Where people were born and where their parents were born constructs a person’s cultural heritage. People’s ancestry is important as it defines their cultural heritage.

The 2006 Census asked people to list up to two ancestries, therefore the results will have responses that exceed 100%.

In Strathfield only 13.2% gave their heritage as Australian. The largest percentage gave Chinese as their ancestry (17.6% of the total population) where 94.4% stated they had both parents born in China. Following Chinese ancestry, English, Indian, Irish, Lebanese and Italian ancestries were rated highly by Strathfield residents.

Of those residents who cited Australian ancestry 70.5% had both parents born in Australia with a further 18.9% having one or both parents born overseas and 8.3% had both parents born overseas.

Strathfield has 0.07% of the population who cited Aboriginal ancestry which is much lower than the Sydney average.

Compared with Sydney region averages, Strathfield LGA has significantly less residents citing an Australian ancestry (16.2% fewer people). Conversely Strathfield had significantly more Chinese and a larger proportion of Indian and Senegalese, Italian, Lebanese and Russian ancestry.

Since 2001 the ancestries that experienced a substantial percentage growth has been Chinese, Indian and Singhalese. In contrast, Australian and English ancestry has had a substantial decline since 2001.

Countries not included rating less than 1% includes: America, Holland, France, Hungry, Macedonia, Malta New Zealand Maori, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Wales.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2006), Strathfield Local Government Area, Census of Population and Housing.