Want to go for a dip at Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach? Prepare to be jammed for an hour against sweaty bodies on a bus trapped in traffic. With Australia’s population growing at the fastest pace of any major developed country, what used to be a stress-relieving outing has instead become a stress-inducing ordeal. The country’s head count will hit 25 million sometime this month—an incredible three decades sooner than the government had originally predicted in 2005.
Immigration has been an integral part of Australia’s story, from the arrival of the first English settlers in the late 18th century through the gold rush of the mid-19th century and the post-World War II boom years. While vestiges of the White Australia policy that favored Anglo-Saxon immigration endured into the early 1970s, an influx of Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, and others since that decade has given rise to a truly multicultural society.