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This paper investigates gender differences in time on housework with relationship dissolution. Using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (2001-2005) and a linear mixed modeling approach, we examine changes in housework hours before and after separation from marriage or cohabitation. The results indicate that relationship type affects change in housework hours of men and women following separation. Men's housework time increase with separation from marriage, but not from cohabitation. Women's housework time decrease after separation from both cohabitation and marriage. We also find evidence of anticipatory behavior where women who separate do less housework hours prior to separation than those who remain partnered. The paper concludes that gender equality is most likely in the absence of a co-residential partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine remittances as a currency of care from the perspective of migrants among the Indian diaspora in Australia. We focus particularly on seven "twice migrants" from Malaysia, Singapore, Kenya and the United Kingdom, and two cases where direct migration of the parental generation from India has led to multiple migration for their children as they moved from Australia to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. These nine cases of multiple migration enable us to delve into the greater complexity and longer history of migration. The paper thus adds a historical dimension to literature on migration, analyzing changes across generations to remittances and the transnational family. Following Fischer and Tronto (1990) we distinguish between "caring about," "taking care," "caregiving" and "care-receiving." Occasional and regular remittances, together with regular communication, visits home and gifts, express the migrants' continued "caring about" and "taking care" of the family left behind, usually the parents. The money sent home helps facilitate "caregiving," usually by the non-migrant siblings. The social value of money as a medium of relationships and belonging has been transmitted across generations, though parents are less likely to want to receive such care in Australia. Moreover, there are tensions inherent in caring. From the migrants' perspective, these tensions revolve around an inadequate valuing of the money sent home and conflicts around inheritance. Our focus on multiple migrants balances the linear notions of migration implicit in the literature on migration, remittances and the transnational family. Overtime, the definition of kin in the transnational family narrows as there is a dilution of family communication. With multiple migrations, there are possible shifts in the geographic centre of the transnational family. As the younger generation migrates further, this dilution is accompanied by a greater diffusion of the transnational family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work life, family life and care are all being substantially re-shaped in Australia as in other post-industrial societies. Concern about work/life balance has increased as domestic gender relations slowly change, the breadwinner/homemaker model becomes less dominant and families undertake more demanding and flexible modes of employment and care. Using data from a qualitative study of nurses and their families this paper explores how families are managing the contemporary intersection of flexible family life and flexible labour. Family values emerged as an important mediating factor in the organisation of work and care. The couples valued parental care and time with children and used shift work to enable family life. We argue that just as the breadwinner model is being modified in Australia so too is the maternalist culture of care. In most of the families in the study the women are important but secondary breadwinners and the men are important but secondary carers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of research attention has been directed to understanding why marriages last or end in separation. Far less attention has been extended to cohabiting relationships, where couples live together without being registered as married. As in other developed countries, couple formation patterns in Australia have changed dramatically over the last few decades, with most "living-together" unions now beginning with cohabitation rather than marriage, and with an increasing proportion of babies now being born to cohabiting couples. This paper uses longitudinal data to track what happens to cohabiting relationships: whether the partners subsequently marry each other, separate or continue to cohabit over a two-year period. It then investigates the role of each partner's relationship satisfaction and fertility aspirations in influencing the pathway taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores associations between social and policy context and how parents of young children allocate time to work and family, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) 1997 and 2006. Over the period, Australia's economy was growing and unemployment was low. Political rhetoric supported 'traditional' family values, family tax policy favoured single income or 'modified male-breadwinner' households, and part time work was the most common 'family- friendly' workplace measure. Against this background, we investigate the market labour supply and intra-household time use of mothers and fathers in couple-headed households with at least one child aged 0 - 4 years (N=747 in 1997 and 626 in 2006). We identify associations between household labour supply and total (paid and unpaid) work, the way paid work, domestic labour and childcare is divided between mothers and fathers, and their subjective feelings of time pressure, at each time point. We find that by 2006, there was lower average maternal market work and a higher proportion of families with young children conformed to the one-and-a-half earner family form than in 1997. In the main there was increased total household work, increased gender specialisation in paid work and caring labour, and much higher subjective time pressure, especially for fathers and the relatively few mothers who were employed full time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of a rise in divorce rates coupled with an increased prevalence of cohabitation, a growing percentage of the population has experienced or will experience the breakdown of a relationship and also the possibility of forming another new relationship. This paper explores the impact of previous relationship and fertility histories on repartnering. Using a longitudinal approach we compare the nature of repartnering behaviour in the United Kingdom and Australia, countries with similar policy and legislative frameworks. Using prospective panels surveys (British Household Panel Survey and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamic in Australia), we find that within five years of becoming single, an estimated 49 per cent of the United Kingdom sample and 43 per cent of the Australian sample had entered a new relationship, most commonly cohabitation. Event history analysis reveals strong repartnering patterns by age, and residency of children. The effect of previous relationship type suggests that people who have previously cohabited are more likely to repartner that those who did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores claims by Elisabeth Beck-Gemsheim that we are living in an era of post-familial families. The demographic evidence to support these claims is clearly evident in relation to changing patterns of family formation and dissolution, as well as the movement of married women into paid employment. But what is less evident is a decline in traditional patterns of gender stratification within families. This paper uses national data from Australia to examine the relationship between post-familial status, as indicated by marital status and employment and time spent on housework. The results show that gender is still a clear predictor of time spent on housework. However, there is evidence that gender inequality may be declining in non-traditional households.

This article is a part of a larger project on the prevalence of intermarriage in Australia based on an analysis of census data. The primary aim of the article is to identify the extent of intermarriage between Italian-born migrants, people born in Australia and other birthplace groupings. The analysis focuses on the pattern of Italian intermarriage in Gippsland in order to demonstrate that the incidence differs from that in urban areas of Australia. Gippsland is a rural region in south-eastern Australia where the economy is based on brown coal power generation, a paper mill, timber extraction and dairying. Intermarriage in Gippsland will be compared with another rural area within the same state of Victoria and with the urban area of Melbourne. The rural area chosen for comparison with Gippsland was the statistical division of North East region in the state of Victoria. This area was selected because it contained a significant number of Italian immigrants who have been settled for a long period, primarily in the tobacco industry. In addition the state of Queensland, which has a high percentage of Italian immigrants, also in tobacco and sugar growing regions, was identified separately in the analyses. Cost considerations precluded the division of Queensland into rural and urban regions. Comparisons will also be made with intermarriage patterns among Italians in Melbourne, which has a long history of Italian settlement, and is the Australian city with the highest proportion of Italian immigrants.

The article analyzes the diversity of experiences by immigrant families in Australia by employing a political economy approach rather than a simplistic culturalist approach. The article further investigates the immigrant family in contemporary Australian society. It poses various questions relating to whereabouts of immigrants and their families. The paper first outlines the major features of Australian immigration, including the way in which immigration policy has unevenly shaped, along "race", ethnicity and gender dimensions, the process of immigrant family formation in Australia. The article then discusses some key features of immigrant family life in Australia, such as the degree of ethnic intermarriage, income distribution and occupational profiles. Next, the class relations as well as gender relations of immigrant families will be considered. The article then looks at the uneven impact of racism in shaping the daily lives of immigrant families in Australia today. Accordingly studies of immigrants and immigrant families have to take into account the complex interaction of several dimensions: the dynamics of emigration and immigration, including immigration and settlement policies, the way in which immigrant labor in utilized, and the social relationships of immigrants as a social group and social class, and the state.

The article presents a study that determines the part played by family and social networks in providing support to elderly Italian, most of whom settled in the early 1950s in Gippsland, a region in South-Eastern Australia where the economy is based on brown coal power generation, a paper mill, dairying and timber extraction. A number of studies from different parts of the world have thrown doubt upon this view. These focused primarily upon urban kinship structures and demonstrated that kinship groupings in modem societies are extremely diverse in form and function. Families who are geographically mobile across societal boundaries where cultural patterns vary significantly may be expected to experience a degree of isolation due to the need to adapt to a new set of institutions and the reduction in size of kin networks due to the fact that initially only a part of the kin network moves. In such a situation the new arrivals tend to rebuild informal support networks.

This paper begins by suggesting an estimate of 200,000 (or 1 1/4 per cent of the total population) of the number of Chinese in Australia in 1988, but makes the point that the aggregate number is not very salient because of the great diversity in the backgrounds of the 'Chinese' in the country. The various categories of people who in one way or another identify (or are identified as Chinese) are briefly discussed in the historical context of their arrival. The Chinese survivors of the White Australian Policy numbered only 12,094 in 1947, of whom 6,678 were Australia born (only 3,778 of those being 'full Chinese', according to the census). With the abandonment of all such immigration restrictions in 1966, the arrival of educated, largely Anglophone Chinese increased greatly, and in 1981 there were estimated to have been 13,750 from China and Taiwan, 10,100 from Hong Kong, 11,350 from Malaysia, 3,000 from Singapore, 2,500 from Papua New Guinea, and some 8,500 from elsewhere in the world apart from refugees from Timor (6,000) and Indochina (30,000). Australian-born Chinese numbered 12,000 in the same year. Over 10 per cent of the total of nearly 90,000 were students, principally from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, or transients who did not have the right to remain in Australia. Student numbers continued to grow to 15,000 in 1985, as did the numbers of Indochinese refugees in particular, 60 to 80 per cent of whom have been ethnic Chinese. These trends have continued, producing the overall guess as to the number of last year noted at the beginning of this abstract. Various factors other than the national origins of immigrant and locally born Chinese that might differentiate among them, such as wealth and class, occupation, residence patterns, and religious affiliations, are then examined. However, their various cultural backgrounds acquired in their countries of birth or rearing, not their ancestral origins in different parts of China, from the primary basis for the... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]