The Women from Rhodesia: an Auto-Ethnographic Study of Immigrant Experience and [Re]Aggregation in Western Australia

The Women From Rhodesia: An Auto-Ethnographic Study of Immigrant Experience and [Re]Aggregation in Western Australia. Eleanor Sybil Venables BA Hons This dissertation is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Murdoch University, Perth, 2003 I declare that this dissertation is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. ___________________________ Eleanor Sybil Venables Acknowledgments My sincere appreciation to Murdoch University for the Murdoch University Studentship (MURS) from January 1998 to July 2001, and for the Completion Scholarship from July to December 2003. Thank you to the administrative officer who, in the beginning, selected Dr Jenny de Reuck to be my supervisor. I thank the women in my sample who have given so much of themselves and been so patient with me. They have allowed me to intrude in their lives in an intimate way; and when I’ve visited, emailed, or phoned to clarify a point from their stories, been so generous with their time. To all of you, the depth of your insights, your strength, and your resilience make me grateful to have met and worked with you. I also acknowledge the women and men who went before, whose memories I have invoked and into whose mouths I have sometimes put my words. My heartfelt gratitude and acknowledgment go to my mentor, friend, and supervisor, Dr Jenny de Reuck, and to my mentor, ‘adept’ therapist, and friend, Theresia Johnston, both of whom inspired and encouraged me and, on occasion, provoked me into transcending (the inevitable) self-doubt. Theresia suggested the metaphor of adult immigrants as transplanted trees, and this has been meaningful in my work. Thanks to my friend and colleague Robin Austen whose help in transcribing the interviews proved so significant to the end result of this dissertation. Robin willingly listened to my ideas about the work and her unselfish input and astute criticism have been immensely valuable. Thanks to my friends and colleagues Sharifa Ahjum, Cheryl Miller, Tessa Pauley, Felicity Pulman, Diane Snooks, and Carolyn Brewer for their support. Julia Hobson and Jenny Silburn kindly helped me over some of the obstacles I encountered. Emma Bertram has helped me with the final printing of the manuscript and has gone out of her way to accommodate me. Catherine Walter (in New York) has shown keen interest in the development of my work and I have welcomed her emails as informative and encouraging. In comparing my research to a game of chess, John Prott alerted me to my movement into the Endgame and the ultimate completion of this thesis. My husband Roland has stood by me and helped support me through many years of study. He has learned to cook and clean and look after himself, no small thing for a white man brought up in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. And special gratitude to my beloved daughter Kathy who has believed in me with such passion and so much love – even as she coped with her own life changing events – her marriage to Simon in 1998 and the birth of my granddaughter, Eleanor Rose, in August 2001. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments … iv Abstract … v Background 1 Introduction: Method and preparation … 2 2 Review of the Literature: Themes already formed … 23 3 History: The beginning is not at Perth Airport … 56 The First Panel: Separation 4 Migration and Separation: Leaving and landing … 83 The Second Panel: Liminality 5 Identity I Being in the centre of my margin … 116 Identity II True Mirrors … 134 6 Limen: The ambivalent neophyte … 153 The Third Panel: Incorporation 7 Memory: Memory and the myth of the eternal return … 184 8 Integration: A real Aussie [at last] … 214 9 Reprise … 249 Bibliography: … 266 Abstract This thesis examines the positioning of white, English-speaking, immigrant women from Africa to Australia. I explore the effects that minimal differences have on issues of identity. Notions of identity, memory, and belonging are contrasted with white settlement in Rhodesia in the last century. My personal history and the desire to write a thesis relevant to the Australian experience led me to ask, “How do women from a privileged background, from Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, understand their experiences as immigrants to Australia?” The relevance lies in the perception that Australia is populated by immigrants and this research interrogates at a deeper level some specific issues presented by this sample group and my interpretation of their experiences augments the literature in this area. I questioned (individually) a small group of immigrants using unstructured interviews; the use of my own experiences and ‘long/desk drawer’ makes the study significantly autobiographical. Notions of migration into Australia from Southern Africa are explored using theories and themes of rites de passage. I interrogate the meanings attributed to assimilation and integration in immigration and connect these to the theory. Identity, memory, and reflection are discussed in the context of separation from Africa and integration into Australia. The similarities and differences and embodied history (habitus) that shape us, interweave the trope of rites de passage, uncovering a multiplicity of identity— attributed, assumed, and self-determined. I examine the ways in which Australians of Anglo-Saxon and British origin tend to position English-speaking immigrants from non-British backgrounds as outsiders and suggest that this attribution has more to do with similarities than differences. Reflection and v discussion of other times and places reveals how memories intersect with ‘new’ lives in Australia and the complexities of time in migration as rites de passage make possible an exploration of present experience shadowing earlier experience. Finally, I discover that identity and belonging as continually negotiated spaces are illuminated by the contrast I drew between assimilation and integration as conceptual tools in understanding the migrant experience. vi Background 1 Chapter One Introduction, method, and preparation.i So one of the hidden grounds of ethnography’s possibility is that ethnographers can ‘be there’ (Probyn, 1993, 71). I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I didn’t know before I wrote it (Richardson, 1994, 517). The genesis for this work is situated in personal experience. The desire to explore a thesis relevant to the African/Australian experience led me to ask the question, “How do women from a privileged background, from Southern Africa understand their experiences as immigrants to Australia?” Historically, the last thirty to thirty-five years has seen an exodus of white Rhodesians (and later Zimbabweans) from Africa; the emigrants have spread throughout the Western world. I have elected to examine a small segment of this diaspora in my thesis. The fragment I have chosen to study comprises six white women who have immigrated to Western Australia from Southern Africa (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Zambia) in the past forty years. I counterpoint my core sample by drawing on 2 correspondence and conversations with friends, relatives, Australians, Zimbabweans, and expatriate Rhodesians. Therefore, while the six women are fundamental to the thesis, there are numerous other individuals who have added to the development of the hypothesis. In the historical context I heed the voices of those long dead; in the present I consider the opinions of colleagues whose ideas and input have encouraged me and inspired the research. There are others too who are anonymous, their words and conversations overheard here and there. The effect of these myriad voices initiate motif and leitmotif as the past impacts on the present and the present on the past. As a seventh member of the core sample my own voice, my own experience, are evident throughout the work and I signal this autobiographical element here, at the beginning, and as palimpsest, throughout the writing. So, I take the opportunity to look at some white women who have come into Australia and who are, or have been, mistaken for Australian women (until they speak), for the racial markers which symbolise difference, are absent. I link the questions of belonging and not belonging that are, in my hypothesis, closely linked to assimilation (as I define it) and integration. As author, and by declaring the autobiographical content of the work, I am situated in the society and, inferentially, in the authenticity of the text. It is within the concept of authority and of speaking for others that I contemplate my own role in the narrative because I too have a history in colonial Rhodesia and I am entangled in the weaving together of history, memory and identity; of separation, transformation, and integration. The issue of authority extends to, and extrapolates from, my authority as writer of this thesis and it is the underlying motif of the methodology and the 3 subsequent writing of this work. I believe it is critical for me to acknowledge the imbrication of authority (of the author) wherever it manifests and this acknowledgment becomes integral to the work. In exploring the identities of immigrant women I reflect on the transition from immigrant to integrant as a rite of passage; I consider how our experiences (and memories) shape us and bring us to the understanding we have of ourselves now. In this context stories of migration into colonial Africa, and from Southern Africa into Australia, are explored. It is within the issues of transitory identity and memory and my reflection on them that I am able to tease out my theories of assimilation and integration into Australian society. Therefore, the validity of our experiences and memories extending from our cultural differences shadows and shapes our identities—national, personal, and attributed; and, in a sense, attention to this bricolage, these minutiae, frames the work.

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