School alumni associations in modern Australia as transcultural conduits of migrant identity: the Sri Lankan experience

ABSTRACT

The literature illustrates that there has been relatively little specific research undertaken on the ways in which pre-migration school connections might have influenced the individual or group migration experience to Australia. Such influence is evident with migrants from Sri Lanka (Ceylon), a gap that the authors have identified in previous work. This paper attempts to bridge this research space by reporting on a pilot study into how Sri Lankan school alumni associations in Australia have influenced the migration experiences of individuals now living in Australia. Data for the study was generated via surveys and interviews with members of alumni organisations. Findings suggest that Sri Lankan school alumni associations can be important drivers and facilitators of both the act of migration and the process of migrant adjustment. They work as conduits enabling their members to remain connected to their ancestral roots in Sri Lanka whilst embedding themselves in modern Australian society.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian migration
• Sri Lanka
• school alumni
• migrant experience
• transculturalism
• colonial education

Introduction

A consistent focus of diasporic sociological studies has been how members of a specific group have adjusted to life in their place of destination and maintained relationships with their places of origin. Often, such studies have focused on elements such as connections around cultural identity (Ashutosh 2012) the place of language, and even the experience of diaspora returning to their place of origin (Thurairajah, Hollenbach, and Alluri 2020). Consequently, it is possible to comprehend the collective body of diasporic research as studies of cultural transition as part of what can be now called transculturalism.

As defined and researched in a number of previous published studies (see, for example, Casinader 2014; 2016; 2020; Casinader and Clemans 2018; Casinader and Kidman 2018; Walsh and Casinader 2018), transculturalism refers to the attitudinal disposition of an individual to be able to live, work and interact in a culturally diverse environment. It has been also argued that, as a frame of mind, it can be seen, both historically and contemporarily, as being intrinsically linked to a reconfiguration of transnationalism (Vertovec 2009) beyond the simple act of cross-border movement, to one in which incorporates this psychological or attitudinal willingness to move in the pursuit of a better life (Casinader 2017; 2023).

A propensity to take advantage of educational and migration opportunities is, therefore, a key aspect of the diasporic social phenomenon. The migrant shifts their understanding of the world to a new location, but in doing so retains a shared identity or culture from their place of origin. In a diasporic frame, transculturalism captures how migration adjusts peoples’ ways of thinking and ability to understand different cultural contexts. That diasporic communities assist with the migration process is well known, but what is less familiar is the contribution of schooling and its social connections to the experience.

In this paper, we employ these reconfigured ideas of transculturalism and transnationalism to focus on the role played by school alumni associations in the migration process. As the first stage in a proposed more comprehensive national study, it reports on a pilot study into such linkages in the context of Sri Lankan migrants to Australia, considering the role of transculturalism and transnationalism in the experience of migrants who are alumni of ‘British-tradition’ schools in Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Their experiences are examined in light of the combination of their Sri Lankan schooling and their participation in Australian-based alumni groups for these schools. Regardless of the limitations of sample size in a pilot study, there was sufficient evidence to suggest that the migration experience to Australia can be greatly assisted by the educational foundation provided by such schools, especially in their socialisation via local Australian alumni associations. The findings indicated that their formal education had had an enduring, positive influence on their migration experience, equipping individuals with transcultural attitudes or dispositions that were reinforced through educational experiences at both ends of the migration experience. Using this Sri Lankan case, the paper demonstrates that schooling and transnational alumni associations comprise an important place within migration studies and are deserving of greater research attention.

Sri Lankan migration to Australia

A significant body of research explores migration to Australian society since 1945, and yet, there are significant gaps in the literature about the Sri Lankan experience, especially with respect to Sri Lankan school alumni groups in Australia. The first gap relates to the relatively restricted nature of sociological research into the migration experiences of the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia (Casinader et al. 2023). The history of Sri Lankan migration to Australia is longstanding and complex and deserves more diverse scrutiny (Casinader et al. 2023). The first Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) migrants arrived in 1882 as indentured labourers in Queensland, but it was not until the 1950s, and especially the 1960s, that official migration numbers became more significant. Many aspects of these waves of movement have been largely well covered by the two major, comprehensive national sociological studies of Sri Lankans in Australia undertaken to date (see Weerasooria 1988 and Gamage 1998). In recent history, however, it is arguable that studies of Sri Lankan migration to Australia have tended to be more narrowly focused, framed and dominated by the political and social contexts of Australian refugee policy and practice, such as positions within the local power hierarchy (Sarwal 2012), particularly in relation to the long term impact of the violent period of Sri Lankan civil unrest that ended in 2009 (for example, Hugo and Dissanayake 2017; Kandasamy, Perera, and Ratnam 2020). Similarly, Pathirage (2023) focuses solely on the Sinhalese community in Darwin. Jayawardena’s work (2023a and 2023b), although taking a broad perspective towards migrant identity in Australia, is almost solely focused on recent (post-Civil War) Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamils; other major migrant groups such as the Burghers, are reduced to an effective footnote, and pre-1948 Sri Lankan migration is ignored.

Such patterns appear to be in contrast to studies of Sri Lankan diaspora elsewhere, where there has been equal focus on studies in areas such as the maintenance of identity through memory (Samuels 2011) and the absence of health research in the United Kingdom into Sri Lankan communities of descent (Aspinall 2019). However, whether Sri Lanka-related or not, Australian, or global, migration studies have tended to minimise or ignore the part played by prior school education in places of origin in influencing the migratory, diasporic experience (Casinader et al. 2023). This oversight includes research neglect of the role played by Sri Lankan school alumni associations, both in and out of Australia, in influencing the shift from one place and culture to another. More recent Sri Lanka-Australia migrant studies, such as Jaywardena (2023a and 2023b) and Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts (2019b), have not adopted the wider sociological perspective of Gamage (1998) and Weerasooria (1988), even though they do contribute to a deeper understanding of the Sri Lankan migration experience, but none of these studies (for example, Jayawardena 2023a and 2023b; Cassim, Hodgetts, and Stolte 2019a; Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts 2019b) have focused on the specific role of school alumni associations. Surprisingly, Jayawardena never refers to Sri Lankan schools per se, and education is only discussed relatively briefly in more general terms as a factor in migration choice. Instead, as with Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts (2019b), she focuses on the notion of migrant identity through the context of Sri Lankan versus New Zealand citizenship. Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts (2019b) referred to the ‘strong sense of Sri Lankanness’ that has been transferred to New Zealand and the place of social associations – in this case, cricket clubs – in creating and cementing that transferral. In this, Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts (2019b) reinforce the earlier studies of both Weerasooria (1988) and Gamage (1998), who highlighted the existence of the many social associations in Australia that have eased the migration experience by ‘ … provid[ing] for [the] social, cultural, and recreational needs of … Sri Lankans’ (Weerasooria 1988, 286).

Unlike these more recent studies, however, Weerasooria (1988) went further by acknowledging not only the existence of school alumni groups as one type of social association present in Australian society (1988, 265–268), but also one whose significance and role in migrants’ cultural transition had been overlooked. Consequently, the pilot study on which this paper is based is designed to be the first stage in an attempt to redress the situation.

Methodology

Guiding parameters and context

The decisions made regarding data collection for the pilot study were based on an overview of key points regarding the cultural and educational history of Sri Lanka. The existence and presence of Sri Lankan school alumni associations has been largely influenced by the country’s colonial history and, in particular, the British phase from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, when the country was known as Ceylon. Independence came in two subsequent phases – as a British dominion in 1948, and then as a Republic in 1972.

As detailed in various historical works (see, for example, Casinader 2017; Casinader, Wijeyaratne, and Godden 2018; Ruberu 1962), it was under the British that a national system of mass education was gradually established throughout the nineteenth century. For various reasons, the initial school networks were established by diverse Christian missionary societies who created a pattern of rural primary schools (Government of Ceylon 1833). There are three notable ways that the arrangements of these schools were different from schools operating under British rule in nearby India (Casinader 2017; Seth 2007), (1) students were taught in the vernacular language of the region; (2) locals were trained to be teachers in these schools; and (3) education was also made available to girls.

In 1833, the first English-language government school was opened in Colombo (Ludowyck 1966); initially called the Colombo Academy, it was renamed Royal College in 1881 and remains the premier state or government boys’ school to this day. At that time, the colonial authorities were being pressured by the local ruling classes to create a government controlled, English language school network in order to prepare the local Ceylonese people to serve in the colonial civil service. This network was situated largely in the colonised urban centres of the southwest of Ceylon, and was minor compared to the network of missionary primary schools across the country. However, the establishment of Royal College created further demand from community groups in Ceylonese society for the opportunity to be schooled in English and thereby gain access to highly prized – and well-paid – government positions (Ruberu 1962). Once again, it was the missionary societies and their related parent churches in Britain that established a series of independent schools to meet that demand, with the common feature of incorporating many of the structural and process elements of English public schools of the time.

To some scholars (for example, Koh and Kenway 2016), this transference of British public school society into the colonies marked such schools as catering for the ‘elite’, but in the case of Ceylon, this ‘eliteness’ was based on a wider range of criteria than the traditional British notions of being upper class or family wealth. Whilst there was certainly lobbying from the traditional Sinhalese and Tamil ruling aristocracy, the major push for more English-language schools was primarily from the culturally diverse combination of middle-class Dutch Burgher, Sinhalese, and Tamil urban communities. Many in these groups had played key administrative and business roles in both pre-European and European Ceylonese society and sought the security and life opportunities that employment throughout the expanding Ceylon civil service and colonial administration would bring. A British-style of education was understood as an important key to this security.

Consequently, schools like St Thomas’ Mt Lavinia, Trinity College Kandy, and St Joseph’s Colombo were distinctly different to what modern interpretations might see as their British counterparts. As evidenced by school histories (for example, Trinity College Kandy, 2023), the life experiences of two of the author team and others (see, for example, Mulvaney 2006), these church-based school institutions had strong social justice values. All were low- or no-fee schools with a strong scholarship ethos that meant that access to an English-language education was not hindered by matters of family resources, unlike the ‘elite’ schools of Britain that, ironically, influenced their organisational and educational structures. Further, these schools were, and remain, also open to all students, regardless of ethno-cultural background or family circumstances. It was therefore the norm in these schools, and their government equivalents such as Royal College, to find student cohorts that were a multicultural combination of the prevalent ethnic, cultural, and language groups of Ceylon including Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and others, a pattern reflected in the composition of the schools’ curriculum, teaching staff and general structure (Government of Ceylon 1870; Mulvaney 2006) Consequently, from their very start, the independent school sector in Ceylon largely possessed an embedded, transcultural acceptance of cultural difference and deep sense of social justice.

Further, understanding this Ceylon-centred colonial relationship between education, migration and transculturalism, and its pertinent educational/sociological consequences in the present day, can be seen in a brief overview of the Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher community. Originally, this group were the direct descendants of the Dutch colonial residents and traders who remained after the Dutch ceded the island to the British in 1796. The Burghers had always placed a premium on education under the Dutch and, as a group, were the backbone of the Dutch administrative corps (Ludowyck 1966). When the British arrived, the Burgher community quickly realised that an English education, in addition to their knowledge of Sinhalese and Tamil, would give them the ability to act as intermediaries between the Ceylonese population and the colonial administration. This knowledge gave them an established position in society equivalent to that of the traditional leader or ‘native headman’ (mudilayar). From their perspective, ‘cultural hybridity was a way of undermining the implacable oppositions of East/West, traditional/modern, and primitive/civilized, which were instituted by the process of colonialism’ (Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts 2019b, 193); in short, they saw transculturalism as a vital attribute to their long term survival as a community. By ensuring that they were referred to as ‘Dutch’ Burghers, the group

chose to emphasise their European descent or, more specifically, their Dutch-ness... In their elaboration of their European heritage, Dutch burghers sought to appropriate a share of the symbols of British power, European blood and western civilization. Yet … in their emphasis on their Dutch heritage they also distanced themselves from the British. (Henry 2008)

It was the Burghers, therefore, who were one of the prime movers behind the establishment of English-language schools, and which became the educational system of choice for the Burgher community.

In such ways, the Burghers themselves became wedded to the socio-political structures that were in situ during British rule. However, those same embedded colonial connections constrained the Burgher community after independence in 1948, which led to the removal of English as the primary language of government and educational instruction. With no foreseeable place in the new period of Sinhalese nationalism, the waves of Burgher emigration began (Henry 2008; Jayawardena 2023a). This movement was primarily to other English-language centres of the old Empire: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom itself. Never numbering more than half a million at their peak, the Burghers are now a small fraction of the population of modern Sri Lanka. A similar pattern of migration became evident amongst other communities of English-speaking Ceylonese, particularly the Sri Lankan Tamils, who became embroiled in the long fight for self-determination that ended effectively with the defeat of the ‘Tamil Tigers’ in 2009.

For our pilot study, there were three particular determinants or limitations in the recruitment of possible participants. All of these were related to the nature of the Sri Lankan migrants under scrutiny. The first element was that that the school alumni associations most likely to exist in Australia would be from the independent sector, since the notion of alumni links is very much a part of the British public-school ethos that underpinned the formation of these schools. The second factor was that initial research indicated that, aside from occasional references to Facebook groups, nearly all the formally structured alumni associations in Australia were associated with boys’ schools in Sri Lanka. Inevitably, this meant that those active within the groups were male and this influenced the single-gender bias within our research. This was not seen to be a major obstacle given that the objective of this pilot study was essentially one of research viability, an imbalance would be rectified if a more comprehensive national study was undertaken. The lack of funding for the pilot study also constrained any attempts to diversify the school sample.

The third determinant was the desire, if possible, to cater for the ethic and cultural diversity of the Sri Lankan diasporic community, which includes the Dutch Burghers (commonly referred to as the Burghers), Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim groupings. For the same reasons of funding and study purpose outlined above, it was therefore decided to concentrate on focus on obtaining a diversity of schools, for, as discussed earlier, one of the realities of Sri Lankan independent schools is that they have traditionally not been ethnic-specific (see, for example, Trinity College 2023). As it turned out, and as will be highlighted by the participants in the data analysis later in this paper, the distinction between these ethnic identities was played down during their schooling and did not became more pronounced back in Sri Lanka until after the participants had migrated. This is a tale of ethnic identity politics, shifting according to political times.

Data generation and analysis

A qualitative approach was employed because the study focuses on exploring the opinions and reactions of people to various elements of a migration experience that was also inherently transcultural. In line with a number of previous major research projects that had similar foci on the attitudes of teachers in the context of cultural understanding, (Casinader 2020; Casinader and Clemans 2018; Deardoff 2011; Fantini 2009; Walsh and Casinader 2018), there were two interrelated stages to the data collection: an initial online survey, followed by an interview with at least two members of the research team, which further explored points of interest that had arisen from the survey. Ethical approval for the research was provided by the Monash University Human Ethics Committee (Approval No. 27921).

The survey had two main purposes. First, it provided basic personal and professional background data on each individual, enabling the subsequent interview to be specifically adapted to the context of each participant. Secondly, it contained a series of questions on a range of topics related to migration and cross-cultural matters; participants were asked to state their level of agreement on each topic statement on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from Total Agreement to Total Disagreement. The participants’ reactions to the survey questions helped to provide an individualised skeletal structure to each person’s subsequent interview, which focused more closely on how the Sri Lankan school experiences of the individual had influenced their Australian migrant journey.

Responses to all survey and interview responses were then subsequently coded, using a combination of categorisations that had been initially derived from previous published studies that employed the same methodology (for example, Casinader 2014 and 2020; Casinader and Clemans 2018; Walsh and Casinader 2018), and then revised to reflect the team’s commonly agreed interpretations of the participants’ responses. Using Dedoose, a web-based mixed methods software similar to Nvivo, coding analysis was then undertaken in order to determine the degree of a person’s transcultural disposition.

School alumni in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) as socio-cultural reflections of their schooling: an overview

The participants

As signposted earlier, and as illustrated in Table 1, the fact that participation was moderated by degree of interest in the Sri Lankan alumni community inevitably led to certain limitations in the final analysis. Participants were recruited through an old acquaintance of one of the authoring team who had extensive contacts with the broader Australian Sri Lankan alumni community. In accordance with the Ethics conditions of the pilot project, this contact forwarded details of the project to a number of Sri Lankan alumni migrants; those who wished to participate then contacted the Chief Investigator directly. For the reasons indicated previously, all the participants were male. The majority were Burgher, with a minority identifying as Sinhalese, and none were Tamil. However, as will be discussed later, the nature of the participants’ cultural identity was far more nuanced than these categorisations suggest, with subsequent influence on the study’s conclusions.

Table 1. Selected characteristics of pilot study participants.

Participant	Birth Year	Age at time of survey	Arrival Date in Australia	Ethnic Background	Sri Lankan School (Primary)	Sri Lankan School (Sec)	School Boarder	Australian School (if relevant)
P1	1952	70	1972	Dutch Burgher	St Joseph's Colombo	Trinity College Kandy	Yes	Glen Waverley High School
P2	1953	69	1972	Dutch Burgher	St Thomas's Mt Lavinia	St Thomas's Mt Lavinia	Yes	N/A
P3	1979	43	2006	Sinhalese	Trinity College Kandy	Trinity College Kandy	No	N/A
P4	1962	60	1972	Dutch Burgher	Royal College Colombo	Royal College Colombo	No	N/A
P5	1945	77	1970	Dutch Burgher/Sinhalese	Royal College Colombo	Royal College Colombo	No	Bentleigh High School

Within this small cohort, there was a degree of diversity in terms of school alumni and migration experience. Three of the major non-government schools and the oldest government school in Sri Lanka were represented in the sample. Across the participants, three were retired and two were still active in the workforce, two had been boarders in their respective institutions, two had been to school in both Sri Lanka and Australia, and all had commenced their adult careers in Australia. We noted that greater interest in participation was expressed by those who had migrated to Australia in the early 1970s; only one had migrated in the twenty-first century, but all had moved to Australia prior to the conclusion of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009).

Overall, the study revealed a strong sense of cultural continuity within new locations amongst the participants. Elements of selfhood that were retained appeared to be associated with English-language proficiency, alongside an educational disposition that reflected knowledge and skills acquired in schools with direct connections to British-style traditions of schooling: from perseverance to comradery to sports. The continuity is also reinforced by Sri Lankan alumni organisations in Australia. That said, this continuity sits within a process of geographic displacement to a location with genuine cultural differences; for instance, the dominance of whiteness in twentieth-century Australia. In the remainder of the article, we outline some instances of the way that participants have navigated this migration and embodied transculturalism to successfully settle in a new country.

Major patterns: a summary

Although the fact that there were only five male participants in the pilot survey has its limitations for the determination of conclusions, there was enough strength in the data to suggest their Sri Lankan schooling had influenced their migration experience in five major interrelated and interdependent ways. Participants generally perceived the influence of their schooling as being distinctly positive, reflecting the transculturalism that we discuss later in Section D.

1. The impact of the school on the migration experience was perceived to be stronger by the older participants (those who had moved to Australia during the 1970s). However, in all cases, the participants’ perceptions of their school’s impact were in terms of personal and employment-related skills, rather than in the depth of their learning and general academic foundations.

2. On the whole, although some had been surprised by distinct contrasts between their lives in Sri Lanka and what they found in Australia, all felt that they had relatively little difficulty in integrating into Australian society. All were aware of the advantages offered by their English-language education when migrating to country like Australia, especially one based in a Sri Lankan society that also had British colonial influences. However, they all commented, to various degrees, on how changes to Sri Lankan society since national independence, which collectively de-emphasised the value placed on English-language education in modern Sri Lanka, had made migration to another country inevitable for those whose proficiency in English was the core of their contribution to Sri Lankan society.

3. All the participants’ school alumni associations had been a significant influence in their migration journey, providing not only friendships and networks of support in Australia, but also job opportunities and the chance to maintain contact with various aspects of Sri Lankan culture.

4. Their school experience had contributed to all of them developing a high degree of transculturalism (Casinader 2020); that is, as discussed previously, the cultural knowledge and awareness to be comfortable in living and working within and across the diversity of ethnic and cultural backgrounds that characterises the multicultural nature of current-day Australia. In this study, the small size of the sample aside, transcultural capacity appeared to be more evolved in the two participants who had been school boarders from an early age.

5. Although all the participants strongly supported the importance of maintaining cultural identity and connections to their birth country, a process in which the school alumni associations played an important role, they all believed that it was the duty of migrants to integrate into Australian society whilst adding their cultural individualities to Australian life. However, all also acknowledged that the nature of their Sri Lankan school education and the wider society in which they grew up were major influences and facilitators of their positive migration integration experience.

The next section will discuss each of the above propositions related to transculturalism through an analysis of the coded interview and survey data.

Discussion

School influence on the migration experience

The data in Table 2 shows the percentage of relevant total codings of each alumnus that related to specific aspects of the migration experience, both generally and in terms of the particular impact of the school on that experience. Thus, as an example, the responses of Participant 1 accounted for 5.6% all the codings that were classified as referring to the overall Migration Experience, and 22% of all the codings classified as referring to the impact of the school on the Migration Experience. In respect of the former, 100% of his responses were coded as referring to the ease of his integration into Australian society. In terms of the latter, 11.1% of his responses were coded as mentioning the school providing him with a sound academic education that facilitated his migration experience, with the other four impacts being equally important on 22%.

Table 2. Impacts of the migration experience.

	Migration Experience-General (Total)	Experience of Racism	Impact of SL migration Australian Society	Ease of Integration into Australian society	Shock of Contrast b/w Aust and Sri Lanka Society	Importance of Maintaining own Culture	Migration Experience – Impact of School (Total)	Provision of Friendship Group	Developed Adaptable Character	Developed Problem Solving Skills	Sound Academic Grounding	Knowledge of world beyond Sri Lanka
Participant 1	5.6	0.0	0.0	100.0	0.0	0.0	22.0	22.2	22.2	22.2	11.1	22.2
Participant 2	16.7	11.1	0.0	77.8	0.0	11.1	34.1	35.7	42.9	7.1	7.1	7.1
Participant 3	33.3	5.6	5.6	55.6	16.7	16.7	19.5	100.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
Participant 4	14.8	25.0	0.0	37.5	25.0	12.5	2.4	100.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
Participant 5	29.6	0.0	18.8	37.5	25.0	18.8	22.0	22.2	11.1	22.2	22.2	22.2

Overall, the responses in the left half of Table 1 suggested that all the participants had felt comfortable integrating into Australian society, with this point dominating their responses (33–100% total individual responses). In addition, it was important for most to maintain a connection to their ‘home’ culture, with several comments on the differences between Sri Lanka and Australia. In part, the ease of integration was premised by a common view that it was important for a migrant to ‘adjust and adopt and become one of the people that you’re going to – [the ones] are welcoming you into their country’ (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021). That did not mean that one should give up their ‘home culture’, but it was an obligation to maintain those past cultural connections without it being forced on others: ‘you need to be proud of your culture, but you shouldn’t try to impose it on anyone else’ (Participant 4, pers. comm., December 16, 2021). It is this situation of ambivalence that Cassim, Stolte, and Hodgetts (2019b) refers to, in commenting that,

‘[b]elonging, here, is not a question of affiliation to a single idea of place, home, ethnicity, or nationality. It is about the multivocality of belongings … where migrants span the distance and straddle both the here (the host nation) and there (the country of origin)’ (186).

It was acknowledged by all alumni that the ease of their integration into Australia was heavily influenced by their English-language education in Sri Lanka: ‘The Australians obviously accepted me very easily, obviously because the language was no issue, being able to speak the language’ (Participant 2, pers. comm., December 15, 2021). Having a natural, comprehensive and intellectual grasp of communication in English assisted entry into the Australian world, as ‘[t]hrough language, all immigrants, including children, come to understand their new world. The new language can help them to know how best to become what they may become in the new country’ (Kirova 2007, 189).

A key part of this perceived advantage that these participants noted was that migration would provide them and their children a wider range of life choices than if they had stayed in Sri Lanka. This thinking could be understood as reflecting a vestige of colonial impact where pro-British rhetoric was noticeable in how migration discussion was framed around the advantages of an English-language education. In this example, the migrant placed especial emphasis on the long term advantages for future generations:

I didn’t want them [children] educated in Sri Lanka because the system of education in Sri Lanka had changed from that of a English-based bilingual education to a Sinhalese-based education, and I knew that it was no good for my kids, so I decided to migrate. If you have a country that only speaks Sinhalese and that language is not spoken anywhere else, what good is it for kids to learn the language and do their sciences and the arts? (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021)

The migration advantages of their pre-migration English language education were further highlighted by the participants’ thoughts on the specific migration benefits offered by their school (Table 3). The majority opinion was that the school had enabled them to develop and acquire sets of both personal and professional skills and capabilities, and that these were the most significant legacies of their Sri Lankan schooling. Several participants described how they were taught through their schooling to translate ethos and values into actions. Personal growth (which accounted for near or more than 50% of individual coded responses in terms of personal impact) and the ability to build and maintain relationships (which, based on the percentage of individual codings, was the most significant school impact for all but one participant) were the primary reported benefits of their Sri Lankan schooling. The strength of these personal capacities was reflected in the participants’ positive reflections of the general ease with which they had integrated into Australian society, especially when it came to building relationships outside the Sri Lankan community, whether that it be an ability to readily engage in local community groups –

Table 3. Personal and professional impact of school education.

	Personal Impact of School (Total)	Boarding School developed adaptable character	Inclusive school ethos influence on personal actions	Promoted value of education as investment	Developed personal capabilities & skills	Enabled Personal Growth	Did not prepare me for life in Australia	Professional Impact of School (Total)	No Prof Impact	Developed competencies & Skills	Skills in Relationships & Communications	Avenue to Employment
Participant 1	14.5	10.0	0.0	0.0	50.0	50.0	0.0	23.7	0.0	55.6	44.4	0.0
Participant 2	29.0	5.0	0.0	5.0	45.0	45.0	0.0	34.2	0.0	7.7	23.1	0.0
Participant 3	24.6	0.0	35.3	5.9	35.3	23.5	0.0	21.1	0.0	37.5	37.5	12.5
Participant 4	17.4	0.0	8.3	0.0	33.3	50.0	8.3	2.6	100.0	400.0	0.0	100.0
Participant 5	14.5	0.0	0.0	10.0	40.0	50.0	0.0	18.4	0.0	28.6	57.1	0.0

There are some who tend to congregate amongst their own and that’s not the best, but that’s their business and you can’t tell them how they live their life. But, no, I’ve [been] very diverse in my circles of friendships and associations … (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021)

– or a realisation that it was necessary for migrants to break out of their own circle:

I belonged to other groups and other cricket clubs and a lot of other activities … I always wanted to expand that a bit more instead of just the old Royalists meeting for dinner at someone’s place (Participant 4, pers. comm., December 16, 2021).

I play with a lot of Australians musically-wise and – I have a lot of Australian friends, both on a social level and a work level (Participant 2, pers. comm., December 15, 2021).

This willingness to move beyond the alumni community notwithstanding, some participants indicated that a successful migration experience also required a willingness to adapt and reach some form of compromise. For example, Participant 3 reflected on the perceived, if troubling, Australian social convention that mingling over a drink was a fundamental key to making personal and professional connections:

I continued to play cricket with various clubs, and one of the big cultural things … is the boozy culture, drinking culture … . I would not hang around after the cricket game and get pissed, I would go home because I had things to do. I felt that I was a little bit socially on the outer, even though I’m a social person. … I was looked over for a promotion in the bank, and I was discussing with a wise Australian man, friend of the family, and his first thing was, ‘Do you go drinking with the boys?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well, you should, because that’s where all the decisions are made.’ So, I started to do that, and then I found the promotions coming (Participant 3, pers. comm., November 11, 2021).

In a different context, Participant 1 commented on how his Sri Lankan school education had given him the confidence and skill to engage with non-Sri Lankan Australians through disagreement, which then facilitated longer term pathways personally and professionally:

The first argument I had in Australia was four weeks into my education at ‘NewWorld’ High School where I had an argument if you like – I admit it wasn’t a fight, it was a discussion with my physics teacher – and the subject was not on physics or anything, other than the fact that I was taken aback by school teachers going on strike. He was quite impressed with my proposition that school teachers are there to develop students and to help them, and them going on strike was destroying the process of developing the character of students. So, after that, he and I became very good friends through this ability to debate, and this was me being a newcomer to Australia … he thought that was a very good thing. … That’s evidence of the confidence that Trinity instilled [in me] to be able to take up a discussion with superiors, and I used that example, for me, right through my working career as well (Participant 1, pers. comm., February 9, 2022).

These more personal actions aside, the participants were aware that the similarities between the Sri Lankan society in which they had grown up and their new home of Australia were based on a shared British colonial history that had played a major part in easing their migrant transition. Aside from the commonality of language, there was sport, and, in particular, cricket. For one participant, community cricket played a significant role in enabling him to locate comfortable familiarities in Australia. Cricket also offered him a means of giving something back to his new community, further facilitating his migration experience in Australia:

As a senior player there, I introduced quite a few Sri Lankans into the club, namely Ravi Ratnayake … who were test players from the Sri Lankan side migrating over to Australia – I got them into – and those people finished up being extremely well loved and getting into the fold there quite nicely, but this was a time when Australia was starting to mature as a country as well and understand different colours [of people] (Participant 1, pers. comm., February 9, 2022).

Such attitudes and experiences mirrored the patterns found in studies of Sri Lankan migrants to New Zealand, in which the power of cricket – which ‘embody specific Sri Lankan social groupings and cultural values … [and a] strong sense of Sri Lankanness’ (Cassim, Hodgetts, and Stolte 2019a, 34) – enables migrants to ‘ forge a new life and place for themselves that is an extension of, rather than an abrupt break from their previous lives and ways of being’ (Cassim, Hodgetts, and Stolte 2019a, 37). It should be acknowledged, however, that both the New Zealand and the Australian studies focus on male migrants, and that the potential influence of cricket as a medium of connection may not be yet replicated in a study of female migrants, notwithstanding the growing place of cricket in the lives of Australian and Sri Lankan women, as exemplified by trends in international women’s cricket.

Transcultural capacity as a migrant

These aspects aside, the most significant impact of the participants’ Sri Lankan school experience can be seen in an integrative analysis of the coding summaries of both the surveys and interviews (Table 3). As outlined earlier, the coding emphases across all the participants honed in on the school’s influence on their personal and professional skills and attitudes. In nearly all cases, personal growth as an element of personal impact accounted for nearly 50% of their codings, with substantial emphasis also placed on professional skills in relationships and communications (Participants 1, 2, 3, and 5), as well as the influence of an inclusive school ethos on their actions (Participant 3, Participant 4).

In all cases, these attitudes coalesced into a transcultural disposition toward cultural difference (Casinader 2020) that was firmly attributed to the attitudes and ethos that they perceived as being inherent across all their schools. The ethnic and cultural demographic mix of Sri Lanka (Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch Burgher, Muslim) was seen as a fact of life to be celebrated: ‘At Trinity, we had Sinhalese, Tamil, Burghers, Muslims, everyone, and then we never had a single fight on race or religion’ (Participant 3, pers. comm., November 25, 2021). Most significantly, the inherently transcultural paradox of both recognising and ignoring cultural difference was fundamental in every aspect of life:

I did not know the difference between a Sinhalese and a Muslim or whatever. Even if I did, and we were aware of it, because on the roll … there was a terrible question called race, and in that race, you had to say whether you were Sinhalese, Burgher, Tamil or Muslim … we never took any damn notice after that. We just mixed and moved very freely with people. They are our friends for life. We’ve been in and out of their homes. We’ve played sport together. We would have no problem in our sisters marrying into those families and vice versa. We didn’t even recognise differences (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021).

In my experience, Royal College was very multicultural, so in my class, close friends were Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, Sinhalese. In fact, it was a minority of Sinhalese, the majority of all the other races … At Royal, you know, there was no divide. There was complete unity (Participant 4, pers. comm., December 16, 2021).

For one participant, the connections between the cultures and ethnicities were enhanced in a boarding school environment:

In boarding school, we used to have our squabbles and fights and whatever, but we forgave each other, and we forgot the incidences. In boarding school … I had Muslims, I had Christians, I had Buddhists, I had Hindus, I had Chinese … I didn’t even know what their religions were at the time, being a young chap, and what their [sects were], but we got on well enough. We shared knowledge. We shared their principles through their religions. It was definitely a harmonious situation, really. The boarding schools always seemed to do better than the day schools, for instance, because of this bonding; the fact that we all got on (Participant 2, pers. comm., December 15, 2021).

For another participant, such experiences resonated with life experiences in contemporary Australia and highlighted that a society must become genuinely multicultural and experienced as such for racism to not be an issue: ‘When we grow up with them, look, we don’t agree with everything, obviously, but we [get to] understand where they’re coming from. I think [that] unless you live with people like that you don’t understand where they’re coming from’ (Participant 3, pers. comm., November 25, 2021).

The strength of these transcultural feelings and attitudes in the sample group was heightened because of the participants’ common view that such transcultural dispositions towards cultural diversity are less obvious in more recent Sri Lankan migrants from the same schools, especially those who had been born prior to, or who went to school after, the Sri Lankan civil war that ended in 2009. As Participant 5 commented, ‘ … . the sad thing today is they’re very conscious of their ethnicity. They’re very conscious of being Sinhalese or Burgher or – not so much Burgher. They’re almost a lost race. But very conscious of whether they’re Sinhalese or Tamil’ (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021). For Participant 1, it is a generational shift –

The newer Trinitarians are wary. After people like myself left, the Burgher community was virtually non-existent, and if I were to go back – as I did a couple of years ago – when I say that I was born in Sri Lanka to somebody from Ceylon, they can’t believe it – they can’t believe that there are people of my colour, and the way I speak, … because that whole Burgher community shifted out by 1985 at the latest. In the last 30, 40 years nearly, there’s a new generation of Sinhalese and Tamils who have no idea of the cultures that used to be there up to about 1980 (Participant 1, pers. comm., February 9, 2022).

Conclusions

Although constrained by the small sample size, the findings from this pilot study did demonstrate that the participants’ prior educational experiences were, to various degrees, advantageous in their migration journey from Sri Lanka to Australia. These experiences were influenced by their schooling in Sri Lanka as much the alumni connections that assisted their induction to Australian society. In this sense, education was a key means through which their cultural adaptation metamorphised. In this article, we have pointed to this disposition as being commensurate with a transcultural capacity, as defined by other research related to this study (Casinader et al. 2023). In the data we have presented, it is clear that participants’ experiences of migration allowed them to embody transculturalism and transnationalism because of their ability to comprehend and display a range of specific cultural cues. In other words, the transcultural nature of their education in ‘British-tradition’ schools in Sri Lanka permitted a successful cultural transition to modern Australia.

Further, the shared colonial pasts of the two nations, although different in many ways, meant that inter-dominion migration was relatively straightforward for those beneficiaries of a similar educational experience. To be sure, English language proficiency played a large role in the smoothness of the transition, but the personality traits celebrated in these particular Sri Lankan schools – strength and integrity of character, rigour, self-reliance, loyalty, competition, as well as sporting capabilities, and in cricket especially – amounted to a form of selfhood that was valued in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Likewise, the facilitation of migration by the school alumni groups in Australia was assisted and supplemented this existing transcultural disposition in an informal, institutional way. In this sense, their identity as school alumni of schools in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon) superseded the lines of ethno-cultural identity groupings and separations – Burghers, Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim – even though these participants had noticed that these had become more pronounced, and sectarian, in the final decades of the twentieth century. The experiences of more recent migrants was in strong contrast to those who arrived from Sri Lanka during or after its civil war, without the advantage of a transcultural education in which cultural difference was both recognised and ignored (Betts and Higgins 2017).

The participants’ arrival in Australia did not lead to a reinforcement of these intra-Sri Lankan differences; rather it was a matter of adjusting themselves to a new culture by recognising that they held useful attributes to facilitate the change in place. The alterations in the participants’ cultural disposition as a result of migration lends itself to a transnational and/or transcultural explanation. Sociological studies of migration always point to change in individual and group characteristics. Indeed, transcultural experiences of individuals point to its composite and dynamic nature within individuals in various contexts. As Carlson and Schneickert (2021, 1136), point out, a change in the habitus of mobile individuals or migrants is ‘a specific configuration of more or less transnationalized dispositions and contexts.’

This is not to say that the migrant experiences of these participants to Australia was without some tensions. As positive as the previous patterns described are, the participants were still aware of some negatives in their migration experiences, although only Participant 4 felt that his Sri Lankan schooling had specifically done little to prepare him for life in Australia. All had experienced some racism, but none felt overly offended by it, and all were similar to Participant 5, who highlighted the importance of migrants being diverse in their connections – ‘I’ve been particularly widely distributed and very diverse in my circles of friendships and associations and all that sort of stuff’ (Participant 5, pers. comm., December 9, 2021) – or learning how to adjust to Australian ‘customs’, such as Participant 4’s lesson that socialising over drinks with work colleagues was key to gaining promotion. This instance reflects a troubling element of Australian workplace culture – specifically, patriarchal nepotism – that the participant understood as a way into social advantage. Whether their schooling experiences may have permitted them to decode this cultural practice is difficult to say. Certainly, access here comes, via sport, to a network that would be closed to those without certain knowledge and attributes.

In conclusion, on the basis of the pilot study, their pre-migration school experiences and ongoing connections with alumni associations do appear to be strong influences on the migration experiences of Sri Lankans to Australia. There is a strong possibility, however, that the pattern has a temporal aspect and may not be as solid with more recent migrations, perhaps because of a distinctly less transcultural Sri Lankan schooling environment. A deeper study into the Sri Lankan migration experience would therefore be of value, although steps would need to be taken to also include alumna from girls’ schools, a greater historical time period of school attendance, a more diverse age range of participants and a more national scope of study. Whatever the case, the existence of Sri Lankan school alumni associations does provide a platform from which Sri Lankan migrants move into wider Australian society, providing

[a] successful sense of belonging [that] is, in any event, not solely based on one’s own nurturing of nostalgic memory and home attachment, but also on the role of others … and their approval, acceptance and support for inclusion in collective memories and notions of home (Marschall 2020, 318).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niranjan Casinader

Niranjan Casinader is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Education at Monash University. Originally educated as a geographer, he worked as a teacher and educational leader in secondary schools and international education for over 30 years before moving into academia, teaching and researching across postgraduate and graduate courses in curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, teacher expertise and Humanities education. His major research focus in retirement are the relationships involving culture and patterns of colonial education, as well as the role of school alumni groups in facilitating migrant experience.

Howard Prosser

Howard Prosser works in the School of Education, Culture and Society, Faculty of Education at Monash University.

Fiona Longmuir

Fiona Longmuir works in the School of Education, Culture and Society, Faculty of Education, at Monash University and is co-leader of the Educational Workforce for the Future Research Impact Lab.

Peter van Cuylenburg

Peter van Cuylenburg was a teacher in government and independent schools in Melbourne for over 40 years, with extensive experience in senior management positions. He began his career as an art teacher and has remained a practising and exhibiting artist, retiring from full-time teaching as Vice-Principal of a K to 12 Independent School in Melbourne. In recent years, he was employed as a sessional tutor and research assistant at Monash University, Melbourne.