ABSTRACT
The most comprehensive attempt that has ever been made to survey post-1945 migrant settlement in Australia appeared in 1966, when public consensus on the ‘success’ of the migration programme was on the verge of breaking down and the period of assimilationist approaches to the migrant presence was coming to an end. The claim that migrants were assimilable was the easier to sustain because communication between migrants and Australians was limited and superficial in the extreme, and sources of knowledge about migrants were few and fragmented. Southern European migrants became particularly visible during the sixties because, with their increased numbers, they began to develop concentrations of population, complete with social centres, churches, shops and eating places, in the inner-city areas of Sydney and Melbourne. The migrant problem that attracted by far the most attention towards the end of the sixties was the education of migrant children.
