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Early in Australia's history legislation was passed in most states to deal specifically with an 'Aboriginal problem'. The perceived 'problem' involved Aboriginals, Asians and white people producing offspring that interfered with official aspirations for a 'pure' white British race. In Western Australia from 1915 to 1940 the Chief Protector of Aborigines was AO Neville, who had become fixated with the idea of eugenics. Neville played a significant role by endorsing the misguided belief that Australia should be made up of 'white' citizens, by deciding who Aboriginal people under his control could marry. His folly eventually dissipated and following the Second World War authorities moved away from the notion of 'biological' assimilation to one of 'cultural assimilation'. Mixed-descent families became the bane of such ambitious ideologies and Aboriginal Australians and migrants evolved as a significant part of Australian society. This paper is written from an Aboriginal perspective and snippets from the author's Rodriguez and Fraser families' lives in the Derby region place the times in context. To explain the local history, this paper draws on Indigenous standpoint theory, which can be described as a paradigm in which commonalities of the underprivileged are analysed. It provides a viewing platform from which this story exposes everyday life of marginalised people by investigating the reality of the Fraser clan and its mixed marriages in Western Australia. The paper considers assimilationism, miscegenation and developmentalism that were played out during the middle of the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on intergenerational cultural activities in a Japanese community in Western Australia. Particular attention is given to the Japanese linking their home culture with their host community. According to the author, the number of Japanese residents in Western Australia has been increasing steadily since the late 1990s, the majority of whom live in Perth and the surrounding communities. A study was conducted that examined the number of permanent and temporary residents, the demography of the residents, and the increase in the number of children born out of mixed marriages. Article topics include the opening of the Weekend Japanese School in 2005 as well as information on the Rainbow Association.

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.

In this illustrated essay I explore the intertwined histories of two rural settlements - Indigo in north-eastern Victoria, Australia, and Shek Quey Lee in Xinhui county, Guangdong, China - to consider how the rich story of Chinese migration and settlement in Australia has been remembered and forgotten, both in China and Australia. With the growth in interest in the history and heritage of the Chinese in Australia over the past twenty years, we can no longer say that it is a "forgotten" history, yet there are still challenges to researching and telling it. One of these is for Chinese Australian history to be seen as integral to the broader narrative of Australia's past. Another is being able to connect the Chinese and Australian parts of the story, to broaden the scope of our research beyond national boundaries to create a truly shared history. This essay suggests that drawing on the small stories of individual people is one way to bring together the connections across time and place, and between landscapes and people often thought of as distant and fundamentally different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio played an important role in the construction of Australia's 'imagined community', transcending spatial boundaries and fostering the development of audiences who were fluent in radio's storytelling tools. This article explores the ways Australian radio audiences of the 1950s responded to Gwen Meredith's representations of Aboriginality, whiteness, intermarriage and assimilation in her long-running ABC radio serial 'Blue Hills'. Through an investigation of the aural constructions of race in the serial, and an examination of audience readings of a narrative that endorsed interracial marriage--because 'colour will breed out in time'--the article reveals some of the multiple understandings of assimilation and the Aboriginal 'question' in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gray has recently proposed a theory of intermarriage in which two factors jointly determine in-marriage rates among the members of different birthplace groups. These two factors are opportunity and preference. McCaa has since criticised Gray's proposal for failing to isolate the effects of group size (market representation) from those of preference. I present further arguments relevant to this discussion, and deploy log-linear models of in-marriage and bilateral exchanges to illustrate the advantages of a model- based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which discussed mixed marriages in Australia. The author said that Australians think of interfaith marriages as Catholic-Protestant marriages. On the grounds of Catholic loyalty and the objection of priests to interfaith marriages, one would expect Australian Catholics to marry less outside the faith than the adherents of other religious institutions. A reason why the in-marriage statistics are so high may be that in a population of immigrants, a person can expect the married couples to be uniformly Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian.

Book Reviews Abe W. Ata, Mixed Marriages: Catholic/Non-CatholicMarriages in Australia. In comparison, Muslim-Christian marriages experienceover thirty percent of parents' and religiouscommunities' disapproval, whereas fewer than six percentof Catholic and non-Catholic Christian marriagesexperience outright disapproval. [Extracted from the article]