Iranian Australians

Iranian Australians or Persian Australians are Australian citizens who are of Iranian ancestry or who hold Iranian citizenship.

Iranian Australians
ایرانیان استرالیا
IranAustralia
Total population
77,870 (by birth, 2021)[1]
36,168 (by ancestry, 2011)
Regions with significant populations
New South Wales, Victoria
Languages
Australian English, Persian
(Azeri, Armenian, Kurdish, Mandaic and other languages of Iran).
Religion
37.3% No religion
30.1% Muslim
10.3% Bahai
2.7% Christianity[2]

Terminology

Iranian-Australian is used interchangeably with Persian-Australian,[3][4][5][6] partly due to the fact[7] that, in the Western world, Iran was known as "Persia". On the Nowruz of 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked foreign delegates to use the term Iran, the endonym of the country used since the Sasanian Empire, in formal correspondence. Since then the use of the word "Iran" has become more common in the Western countries. This also changed the usage of the terms for Iranian nationality, and the common adjective for citizens of Iran changed from "Persian" to "Iranian". In 1959, the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Reza Shah Pahlavi's son, announced that both "Persia" and "Iran" could officially be used interchangeably. However the issue is still debated today.[8][9]

History

The first known Iranian immigrant to Australia was Hamed Mortis (Persian: حامد مرتس) who was naturalised in New South Wales (NSW) on 20 October 1883.[10][11] The only other early Iranian immigrant to NSW was Mohamad Ameen Khan (Persian: محمد امین خان) who was naturalised on 29 June 1899.[12]

Few Iranians migrated to Victoria in the nineteenth century, with only seven recorded in the 1891 census. From 1950 to 1977, the first wave of immigration from Iran to Australia occurred, but it was relatively insignificant in terms of the number of immigrants. Annually, few thousand tourists entered Australia which only a few hundreds were immigrants during this period, mostly university students who decided to stay. The vast majority of Iran's emigrants left their homeland just after the 1979 Islamic revolution which was the end of 2500 years of monarchy. For the period 1978–1980, the average number of Iranians entering Australia as immigrants annually increased to more than 5,000. From the period 1980–1988, there was a strong trend of emigration to Australia. Since 2000, there has been a wave of Iranian migration to Australia, especially engineers and doctors, through skilled migration program.

Iranians speak Persian and also Azerbaijani Turkish, Kurdish, and some other Persian languages and dialects are spoken in different regions of Iran. They practice the Iranian culture, which includes Nowruz. Along religious lines, both Muslim and non-Muslim Iranians reside in Australia. Non-Muslim Iranians include Iranian Christians mainly Armenian and Assyrian, Iranian Baháʼís, Iranian Mandaeans, Iranian Jews and Iranian Zoroastrians. The Bureau of Statistics reports that at the 2011 census the major religious affiliations amongst Iran-born were Islam (12 686) and Baháʼí (6269). Of the Iran-born, 18.4 per cent stated 'No Religion', which was lower than that of the total Australian population (22.3 per cent), and 9.4 per cent did not state a religion.

Several sources have noted estimates of Iranian diaspora mainly left Iran since the 1979 revolution, a significant number of which currently reside in the United States and Western Europe while the community in Australia is very small. The Iranian-Australian community, in line with similar trends in Iran and other countries around the world, has produced a sizeable number of individuals notable in many fields, including Law, Medicine, Engineering, Business and Fine Arts.

Iranian Australian census

In 1991, the ABS figures revealed an Iranian population of 12,914. In 2004, 18,798 people in Australia claim to be of Iranian ancestry.[13]

Notable people

See also

References
  1. "Australia's Population by Country of Birth". Australian Bureau of Statistics. 26 April 2022. Retrieved 26 May 2022.
  2. "2021 People in Australia who were born in Iran, Census Country of birth QuickStats | Australian Bureau of Statistics". www.abs.gov.au.
  3. Daha, Maryam (September 2011). "Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents". Journal of Adolescent Research. 26 (5): 543–569. doi:10.1177/0743558411402335. S2CID 146592244. ... the majority of the participants self-identified themselves as Persian instead of Iranian, due to the stereotypes and negative portrayals of Iranians in the media and politics. Adolescents from Jewish and Baháʼí Faiths asserted their religious identity more than their ethnic identity. The fact Iranians use Persian interchangeably is nothing to do with current Iranian government because the name Iran was used before this period as well. Linguistically modern Persian is a branch of Old Persian in the family of Indo-European languages and that includes all the minorities as well more inclusively.
  4. Nakamura, Raymond M. (2003). Health in America: A Multicultural Perspective. Kendall/Hunt Pub. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-7575-0637-6. Iranian/Persian Americans – The flow of Iranian citizens into the United States began in 1979, during and after the Islamic Revolution.
  5. Zanger, Mark (2001). The American Ethnic Cookbook for Students. ABC-CLIO. p. 213. ISBN 978-1-57356-345-1.
  6. Racial and Ethnic Relations in America, Carl Leon Bankston,"Therefore, Turkish and Iranian (Persian) Americans, who are Muslims but not ethnically Arabs, are often mistakenly..", Salem Press, 2000
  7. Darya, Fereshteh Haeri (2007). Second-generation Iranian-Americans: The Relationship Between Ethnic Identity, Acculturation, and Psychological Well-being. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-542-97374-1. According to previous studies, the presence of heterogeneity is evident among Iranian immigrants (also known as Persians – Iran was known as Persia until 1935) who came from myriads of religious (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Armenian, Assyrian, Baha'i and Zoroastrian), ethnic (Turk, Kurds, Baluchs, Lurs, Turkamans, Arabs, as well as tribes such as Ghasghaie, and Bakhtiari), linguistic/dialogic background (Persian, Azari, Gialki, Mazandarani, Kurdish, Arabic, and others). Cultural, religious and political, and various other differences among Iranians reflect their diverse social and interpersonal interactions. Some studies suggest that, despite the existence of subgroup within Iranian immigrants (e.g. various ethno-religious groups), their nationality as Iranians has been an important point of reference and identifiable source of their identification as a group across time and setting.
  8. Majd, Hooman, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, by Hooman Majd, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 23 September 2008, ISBN 0385528426, 9780385528429. p. 161
  9. Frye, Richard Nelson (2005). Greater Iran: A 20th-century Odyssey. Mazda. ISBN 9781568591773. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  10. https://records-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=61SRA&lang=en_US&docid=INDEX1421173
  11. https://records-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=61SRA&lang=en_US&docid=INDEX1418479
  12. https://records-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=61SRA&lang=en_US&docid=INDEX1419643
  13. Khoo, Siew-Ean; Lucas, David (24 May 2004). "Australian' Ancestries" (PDF). Australian Census Analytic Program. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved 20 July 2008.
  14. beverlyhomes.com.au
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