Melbourne’s diasporas often form cultural clusters, but where?
Having spent the last year getting to know the cultural landscape of New York City, it strikes me that the various ethnic and cultural enclaves are fairly well-known. Flushing is known for its Chinese population, Jackson Heights as the hub of Indian and South Asian diaspora, Greenpoint is a known Polish area, and Brighton Beach is the centre of Russian and ex-soviet settlement. This shared knowledge is invaluable for recent arrivals seeking community to help them transition to their new home, or to locals wanting an authentic experience of other cultures and cuisines.
Similar to NYC, Melbourne is a melting pot that brings together people from all over the globe to build our multicultural hub of a state capital. But, unlike its American counterpart, the exact locations of Melbourne’s various ethnic enclaves are a bit less well-known. Perhaps they’re not quite as well-defined as New York, whose different neighbourhoods have formed over many more decades of immigration, or maybe the sprawl of greater Melbourne has reduced their concentration in comparison to the urban jungle of NYC…
In any case, I wanted to better understand the various cultural hubs of Melbourne as well as I could. To achieve this, I downloaded the 2021 ABS census data1 and located the 15 most populous communities of overseas-born Victorians. On the map below, toggle between them using the layers in the top right corner.
That’s all – just a quick post so that I (and you) know where to go look for the best Vietnamese or Iraqi food when I’m next in Melbourne.
Data used under a Creative Commons license, full data is available from the ABS website at https://www.abs.gov.au/census↩︎