Artist Statement
The former Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, said in 1948 “No Japanese women, or any half-castes either, will be admitted to Australia… They are simply not wanted and are permanently undesirable”[1]. Just five years later, my Japanese grandmother arrived on a boat to Australia as one of 650 ‘war brides’ reuniting with their Australian husbands and fiancés they met in post-war Japan during the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF).
When thinking about the label ‘permanently undesirable’, rabbits come to mind in Queensland. Outlawed as a pest in the state, these creatures introduced to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, are still illegal to keep in Queensland. Without any local predators, rabbits became a problem in the 1880s as growing populations damaged crops, leading to soil erosion. To control the spread of the rabbit population, a ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ (now known as the State Barrier Fence of Western Australia), began construction in 1901 – the same year the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 came into effect, also known as White Australia Policy.
In lunar horoscopes, 2023 marks my grandmother’s auspicious year of the rabbit. This hand cut paper fence is a replica of the same wiring used in the construction of the rabbit-proof fence and represents the attempt to keep out rabbits, as an allegory for political and social barriers of my grandmother’s arrival in Australia in 1953. It is an ironic interpretation of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – a fence made of paper.
Despite the barrier of the White Australia Policy, my rabbit grandmother managed to find a hole in the fence, arriving in Australia in 1953 and raised a family of four children, including my mother – who was the first baby born to a Japanese war bride in Queensland. It's now seventy years since my grandmother arrived in Australia. Although she gained an exemption from the Act, Calwell’s words echoed social sentiments of post-war hatred towards Japanese people for many years afterwards.
As a third generation Nikkei Australian (Japanese descendant), my arts practice navigates this transcultural identity that is imbued with the ambivalence of pride in Japanese cultural heritage, intergenerational remnants of pain from racial discrimination, and the experience of inhabiting a third space where ‘the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences’.[2]
Using archival records as a starting point for mapping familial migration from Japan to Australia, this work intertwines the oral histories and cultural remnants that archive narratives of a Japanese-Australian migration story in Queensland.
[1] Cited in Kunz, Egon F. (1998) Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
[2] Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
When thinking about the label ‘permanently undesirable’, rabbits come to mind in Queensland. Outlawed as a pest in the state, these creatures introduced to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, are still illegal to keep in Queensland. Without any local predators, rabbits became a problem in the 1880s as growing populations damaged crops, leading to soil erosion. To control the spread of the rabbit population, a ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ (now known as the State Barrier Fence of Western Australia), began construction in 1901 – the same year the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 came into effect, also known as White Australia Policy.
In lunar horoscopes, 2023 marks my grandmother’s auspicious year of the rabbit. This hand cut paper fence is a replica of the same wiring used in the construction of the rabbit-proof fence and represents the attempt to keep out rabbits, as an allegory for political and social barriers of my grandmother’s arrival in Australia in 1953. It is an ironic interpretation of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – a fence made of paper.
Despite the barrier of the White Australia Policy, my rabbit grandmother managed to find a hole in the fence, arriving in Australia in 1953 and raised a family of four children, including my mother – who was the first baby born to a Japanese war bride in Queensland. It's now seventy years since my grandmother arrived in Australia. Although she gained an exemption from the Act, Calwell’s words echoed social sentiments of post-war hatred towards Japanese people for many years afterwards.
As a third generation Nikkei Australian (Japanese descendant), my arts practice navigates this transcultural identity that is imbued with the ambivalence of pride in Japanese cultural heritage, intergenerational remnants of pain from racial discrimination, and the experience of inhabiting a third space where ‘the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences’.[2]
Using archival records as a starting point for mapping familial migration from Japan to Australia, this work intertwines the oral histories and cultural remnants that archive narratives of a Japanese-Australian migration story in Queensland.
[1] Cited in Kunz, Egon F. (1998) Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
[2] Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.