Australia

The Basque clubs of Australia came out of that emigration of cane and public works: three in all, two from the sixties and one from 2003. The official register of the Basque Government recognises two today, in Sydney and in Townsville. Melbourne’s, which was the first, no longer appears on its list.¹

Until the early sixties the Basques of Melbourne met in private homes and in the odd restaurant. In 1964 the Basque Society Gure Txoko held its first Basque festival at St Patrick’s church, with Mass, txistu, some twenty children dressed as dantzaris, pelota matches and a wood-chopping demonstration.² Pelota had its own places in the city: several frontons at churches and schools which, between the fifties and the eighties, served as meeting points.² In the eighties there were years when the association was inactive.² euskalkultura.eus lists it today as not active, and it no longer appears on the Basque Government’s official list.¹⁰¹

Two years later it was Sydney’s turn. The Gure Txoko Basque Club was founded on 31 July 1966, the feast of Saint Ignatius, when twenty-six families put in 200 dollars each, some six weeks’ wages at the time, to buy a house in the suburb of Darlinghurst, close to the city centre.⁷⁵ Inside there is a dining room for about ninety people, a kitchen, a library and a fronton, little used today.²⁵ It is the oldest official Basque organisation in Australia that has kept running without interruption.² It opens on Sundays with Basque food, mus and pelota, and keeps up the feasts of the calendar.⁵ In November 2016 it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with nine days of pelota tournaments, cookery workshops, a Basque film festival, herri kirolak and music.⁷ The register credits it with 115 members.¹ They are no longer the same people who founded it: the first were construction workers, and today they are mostly young graduates who come for a season to learn English.⁷

The Basque Club of North Queensland, in Townsville, was born of a telephone directory. In May 2003 José Mari “Joe” Goicoechea sent 230 letters to “all the Bascos we could find in the telephone book”, and within a month 260 people replied. On 8 June 2003 some twenty people met at his house in Townsville and agreed to set up a cultural association, with no politics or religion, and chose the club’s name by 18 votes to 2. The founding meeting was held on 10 August at the Wulguru community centre.² The club was registered as an association on 13 November 2003 and says it started with more than two hundred members and has kept them.⁶ The register recognised it in 2005.¹