilliant idea. Registering a name costs 105 kangaroo dollars - which I found a little ironic (thanks for coming - now, whilst you're waiting, would you mind signing a cheque?)
The database is searchable from a terminal in the Museum. An entry "Czechoslovakia" shows a long list of Czech, German and Jewish names (most of them came between 1930 and 1945).
NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS BY HOME NATION (1945 - 1986) - selected
- Great Britain & Ireland - 1 846 444 (41.34%)
- Italy - 381 774 (8.55%) Thanks guys from bringing the Italian coffee to Melbourne!
- New Zealand - 175 605 (3.93%) Are you finding this strange also?
- Germany - 144 097 (3.23%)
- Poland - 105 067 (2.35%)
- Lebanon - 63 914 (1.43%)
- South Africa - 36 504 (0.82%)
- France - 26 157 (0.59%)
- Czechoslovakia - 23 076 (0.52%)
- China - 21 357 (0.48%)
TOTAL - 4 466 042
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