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Sue Green

IF you thought the average Australian was a middle-aged white man, beer-gutted, English-speaking and driving a battered Holden, think again.

  The latest Australian population census shows that the face of Australia is changing. And while it reveals an ageing, better educated, increasingly mobile population, it also shows one that is increasingly Asian and increasingly likely to speak Chinese at home.

  As for that average Australian - she's a 33-year-old clerk with a house, a car, a A$35,000 (HK$190,000) a year income and a A$600 a month mortgage.

  She's less likely than in the past to have children, more likely to have a degree, to speak a language other than English at home and to be of migrant or aboriginal origin.

  This picture of Australia has been painted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 1991 Census of Population and Housing, a compulsory census taken of every Australian household in August 1991 and just released (as processing the quantity of data is a lengthy task).

  When it was taken there were 16.85 million Australians, with women in the majority by 0.3 per cent. Although most of the 22.3 per cent born overseas were still from traditional destinations such as Europe and the former Soviet Union, the percentage from Asia has risen steadily.

  In New South Wales people from the Philippines showed the largest increase since 1986 - 125 per cent - with China (116 per cent) and Hongkong (103 per cent) coming in second and third.

  And as the number of Chinese people has risen, so has the number speaking Chinese. Although 12.88 million Australians (that's 82.6 per cent) still speak only English at home, that's actually down two per cent on 1986.

  Chinese is spoken by 9.2 per cent of those speaking another language at home - up from 6.5 per cent in 1986 - while the number speaking the traditional migrant languages of Italian and Greek fell.

  Social changes and pressure of modern life are among the trends revealed by the census. For instance, the traditional family of two parents and two children is breaking down, with more than five per cent of 1991 families headed by working solo parents.

  And as high interest rates and the pressures of the recession made an impact, the number of Australians buying their own home dropped - down from 30.9 per cent in 1986 to 26.6 per cent.

  What's more, the Land Down Under, often thought of as a place of sun, surf and people leading a ''laid-back'' lifestyle, was revealed as the land of a million clerks: 1,069,188, in fact.

 That is Australia's largest occupation group, with sales and service workers the next largest, followed by trades people. But despite the size of those groups, Australians are becoming increasingly well qualified, with those holding university degrees up from 8.6 per cent in 1986 to 12.8 per cent in 1991, reflecting the steady rise in higher education enrolments. The government says this shows its strategy, of expanding higher education, is paying off.

  The census isn't the only new data to show that Australian life is changing and taking its toll. A new poll, which asked 1,000 Aussies whether they suffered from a range of modern-living related ailments, found many Australians feel bad most of the time.

  Over-tiredness and backaches were the most common complaints, followed by headaches and trouble sleeping. Tiredness topped the list, with four out of 10 of those surveyed regularly feeling over-tired. And it was women and young people who suffered most.

  Although none of the ailments is, on the face of it, life-threatening, they detract from the quality of life. Professor Hedley Peach, head of Melbourne University's Department of Community Medicine, says there's evidence they are induced by the way we live, with stress from work, relationships, problems at home all affecting our health.

  The census doesn't deal with health, but it does confirm one trend receiving a great deal of attention here lately: the rapid growth in the population of Queensland, as disgruntled southerners move north in search of jobs and sunshine. With a 15.1 per cent population rise since 1986, it was the fastest growing state.

  But it's not just Australian-born migrants boosting the population. The percentage of Queenslanders born overseas rose from 15 per cent to 17.1 per cent, with 13.4 per cent of those born in Asia.



Changing face of average Aussie