Melbourne Story- The Place of Koreans in Australia

The first place we settled after immigrating to Australia was Box Hill, about twenty-five minutes by train from Melbourne’s city center.

When you get off the train and ride the escalator up to street level, you arrive at a busy commercial area. On the ground floor are two large supermarkets — similar to Korea’s big discount stores — along with clothing shops, variety stores, a food court, and several produce markets.

Once you step outside the station, rows of single-story shops stretch along the street. Most of them are operated by Chinese business owners.

Melbourne’s city center has a well-established Chinatown. I visited it a few times, and its scale was far larger than the Chinatown in Incheon that I was familiar with. Box Hill, too, could easily be called a Chinatown in its own right.

The difference, however, lay in the background of the residents. While the city’s Chinatown was largely shaped by immigrants from mainland China, Box Hill was home mainly to people of Taiwanese origin.

Between 2004 and 2005, about 120,000 people were granted permanent residency in Australia, excluding student and temporary work visas. Of these, around 26,000 were from the United Kingdom, 14,000 from China, 12,000 from India, and about 5,000 from South Africa. At the time, Koreans numbered only about 1,800.

By 2024–2025, the number of new permanent residents had increased to approximately 185,000. Indians accounted for about 48,000, followed by 20,000 Chinese, 11,000 Filipinos, 10,000 British, and 9,000 Pakistanis. The number of Koreans was so small that it barely appeared as a distinct figure in the statistics.

The Melbourne I encountered was very different from what we had imagined back in high school, when we heard stories about Australia as a “White Australia” where Asians would inevitably face discrimination.

After living here for more than sixteen years, using trains, trams, and buses countless times, that initial sense of unfamiliarity gradually disappeared. Now, daily life here feels no different from life in Korea. Living among people of many different backgrounds — Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, African, and others — has become so ordinary that it sometimes feels almost unremarkable.

Occasionally, stories about discrimination appear on YouTube or in the media. But neither I nor my family has personally experienced overt discrimination. There were a few moments when I felt ignored or dismissed, but in hindsight, those were often times when I had misunderstood what was being said because of my limited English. That kind of misunderstanding could happen anywhere.

When I take the bus in the morning, passengers greet the driver with a casual “Good morning.” When getting off, many people raise a hand and say “Thank you,” and the driver responds in kind — though this custom has become less common in recent years.

At the market, even the slightest bump is followed by a quick “I’m sorry.” It is rare to see people glaring at one another or picking fights. When I asked for directions, people used to pull out a thick street directory called Melway and explain the route in great detail, much as Koreans do when helping a foreigner back home.

The only problem was that I often could not fully understand those explanations.

I rarely felt discriminated against. What truly separated me from others was not race, but language.