Iranian Australians or Persian Australians are citizens of Australia whose national background or ancestry is traced from Iran.
Terminology
Iranian-Australian is used interchangeably with Persian-Australian, partly due to the fact that, in the Western world, Iran was known as "Persia". On the Nowruz of 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked foreign delegates to use the term Iran, the endonym of the country used since the Sasanian Empire, in formal correspondence. Since then the use of the word "Iran" has become more common in the Western countries. This also changed the usage of the terms for Iranian nationality, and the common adjective for citizens of Iran changed from "Persian" to "Iranian". In 1959, the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Reza Shah Pahlavi's son, announced that both "Persia" and "Iran" could officially be used interchangeably. However the issue is [|still debated today]. There is a tendency among Iranian Australians to categorize themselves as "Persian" rather than "Iranian", mainly to distinguish themselves as being of Persian ethnicity, which comprise about 65% of Iran's population. While the majority of Iranian-Australians come from Persian backgrounds, there is a significant number of non-Persian Iranians such as Azeris and Kurds within the Iranian-Australian community, leading some scholars to believe that the label "Iranian" is more inclusive, since the label "Persian" excludes non-Persian minorities. The Collins English Dictionary uses a variety of similar and overlapping definitions for the terms "Persian" and "Iranian".
History
The first known immigrant to Australia was Hamed Mortis who got naturalised in New South Wales on 20 October 1883. The only other early Iranian immigrant to NSW was Mohamad Ameen Khan who got naturalised on 29 June 1899. Few Iranians migrated to Victoria in the nineteenth century, with only seven recorded in the 1891 census. From 1950 to 1977, the first wave of immigration from Iran to Australia occurred, but it was relatively insignificant in terms of the number of immigrants. Annually, few thousand tourists entered Australia which only a few hundreds were immigrants during this period, mostly university students who decided to stay. The vast majority of Iran's emigrants left their homeland just after the 1979 Islamic revolution which was end of 2500 years monarchy. For the period 1978–1980, the average number of Iranians entering Australia as immigrants annually increased to more than 5,000. From the period 1980–1988, there was a strong trend of emigration to Australia. Since 2000, there has been a wave of Iranian migration to Australia, especially engineers and doctors, through skilled migration program. Iranians speak Persian and also Azerbaijani Turkish, Kurdish, Gilaki and some other languages and dialects are spoken in different regions of Iran. They practice the Iranian culture, which includes Nowruz. Along religious lines, both Muslim and non-Muslim Iranians reside in Australia. Non-Muslim Iranians include Iranian Christians mainly Armenian and Assyrian, Iranian Baha'is, Iranian Jews and Iranian Zoroastrians. The Bureau of Statistics reports that at the 2011 census the major religious affiliations amongst Iran-born were Islam and Baha'i. Of the Iran-born, 18.4 per cent stated 'No Religion', which was lower than that of the total Australian population, and 9.4 per cent did not state a religion. Several sources have noted estimates of Iranian diaspora mainly left Iran since the 1979 revolution, the significant number of which currently reside in the United States and Western Europe while the community is Australia is very small. The Iranian-Australian community, in line with similar trends in Iran and other countries around the world, has produced a sizeable number of individuals notable in many fields, including Law, Medicine, Engineering, Business and Fine Arts.
