A Maltese-Australian migration researcher has been awarded the prestigious Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his services to the Maltese community in New South Wales.
Sliema-born Mark Caruana was given the honour in recognition for documenting more than 200 oral histories of Maltese who had arrived and settled in Australia before World War II.
The 73-year-old said he felt honoured to be recognised by the Australian government for his long contribution to building a landscape picture of their collective memories and archiving them for future generations of migration researchers and the Maltese at large.
“In Australian society, this is like getting an Order of the British Empire (OBE); it’s prestigious. My children are delighted,” he said.
Mr Caruana was named in the Australia Day Honours list, among over 800 fellow Australians recognised for their contributions to different areas, from medicine to music to the environment. The nominees will receive their medal in April.
The researcher has been active in recording and documenting the settlement history of the Maltese community in Australia since he migrated there in 1973 with his wife and son. While working as a librarian at the Macquarie University, he started helping new Maltese arrivals navigate Australia’s immigration process.
“This was a rescue operation to document the collective memory of mainly pre-Second World War Maltese arrivals and what it was like for them to come to a new country, to find a job or to learn English.
“This was a community with very few educated or professional people among them. At the time (in the 1980s) they told me about their feelings of leaving family behind and of the challenges they experienced when they got to Australia.”
The peak of Maltese mass migration to Australia took place between 1955 and 1965. Over 60,000 Maltese had left the country for Australia, as assisted passage migrants, because of redundancies made in Malta’s dockyards and the uncertainty of the country’s survival in the wake of becoming independent from the UK.
He provided one-to-one help, filling in their immigration forms or sourcing important contacts within the community. During the 1980s, he began preserving the stories of the Maltese migration journey through cassette recordings and later video.
“They were working in the mines, on the wharf or labouring on farms as cane-cutters or market gardeners. This suited Australia at the time. It was a pioneering country and they needed manual workers. What money they raised, they sent home. If it was not for migration, Malta would not have survived,” he said.
In the last census carried out in 2016, there were more than 175,000 Maltese Australians of Maltese descent.
Mr Caruana has also been involved in building databases of passports issued to Maltese citizens going as far back as the 1815 and helping people from Australia and Malta’s diaspora, to trace their Maltese lineage in order to apply for Maltese citizenship.