Australian
Screen

Clip description

Miyuki Linsdell recounts travelling to Geelong from Melbourne in the late 1950s shortly after her arrival in Australia just to hear Japanese sailors speaking her native language. She is framed in close-up and speaks to the camera in Japanese. A group of Japanese women are shown eating a meal at Sukiyaki House in Melbourne’s CBD. One of the women describes the attitudes towards her and her friends when they wore their kimonos down the street in 1950s Australia. Still photographs accompany her story.

Curator’s notes

Cultural isolation and loneliness is a theme that runs through the film and Linsdell’s testimony in this clip gives the viewer an insight into how this is experienced. To lose the ability to connect with the elements of a familiar culture (be it through food, language or customs) is both profound and difficult. Earlier in the film, Linsdell relates a similar story about the absence of Japanese food in Australia. By choosing to focus on individual stories in this way, Hoaas draws out the importance of cultural reference points in forming an individual’s sense of belonging in a foreign land. Unsurprisingly, Sukiyaki House – one of the first Japanese restaurants to open in Melbourne – acts as a hub for the women.

The kimono story in this clip describes the underlying hostility towards the Japanese in Australia at the end of the Second World War. Until 1952, the Immigration Restriction Act (which enshrined the White Australia policy) had enabled the Commonwealth to restrict entry into Australia of non-European migrants. In 1952, then Minister for Immigration Harold Holt allowed the arrival of a number of Japanese 'war brides’ – women who had married Australian servicemen during the postwar occupation of Japan. Over the next five years, hundreds of Japanese women entered the country in this way. Despite this shift in policy, public attitudes towards the Japanese were less accepting. This woman’s experience illustrates the difficulty of 'fitting in’ to a new culture when visible cultural differences, like the wearing of a kimono, are displayed.