Australia is one of the most multi-cultural countries in the world. We are home to the world’s oldest continuous cultures, as well as Australians who identify with more than 270 ancestries. One in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas.
Harmony week is all about celebrating this rich cultural diversity. Harmony Day began in 1999, coinciding with the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21. It has now grown to a week-long celebration.
Harmony Week is a celebration of our different backgrounds, different cultures and different experiences. Our diversity is one of our great strengths. We are one nation and we all Australians.
Yarra Plenty Regional Library is hosting events and activities for you to join in the celebrations and learn about other cultures.
EVENTS
You can learn Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging in a hands-on workshop at Watsonia Library where you will create your own arrangement to take home.
Do you have a traditional family dish to share stories about? Join in our discussion at Mill Park Library and bring along a sample of the dish to show.
Celebrate Holi, the Indian Festival of Colours at Ivanhoe Library and Cultural Hub with Indian singing – traditional and modern. Featuring classical Indian dance by Dr Sam Goraya and students.
Children can have fun at a Kids’ Art Studio at Thomastown Library, making flags and other beautiful creations to take with you on the Thomastown Picnic.
At Lalor Library, kids can decorate Harmony Hands in the colours of their cultural background. Hands will be displayed on a library poster.
If you would like to read, listen or watch more about living in Australia’s diverse cultures, try our Harmony Week Recommended Reads below.
KEEP READING!
This harmony week we highlight some of YPRL’s resources about harmony and multiculturalism that you can borrow to read, watch, and listen to. We also have resources available for loan in 18 community languages across our branches.
The ultimate book about growing up in Australia - a choice selection of wonderful stories and recollections. Featuring pieces from Black Inc.'s definitive 'Growing Up' series: Growing Up Asian, Growing Up Aboriginal, Growing Up African, Growing Up Queer and Growing Up Disabled in Australia, it captures the diversity of our nation in moving and revelatory ways.
Australia Day by Melanie Cheng.
In ‘Australia Day’, debut author Melanie Cheng creates a dazzling mosaic of contemporary life, through 14 stories that reflect the diversity of Australians and the starkness of human frailty. The people she writes about are young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Chinese, Lebanese, Christian, Muslim. What they have in common—no matter where they come from—is the desire we all share to feel that we belong. The stories explore universal themes of love, loss, family and identity.
Winner, Prize for Fiction, The 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
Available as a book and an eBook (Libby).
Seeking Asylum: Our Stories, by the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre.
This beautifully illustrated hardback captures the stories of those who have lived the experience of seeking asylum. In their own voices, contributors share how they came to be in Australia, and explore diverse aspects of their lives - growing up in a refugee camp, studying for a PhD, changing attitudes through soccer, being a Muslim in a small country town, campaigning against racism, surviving detention, holding onto culture, dreaming of being reunited with family. Seeking Asylum redefines assumptions about people who have sought asylum and inspires readers to take action to create a more welcoming Australia.
Available as a book and eBook.
Half My Luck [audio book MP3] by Samera Kamaleddine; read by Sophie Loughran.
Layla Karimi is sort of Australian and sort of Lebanese: a 'halfie' who doesn't really fit into either world. And when all hell breaks loose at the first beach party of the summer, Layla finds herself caught between her friends and the Lebanese kids who call themselves 'the Cedar Army'.
One group has been wrongfully accused and Layla knows the truth that could help clear them. But will she speak up?
The Migrant Experience, a Kanopy Streaming Video series.
This documentary series, via our free Kanopy streaming service, looks at how immigrants have been received upon their arrival in Australia. It explores the expectations, fears and challenges of these new immigrants in first meetings between new and old settlers as well as the migrants' desire to play a bigger part in what was fast becoming a multicultural society. A co-production of Film Australia and the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs.
The Price of Two Sparrows by Christy Collins.
A contemporary Australian novel. Heico, an ornithologist fighting a losing battle to protect the birds in his beachside suburb on the site of a planned mosque, finds himself embroiled in community resistance to the project. Nahla is Heico's house cleaner. Having recently arrived in Australia she sees the mosque as a symbol of what she hopes to find in Australia: community, familiarity, acceptance. As resistance to the project intensifies, she must summon the courage and the language to speak out and claim her space in this new life.
READ WITH YOUR KIDS!
This Love: a celebration of harmony around with world by Isabel Otter.
Celebrate love from all around the world! A series of gentle rhymes sensitively explores what love feels like to children. With beautiful illustrations and wonderful examples of diversity, it gives a timely, happy, simple, positive message.
I'm Australian too by Mem Fox and illustrated by Ronojoy Ghosh.
From countries near and far, many have made their home in Australia, sharing it with the original inhabitants, and living in peace beneath the Southern Star. Mem Fox celebrates Australia's incredible multicultural heritage in this beautiful book.
An Aussie Year: Twelve Months in the Life of Australian kids by Tania McCartney & Tina Snerling.
Meet Ned, Lily, Zoe, Kirra and Matilda-Australian children representing a multicultural blend of culture and race that typifies our beautiful country. They are taking you through a year in the life of Australian kids, from celebrations to traditions to events, to our everyday way of life.
Your Name is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and illustrated by Luisa Uribe.
Saddened by her classmates' and teacher's mispronunciations of her name, a girl is empowered by her discovery that names are like songs when she and her mum celebrate the musicality of African, Asian, Black-American, Latinx, and Middle Eastern names.