Symbolic crossings : Vietnamese women enter the Australian consciousness, 1976-1986

In a recent paper published by the Australian Studies Centre In London, Ann-Mari Jordens emphasises that the category 'Australian' is itself not so much a state of being as it is a process of redefinition, the boundaries of which are constantly being re-negotiated. Although Jordens uses empirical extensions of citizenship rights to elucidate how these boundaries have shifted to include previously excluded ethnic groups, I argue from a very different perspective that one can also trace the changing parameters of Australian identity through the field of symbolic representation by using less traditional forms of historical evidence which reflect how everyday historical meaning is constructed from the images of the public sphere. Of course, this assumes that the way immigrants enter everyday historical thinking depends on the manner in which images of them can reflect the power relations of Australian society on an ideological level and that the media can provide the discourse through which these relations operate. This assumption, as put forward by Stuart Hall, is adhered to throughout this article by using media images not as mechanical reproductions of historical reality but as ideologlcaliy informed historical products that reflect the dominant preconceptions and norms of Australian society. From these products, I wish to chart the manner in which the Vietnamese presence entered the Australian consciousness in a discrete and pacified form. From an initial survey of popular newspapers in Melbourne it became apparent that despite the fact that the bulk of the refugee outflow up until the mid-1980s consisted of single young males without accompanying females, the meaning of the Vietnamese migration experience was often - but not entirely - conveyed in photographs depicting women and children, but not men. Therefore, the paradigm of gender provides an innovative and challenging tool of analysis in this case, as Vietnamese immigrant women were positioned in a manner which reflected dominant attitudes towards femininity in Australian society and became metaphors for the way that national identity was constructed and asserted in the public Imagination in the period of Indochinese arrival and settlement in Australia. Or as Kum-Kum Bhavnani has recently stated in relation to the European context; 'race, nation and identity are the boundaries of culture, and women are the markers of these boundaries’. In Australia these boundaries were marked by stereotypes of women that said more about the societal ideology that produced them, and these stereotypes were and are contested by the multiple historical, ethnic and material realities of actual Vietnamese immigrant women