The truth is Somalis are attracted to cheap housing. The projects in Melbourne like Flemington and north Melbourne have no proper mosques and are now exclusively Somalis and even their children who are college graduates with families live there. Literally, the cops are present 24/7 on these projects. Furthermore, the worst performing public high school in the state of Victoria is next door. Most of their kids attend that school.
The school
The Department of Education and Training puts out graphs that plot schools on axes of advantage and disadvantage – parental income on the left and numbers of parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds along the bottom. Flemington Primary School is in the warm and dense area at the top left – high wealth and low numbers of migrants. Debney Park, on the other hand, is flung out on the right-hand side. Only a few schools in Victoria are more disadvantaged. You can see one school playground from the other but the graph tells us they are, in fact, far apart.
In today's Australia, social position and wealth are usually correlated with postcode. Disadvantage and advantage are geographic. But in Flemington, so far as schooling is concerned, the divide is the old route to the goldfields. It is Mount Alexander Road.
Among the parents at Flemington Primary I have yet to meet any who are seriously considering sending their children to Debney Park Secondary College.
"Well, I think they have their schools and we have ours," one parent said to me, as we wrapped presents for the Father's Day stall last year. I had asked why so few of the public-housing tenants, many of them African refugees, attended Flemington Primary. I wrapped a pair of black cotton business socks in giftwrap and choked down my initial, furious reaction. After all what she said was a simple statement of fact. And it was dressed up with the usual caveats of those parents planning to send their children to private secondary schools. They are sure, of course, that teachers in the public system do a very good job. But it won't be for their children.
It is also true, of course, that "our" school has a catchment area covering the well-to-do renovated houses in the leafy streets. The public-housing area falls just outside our catchment area and is served by its own primary school.
It is not that there are no poorer students, no dark faces, in our school. There is a smattering of recent African refugees, their mothers in head-scarves, but they are in the minority and rarely seen at school functions. The leadership of the school and the atmosphere are unmistakably white and middle class. Our school has a nickname in the suburb: "Flemington Grammar". One of the teachers told me with pride that my children were fortunate – I was getting "a private education without having to pay for it".
At Flemington Primary there are a thousand things that we do without thinking twice that confirm our comfortable financial situation. We have school concerts in the local theatre with an admission fee of $15 a head. We have a Christmas dinner in a restaurant at the casino that charges $45 each. Hardly a week goes by without the need to shell out money for something or other at school. Recently, a letter came home requesting a $100 donation per family – fundraising towards a new school hall. Our social functions include alcohol and the sausage sizzles are rarely
halal, despite all the black Muslim faces across the street.
In another conversation, I was talking to a parent about the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. "Ah yes," he said. "Balwyn. If you live out there, you can educate your children in the public system and they'll be ok." The implication, not conscious or examined, was that one could not do that where we lived.
Instead, the parents discuss the private school options or which government schools – some of them many kilometres away – present an acceptable risk. Nobody even considers the high school across the street.
But I am, or I want to. And hence my fear.
https://griffithreview.com/articles/beyond-the-comfort-zone/
As you can see, there is white flight at the local high school because we turned it into a gthetto school.