Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity

By Anthem Press

Focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould, the essays in 'Migrant Nation' work within the gap between Australian image and experience and offer fresh insights into the ‘other’ side of identity construction. The volume casts light on the hidden face of Australian identity and remembers the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews and documentary fragments, as well as rich archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783087228

Book preview

Migrant Nation

Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture

Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specializes in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.

Series Editors

Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia

Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board

Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia

Delia Falconer – University of Technology Sydney, Australia

John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia

Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China

Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia

Ivor Indyk – Western Sydney University, Australia

Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia

James Ley – Sydney Review of Books, Australia

Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia

Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, USA

Lyn McCredden – Deakin University, Australia

Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia

Brigitta Olubas – University of New South Wales, Australia

Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia

Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Australia

Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia

Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia

Migrant Nation

Australian Culture, Society and Identity

Edited by

Paul Longley Arthur

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2018 Paul Longley Arthur editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-720-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-720-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

1.Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity

Paul Longley Arthur

2.Remembering Aboriginal Sydney

Peter Read

3.Files and Aboriginal Lives: Biographies from an Archive

Anna Haebich

4.Writing, Femininity and Colonialism: Judith Wright, Hélène Cixous and Marie Cardinal

Alison Ravenscroft

5.The Staging of Social Policy: The Photographing of Post-War British Child Migrants

Kerreen Ely-Harper

6.Writing Home from China: Charles Allen’s Transnational Childhood

Kate Bagnall

7.Australian? Autobiography? Citizenship, Postnational Self-Identity and the Politics of Belonging

Jack Bowers

8.A Nikkei Australian Story: Legacy of the Pacific War

Yuriko Nagata

9.Displaced Persons (1947–52) in Australia: Memory in Autobiography

Jayne Persian

10.Between Utopia and Autobiography: Migrant Narratives in Australia

Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams

11.Vietnamese–Australian Life Writing and Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues

Michael Jacklin

12.Heroes, Legends and Divas: Framing Famous Lives in Australia

Karen Fox

List of Contributors

Index

FIGURES

5.1Dr Barnardos’s 1948 party on board the Ormonde

5.2Documentation of the Barnardo’s Australian Archival Collection

5.3Clifford Remmer, age 12, photographed prior to leaving England for Australia

5.4‘What a great place it was to be a kid’

5.5‘Cliff Remmer on right showing new boys Ray Searby and mate the chicks at the Mowbray Farm School 1951’

5.6‘Burwood Girls at Mowbray Park to visit their Brothers’

5.7Back view of ‘Burwood Girls at Mowbray Park’ photograph

6.1Charles Allen as a boy, photographed sometime before he went to China in 1909

6.2Backyards along Campbell Street in Surry Hills, Sydney, in 1900

6.3One of the letters Charles Allen wrote from China to his mother in Sydney, dated 11 April 1911

6.4Chuk Sau Yuen village was located outside of the county capital of Shekki, pictured in 1932

6.5Charles Allen’s Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test, issued in June 1909

Chapter 1

Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity

Paul Longley Arthur

It’s my present that is foreign, and […] the past is home, albeit a lost home.

(Rushdie 1991, 9)

Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity.

(Kristeva 1991, 1)

As a former colony of Great Britain, Australia has faced the dual challenge experienced by all settler colonies of forging an identity that allows it to distinguish itself from its ‘parent’ culture at the same time deal with its complicity in the colonization of the new land and the treatment of its original inhabitants. In the case of Australia, this situation has been further complicated by the fact that the land was simply taken – without a war, without a treaty and without negotiation. Throughout its European history, Australia has needed to perpetuate its founding myth of being a previously uninhabited land. The false descriptor terra nullius was the framing principle for a mythology and a moral platform with repercussions that are felt to this day. This principle has facilitated long-term ‘historical amnesia’ (Young 1990, 25)¹ and provided justification for ruthless racial policies designed to serve the dream of a young, white egalitarian society building a nation in a ‘new’ land.² Australian writer Peter Carey has commented, ‘We preferred to forget the doctrine of Terra Nullius to justify theft and murder’. Forgetting ‘is a habit for us’, he says, adding, ‘as it is for most people’.³

A few years before Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, Richard White pointed out that while every new nation has to go through the process of inventing an identity, in Australia it is ‘a national obsession’. Australia, he reflected, ‘has long supported a whole industry of image-makers to tell us what we are’ (White 1981, viii). Other scholars since then have directly addressed the topic of the construction of Australian identity, using a wide variety of approaches.⁴ In these explorations an undercurrent of anxiety has repeatedly been identified in the self-image that Australia has projected. This anxiety has many possible causes, but prominent among them is the uncomfortable recognition, growing stronger over recent decades, that the old identity ‘brand’ is now so far from the reality of what Australia has become in its national policies, practices and the daily life of its citizens that it can no longer be invoked without irony. In particular, Australians’ professed egalitarianism is at odds with widely held community attitudes to difference – whether racial, ethnic or cultural. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country exposed the problem and explained it in terms of ‘the inability to imagine a way of life different from one’s own’ (Horne 1964, 46). Now the discrepancy between Australia’s public face and its inner life has grown to unmanageable proportions and has become highly visible, demanding attention. Put simply, a vast gap now exists between the old dream and the accumulating narratives of the reality of living in Australia today. As Salman Rushdie once put it, in the context of India, ‘their descriptions [are] incompatible’ (Rushdie 1991, 13).⁵ In recent years the resultant tension between these divergent narratives has been causing social and political collisions of views about Australia and Australianness on an unprecedented scale, with digital media providing more scope and freedom than ever before. Commenting in the Australian Financial Review, Anne Hyland wrote, ‘As a nation we hold a mirror to ourselves and the reflection we see is that of progressive people: an egalitarian bunch, who are in favour of a fair-go. But that’s not the reflection at the moment’ (Hyland 2015, 53). Nor is it how Australia is perceived by the rest of the world, as was made painfully clear in 2015 when, as part of a periodic review by the United Nations Human Rights Council, more than a hundred countries criticized Australia’s human rights record,⁶ with the treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous people dominating their concerns.⁷

The chapters in this volume enter this fraught arena of national self-examination on the common understanding that it would be as unproductive to attempt to define ‘what we are’ as to try to record the past ‘as it really was’.⁸ Instead, the chapters work within the gap between image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way, this collection shines a light on what has been termed the hidden face of our identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling. ‘In every era’, wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (Benjamin 1973, 257). The biographical methods used by the authors to delve below the traditional historical record to piece together untold stories from individual lives support the overarching purpose of Migrant Nation, which is to ‘brush history against the grain’ (Benjamin 1973, 259).

Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these chapters were foreign to the Australian settler dream. Their stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside the dominant Australian story since there was no place for them inside it as it was repeatedly told. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews and documentary fragments, as well as rich archives that are opened up and explored in the pages that follow, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.⁹

As Rushdie explains, ‘identity is at once plural and partial’, and it is built on ‘ambiguous and shifting’ ground (Rushdie 1991, 15). In Australia, the ground has shifted massively over the past half-century, with three landmark changes being the inclusion of Australian Indigenous people as citizens for the first time following a referendum in 1967,¹⁰ the dismantling of the White Australia Policy between 1949 and 1973¹¹ and the introduction of the policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s.¹² Further shifts, though not yet enshrined in law, are commanding a high degree of attention and generating vigorous debate in the media, notably the increasing pressure to acknowledge Indigenous people in Australia’s Constitution. This unresolved matter has been described by the Indigenous leader, academic and activist Patrick Dodson as ‘an ongoing, gnawing sore in the side of our national psyche’ (Pearson 2015). Also attracting national attention are ongoing debates on the legalization of gay marriage and, albeit with less urgency, the establishment of a republic. Globally, the escalating fear of terrorism¹³ since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the New York World Trade Center, and mass displacement and migration of people on an unprecedented scale, are developments that have generated new anxieties. These developments place further pressure on the old narratives of Australia, forcing Australians to look critically at their culture and national image, as though from the outside.¹⁴ With nearly half of Australia’s population now living in migrant households, the third-highest proportion in the Western world,¹⁵ a reimagining of the nation is an ever-present imperative. Such reimagining is no easy task while key issues are polarizing the community, and nostalgia for the old images and narratives of nation arouse passionate advocacy for their continuing relevance as repositories of so-called core values.¹⁶ Integral to this traditionalist approach to Australian identity is resentment and hostility towards ‘strangers’, as the omnipresent discourse of immigration demonstrates and as vividly dramatized in the confronting SBS Television reality documentary Go Back to Where You Came From.¹⁷

In White Mythologies Robert Young commented that ‘in order to come to terms with the past, the initial gesture must be to confront its strangeness, rather than to seek for similarities and continuities’. Invoking Michel Foucault, he refers to a strategy ‘designed to restore the otherness that history by definition must disallow’ (Young 1990, 75). Advocating a similar process of restoration, Benedict Anderson wrote, ‘Out of this oblivion spring narratives,’ and ‘out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity […] which because it cannot be remembered, must be narrated’ (Anderson 1991, 204). The chapters in this volume contribute to such a process in the Australian context.

In the first chapter, ‘Remembering Aboriginal Sydney’, Peter Read explains that Sydney has two distinct Aboriginal histories. One is well documented and well known, dealing with the stories that emerge from the records of various government services, while the other is concerned with a lesser known history – that of the 5 per cent of Indigenous people whose families have always lived in the area – from before the time of colonization. Remarkably, in some cases their stories have not been entirely lost and, indeed, continue to be passed down through the generations. Critical to the survival of these stories, Read argues, is the continuous connection between the people and the physical location of their ‘spiritual genesis’, resulting in what can be described as ‘body-remembrance’. Drawing upon oral histories, the chapter uncovers a vital layer of Sydney’s Indigenous history and, in the process, provides powerful insights into the crucial role of place in the sustenance of oral traditions. Some of those who have maintained a continuous connection with their families’ ancestral sites have been able to preserve their sense of historical identity and belonging – and their stories – despite the ravages of early colonial conflicts and in a contemporary urban environment where the physical traces of their history have been all but obliterated. For these city dwellers, the identity that they honour and maintain is of their own ancestry and their own nation, bearing little resemblance to the images of urban Indigenous people who appear, when they appear at all, in mainstream narratives of Australian identity. Told against the backdrop of the ongoing heated public debate about the racially charged and targeted booing of a top Australian Aussie Rules football player who overtly celebrates his Indigeneity on the field, the opening two chapters make an important and timely contribution.¹⁸

Anna Haebich’s chapter, ‘Files and Aboriginal Lives: Biographies from an Archive’, focuses on an identity story with the opposite trajectory of that explored by Read in that it traces the systematic forced severance of the connection between Indigenous people and their families, culture, languages and ancestral homelands by successive governments. Drawing upon a vast archive that documents 74 years of implementation of the policy requiring the removal of Indigenous children from their families, Haebich’s chapter exposes the depth of Australia’s commitment to maintaining the myth of its white identity – a myth itself based on the convenient untruth of terra nullius. The power of the archive to influence rather than merely record history is a key theme of Haebich’s exploration of the West Australian Department of Indigenous Affairs archive, including detailed records kept by the notorious A. O. Neville, who held government office as the ‘Protector of Aborigines’ for 25 years at a critical period in Aboriginal/settler relations and played a significant role in determining the course of Australian Aboriginal history. Taking as her starting point the proposition that archives are ‘active, generative substances with histories’, Haebich traces the course of this archive’s development, in all its horror, not simply as an accumulation of files but as a body of recorded history that has a life of its own and can tell its own story. On one level, she is concerned with the process of construction of government archives by powerful historical figures, but on another the chapter is about the people who are the subjects of the thousands of documents that make up the archive. Disempowered and dispossessed by the policies that officials, including Neville, zealously oversaw, Indigenous people watched as their culture, languages and lands were systematically and ‘legally’ taken from them. When their children were taken, their sense of a future was taken away with them. Haebich shows how this process, meticulously documented and recorded in the official archive, was normalized and rendered acceptable by a discourse of benevolence and moral rectitude. In this way, she shows how the archive was able to play an active role in masking and thus legitimizing racism and cruelty on a massive scale while strengthening the prevailing positive myths of national identity.

Archives are controlled and regulated like any other instruments of power. Delving into this archive allows Haebich to explain the steps by which a government department was able to implement policies that would destroy people’s lives under cover of legitimate ‘scientific’ regulation and classification. Her chapter, framed innovatively as a biographical ethnography of the archive itself, provides a wealth of new insights into this grim aspect of Australian history. In the process, it foregrounds the bitter irony for the original inhabitants of the land in finding themselves forcibly estranged from their historical identity by outsiders who generated a new identity story, one in which they had no place. Haebich’s chapter is one of many in this collection that reveal Australia as it was experienced by those who were dispossessed and disempowered by controlling sociopolitical systems and policies and had alien identities imposed upon them that could not be shaken off. Their personal stories invade and disrupt established narratives of Australia’s colonial history.

While also engaging critically with standard versions of Australian history, Alison Ravenscroft’s chapter takes a different approach: that of aesthetic defamiliarization, or estrangement, as Auerbach called it, through the prism of art – in this case, writing. Her particular focus is on the autobiography of the poet Judith Wright. A member of a wealthy colonial settler family that was able to ‘take up’ prime land in New South Wales in the 1840s, Wright reveals ambivalence and discomfort about her relationships with the land and with Indigenous people in terms of her identity as an Australian and as a woman. As a woman, she had no claim to the land under Australia’s inheritance traditions, and this dispossession was keenly felt. As an Australian of the settler class she was implicated, through her family, in the taking of the land by white colonizers. She was, as Ravenscroft points out, both dispossessed and dispossessing, with whiteness and femaleness playing against each other in a tension that is exposed repeatedly in her writing, particularly through instances of accidental self-revelation when the smooth realist surface of the writing is punctured by moments of narrative disjuncture or irrationality. Setting Wright’s text against autobiographical writings by Hélène Cixous and Marie Cardinal – whose works are actively self-exposing and self-exploratory – provides a productive comparative approach for understanding dilemmas of identity revealed, both consciously and unconsciously, in Wright’s Australian story. As she brings her exploration to a close, Ravenscroft spells out the value of bringing together, into the same conceptual space, women who are poles apart – in time, distance, culture, politics and in the nature of their art:

Non-Indigenous Australia is a country of exiles, émigrés and refugees looking to find a home, and looking to make something of ourselves. Unlike realist forms of autobiography, Cardinal’s and Cixous’s performative writings suggest a practice in which familiar notions of ourselves as women living under colonialism are made strange.

In ‘The Staging of Social Policy: The Photographing of Post-War British Child Migrants’, Kerreen Ely-Harper uses old archival photographs as a means to imaginatively enter the lives of post-war British child migrants who came ‘looking to find a home’ in Australia under the Dr Barnardo relocation program. With no knowledge of their origins, many of the children later sought to trace their relatives. Focusing on the case of one of Dr Barnardo’s boys searching for his lost history, the chapter explores not only the boy’s touching personal story but also a significant area of Australian social history that had received very little attention until it came into public visibility with the publication of the Australian government report on these ‘forgotten Australians’: Lost Innocents – Righting the Record (2001).¹⁹ As the writer explains, the archive she explores ‘carries both memory traces and memory erasures embedded within the thousands of images of identified and nonidentified children. With each update something has been lost, replaced, buried, or uncovered through the process of viewing, sifting through and archiving so many childhood histories’. The predominantly ‘happy’ images in the photographs at the heart of this story cover the sad reality of children deprived of both their history and identity. This is a moving account of a search for origins and an attempt to refashion an identity retrospectively from the traces and remnants of the past, most of them found in ‘staged’ visual records.

A collaboration between Ely-Harper and the primary subject, whose family history was effectively erased, this project attempts to reconstruct his story in a personal and interactive way and to fill in historical gaps with the memories of feelings and events that the photographs trigger. Through this process, the subject, ‘Cliff’, reframes and ‘rewrites’ the ‘then-child adult back into the digital social records’. Because the photographs themselves were a part of the machinery of dispossession, the subject’s relationship with them as agents of recovery is complex and sometimes contradictory. This makes the story relevant to other kinds of dispossessed people in the Australian context, notably Indigenous people taken from their parents in childhood, who later seek and confront histories from which they have been estranged in order to recover or rebuild a sense of self out of the losses, uncertainties and traumas of the past. It is also relevant to Australia’s need to confront its own erased histories in order to generate a meaningful new story of itself as a nation.

Kate Bagnall’s chapter further develops the theme of childhood dislocation by taking us into another period in Australia’s history and to a different immigrant group. Through intensive historical research, the writer has reconstructed a microhistory of the life of a Chinese–Australian child, Charles Allen, from scraps of archival information and especially from a handful of letters written by him in China and posted to his mother in Australia during the early years of the twentieth century. Like many other Chinese people, Charles’s father came to Australia in the late nineteenth century to try his luck and seek a better life. He settled down with an Australian woman and they had children, including Charles. Sent by his father to live in China at the age of 13, Charles wrote the letters to his mother during his six years of ‘exile’, which is how he experienced life in his father’s ancestral village. Although only four letters have been preserved in the archive, they provide rare insights into a little-known but not uncommon occurrence – the sending of Australian-born children back to their Chinese fathers’ homeland for their education. These letters tell the poignant personal story of a homesick boy, longing to return to his mother and his home in Australia.

Back in Australia, his mother’s repeated futile attempts to negotiate the bureaucracy of immigration in the context of the White Australia Policy add a heart-rending dimension to this sad narrative. Unable to adapt to the Chinese language and customs, unwanted by his father and deprived of an Australian upbringing with his mother, the boy is trapped between worlds and robbed of a sense of belonging and of a viable identity. By tracing, through the archives, key moments in Charles’s later life, the writer brings into visibility a neglected aspect of Australia’s social history. From the small collection of Charles’s letters a wealth of detail unfolds that demonstrates the value of the microhistory approach in bringing into visibility hidden strands of Australia’s identity:

However sketchy a picture might finally appear, however insignificant they were in the broad sweep of history, their small lives nonetheless contribute to understanding the complexity of Australian identity at a time when most Australians thought of their country as a white nation, built by and for the white man.

Jack Bowers’s chapter, ‘Australian? Autobiography?: Citizenship, Postnational Self-Identity, and the Politics of Belonging’, has in common with Bagnall’s a desire to record and honour lives that would otherwise almost certainly disappear from the public record, or leave hardly a trace. Framed by the story of the suicide of a young Afghan refugee in detention in Australia, the stories of transnational identity that follow are told in the shadow of that event. Acknowledging the self as ‘evolving, fragmented, contextual and relational’, Bowers explores the ceaseless interplay between two forms of identity: that which derives from the way we are seen by others and that which we develop within ourselves – our own sense of self. The stories of two other men, both Australian, are then considered in terms of the impact of a mismatch between these external and internal views in the context of the complicating factor of moving between nations in a world that may be viewed increasingly as postnational as a result of mass migration and globalization in the second half of the twentieth century. Although Bowers’s primary focus is on individuals, the same argument – about ‘self-identity’ and externally applied identities that ‘configure’ us – can also be applied to Australia and is particularly topical right now, with debates raging about Australia’s position with regard to refugees, Indigenous disadvantage, the environment, and the changing relationship with Asia. In her 2015 article, ‘90% of Us Are Proud Australians: Proud of What, Exactly?’ – written in response to a new report on attitudes towards Australian national identity – Samira Farah makes this comment:

Currently, Aussie pride gives some Australians something to cling to that allows the very real fragmentation of our communities to be ignored. By beating our collective chests over pride and refusing to have honest debate on what constitutes it and who gets access to it, Australians operate on a never ending pattern of exclusion.²⁰

Bowers’s special interest is in the kind of ‘othering’ that is ‘associated with being considered a minority’ and its impact on the development of self-identity. ‘Self-identity’, he explains, ‘is not simply a mask that we draw according to our choosing; nor is it some intrinsic core to be revealed through painful scraping away of our superficialities.’ Whether for nations or for individuals, identity is ‘a two-way street: not only is identity a matter of how we interpret the world, but also a matter of how the world interprets us’.

Bowers uses two published Australian life narratives as the examples for his exploration of identity formation in the contemporary world. One is the story of Juan Céspedes, a refugee to Australia from Cuba, and his relationship with John, an Australian historian. Ostracized in his early years for being black in a country where black people continued to be seen as the descendants of slaves, he bore the additional social stigma of homosexuality, making him a fringe dweller in his homeland of Cuba. At 13 his parents sent him away from their home in Guantánamo to study veterinary science in Havana, but Juan chose to fulfil his desire to study dance instead. In order to escape ‘re-education’ for homosexuality he became a refugee to the United States at 15. In his search for a place where he could belong, Juan found himself treated again and again as a stranger.

Another story is that of Gordon Matthews who, as a child, tried to negotiate an identity ‘through his two uncomfortable differences’ – his adoption as a child and the colour of his skin – but was unable to find either acceptance or legitimacy. The peace of mind he found in discovering what he believed to be his Australian Indigenous identity was shattered when his biological parents were confirmed to be Sri Lankan and living in the United States. He found himself drawn into and then alienated from one world after another and facing the pain of repeatedly having to demolish and rebuild his sense of self. ‘I imagined myself shredded layer by layer and created anew’, Gordon wrote as he approached with dread the moment of meeting his ‘real’ mother in the United States. By exploring these complex personal stories, Bowers’s chapter raises, powerfully and movingly, issues that are critically important in relation to ‘postnational’ identities, particularly those disrupted or marginalized identities in Australia and in a globalized world.

Yuriko Nagata’s chapter focusses on the life of one man, Joseph Murakami, an Australian of Japanese heritage who, at the age of 14, was interned in an Australian detention camp for the duration of World War II. The writer traces this event’s long-term repercussions for Joe’s future in terms of identity and belonging: ‘In the shadow of the turbulent history of Australia and Japan, Joe has had the right to claim two identities, but in fact he has never really felt that he owned either of them’. Overnight, the internment camps redefined Japanese immigrants – individuals who had made their homes in Australia as aliens – as the enemy within. Drawing upon interviews with Joe, who now lives in Japan, the chapter documents this important aspect of Australia’s wartime history from the point of view of those who, by chance, were caught up in world events and national policies that produced vehement anti-Japanese sentiment and reclassified and redefined them. At the same time as revealing in detail the effects on personal identity of rejection and exclusion from normal family life and citizenship, the writer also paints a picture of a nation changing its own character, first in its harsh response to the Japanese residents in the dual context of war and the White Australia Policy and, later, in its liberalization of its policies towards immigrants.

As in the individual case of Joe, Australia as a nation carries within its own life story the history of the internment of the Nikkei (emigrants from Japan and their descendants), and although the events recounted took place seven decades ago, their influence can still be felt. Simply and quietly told, without rancour, Joe’s story, often in his own words, strikes a chord in relation to contemporary debates on immigration and Australia’s sense of itself as a nation in the Asian region, particularly as it deals with old national enmities and wounds. Most importantly, in recounting the experience of one of the few living survivors of Japanese internment, Nagata exposes the permanent scarring left by Australia’s World War II policies.

Drawing upon stories from