Mixed Race Studies

Being a Eurasian Australian

Yemaya: Sydney University Law Society’s annual interdisciplinary Women’s journal
Yemaya 2010 (2011-04-17)
Theme: “Intersextions”
pages 34-36

Lyn Dickens

Lyn Dickens relates her experiences of being a young Eurasian woman in Australia

Being a Eurasian Australian is a strange thing. Don’t get me wrong, my mixed-race heritage has never been a source of inner-conflict, nor have I ever had an ‘identity crisis’ about having Anglo-Celtic and Peranakan parentage. Unfortunately, I can’t say that everyone else is always so comfortable with my ethnicity.

When I was fifteen, I was at my local shopping centre when a strange man loomed into my path and demanded, “What are you?” Stunned, I avoided his bemused gaze and kept walking. What did he mean? was my initial reaction. Then I thought, with slow-mounting anger, what kind of question is that? I was not a thing—a “what” could not encompass who I was. But even in my racially naïve teenage brain, I realised that his question was about my not-quite-white appearance. It was not the first time that I had been confronted by a stranger about my racial heritage. The question “Where are you from?” was a disturbingly common occurrence during my teenage years. Funnily enough, while my Asian friends were sometimes quizzed about their origins by acquaintances, they didn’t seem to attract strangers on the street the way my sister and I did.

Were we freaks? Back then, the thought occasionally crossed my mind. It wasn’t until I reached university and actually met a few other Eurasian women that I realised they had all had similar experiences, and that these experiences would keep coming. Even today, meeting someone new all but guarantees a discussion of my race and, inevitably, everyone sees something different. At a conference recently, a woman assumed I was Chinese and when I informed her of my heritage she responded in an offended tone, “but you don’t look Eurasian”. On another occasion I was at a dinner party and the majority of the guests assumed I was half white and half ‘something’. The exact type of ‘something’ which made up this half became a topic of conversation. Was I half-Japanese, half-Singaporean, half-Burmese?

Compared to many other young, Eurasian Australian women, my experiences could have been worse. My friend Serena—twenty-nine, fun, friendly and Eurasian—went to a trendy Sydney nightclub recently. While she was dancing with a group of friends, a Caucasian man grabbed her and bit her on the shoulder. Shocked, she could only stare in amazement when he said, “You wanted that, didn’t you? Girls like you always do.”

“Girls like what?” I exclaimed, slightly scandalised, when she told me. She gave me a wry smile and shrugged.

“Girls like us”, she replied. “Eurasians”…

Read the entire essay here.

Love Against the Law: The autobiographies of Tex and Nelly Camfoo

Aboriginal Studies Press
2000
120 pages
240×170 mm
ISBN 9780855753481

Tex Camfoo

Nelly Camfoo

Edited by:

Gillian Cowlishaw

During his life, Tex Camfoo has been classified as Aboriginal, half-caste and European. As a half-caste he could not legally associate with or marry an Aboriginal woman. As an Aboriginal, he was not allowed to visit the pub with his European work mates.

Nelly Camfoo was always considered Aboriginal. From childhood she has taken part in ceremonial life. She finds white people both frustrating and foolish – ‘they can’t understand because they can’t listen’.

The stories of Tex and Nelly Camfoo intermingle to highlight the ambiguous social position of Aboriginals living in the Northern Territory during this century. They provide insight into race relations, the contradictory attitudes of missionaries and police, they reflect morality and religion as well as recent political developments.

Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘settled’ Australia

Aboriginal Studies Press
1988; Reprinted 1991
288 pages
240×170 mm
ISBN: 9780855751852

Edited by:

Ian Keen, Visiting Fellow
School of Archaeology and Anthropology
College of Arts and Social Sciences
The Australian National University

This volume brings together results of research by anthropologists on the social life of people who used to be labelled ‘part-Aborigines’ or ‘urban Aborigines’.

Issues discussed include bases of identity, ties of family, structure of community, ways of speaking, beliefs and feelings about country, and attitudes to the past.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Marie Reay
• Contributors
• 1. Ian Keen / Introduction
• 2. Diane Barwick / Aborigines of Victoria
• 3. Barry Morris / Dhan-gadi resistance to assimilation
• 4. Julie Carter / Am I too black to go with you?’
• 5. Jerry Schwab / Ambiguity, style and kinship in Adelaide Aboriginal identity
• 6. Diana Eades / They don’t speak an Aboriginal language, or do they?
• 7. Jeremy R. Beckett / Kinship, mobility and community in rural New South Wales
• 8. Chris Blrdsall / All one family
• 9. Basil Sansom / A grammar of exchange
• 10. Gaynor Macdonald / A Wiradjuri fight story
• 11. Marcia Langton / Medicine Square
• 12. Patricia Baines / A litany for land
• 13. Peter Sutton / Myth as history, history as myth
• Index

1. Ian Keen Introduction

According to the perceptions of many people including anthropologists and other researchers, Aboriginal people of mixed descent classified in earlier decades as ‘part-Aborigines’, have no distinctive culture (eg Bell 1964,64; Barwick 1964; Beckett 1964; Rowley 1971; Hausfield 1977, 267; RM Berndt 1979, 87; and see Read 1980, 112). Fink (1957, 110), for example, has judged that the Aborigines of a New South Wales town simply possessed a common group identity as ‘black’ and an opposition to white people. In Eckermann’s view (1977), the Aboriginal people of a southeast Queensland town have been assimilated and integrated, having a mode of life typical of working class culture (see also Smith and Biddle 1972, xi), To the Berndts (1951, 275-76; Berndt 1962, 88), the Europeanisation of so small a minority has seemed inevitable.

In contrast, others (and sometimes the same authors writing at different times) have detected a distinctive, even unique, culture or way of life, with its own folkways, mores and beliefs (Calley 1956; Bell 1961, 436-37; Smith and Biddle 1972,124; Howard 1979, 98; Crick 1981). Langton (1982, 18) has remarked that ‘loss of culture’ should not be a matter of faith, but of investigation. Indeed, much of the substance of the publications cited above, as well as the results of current research, show that many features of the social life of these people are distinctive, and also display marked similarities to aspects of the cultures of Aboriginal peoples whose social lives have been changed to a lesser degree by the process of colonisation. Calley (1956, 213) wrote that the people of mixed Aboriginal descent possessed a society ‘leaning heavily on the logic and outlook on life of the indigenous traditions’ yet quite well adapted to the white community that surrounds it.

It was my familiarity with some ongoing anthropological research into the social life of Aboriginal people of southeast Queensland, New South Wales and the southwest of Western Australia, that led me to invite contributions to a volume on continuities in the culture of Aboriginal people living in what Rowley (1971, vii) called ‘settled’ Australia. The closely settled regions, by contrast with what Rowley termed colonial’ Australia, dominated by pastoral production, are those which have been most radically transformed by people of European origin. They lie mainly in the southeastern and southwestern parts of the continent, extending on the east coast north to Cairns, and north to Carnarvon on the west coast, The category should also include Darwin, the major European and Asian settlement of the north.

This volume (Being Black), brings together some of the results of a continuing interest among anthropologists in the social life of people who used to be labelled ‘part-Aborigines’ or ‘urban Aborigines’, Studies burgeoned during the post-war decades when ‘acculturation’ was a major anthropological interest, although research dwindled somewhat through the 1970s, Meanwhile research by geographers and economists has greatly extended our knowledge of the social and economic conditions of Aborigines of these regions, and the new Aboriginal history has revolutionised our perceptions of Australian history, Aborigines themselves are increasingly writing (and making films and videos) about their own lives (eg Bropho 1980; Clare 1978; Davis and Hodge 1985; McLeod 1982; Miller 1985; Mum Shirl 1981; Pepper 1980; Perkins 1975; Rosser 1978; Simon 1978)…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Mixed-Blood Marriage in North-Western New South Wales: A Survey of the Marital Conditions of 264 Aboriginal and Mixed-Blood Women

Oceania
Volume 22, Number 2 (December 1951)
pages 116-129

Marie Reay

This survey is based on family records of over 300 aboriginal and mixed-blood women in north-western New South Wales, collected during 1945-6.

The records were obtained through one formal and at least one semi-formal interview with each woman, supplemented by informal conversations and by community gossip. In no case were interview data used without these additional checks, although records of 20 deceased women were included which were obtained from surviving members of their families.

The collection of these records was facilitated by a lively interest in genealogies being retained by the aborigines of this area.

Records of women of indeterminate ethnic background were not used (e.g. one woman whose ancestry included Cingalese and Maltese as well as aboriginal, and some whose aboriginal descent could not be accurately traced). Also, records of women of three-eighth caste (usually classified in census returns as quadroons or half-castes, according to their skin-colour), five-eighth caste (usually dubbed “half-caste”) and seven-eighth caste (usually classified as three-quarter caste or full-blood, according to their skin-colour) were not used for this survey of mixed-blood marriages, although their offspring were included in the final estimate of the composition of the next generation of mixed-bloods.

Of the 264 women whose marriages are examined here, 12 are full-blood, 26 are three-quarter caste, 129 are half-caste, 77 quadroon and 20 octaroon or lighter.

Definition of Terms

Full-blood.   Any person of unmixed aboriginal descent.

Three-quarter Caste. Any person having one white grandparent and three grandparents of unmixed aboriginal descent; i.e. any person of three-quarters aboriginal descent.

Half-caste. A term which is popularly used for any aboriginal mixed-blood but is used here to denote any person with an equal proportion of white and aboriginal ancestry. No distinction is made between a first generation half-caste and the offspring of two half-castes…

Whiteness and the city: Australians of Anglo-Indian heritage in suburban Melbourne

South Asian Diaspora
Volume 4, Issue 2, May 2012
pages 123-137
DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2012.675721

Michele Lobo, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Leslie Morgan
School of Education
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to map how two Melburnians of Anglo-Indian heritage make sense of their belonging through connections to cities within the South Asian diaspora, in particular, Lahore, Kolkata and London. As diasporic writers of mixed descent working within the disciplines of geography and visual culture, we use food and images of public space as entry points to explore our everyday experiences as translocal subjects who inhabit several spaces simultaneously. The exploration of such stories of intercultural encounter is interesting and significant in the field of diaspora studies because as South Asians we were historically an ‘out-of-place’ group of mixed descent in a colonial context, a community without a regional home in independent India/Pakistan, and an imagination that we were entitled to a home in Britain and Australia by virtue of our whiteness and Anglo-ness. Our stories provide a nuanced understanding of the dominance, power and privilege of whiteness in colonial and post-colonial contexts and an insight into how mobility impacts on our sense of belonging.

What do you eat for breakfast?

An interview held at a participant’s home on a cold winter morning was nearing conclusion. The audio recorder was switched off, but Harry, an Anglo-Australian man, a local councillor continued to talk about how Dandenong was changing. He expressed feelings of loss, regret and anxiety when he said that Dandenong, once a white working-class neighbourhood in suburban Melbourne with ‘good-quality homes and good-quality people’ had now become stigmatised as a ‘shit hole’, ‘a ghetto’ with ‘second-class citizens’ (Harry, interview 1 May 2003). Harry then began alluding to the cultural difference between Anglo-Australians and ‘ethnics’ and used food as the principal determinant. He said that ‘they live on the smell of an oily rag. It does not cost them very much to live. They see the food, vegies. jeez, it’s so cheap. Their diet is poor, that is their staple diet until they follow the Australian way of life’ (Harry, research diary entry, 1 May 2003). When Harry described Dandenong with disgust, stigmatised recent settlers, many of who are from India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Sudan, and devalued ‘ethnic’ food as cheap, less nutritious and unhealthy. I was shocked and surprised; as a new resident, this was the first time that I had heard an Anglo-Australian who was an elected community leader speak in such a manner…

Read or purchase the article here.

Indigenous Giles stands by Abbott

NT News
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
2012-11-15

Nigel Adlam

TERRITORY indigenous politician Adam Giles has refused to condemn Tony Abbott.

Mr Abbott said Alison Anderson was an “authentic representative” of ancient Central Australian culture but mixed-race MP Ken Wyatt was “not a man of culture”.
 
Mr Giles also refused to criticise the Coalition leader for not including him in a list of the NT’s Aboriginal Members of the Legislative Assembly…
 
But Mr Giles did warn that Aboriginality was a “sensitive subject”.
 
“Sometimes the smallest word can get the hairs on your back going,” he said.
 
Mr Abbott said he wanted to increase indigenous representation in the national parliament.

But he seemed to blunder into the “who’s an Aborigine?” minefield when he then made the comparison with Mr Wyatt – calling him an “urban Aboriginal”.
 
Mr Abbott’s office yesterday said he had not been implying Mr Wyatt was not indigenous…
 
Mr Giles said he wouldn’t get involved in the argument about “who is more authentic”.
 
“It’s abhorrent,” he said.
 
“All indigenous people know who they are.”
 
In a seeming reference to the difference between mixed-race people and full-blooded Aborigines, the Transport Minister said: “I know how many indigenous Australians have a hole in their heart in wanting for cultural enrichment…
 
Read the entire article here.

“Representing” Anglo-Indians: A Genealogical Study

University of Melbourne
1999
350 pages

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English with Cultural Studies

The ‘mixed-race’ Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community was born of the European colonisation of India some four hundred years ago. This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998. Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misrepresentations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’ writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity.

The dissertation functions at three levels. First, it examines the construction of Anglo-Indian stereotypes in various discursive practices, offering a critique of the knowledges and images produced within specific literary and non-literary texts. Second, it retrieves the ‘buried’ texts of the Anglo-Indian community, which have been ‘disqualified’ by official discourses. Third, drawing on postcolonialism and poststructuralism, it mounts a practical argument against mimeticism or image analysis by demonstrating how complex discursive and ideological currents mediate stereotypical representations. More specifically, it enumerates the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the production of Anglo-Indian stereotypes, arguing that such figures are historically variable and internally contradictory. Using Foucault’s genealogical method as a starting point, the dissertation examines (mis)representations of Anglo-Indians as they meet and disperse within an interactive network of power/knowledge relations.

This strategy not only accounts for the emergence of pejorative stereotypes, but encourages the articulation of Anglo-Indian identities in their diversity. This contrasts with the impractical compulsion, articulated by Anglo-Indian image critics, to build a homogeneous community.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Contents
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction
• 1 (Mis)representing Anglo-Indian History
• 2 ‘Pangs of Nature and Taints of Blood’: The Anglo-Indian ‘Stereotype’ in Raj Literature
• 3 Sexual Relations, Colonial Governmentality and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 4 Imperial Power and Regimes of Truth: Racial Science and Anglo-Indian Stereotypes
• 5 ‘Poor Relations’: Social Science and ‘The Eurasian Problem’
• 6 Ambivalent Stereotypes: Kipling, Rushdie, Chandra and Sealy
• 7 ‘The Good Australians’: Multiculturalism and the Anglo-Indian Diaspora
• 8 Conclusion: ‘Bringing it All Back Home’
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

A diverged family converges at Harvard Law

Havard Law School News
2012-10-10

Audrey Kunycky

A chance encounter, a discovery of kin on opposite sides of the world

It wasn’t inevitable that Harvard Law School graduate students Erum Khalid Sattar and Rebecca Zaman would meet so soon, or even at all. Sattar has been at the law school for three years, pursuing a doctorate in juridical science (S.J.D.); Zaman arrived in August to begin a year of study for a master’s in law (LL.M.). Sattar is from Pakistan, and studied law in London; Zaman grew up, earned her law degree and completed a judicial clerkship in Australia. Then again, they’re about the same height, with the same dark brown hair, and that might not be just a coincidence.

In August, a few days into LL.M. Orientation, the two women shook hands and said hello at a Graduate Program reception. “If we hadn’t been wearing nametags, what happened next might never have happened,” says Zaman. Sattar’s large, expressive eyes are glittering, but she wants Zaman to tell the story, because she tells it better.

My surname is Zaman, and it’s a very unusual surname for a white-appearing Australian to have,” explains Zaman. “So when they saw my nametag, a lot of the Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners asked how I could have this name. When I met Erum, it was very similar.  So I said, ‘Oh! My father’s father is a Muslim Indian from Hyderabad.’ And Erum said, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. My family was from Hyderabad, before they moved to Karachi after the partition.’ And she laughed, and said, ‘Maybe we’re related.’ We both laughed, and I said, ‘Maybe. It’s a strange story.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Children of the Occupation

NewSouth Publishing
2012-07-01

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

Towards the end of an eventful life, George Budworth, who served with the Australian Army in Japan after the war, wrote an account describing the first time he saw his son, Peter. It was not in a hospital maternity ward but on the streets of Kure one chilly night in 1954:

In broken English, the woman said, ‘Please, you look my baby, he sick’. She turned her back to Quietly [George’s fictional alter ego]. The baby was tied on her back in a kind of carryall. Quietly reached down and flipped back the lid. Looking up at him was the pinched, undernourished white face of a very young baby. Quietly could see at a glance that the child was half Japanese ­– certainly not a full blood. ‘He now six weeks; he Goshu (Australian) baby-san,’ was all she said through her sobs.

George gave the woman all the money he was carrying. She later sought him out to return the change; they started a relationship; and George formed a close bond with the child, Hideki, whom he renamed Peter and formally adopted.

In 1956, as the British Commonwealth Forces Korea prepared to pull out of Japan, George was among a handful of soldiers and civilians seeking permission to take adopted children back to Australia. In the decade since the first Australian troops arrived in Occupied Japan, such a thing had never been allowed (though war brides were admitted after 1952). In George’s fictionalised memoir, Peter’s mother, Fusako, surrenders custody of her child because she fears for his future in Japan: ‘They could never go to school, never marry, or hold any job but as labourers, in other words a life worse than death was the best these children could expect’…

…Walter Hamilton’s book Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story will be published by NewSouth in June.

Read the entire article here.

Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

NewSouth Books (American Edition coming soon from Rutgers University Press)
July 2012
352 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781742233314

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

This is a beautifully written, deeply moving and well-researched account of the lives of mixed-race children of occupied Japan. The author artfully blends oral histories with an historical and political analysis of international race relations and immigration policy in North America and Australia, to highlight the little-known story of the thousands of children that resulted from the unions of Japanese women and Allied servicemen posted to Japan following WWII. It is a powerful narrative of loss, longing and reconnection, written by the ABC’s long-time Tokyo correspondent, Walter Hamilton.

Visit the website here.