Heimat Melbourne

"This book is about a group of immigrants whose mother tongue was German. They inherited a language, a literature, a culture that was German. ... this book attempts to view the German-speaking community by disregarding the assimilation process to which they willingly submitted, by highlighting their lives and experiences and activities in the early formative life of Melbourne against the background of the large Anglo-Celtic majority, before those differences disappeared. This is done by examining who they were, whence they came and why - if that could be ascertained - and in what ways they differed from the community at large, how they fared, what they did and how they did it."--Introduction.