Explorations in Sights and Sounds
Orginal Publication Date
1986
Journal Title
Explorations in Sights and Sounds
Volume
6
Issue
ess/vol6/iss1
First Page
21
Last Page
22
Abstract
Within recent years the migrant experience in Australia, particularly of non-European peoples, has attracted increasing attention from historians and social scientists, under the strong influence of the American scholarly tradition. The Chinese, among Asian groups, have received the most attention. In Indians in White Australia, the Sydney anthropologist Marie de Lepervanche contributes substantially to our understanding of the experience of another Asian group, Indians, whose fortunes over a century or more have been previously neglected. First the writer establishes, briefly but lucidly, an historical context for understanding the situation in which Indians find themselves in contemporary Australia; she examines the origins of Indian migration, and the vicissitudes they faced during the twentieth century when the "white Australia policy" only recently discarded, held sway. Secondly, in greater detail, she portrays the lives of a particular community of Punjabi Sikhs with whom she lived periodically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which serves as a case study of one style of adaptation to the demands of the modern Australian cultural context.
Rights
Copyright, ©EES, The National Association for Ethnic Studies, 1986