As the only child of immigrants, I know the discomfort of moving into the middle class

Sydney Morning Herald

18-05-2025

I'll never forget the feeling of awe – and acute discomfort – the first time I walked into The Age 's newsroom.
I was 22 and, for as long as I could remember, had wanted to work with the big (news) wigs in town. After two blissful and terrifying weeks working my butt off, I was asked to stay for another (I readily agreed), and eventually landed a permanent job.
Little did I know how much coming in as an employee, and no longer an intern, would make me feel like a fish out of water. Yes, I had a degree from one of Australia's best universities, but I was still living in an outer western suburb, which felt like a world away.
Conversations revolved around the inner north and south, with high-profile journalists I'd read for years talking about their weekends at book readings and music festivals, dining at new restaurants or checking out museums. Unlike most media professionals, I don't come from an English-speaking background, and while my working-class Polish roots have equipped me to fight and never give up, they didn't expose me to the world of theatre, musicals, overseas travel and multicultural cuisines.
While in some ways this was my dream life, it still felt out of reach because I was a class migrant.
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In an article for The Conversation, UK researchers Dr Madeline Wyatt and Samantha Evans found that people who experience social mobility through education often 'felt under pressure to change mannerisms, adjust their accents and conceal behavioural habits to fit into a workplace'. As one participant in their 2022 study said: 'The [work] culture is very middle class, where it might be that you can quote Latin, that you drink wine rather than beer, that you socialise in a certain way.'
This kind of social mobility also tends to affect family dynamics. In Australia, we like to pretend that class doesn't exist or, at the very least, matter all that much. But as Dr Alexandra Coleman from the University of Western Sydney points out, education has become a dominant hope for a good life. Take, for example, riot police recently being called to manage unruly crowds at Sydney's Canterbury Racecourse, where selective school exams were being held, and unruly parents jostled for their children to enter the test and, by extension, a better life.
While I have learnt to 'pass', the natural trappings of wealth and comfort are easy for us outsiders to recognise if you know the signs. I once dated a guy whose dinner table guests included famous playwrights and political figures, and who asked me, 'Three prime ministers came out of my school. How many came out of yours?'