Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies 9819990327, 9789819990320

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction: Transnational Cross-Cultural Marriage in Australia’s Multicultural Society
Introduction
The Genesis of the ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Stereotype
Histories of Mediated Marriages
What Is Marriage?
Marriage and Moral Panics
End of Patriarchalism?
Stereotypes
Stereotypes and Stigma
What Are the New Forms of Family Created Through International Marriages?
Where Did the Stereotypes Come from?
New Patterns of Transnational Courtship
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Histories of Spousal Migration
Introduction: Migration for Marriage
Female Migration in the Early White Settler Colony
Origins of the White Settler Colony
Disruption of Families
Women Convicts
Marriage
Free Settlement and Bride Migration
Assisted Passage Schemes for Women in the Nineteenth Century
Non-British Free Migration in the Nineteenth Century
Post-World War 2
Proxy Marriage
Asian Migration
Spousal Migration in the ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Era (Post 1980s)
‘Mail-Order Bride’
Immigration Policy, Economics and Rights of Social Citizenship
Migration and Family Care
Combatting Abuse of Vulnerable Women
Welfare, the Family and Immigration Policy
Critical Role of the Family in Welfare Provision
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 3: ‘An Ocean of Fishes’: Negotiating Love Online
Finding Intimacy, Reconfiguring Gender Relations in a Virtual World
Is the Internet Another Place? Is It Something Altogether Novel?
The Internet as a Space of ‘Community’?
KASAL: Online Intimacy and Courtship/Transnational Cross-Cultural Relationships
Favourite Narratives, Stories and Tropes
How Do People Meet?
The ‘Spark’
Communication and Getting to Know One another
The Internet Compared with Other Ways of Dating
Checking for Authenticity
Some Kinds of Interpersonal Interactions Are Enhanced by Technologies
What About Stereotypes?
Marriage, Trust and Intimacy
The Greencard: Immigration as a Form of Capital
Cultural Differences
The Ring
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Creating Intercultural Families
Introduction
Meet the Families
Trevor and Alma: The ‘Snail Mail’ Generation
Negotiating Gender Roles
Maria and Roy: Matchmaking
Matchmaking
Family Caring
Ongoing Responsibility for Family Members Overseas
John and Medina: Meeting Via an Internet ‘Asian Bride’ Site
Financial ‘Motives’: Opportunity to Earn Money to Support the Education of Their Children
June and John: Online Courtship After Matchmaking by a Friend
Demographics—Limited Opportunities to Marry
What Else Do Do the Case Studies Reveal–Motives/Intentions/Opportunities/Satisfactions?
Ideals of Family Life
Stereotypes
Seeking ‘Autonomy’ to Pursue Their Own Lives; Adventures in Identity
Engaging Multiculturalism
Negative Stereotypes and Communication
‘Quasi-Kin/Affinal’ Networks
‘Third Culture’ Children
Impacts of Immigration Regimes
Indonesian-Australian families
Religion
Similarities in Experience with Filipino-Australian Families
Immigration Issues
Racism and Stereotypes
Conclusion
Works Cited
Conclusion: Global Intimacy, Marriage and Mediated Courtship
Appendix: Methodology
Ethics and Confidentiality
Brief Description of Research Sites
Index

Citation preview

Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies

Kathryn Robinson

Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies

Kathryn Robinson

Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies

Kathryn Robinson College of Asia and the Pacific Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

ISBN 978-981-99-9032-0    ISBN 978-981-99-9033-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9033-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Dedication This book is dedicated to three inspiring scholars of migration Gillian Bottomley (1939–2016) Pnina Werbner (1944–2023) Gavin Jones (1940–2022)

Acknowledgments

Researching and writing this book has been a long journey, an enduring passion alongside my principal research focus on Indonesia. Ethnographic research on Filipino and Indonesian marriage migrants in Australia was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant DP 0451491, with me (Kathryn Robinson) as Chief Investigator (CI). The grant-funded Research Associate Dr Cleonicki Saroca conducted the field research in Filipino-Australian communities and with ‘online’ couples; research assistant Dr Monika Winarnita researched among the IndonesianAustralian community in Canberra (going on to conduct doctoral research on Indonesian marriage migrants in Perth); and Dr Fiona Crockford delved into the historical material on bride migration in the early years of Australia. I was fortunate to have a Research Fellowship at Asia Research Institute in Singapore in 2010, where the Migration and Asian Family clusters were conducting ‘cutting edge’ research in the field of marriage migration. I have benefited from participating in several Women Writing Away retreats at Taupo in New Zealand and I thank the participants for valuable feedback during that precious time for writing. Dr Carolyn Brewer assisted in pulling the first draft together, and Jennifer Fowler read the penultimate draft. I am grateful to the Canberra Australia Indonesia Families Association (AIFA) whose members have offered me friendship and the opportunity to participate in their intercultural space. I also thank the Australian communities and the online Fil-West community who

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welcomed Dr Saroca into their lives. I thank Macquarie University colleague, the late Dr Una Gault, who first alerted me to this interesting topic. The late Professor Gavin Jones, whose own research on marriage is inspirational, gave great encouragement; and the late Professors Gillian Bottomley and Pnina Werbner were trailblazers in the anthropology of migration.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Transnational Cross-Cultural Marriage in Australia’s Multicultural Society  1 2 Histories of Spousal Migration 27 3 ‘An Ocean of Fishes’: Negotiating Love Online 57 4 Creating Intercultural Families 83  Conclusion: Global Intimacy, Marriage and Mediated Courtship115 Appendix: Methodology119 Index123

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About the Author

Kathryn Robinson  is Professor Emerita in Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Author of Gender Islam and Democracy in Indonesia (Routledge 2009), she has written extensively on gender relations and marriage in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Her anthropological research also encompasses the social and economic consequences of large-scale mining (Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of Development in an Indonesian Mining Town, SUNY Press 1986); and Islam in eastern Indonesia (Mosques and Imams: Everyday Islam in Eastern Indonesia NUS Press 2021). She lives in Canberra and enjoys participating in the academic life on the ANU campus, in particular the activities of the Southeast Asia and Gender Institutes.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Transnational Cross-Cultural Marriage in Australia’s Multicultural Society

Abstract  Negative evaluations of Asian-Australian correspondence marriages (so-called mail-order bride unions) persist since the genesis of the stereotype in the 1980s. This chapter examines historical and social factors contributing to the genesis of the stereotype: marriage histories and practices; globalisation in travel and new forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs); and Australia’s relations with Asia. How are real-world relations haunted by negative stereotypes? The chapter introduces a research project spotlighting the families formed through correspondence courtship, relationships that are hidden from view by sensational media reporting of failures. Keywords  Marriage • Intimacy • Stereotypes • Transnational marriage • Correspondence courtship • Romantic love • Masculinity and femininity • Feminism • Changing gender roles • Australia and Asia • Mail-order brides • Racism • Internet

Introduction Asian women engaged in mediated correspondence courtship leading to marriage with Western men are subjected to pernicious stereotypes that question their motivations and those of their Australian (Western nation)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 K. Robinson, Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9033-7_1

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and husbands. Whether conducted by way of ‘snail mail’, or nowadays through the internet, their relationships are frequently labelled as inauthentic. This book goes beyond the sensational mass media reporting and the cultural analysis of the marriage brokering sites, to engage with the individuals and families embarking on the ‘adventure in identity’ of a transnational, cross-cultural mediated marriage. This most recent form of transnational brokered marriage, that of Asian women, continues a history of spousal migration in Australia that began with white settlement at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time, migrant brides were predominantly white women. The genesis of the negative stereotypes of Asian migrant brides can be linked to the history of settlement and migration. The colonial heritage also plays a role in the genesis of the stereotypes. The negative stereotype of ‘mail-order bride’ emerged in public debate in the 1980s in Australia and other nations of the global North. It arose in media hysteria in reporting correspondence courtship between men from the wealthy countries of the global North and women from the global South, at that time predominantly from the Philippines. Media reports reproduced stereotypes of ‘gold digger’ women and ‘loser’ men. The women were depicted as ‘highly sexualised mercenaries’ (Roces 2021, 119) and the men as old, ugly, or otherwise unable to attract a wife. In Australia, fiancées/spouses were in an uncapped immigration category (see Chap. 2), and the stereotype contained a suspicion that people were using the uncapped spousal reunion category to ‘rort’ the migration system in Australia.1 ‘All too often, they have been portrayed as if they were trapped in time, hapless victims without agency to negotiate their marginality and subordination’ (Bonafacio 2009, 143). I became aware of this emerging social issue in 1981, when I was asked to write a commentary on an article published in an Australian Social Science journal, written by a male academic married to a Filipina. The article protested the negative stereotypes of ‘loser men’ and ‘gold digger women’ in the media (Watkins 1982). I had been interested in debates about the origins, history, and meaning of marriage as an undergraduate student and ardent ‘Women’s Liberationist’ in the 1970s. As a PhD student in Anthropology researching in Indonesia (1977–79), my assumptions about marriage and women’s rights/autonomy were tested by conversations with women in arranged marriages, in a rapidly changing social and economic environment in which courtship and free choice marriage was replacing parental choice of spouse (Robinson 1998). The circumstances of the journal editor’s request for me to comment related to

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the competing stereotypes noted above. One of the editors apparently felt outrage at the article as she subscribed to the ‘Orientalist’ view, of passive Asian women undermining feminist gains. I chased down the origins of some of the negative stories in the print media. For example, the head of the marriage guidance bureau had written a letter to a major newspaper stating these brokered marriages were likely to fail. When I contacted the organisation requesting the data, they had none—it was his opinion, based on a stereotype about the nature of marriage (see below), given weight by his public role. This was a precursor of the kind of opinion masquerading as fact that we are all too familiar with today in social media posts. Delving into the issue, I was struck by how little was known about the women and men engaged in transnational correspondence courtship. The public debate was tabloid media reporting, including spotlighting stories of domestic violence (discussed below). As an anthropologist interested in forms of marriage, family, and gender relations, I had questions beyond the shallow assertions in the press, about how these relationships were negotiated and sustained, and the personal meanings in the spouses’ lives. In 2004 I was able to undertake an ethnographic study of mediation of transnational marriages by way of the internet, and also explored established transcultural families in six communities across Australia (see Appendix).2 This book addresses how courting couples establish intimacy and trust on the internet and investigates the communicative practices associated with ‘the presentation of self’ that have developed in this digital environment. However, to understand the ways in which such intimate relationships develop, an important comparator group was families living in Australia where one partner was Australian, the other Asian (specifically, Filipino or Indonesian for the purposes of this study). We interviewed both women and men in these bicultural relationships: Jones and Shen (2008) note the lack of research on men contracting transnational marriages in Asia. The established couples encountered through fieldwork give more insights into how family relationships develop and become established. This book brings together a critical anthropological view of the social institution ‘marriage’ and of how we understand it, reporting on ethnographic research on mediated marriages. It takes up questions about the real-world impacts of pernicious stereotypes in relation to transcultural relationships and changing modes of mediated courtship. Current practices of brokered marriage are contextualised in the history of marriage

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migration in Australia, a settler colony whose brief history has been characterised by regular periods of male-dominated migration flows, and corrections of female marriage migration to ensure demographic growth. Asian-Australian marriages have occurred in the context of increased global flows and movements of people, contextualised by the ‘Australia in Asia’ debate of the last century. This chapter discusses the genesis of the public debate, and sets out the philosophical and historical discussion of marriage as an institution and as a subject of debate in the public square.

The Genesis of the ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Stereotype The media coverage of this new social phenomenon in the 1980s was obsessed with the assumption that sex was the dominant ‘motif’; ‘loser’ western men take advantage of their ‘cultural capital’ as westerners to access beautiful, sexy (young) Asian women; and that ‘gold digger’ Asian women manipulate men to obtain money and/or to gain Permanent Residence (PR) or citizenship status in a wealthy country. These negative stereotypes, found in both popular discourse and in scholarly literature, circulate in both the Philippines and the Western countries into which Filipina marriage migrants are marrying. The simplistic and pejorative reporting concealed connections to other public debates of the day: about the future of marriage, divorce, and women’s rights, the new stream of migration to Australia from Southeast Asia post-1975, and increasing global connections through new media and transport connections. Media coverage largely failed to engage the human desires, the ‘adventures in identity’ and questing for new life chances associated with these intercultural unions. Such stereotypical objectifications involve ‘(mis)understanding cultures as unitary forms in contact, missing the networks of relations that comprise[s] the intercultural dimension’ (Adams and Janover 2009, 230). The historical genesis of the negative stereotype ‘mail-order bride’ arose at the time of late twentieth century social upheavals associated with Australia’s changing relationship with Asia; the effects of ‘globalisation’ in travel and communication; and the social disruption as the 1970s women’s movement succeeded in achieving significant social changes which have impacted on the institutions of marriage and the family. These social transformations occurred at a critical time in the social history of Australia, a white settler colony moving uneasily away from a ‘White Nation’ to an aspirational multicultural society (discussed in Chap. 2). The negative

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stereotype has its genesis also in an historical and apolitical analysis of the institution of marriage (see below). These are the threads that I take up in this narrative. In Australia (as in other western countries) a negative, sexualised stereotype of Southeast Asian women (including Filipinas) arose at the time of the Vietnam war, reflecting the circumstances for women around Southeast Asian American air bases in the Vietnam war, and the associated rise of sex tourism, especially in the Philippines and Thailand. As debates continued, through the 1980s and 1990s, countervailing stereotypes of the women emerged: subservient Oriental women, who potentially undermined feminist objectives and goals (Roces 2021, 119) in relation to gender equity. Both Filipina activists and their Australian allies in government understood this context and the role of media in propagating Orientalist myths about Filipinas that touched two opposing ends of a spectrum: the gold digger or promiscuous highly sexualized prostitute and the docile, demure, obedient, religious, and accommodating wife who believed her destiny was to serve her husband (Roces 2021, 132).

In a countervailing discourse, Asia is seen as a world of stronger family values, where there is support for patriarchal family values, felt by some to be under threat in Australia (Robinson 1994). The figures in the debate are the two ‘straw men’ of ultra-Orientalism and ultra-universalism (Emmerson 1995, 99). The stereotype of ‘the Asian woman’ as a repository of traditional family values is a refraction of debates about relations between men and women in our own society, especially feminist critiques of (hegemonic) masculinity (Nader 1989). The negative framing was dominated by the trope of migrants as an economic category: women from poor countries seeking advantages of life in the West. But a more appropriate framing of the issue is the normative expectation of all Australians to marry and have a family (see Chap. 2). This book challenges the stereotypes, and the unreflected assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family formation in Australia that underpin them. I argue that the stereotypes arise out of the Australian past, from convict-era stereotypes of ‘Damned Whores’ (Summers 1975) which persisted in the early nineteenth century and beyond, and the twentieth century anxieties about new forms of global connectedness that gave rise to anti-immigration debates and fears for the ‘White Nation’ (Hage 1998).

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In the 1980s, the common practice of correspondence courtship was for women to place advertisements inviting correspondence (‘pen pals’) with prospective suitors. In Australia, the ads were in popular magazines like Australian Post or in dedicated singles magazines (such as Australian Singles). In the pre-internet era, the relationships proceeded through ‘snail mail’ usually supplemented with landline calls (often made with great difficulty, e.g., from pay phones) until the couples were able to meet, perhaps proceeding to marriage (discussed in Chap. 4). Correspondence courtship nowadays is now more likely to be by way of the internet. This book explores the use of the internet in mediated courtship, through research undertaken at the time it was supplanting but also complementing ‘snail mail’ correspondence. The book addresses the questioning of the legitimacy of courtship (seeking intimacy) by way of the internet.

Histories of Mediated Marriages In Australia, initially established as a white settler colony and now officially a multicultural society, transnational brokered marriage has historically been a path to family formation. This began with women who came on ‘bride ships’ to the settler colony in the early nineteenth century and includes women from Europe who came as ‘proxy brides’ of single male migrants who had sought out economic opportunities in the new country (see Chap. 2). Mediated forms of courtship, such as marriage brokering and correspondence courtship, are part of Australia’s history. Today, there is a constant and fluid uptake of new forms of media by people embarking on courtship. Discussion of relationships established by way of the internet is often framed by reflections on other sorts of online encounters— those in the realm of ‘fantasy’ like virtual worlds, gaming, with allegations that the internet is wide open to deception, fraud and hence an inappropriate place to be establishing intimate relationships. While increasing numbers of Australians are seeking ‘love online’, courtship and marriage between Asian women and Australian men remain at risk of pejorative assessments which hark back to that earlier form of correspondence courtship (the so-called mail-order bride era). The internet as the site of meeting and courtship creates another level of suspicion as media reports abound of internet ‘scams’, including the ubiquitous ‘romance scams’ enacted on social media. Ultimately, the negative views draw on unreflected assumptions about courtship and marriage in Australia

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and make judgments based on negative stereotypes of the men and women in mediated Asian-Australian unions. I conducted research about these relationships between 2004 and 2007, at a time when mediation was moving from ‘snail mail’ to the emerging global world of the World Wide Web (see Appendix). A new generation of critics of transnational mediated marriage were emerging, especially in the field of cultural studies. The magazine ads were replaced by websites where women could advertise for prospective suitors. These readily accessible sites attracted critical analysis, especially of their forms of signification of exotic Asian beauties and Asian family values (see e.g., Halualani 1995; Tolentino 1999). The common critique was the idea that women were being advertised as commodities, like items in a mail-order catalogue While many of these sites are distasteful in the way they represent women—a positive endorsement of the supposed passivity of stereotypical subservient Asian women is contrasted with ‘feminazis ‘(the first time I had heard this term) used to characterise Western women embracing changes in gender roles who have no interest in men like the ones running the websites—and suspect for their related commercial operations of selling travel (sometimes linked to sex tourism), the intentions, actions and lives of the women (and also the client men) engaging in mediated courtship were absent in this critical scholarship (Robinson 2007). ‘Globalisation’ is an undercurrent in the debate. Especially from the last decades of the twentieth century there is increasing interconnectedness on a transnational level ‘by way of interactions, exchanges and related developments, affecting not least the organisation of culture’ (Hannerz 1996, 7). These changes are not mere homogenisation, one-way flows from the wealthy North to the impoverished South (Iwabuchi et al. 2004, 9); and not just a reworking of global economic relations, implied in the metaphor ‘marriage market’ used in academic analysis of correspondence marriage websites. As forms of interpersonal relations and family formation, intercultural cross-border marriages throw ups more pressing and nuanced challenges. For example, in international legal debate, ‘family values’ are resistant to claims of universalism. Support for the international convention on child abduction drafted at the Hague conference on private international law in 1980 is growing slowly: 103 countries (out of 193) had signed on in 2022 up from 53 in 2000 (Robinson 2000).

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What Is Marriage? There is literally nothing about marriage that anyone can imagine that has not in fact taken place, whether prescribed, proscribed or optional. All these variations seemed quite natural to those who lived them (Bernard 1972, 272).

We live in an era where marriage is undergoing redefinition, in response to feminist campaigns for women’s rights and transformations in the social role of women. Changes such as no-fault divorce, women’s entry into the workforce, and (notionally) equal pay undermine many of the underpinnings of marriage as a patriarchal institution. More recent challenges have come from campaigns for the normalisation of same-sex marriage. Marriage and Moral Panics Marriage—and gender roles—are under the spotlight in the West in recent decades as nations all over the world have engaged with political demands for recognition and legalisation of same-sex marriage. Opponents have relied on assertions about marriage and family which are ‘naturalised’ by ideology: assertions that particular social forms are expressions of our essential biological nature. Definitive delineations of what constitutes marriage emerged in many public debates, including in Australia in 2015 leading up to a plebiscite on legalising same-sex marriage. Government minister Eric Abetz made the ‘No’ case: marriage is defined in Australian law as ‘a union between a man and a woman’, and the institution has existed for millennia in a single form (quoted in Robinson 2015a). This form is presumed to be the modern Western ideal of the monogamous heterosexual conjugal union (the heteronormative nuclear family) founded on romantic love and imbued with ‘family values’ as the basis of attachment and intimacy as well as procreation. The debates about marriage reform foregrounded an understanding of marriage as a special kind of intimate interpersonal bond, socially acknowledged and valued; that this kind of loving relationship is the foundation of families; and that family formation and parenting are the recognised forms of social adulthood. The assumption of heteronormative marriage as ‘natural’ is challenged by normalisation of same-sex marriage. This social and legal change highlights the plasticity of the concept of ‘marriage’ and belies its apparent universality in form.

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The public debate around so-called mail-order brides beginning in the 1980s is an earlier moral panic about marriage and gender relations in Australia The pejorative term arose as a label for marriages contracted across international boundaries by men from wealthy nations and women from poor nations (originally Southeast Asian countries), and which originated in correspondence courtship. As noted above, I began following this public debate in 1982 (Robinson 1982), as well as subsequent media ‘storms’ that touched on the issues of Asian-Australian marriage (Robinson 1996, 2000). As an Anthropologist, I was curious to see beyond the media representations and understand the lives and choices of people transacting transnational correspondence relationships. Mediation of transnational marriages is more likely these days to be to be through the internet but  the  ‘mail-order bride’ stereotype of Asian-­ Australian marriages lingers and ‘haunts’ many families. When I describe this book to people, a common response is to rehearse the stereotype of sexy Asian women and ugly old men in purely transactional relationships. Another is to ask, ‘is it a funny book?’, reflecting negative pop culture images played for laughs (as in the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert). The censorious tone towards the parties involved in Australian–Filipina marriages indicates that the phenomenon is seen by some to represent an undermining of the dominant myth in our society that sexual attraction and romantic love are the ‘natural’ appropriate basis for marriage.3 The stereotype of the Asian woman as a repository of traditional family values is a refraction of public debates about marriage and marital relations. Marriage appears to be a universal social category because it is always ‘recognised’ by observers in the taken-for-granted forms of social and biological reproduction. Anthropologists are aware of the vexed issues of arriving at a universal definition of marriage, let alone the associated social and cultural expectations: inter alia, contractual obligations between spouses and their kin; intimacy and sexuality; expectations of spouses and parenting relations; and relations with kin and affines. Anthropologists identify a wide range of institutional arrangement that we recognise as marriage, defined as ‘An institutionalized form of relationship in which sexual relationships and parentage legitimately take place’ (Keesing 1981, 514). Marriage and family forms are important sites of differences across and between cultures. But whatever its specific social form in a particular place or time, the practice identified as ‘marriage’ is ‘naturalised’, understood as the expression of a fundamental form of human relations, in public

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discourse and everyday practice. Indeed, the existing marriage forms are the cornerstone of the reproduction of gender relations (Connell 1987; Robinson 2018). However, institutionalised practices labelled as ‘marriage’ are always subject to changes and variation, spatially and over time. Further to understanding ‘what is marriage’, historians of the family and personal life have questioned the timelessness and traditionality of marriage. Historian Jack Goody (1996, 167–68) questions the presumed relationship between the nuclear family (the conjugal pair in a small household) and capitalism. He contests the argument for the rise of individualism, and the move from ‘social to individual control’ of marriage (1996, 176). Goody is critical of historical studies that claim to discover the origins of conjugal love (and companionate marriage) ‘which Shorter attributes to the nineteenth century, Stone to the seventeenth and Macfarlane to much earlier England’ (1996, 185–86), arguing that conjugal love is more widely distributed ‘both in time and space’ than these accounts allow (1996, 186): for example, there is evidence of conjugal and romantic love in Asian societies. Romantic love, intimacy, and ideas of the fulfilment of sexual desire have proven to be extremely motile in the global economy. Their manifestation in particular settings, however, cannot be assumed to be the working out of a unilinear progress towards a better world. The notion of a unilinear progress in both personal relations and economic development is an important aspect of the assumption of the ‘uniqueness of the West’ which Goody is critiquing (1996, 167–68). Social scientists have analysed the family—the households and the marriages which constitute them—as connected to dominant economic forms. Marx saw marriage as ‘incontestably a form of exclusive private property’ (cited Mitchell 1971, 110). For Engels, monogamy ‘appears as the subjugation of one sex by another’ (cited Mitchell 1971, 112) and is hence the prototype for all forms of class subordination. Second-wave feminism, in the 1970s drew on Engels and identified marriage as the quintessential patriarchal institution: the ‘oppression of women’ based on women’s confinement to, dependence on, and control by men within that family’ (Robinson 2018). In Kate Millett’s original formulation of the notion of patriarchy (1970), the family was identified as ‘patriarchy’s chief institution’ which she argued was basic to all societies (cited in Curthoys 1988, 104). The gendered division of labour in the family, established through monogamous heterosexual marriage, is the root of sex inequality in all areas of social life, including women’s position in the labour market and their absence from high public office (Nicholson 1997, 19).

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Feminists have challenged the roles women hold within families. Many second-wave feminist agendas related to women’s rights regarding marriage and family responsibilities, for example wages for housework, state-­ sponsored 24-hour childcare, reproductive choice (contraception and abortion) and criminalisation of domestic violence. For socialist feminists, monogamy and the family were essential to capitalist social relations: domestic labour provided one basis of capitalist profits, as women’s unpaid labour in the household subsidised the costs of the reproduction of labour power (Robinson 2018). Second-wave feminism argued that alternative forms of living arrangements that met women’s emotional and material needs were important revolutionary steps to achieving women’s emancipation from oppression. Bernard’s (1972) critique of marriage pre-figures Giddens (1992) in predicting the emergence of new models of partnering that valorise companionship. Giddens (1992) argues there is a revolution in marriage and family life away from economics to intimacy. In his 1999 BBC Reith lectures entitled ‘Runaway World’, he proposes that the revolution in marriage and family life is an aspect of the globalising world that he is analysing. The valorisation of romantic love as a basis of a marriage predicated on the intimate bond between husband and wife is, he argues, a relatively recent historical phenomenon. In his view it developed along with capitalism, reflecting new forms of individualism. Giddens suggests that romantic love is historically related to the realisation of the self in personal relationships, which, like marriage and sexual relationships, is a quintessential fact of modernity. The appearance of romantic love in history is a step in the movement towards the ‘pure relationship’, one entered into ‘for its own sake’, for what each person can derive from a sustained association with another (1992, 58). He argues that this heralds a potentially revolutionary social transformation. The ‘pure relationship’ is not necessarily tied to marriage; rather it is part of a ‘generic restructuring of intimacy’ related to the development of a ‘plastic sexuality’ (that is, one not necessarily tied to the imperatives of reproduction) (1992, 58). The elevation of intimacy to a central role in the contraction of marriages is at the heart of the critique of the ‘legitimacy’ of correspondence marriages. But the idea of romantic love as the ‘spark’ (Giddens 1992) for conjugal bonds that encompass sexual attraction is contradicted in situations of arranged marriages where the ‘spark’ develops after marriage (Robinson 1988).

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Towards the end of the twentieth century, marriage did seem to be under threat as increasingly new patterns of personal life emerged (Giddens 1992, 1999). One of modernity’s most powerful discourses is that of the autonomous individual seeking personal fulfilment in their sexual relations; and notions of individual agency are especially powerful in the arena of gender identities and sexual relations (Giddens 1992). The move away from marriage appeared to be a realisation of some second-wave feminist aspirations. However, into the twenty-first century it is clear marriage as a social and cultural institution has not gone away; rather it has been transformed. The political demand for same-sex marriage highlights some of the new concerns about what marriage means, and what people aspire to in marital unions, for example, social recognition, legal rights, a step in the path to adulthood that includes home ownership, parenthood etc. It is now a truism to identify changing gender relations as a core component of the changes associated with the contemporary global order. Roberta Hamilton (1978) argues that notions of romantic love have been critical to contemporary constructs of marriage. She argues that as production increasingly became located outside the home, love became elevated as the chief ideological underpinning of marriage. This resonates with the positions of scholars like Zaretsky (1974) and Lasch (1977) who argued that marriage is a mainstay of personal life which has become the key refuge from the impersonal forces of capitalism Bernard (1972) notes that high divorce rates indicate how important marriage has become, not its decreasing importance. Any diminution in the emotional satisfaction of marriage makes a marital union untenable. Some of the hostility to correspondence courtship and other forms of brokered marriages arises due to the challenge such arrangements pose to the contemporary ideological construction of marriage as a love match. ‘Mail-order marriages’ appear to be in contradiction with the valorisation of intimacy as it is assumed that one of the motives behind women offering themselves as spouses for foreigners must be that they perceive themselves as having a ‘currency’ on the global market to affect an escape route, for themselves and perhaps their families, from poverty. However, in the contemporary world, many women live in societies where choices and life chances are poor, where women’s access to employment is limited relative to men’s. Their choices and life chances are very directly constrained by economic imperatives, but global technologies and information circuits are opening new economic possibilities for people of the global South.

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Marriage may seem to fit more squarely in the realm of the personal, as an expression of desire, for women in the developed world. However, separating and delineating economic and affective bases for marriage is not as simple as the ideology of romantic love presents. ‘[P]olitical economy is implicated in the production and reproduction of desire’… [in] … ‘even the most minute and intimate levels of interactions’ (Constable (2003, 143). Social difference, or ‘distinction’ can provide a ‘currency’ for the accumulation of cultural capital which is then convertible to social capital of a desirable marriage partner. The actions of poor women on a global ‘marriage market’ in which women are most usually marrying hypergamously (‘marrying up’), in converting a social or cultural difference to social capital, is not unique to North/South relationships. In addition, the idea of romantic love as the ‘spark’ (Giddens 1992) does not prescribe a ‘natural’ or universal connection between sexual attraction, desire and conjugal bonds; many instances of arranged marriage presume sexual attraction, sexual satisfaction and love follow marriage rather than serve as the prelude (Robinson 1998).

End of Patriarchalism? The Orientalising stereotype of Asian brides as ‘traditional’ wives has its basis in changing gender relations in Australia, such as the large-scale entry of women into the workforce in the post-WW2 era, the introduction in the mid-1970s of no-fault divorce, the extension of limited state support for mothers in the form of single parent pensions (formerly only for widows) and so on. In contemporary Australia, marriage and family relations are hotly debated. There have been attacks by political conservatives on the divorce courts (both verbal abuse and actual violence); opposition to legalising same-sex marriage; and protests about men’s rights in child custody and garnisheeing of non-custodial parents’ wages for child support. Carol Pateman (1988) identified the marriage contract as critical to the form of patriarchy found in contemporary capitalist societies. Rather than being a contract between two free and equal individuals, she argues it is the mode through which the community of men regulates their access to women. This fraternal form of patriarchy or ‘brother right’ in her view superseded an older form of patriarchy, or ‘father right’ which was characteristic of societies whose fundamental social form was based on relations of status, not contract.

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Castells identifies the end of patriarchalism—of which the patriarchal family is the core—as fundamental in the dramatic social transformation in the ‘information age’ (1997, 133–38). ‘Resistance identities’ emerge as a result of the ‘dissolution of former legitimizing identities’ (1997, 356). The quest for ‘father right’ can be read as a response to the dissolution of a personal identity because of the decline of patriarchalism which Castells argues is a consequence of the women’s movement and changes in the global economic order, including the ‘massive incorporation of women into paid work’ (1997, 135). Some men feel there is an erosion of their rights in relation to their children through a weakening of the power of the marriage contract central to fraternal forms of patriarchy. Men who are angry about the diminution of ‘father right’ express envy of the apparent certainty and immunity from the destabilising global processes offered by religious fundamentalism, or at least by the assertion of identities based in religion. The figures in the debate are the two straw men of ultra-­ Orientalism and ultra-universalism (Emmerson 1995, 99). For some sectors of Australian society, Asia is seen as a world of stronger family values where there is support for patriarchal family values which are seen as under threat in Australia (see also Robinson 1996, 2000). This is explicitly stated by some proponents of ‘Asian brides’, such as the webmaster of the site Heart of Asia, who says ‘the feminist movement is to blame [Emphasis in original] (cited Robinson 2007, 488). The men who experience disempowerment in contemporary Australia embrace this image of Asian values as part of a resistance identity, ‘generated by those actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society’ (Castells 1997, 8). Gender constructs are significant in both ethnic identities and their counterpoint, ethnic stereotypes. Contestations about the nature of male-­ female relations, and the nature of marriage, intersected with debates about Australia’s relations with Asia. The hullaballoo over ‘mail-order brides’ occurred at a particular moment in Australia’s post-WW2 immigration programme: the dismantling of the White Australia policy; the beginning of Asian migration post-1975, when the government accepted Vietnamese boat refugees following the end of the Vietnam war; and a shift from an emphasis on assimilation of migrants to the espousal of multiculturalism. This was also a time when significant shifts were happening in the ways Australia connected to the world, the wide-bodied jet opened

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up cheap air travel ending Australia’s relative isolation, and especially exposure to (and from) Asia. These changes are discussed in Chap. 2.

Stereotypes Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one form of representation. Like fictions, they are created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real … They are an invention, a pretence that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken—are not allowed (bell hooks 1992, 341).

Stereotypes are also reductive and demeaning. Edward Said (1978, 7) argues that the West portrays the East as an ideal and unchanging abstraction. Orientalism is a way of dealing with the Orient ‘by making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it … an accepted grid for filtering the Orient into Western consciousness’. He extends his argument to show how the ‘Orientalist grid’ is important in maintaining women as a subordinate class in both the Orient and the Occident (Nader 1989, 234). Comparison is important to gender constructs. ‘Critique of the other may be an instrument of control when the comparison asserts a position of superiority’ (Nader 1989, 347). That is, while it may be bad here, it is worse somewhere else, for example the Orient. So, images of women in other societies reinforce norms of subordination in our own through the process of constructing positional superiority. Hence the negative stereotypes of women in other cultures are significant in both Orientalist and patriarchal discourses. ‘The positional superiority of Western women as symbolic of the positional superiority of the West is a deeply ingrained idea’ (Nader 1989, 329). But the fear of Asia (of non-white immigration in general) is also of miscegenation; this is not like other forms of immigration where the newcomers can be ghettoised. Here they are scattered into the most remote regions in Australian households, giving birth to ‘dusky’ Australian children (Lo 2002). Stereotypes and Stigma Stereotypes are a way of representing the intercultural. A cross-cultural union creates a very personal space of the intercultural: the conjugal relationship, household and family, in which practices originating in different

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cultures come together. The interviews in this study with transcultural families explored the ways negative stereotypes are engaged by the courting couples and family members, and how they intrude upon expectations and practices in the intimate intercultural social space of marriage/family. How do stereotypes impact on the interpersonal communication and ways of relating that are constitutive of this intercultural space? The stereotypes operate in everyday social relations to create a feeling by courting couples and husbands and wives; in certain social settings, they are stigmatized by their choice of marriage partner. Erving Goffman (1963, 4) notes stigma expresses a relationship between an ‘attribute and a stereotype’, so a stigma is a ‘mark’ or ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’ and that reduces the bearer ‘from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’ (1963, 3). Stigmatisation impacts the development of these intercultural relationships. Stereotypes influence intimates (friends and especially family) outside the relationship who express concern for their friend or family member in terms of the stereotypes. The women face concerned comments from their families about the risks posed by foreign men, and the men are warned of the risks they face from Filipinas. Some of the prospective ‘courters’ respond by hiding their intentions from their families until they have assured themselves that they want to pursue the relationship. When the ‘mail-order bride’ first emerged as a social phenomenon— and a trope—in the Australian media in the 1980s, the negative stereotype characterised the women as contracting marriages based on an economic calculus, rather than romantic love (Robinson 1982). I wrote in 1982 that many of the feminist critics of the ‘mail-order bride’ phenomena, paradoxically, were enraged that women were contracting marriages based on a presumed economic calculus, not on romantic love. These critiques have hardened in the subsequent decades, to a view that these marriages are a form of trafficking (Robinson 2007). The ‘mail-order bride’ stereotype overworks a market metaphor to valorise the economic gulf between rich and poor countries in the global economy as the primary factor motivating these marriages. Men from rich countries with social and cultural capital in the global economy by virtue of their citizenship of a rich country, but with little currency in a local ‘marriage market’ (too old, too ugly, not ‘cool’), who have nothing to trade on the marriage market save their relative wealth in global terms as citizens of developed nations, and their ability to offer permanent residency (PR) or citizenship status of a rich nation to their poor nation

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spouses. They are ‘matched’ with young sexually potent Asian brides; poor women who have nothing but their exotic Asian beauty to bring to a marriage, and who trade their Asian beauty for economic security and a passage to the developed world. The link to trafficking presumes that for the men these relationships are primarily about access to a desirable sexual partner. The market metaphor, that men can select a bride from a catalogue, projects an assumption that this questing for romance and relationships is a simple market transaction, in which the women, in particular, lack agency. ‘Gold digger’ women and ‘loser’ men remain the pervasive stereotypes of the men and women who transact cross-cultural marriages through correspondence media, whether it is the older generation of ‘snail mail’ pen pal courtship, or couples who utilise the new communication media of the internet to meet partners and to develop their relationships. These sensational stereotypes represent gender structures that have their principal expression in gendered sexual desire. The power dimension of the conjugal relationships thus established is presumed, in this representation, to draw on a simplistic structure of isomorphism between global inequalities and structures of masculinity and femininity. The stereotypes stigmatise the marriages as inauthentic because of a presupposition that long-distance correspondence courtship cannot give rise to the romantic attachment presumed to be fundamental to the conjugal bond; they do not follow the assumed ‘script’ linking ‘romance’ and marriage. As mediation moved from ‘pen pal’ ads and ‘snail mail’ correspondence to the internet, the fear of the internet as a site of inauthentic communication added to the negative views. This is discussed on Chap. 3. In addition to the stigma associated with stereotypes, the ‘naturalised’ assumptions about family relationships that have been formed within families (and cultures) of origin accompany the spouses into their unions. These encompass potentially unreflected expectations about gender roles, parenting and the scope or dimensions of family relations (e.g., nuclear vs. wider kin relations). The negative stereotype expressed in the ‘mail-order’ epithet assumes that these are inauthentic marriages because partners do not meet in the ‘usual way’, a presupposition that long-distance correspondence courtship cannot give rise to the romantic attachment that is presumed to be fundamental to the conjugal bond. That is, critics impose a unitary notion of marriage that reflects a modern Western ideal—a construct of legitimate marriage that presumes a particular trajectory of romantic questing and

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individual fulfilment. And they have inauthentic motives (‘gold digger’ women and ‘loser ‘men’ seeking sex partners). The assumption is that they face incommensurable cultural differences. Apart from sensationally reporting acts of domestic violence against Filipinas married to Australians (shocking occurrences but not at variance from the ‘normal’ in a society where domestic violence is now acknowledged as a social problem that was not publicly discussed or considered a crime until 1975) the other popular headline is about the (inevitable) instability of these transcultural unions. The assertions are not based on any data. This claim was investigated by Chua et al. (1987) who analysed statistical data on marriage breakdown and found no evidence that Filipino-Australian unions were more likely to fail than Australian marriages in general. These stereotypes can be challenged on many grounds, but I begin with a focus on the motivations and actions of our interview subjects. These relationships are formed with an aspiration to create marriages and families. While the stereotypes of ‘correspondence brides’ represents the women as utilising their Asian beauty and/or youth as assets that they trade on the global marriage market, the women narrate their own stories as questing for love and family. In a similar vein, the men in established family relationships in our study were overwhelmingly questing for conjugal love and family life not simply the ‘plastic sexuality’ (sexuality divorced from reproduction) that Giddens (1992, 58) claims as a feature of modern personal life. To that extent the motivations of actors do express stereotypes—or unreflected assumptions. Some of the women expressed that they felt they would have more autonomy as Australian wives and avoid the kinship-based power that they experienced (negatively) in their families. However, it is also clear that the negative stereotypes haunt these couples as they negotiate courtship (Saroca 2006). (Discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4). The modes of representation used by ‘brokers’ on websites promoting correspondence courtship do uncritically replicate stereotypes, for example in the way women seeking partners are represented and displayed by the managers of the sites (Robinson 2007). But these stereotypes are not necessarily endlessly reproduced as the basis of the real interpersonal relations thus established. The women who contract these marriages have taken bold steps to achieve their goals, including moving across the world. They negotiate the forms of interpersonal relations and assert their own values in the marriages. Marriage as a social form varies across time and

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space, and the new patterns of spouse selection have the capacity to result in new family forms, new patterns of conjugal relations. This is discussed further in Chap. 4. While the men who seek wives overseas may be expressing a kind of fundamentalism, by looking for a way to avoid/change what they feel to be an undesirable situation in their country of origin, the women may be taking up a different position in relation to forms of global power. Huntington (2004) is reputed to have characterised the intersection of gender and global power as ‘Davos man and Manila woman’ (capital: labour::powerful man: working migrant woman).4 Coming from societies (Philippines and increasingly mainland Southeast Asia, Russia) where global economic inequalities provide the impoverished conditions of their everyday lives, the limits of their life chances, the flows of global capital also open spaces for them to take new (albeit risky) choices where, for many, aspirations can be realised. The commodified conditions under which some meet their spouses, by way of commercial brokering sites that also sell travel for example, give way to the possibility of subsequent non-­ commodified exchanges (both emotional and material), for example, remittances to their families back home, or support for children from previous relationships. These relationships necessarily involve negotiation and reconstitution of the taken-for-granted of personal life, for men and women. They involve forms of cathexis which are bound up with the constitution of gendered identities. For example, a culturally based assumption held by a migrant woman that she will manage the household finances may be at odds with a husband’s assumptions of spousal dependence which for the man can be bound up with ideas of sexual attractiveness. What Are the New Forms of Family Created Through International Marriages? One woman advertising on a website writes that she would like her potential spouse to ‘understand that she comes from a poor family’, a reference to her expectation that the distance from her family of origin will not prevent her from maintaining her ties and helping them based on her own (presumed) better fortune. For Filipinas marrying in Australia an important issue is the continued support that they can offer their families, though remittances and through sponsoring further migration; indeed, Filipinas in mixed marriages appear to give more support to their families through remittances than all-Filipino households (Jackson 1993).

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A website publishing ads from Russian women had a preponderance of women with children seeking a new father for their family. We see fragments of personal and interpersonal life, and institutions for social reproduction coming together in diverse ways. The book aims to avoid teleological explanations of personal relations that see them as reflexively related to social forms like ‘patriarchy’ or ‘capitalism’, or to see them in terms of unilinear processes of change towards modernity. We did find instances of behaviour that matched the characteristics represented in the negative stereotypes: a Filipina who met her Australian husband on the internet spoke critically of women, who she saw as ‘scammers’ trying to get money from western men, that she encountered when she ran an internet café in Manila. Some of the men reported that they wrote to women from match-making sites who immediately requested money; some of the men who posted on the Fil-West web site, where we conducted research, posted comments that reflected Orientalist stereotypes of sexy Asian beauties. A fundamentalist impulse may lie behind a man’s longing for a foreign bride (seeking a ‘traditional’ wife) may lead to dangerous situations for women in the marriages they contract. Needless to say, no-one from this latter group responded to the invitation be part of our study. However, like many of the people interviewed by Constable (2003), a desire to counter negative stereotypes was a factor motivating some participants to participate in her research on correspondence courtship. Where Did the Stereotypes Come from? Coming into the twenty-first century, there have been changes in Australia’s ‘national imaginary’ in how it relates to Asia (Hamilton 1990). Travel to Asia and a high-profile Asian presence in some urban neighbourhoods, for example, are now commonplace experiences for many Australians. This is a far cry from the post-WW2 years when Australia was still part of the British Empire, comfortably Anglo, (Robinson 2000) and when young Australians, making their pilgrimage overseas on ocean liners, headed straight for London with brief stops at exotic ports like Aden and Gibraltar. In the 1950s, I was educated about my place in the world by the map showing ‘Australia’s Neighbours’ in the ‘First Steps in Learning’ section of the Australian Junior Encyclopaedia (Barrett 1956: vol. 3, after p. 924). The centrally located image of Australia was flanked to the northwest by India, and then by Africa and Europe. To the north was Papua

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New Guinea, the lone representative of the Asia-Pacific region, which was otherwise represented by America. There was no Southeast Asia, no China. The omissions of Southeast Asia and what are now the island nations of the Pacific are even more remarkable considering that these were the theatres of war from which my father and his generation had just returned.5 The new-found role of Asia in the national imaginary has been fuelled by an increase in the volume of ‘real relations’ with Asia, in what Hannerz (1992) has called the ‘global ecumene’. In this view, the global order is constituted not just at the level of the economic, or the cultural, but also in terms of interpersonal relations. These real social relations have the power to disrupt and challenge the taken-for-granteds in everyday life and enter debates about Australian identity—the Australian way of life, values and sensibilities. Contemporary debates focus on the purported loss of our Australian way of life, the defence of a unitary Australian culture (e.g., the argument that migrants and especially new citizens should speak English) and the doomsday scenario of ‘us’ being swamped by ‘them’ are the ongoing focus of complaints of conservative politicians such as Pauline Hanson who founded the nativist and populist One Nation party in 1994. While the initial electoral successes this party put such issues at the centre of current political debate, they have been not far below the surface in media coverage of events concerned with the consequences of the increased volume of social integration with Asia. Marriage migration has brought into play contested notions of family values, foundational to the presumed cultural gulf between the Orient and Occidental Australia (Robinson 1996, 2000).

New Patterns of Transnational Courtship The moral panic about ‘mail-order brides’ has subsided in the Australian media and seemingly in popular culture perhaps related to familiarity with now-ubiquitous ‘online’ dating all over the world; a trend that was intensified as governments-imposed lockdown during the COVID pandemic in 2019–2021. Websites advertising Asian brides for western men still exist, some totally new and others ‘reborn’ from previous sites. A global trend in marriage migration is the recruitment of Southeast Asian and Russian women as brides for men in East wealthy Asian countries, like Japan, Taiwan and Korea (Yang and Lu 2010; Robinson 2015b; Bèlanger et al. 2012). This phenomenon is responding to demographic imbalances in

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East Asia, and social factors such as the difficulty of Japanese farmers finding wives and the success of their marriages to Filipinas (Faier 2009; Suzuki 2003). The complex mosaic of the social circumstances of cross-­ border marriages in Asia are addressed in Shii (2016). Vietnamese women figure strongly in this migration. Bèlanger et  al. (2012) report that Vietnamese media vilifies women seeking online relationships.

Conclusion These Asian-Australian cross-cultural unions create a very personal space of the intercultural: the conjugal relationship, household, and family, where interpersonal communication and relating are constitutive of the intercultural. While the migration of Asian women to Australia as brides may have been novel in the late twentieth century, it fitted a pattern of sex selective migration that has characterised Australia since the first days of white settlement. This is explored in the next chapter. The ‘moral panic’ and negative stereotypes evident in the response to women from Asia conducting mediated courtship with men in Australia has roots in forms of racism that have coloured Australian migration. Changes in the gender order consequent on the campaigns of second-­ wave feminism contribute to anxieties that attend the stereotype. The next chapter explores Australia’s history of brokered marriage migration as an aspect of population strategies to fill the ‘empty continent’. The results of the ethnographic study of transcultural mediated marriages are set out in the next two chapters. Contemporary forms of mediated courtship by way of the internet are the subject of Chap. 3; and Chap. 4 explores the family lives of Filipino-Australian and Indonesian Australian families, with a focus on conjugal relations and companionate marriages, multicultural communities, and ‘Third Culture’ children. Negative stereotypes of the men and women in these unions are a haunting presence in the lives recounted in these two ethnographic chapters.

Notes 1. Similar critiques are used for the small number of refugees who arrive illegally by boat in Australia—they are ‘queue jumpers’. 2. The research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP 0451491 Interpersonal and Family Relations in Transcultural/ Transnational Marriages, with Kathryn Robinson as Chief Investigator (CI).

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3. In Southeast Asia there are traditions of romantic love and sexual passions, for example in court chronicles like the Mahabharata in Indonesia. However, until recent times it was not usually assumed that this was an appropriate basis for marriage. Marriage was arranged between the families of the bride and groom, with an eye to constituting a successful new household; it was assumed desire and passion would develop between husband and wife after the wedding. 4. Hence Huntington expresses the power of hegemonic masculinity, and non-­ hegemonic forms are outside this purview 5. As a young adult, returning from the typical young Australian pilgrimage overseas which by then focused on a trek through Asia, I was astounded on attending an Anzac Day March in Sydney to realise that the out of the way places which I had adventurously sought out (places like Ambon, Tawau, Tarakan, Sandakan, Surabaya) and also places I knew as the exotic subject of ethnographic accounts (like Biak and Guadalcanal) were proudly emblazoned on the banners carried by the returned soldiers in the march.

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CHAPTER 2

Histories of Spousal Migration

Abstract  The ‘mail-order bride’ flow is one of the latest iterations of bride migration to Australia, a nation which, from the early days of white settlement, has been troubled by a demographic sex imbalance coupled with an anxiety to populate the ‘empty continent’. Selective male migration tied to economic opportunity has characterised many waves of migration post-colonisation. Brokered female marriage migration has been a response to the sex imbalance created by migration policies. ‘Family reunion’ (encompassing visas for partners) became a significant component of immigration policy in the latter part of the twentieth century. The interconnectedness of the late twentieth century world facilitated brokered migration of women from Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines. The negative stereotypes of Asian-Australian marriages that emerged in response to these marriages reflect underlying ideologies of gender relations that developed in the early years of colonisation, where male convicts outnumbered women by a factor of 6 to 1. This chapter reviews the history of sex-selective—and marriage—migration to Australia, and the popular discourses that have emerged in response. Keywords  Bride migration • Settler colony • Female convicts • Immigration policy • Proxy marriage • Labour migrants • Gender relations • White Australia policy • Correspondence marriage • Family caring • Welfare state © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 K. Robinson, Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9033-7_2

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Introduction: Migration for Marriage Migration for transnational marriage, a facet of the increased global population movements in our interconnected world, is a nexus of gender relations and differential economic and political power. Cheaper mass international travel following the launch of the ‘jumbo jet’ (Boeing 747) in 1969 intensified global connections, as has the internet post-1980s (see e.g., Pertierra 2007). Women are a strong component of the now abundant labour migration from the global South to the North. Female migrants from poor developing countries also aspire to marriage in the wealthy nations where they find work, in quest of expanded life chances (McKay 2003; Piper and Roces 2003). But transnational spousal migration is not new (Zug 2016). In Australia, ‘bride’ migration has been relied on—by governments and citizens alike— since the beginnings of European settlement, mirroring the marriage histories of other white settler colonies (Zug 2016). Linked to the state imperative to ‘populate’ the notionally empty continent, distinctive practices of marriage migration have been characteristic at several junctures in Australia’s history. In the current era of mass migration, global economic relations, and state migration regimes articulate migration, marriage practices, and gender relations. Mediation of courtship and marriage is facilitated through the global interconnections of the World Wide Web (WWW.) ‘Fiancée’ and ‘spousal’ visas are a significant component of the family reunion category of Australian migration, accounting for around 5 per cent of places (around 40,000) in the migration stream in 2022–23, and for 2023–24 (Australian Government 2023). Mid-twentieth century mediated transnational marriages involved correspondence courtship through letter writing: hence, the pejorative term ‘mail-order bride’ which has come to symbolise unequal gender and economic relations in the global economy.

Female Migration in the Early White Settler Colony A constant theme in the history of the white settlement of Australia post-1788 has been state-sponsored gendered migration. Beginning with transport of (predominantly male) convicts from England to the penal colony of New South Wales in the late eighteenth century, there have been many sex-specific programmes to fill labour market niches, and to meet demographic imperatives to populate the island continent.

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Origins of the White Settler Colony Industrialisation, famers’ loss of land and urbanisation in Georgian England gave rise to moral panic by burghers about rising crime rates in the growing cities. The exploding prison population was a significant problem. Some convicts were sent to the free settler colonies in the Americas where they served time as indentured labourers (Zug 2016) but this pressure-valve was no longer available after the American war of independence. The prison population swelled, and a stop-gap solution was found in imprisoning the overflow in rotting hulks in London and Portsmouth ports. In 1779 the House of Commons established a committee to determine where convicts, if sentenced to transportation, could be sent now that America was closed to them. It needed to be somewhere distant and where the colony was able to support itself (Hughes 1988, 57). The novel solution proposed was to transport the convicts to the territory of New South Wales on the Southern Continent (Australia), that had been claimed for Britain by Captain James Cook on a voyage of exploration in 1770. Joseph Banks, the botanist on Cook’s expedition, spoke of Botany Bay where they had landed—just south of today’s Sydney Harbour—as promising. It had good soil, fresh water, and wood. The prisoners were guaranteed not to escape due to the isolation of the proposed colony. Banks’ view was taken as enough, and there was no further reconnaissance. In 1786 the decision was taken to found a penal colony at Botany Bay as a dumping ground for excess convicts from British gaols. (Summers 1975, 286). The proposed colony would serve ‘as a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increases of felons in this country, and more particularly in the metropolis’ (cited in Hughes 1988, 66.) Planning began for The First Fleet, the 11-ship expedition that set out from England in 1787 with 1480 people. More than half were convicts: 586 men and 192 women. The rest were seaman, servicemen, and officers, a few with accompanying families. Several babies were born to convict women on the eight-month long journey. Robert Hughes book The Fatal Shore (1988) shines a spotlight on this sorry history. ‘None of the convicts could have had any idea of their destination. Before them yawned a

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terrifying void of time and space. They were going on the longest voyage ever attempted by so large a group of people’ (Hughes 1988, 77). Who were the convicts? Few were dangerous criminals: most had been sentenced for theft and larceny, some forced by ‘a pitiful necessity’ (Hughes 1988, 72) stealing food and clothing. The average age was around 27, with most in the 16–25 and 36–55 age groups (Hughes 1988, 73). In selecting the felons, no thought was given to assembling a set of the appropriate skills for the viability of the colony (Hughes 1988, 74). The imbalance of females to males indicated that no thought had been given to the possibilities for social reproduction, for enabling the convict-­ colonisers to establish households. Robert Hughes notes: ‘not one woman on the First Fleet, legend to the contrary, had been transported for prostitution, as it was not a transportable offense’ (1988, 70). However, both he and Anne Summers (1975) recount how convict women were treated as whores and subject to sexual assault and depravity (see below). Disruption of Families Transported convicts left behind spouses and children, as well as sweethearts and parents. There were sad scenes in the ports as family members said their goodbyes (Hughes 1988, 131). Prisoners’ letters to their wives expressed their sorrow at separation, hopes of a future for their families, despair about parents that they felt they should be caring for, and concern that ‘transportation would sunder the family forever’ (Hughes 1988, 134). Hundreds of women petitioned the Privy Council to request Australian exile with their husbands, but this rarely happened (Hughes 1986, 132). ‘Many prisoners hoped their wives would go into Australian exile with them although few actually did; it was hard to get a passage out there and tickets were far beyond the means of a worker’s wife’ (Hughes 1988, 131). The ‘open prison’ of the penal colony encouraged prisoners to establish households and economic enterprises and the colonial state brokered marriages between prisoners as a means to populate the colony. However, the sex imbalance endured, and until the end of transportation in 1841, only around 12 per cent of the convicts were female. Women Convicts Women convicts were doomed to a totally sexualised existence. Sexual abuse began on the journey. The First Fleet transported female convicts in

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separate ships, but this did not save them from the depravity of the seamen and soldiers. John White, the surgeon on the Charlotte (one of the ships for female passengers) describes the scenes on board in the sweltering weather. The hatches were opened at night and some of the women and the seaman and marines ‘rutted like stoats’ (quoted Hughes 1988, 79). When the ships finally docked at Sydney Cove, the site eventually chosen for settlement, the women were disembarked a few days after the men, once tents and huts for them were ready. On 6 February 1788, they were ferried from ships on long boats. In the evening wind and rain destroyed the camp. ‘The women foundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts, intent on raping them’ (Hughes 1988, 88). Sailors from the transport ships also joined in, giving rise to a two-day debacle. ‘[T]he sexual history of Australia may fairly said to have begun’ (Hughes 1988, 89). For the first two decades of the colony, almost all white women were transported convicts. Men outnumbered women 6 to 1 (Hughes 1988, 163). For the first 50 years, all women were categorised as ‘whores’. ‘The Whore stereotype was devised as a calculated sexist means of social control and … characterized as the fault of the women who were damned by it’ (Summers 1975, 286). Many may have been whores (although as noted above, prostitution was not a transportable offence [Hughes 1988]); but what choice did they have? The ‘Whore’ stereotype was reinforced by the social structure of the colony. There were no other ways for women to live on arrival: men worked to build the settlement but women were designated for sexual gratification and giving birth. And it was for life. Men could work a passage home on completion of sentence, but women were transported for life (Summers 1975, 274). Marriage British authorities recommended to the Governor of N.S.W (Arthur Phillip) that he promote marriages, assuming it would lead to improved morals (Summers 1975, 270). But in practice women were sexual commodities. Female convicts were distributed among male inhabitants ‘not only as servants but as avowed objects of intercourse … rendering the whole colony as little better than an extensive brothel’ (Letter from a free settler, cited Summers 1975, 269).

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Some women were domiciled in the Female Factory, up the river in Parramatta, that served as a brothel and a marriage mart (Summers 1975, 280). They lived in squalid, crowded conditions and worked at spinning and weaving. A new three-story building for 300 inmates was built in 1821, but conditions remained dire. Women were subjected to ‘auctions’, in which men could select a wife from women lined up for inspection, like cattle (Summers 1975, 282). Initially the motive of the men was sexual gratification, but as settlement proceeded apace, men increasingly sought ‘marriage’ to provide domestic comforts and for household labour on the land that male settlers (free and released convicts) were occupying and farming. This sad history of white settlement became hidden from view for perhaps the first two hundred years of the colony. When I was growing up in post-WW2 Australia, people did not reminisce about or recite genealogies of convict ancestors, and the brutality of the early settlement was hidden behind heroic tales of exploration, adaptation, and invention. Celebrations of the bicentenary of settlement in 1988 promoted a passion for family history, and only after this time, I learned of my own convict ancestors, including Hannah Cooke who was transported on the ship The Wanstead, on 9 January 1814. Her crime? A burglary in which she stole ‘wearing apparel of the value of 10 pounds’ and a gun. She was among 120 female convicts who embarked on the voyage (during which three died) arriving in Sydney on 9 January 1814. She was sent to the Female Factory at Parramatta and from there was married by the Anglican zealot William Marsden, who had established the marriage register for women convicts. She was married to another convict, William Prior, who had been transported on the Guilford in 1812, for theft. His first wife had died in 1810, his four children remained in England. By the end of 1800 only forty-two transport ships had gone to Australia, and passage was weak and irregular for the next fifteen years. But in 1815 ‘the flood began’ (Hughes 1988, 144). The peak year was 1833, with 36 ships and 6779 prisoners: 4000 to Sydney and the rest to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) (Hughes 1988, 144). But through the latter part of the decade, transportation was winding down, and ceased to Sydney in 1840. By 1847 the Female Factory at Paramatta was closed and most of the women discharged, except for those deemed ‘invalids’ and ‘lunatics, who remained in the renamed Lunatic Asylum (Summers 1975, 285). Convicts continued being sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), a separate colony since 1825; and transportation to Western Australia began

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in 1850. Between 1787 to 1868 (the last convict transport), Britain sent 825 shiploads of prisoners from England and Ireland, with an average loading of around 200 per ship (Hughes 1988, 143). At that time only around one in seven transported convicts were female. What remained in historical memory was the image of ‘Damned Whores’; women whose main function was to gratify male sexual desire who were vilified for their sorry fate in historical accounts of the period (Summers 1975, 273). ‘The stigma of the stereotype shackled the female convicts as firmly as any leg irons’ (Summers 1975, 276). It became deeply incised in the Australian psyche during these early years of white settlement, leaving a stain on the politics of gender in Australia. Free Settlement and Bride Migration There had been a trickle of free migrants in the early decades of the colony: 730 between 1810 and 1821, of which 310 were the wives and children of transported convicts (Summers 1975, 279). But the number grew dramatically as the penal colony began to morph into a colonial settlement and outpost of empire, producing food and wool for the ‘mother country’ as well as becoming self-provisioning. Women began arriving as domestic servants. The population started moving out of Sydney, forcibly dispossessing Indigenous people as they staked out new areas for agriculture. The land grab attracted free settlers, as well as discharged convicts. The sexual mores of the colony caused concern in Britain: A Select Committee on Transportation was formed in 1812. It noted that women were ‘received rather as prostitutes than as servants’ (cited in Summers 1975, 269) distributed almost ‘as part of daily rations’ (Summers 1975, 269). Concerns about moral laxity were linked to the lack of women in the population. Moral crusaders such as Caroline Chisholm argued that the presence of women would be the ‘great civiliser’ (Rushen 2003, 137; Russell 1994) hence there should be an increase the number of women free migrants, to be domestic servants and wives. The reformers ‘had a strong belief in the importance of women for the creation of a good society, and in the virtues of marriage and the family’ (Curthoys 1988, 27). An Emigration Committee was established in London in 1833, to encourage young women to migrate to New South Wales to perform domestic service. They sought unmarried or widowed women aged eighteen to thirty. Criteria related to ‘usefulness and general moral conduct’. Applicants were required to be ‘in excellent health, and very clean and

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orderly in their dress and appearance’ . They were offered free passage on ‘commodious ships’ escorted by matrons who enforced rules for appropriate behaviour and discipline on board ship (Daniels and Murnane 1989, 166). Women received pre-departure training and promised help to find positions with good pay on landing (Rushen 2003). Another of my ancestors, Emma Cayford, came on a female emigrant ship, the David Scott, in 1834. It brought 371 women who were free settlers, alongside commercial cargo. Emma, aged 19, came on an assisted passage to work as a domestic servant. Soon after her arrival she married an overseer on a farm near Wollongong (south of Sydney), but he died in 1842. By that time the couple owned a farm and had three sons and a daughter. In 1844, she married again, to Thomas Gray, who arrived in Sydney in the Surrey in 1831, having been sentenced to seven years transportation after being convicted for stealing a sovereign. He and Emma had another five children. But as transportation ended and free settlers began arriving in the mid-­ nineteenth century, the sex imbalance of the penal colony was not erased, as there were more male free settlers than women. The sexual culture remained the same. Female immigrants were subjected to the same treatment as convict women had been. When a ship arrived: hordes of men would assemble at the docks, waiting to claim their share of the imported goods. Employers seeking domestic servants had to battle with lustful men who had no intention of paying for the services that they required. Some of the women received proposals of marriage before they disembarked but mostly, they faced ‘proposals’ of a different nature (Summers 1975, 277).

Another hidden history is the abuse of Indigenous women who were ‘sexual objects and fair game for white men’ (Summers 1975, 276; Hamilton 1990, 20; also Rowley 1970) including being used as sex slaves by single male settlers (Behrendt 2000). Recent research uncovering stories of massacres of Indigenous people by white setters as the ‘frontier’ expanded reveals that, as well as conflict over material resources, sexual abuse of Indigenous women was a common trigger for the Frontier Wars between white settlers and Indigenous people. The next section explores the efforts to reform the social life of the colony by increasing the number of women, institutionalising marriage and, as the century drew to a close, increasing the birth rate, but the ideology rooted in the ‘Damned Whores’ stereotype of women was the major obstacles to reform (Summers 1975, 272).

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Assisted Passage Schemes for Women in the Nineteenth Century Organised immigration of women and girls to solve ‘the servant problem’ continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the 1930s. The colonies were presented to young English women as places of opportunity, especially for domestic service, for which they were promised high wages. Promotional literature also laid out the prospects for marriage, due to the availability of husbands. ‘The idea took hold that women who migrated to the colonies would marry more readily and more advantageously than those who remained at home’ (Rushen 2003, 137). A monthly newspaper, The Matrimonial Chronicle ‘published articles on various aspects of marriage and ran a column for those seeking marriage partners. Many of the advertisements stressed the importance of the wife’s contribution to the operation of the farm or business’ (Daniels and Murnane 1989, 117). They cite a letter from Lucy Hart: ‘I have never been without a pound in my pocket since I have been John Hart’s wife and I think that is a great thing to say’ (cited in Daniels and Murnane 1989; See also Gothard 2001; Richards 1995). Free passages were provided to ‘Domestic Girls’. A 1929 pamphlet, published in Melbourne, entitled ‘AUSTRALIA Invites the British Domestic Girl’ (Development and Migration Commission 1929)—prefigured later information campaigns for prospective migrants/spouses setting out information on Australia and its natural and social conditions. The pamphlet emphasised the ‘anglo’ nature of Australia, the familiarity of the language, culture, and society. ‘In language, dress, and habits as well as in political, social, and moral notions, Australia is essentially the same as the Motherland’ (ibid. 1929, 5). The pamphlet sets out ‘What Australia has to offer’: fewer class distinctions, plenty of jobs, good wages, and living conditions. It picks up the theme of marriage prospects: ‘unlike Britain (and Europe generally), which has a surplus of women, the Commonwealth has a surplus of men’. (Indeed, several authors point to male emigration from the British Isles seeking fortune in the United States and British overseas colonies, as contributing to a sex imbalance that fed selective female emigration). The 1929 pamphlet promised increasing numbers of marriageable men: ‘That they will come in increasing numbers there is no doubt; and is it not reasonable to suppose that those of them who are not already married will turn their thoughts to life-partnerships when they feel themselves established?’ (Development and Migration Commission 1929, 7–9). The

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pamphlet went on: ‘The domestic girl, in coming to Australia, has the certainty not only of a good living while she needs to earn one, but also of improving her chances of satisfactory marriage and ultimate establishment of a home of her own’ (Development and Migration Commission 1929, 9). On arrival, the government allocated the newcomers to employers under a programme in which they exercised little choice. The women signed a contract under the Empire Settlement Act (1922) agreeing to work as domestic help for ‘at least twelve months’ after their arrival at a port designated in the contract. If they undertook any other work in the first twelve months, they had to repay the ₤11 granted as assisted passage. It was a surprise to some that the term ‘domestic servant’ frequently meant ‘farm labourer’. Many found themselves in the country performing hard physical work, to which many were unaccustomed. While there was concern young women migrants be chaperoned while on board ship, once released from the oversight of their ‘matron’ there was concern for the welfare of single female, but also officials expressed anxiety about girls of ‘poor character’ behaving badly—evidencing the ongoing power of the ‘Damned Whores’ ideology. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, migrant women did not rush into marriage but carefully considered their options (Rushen 2003, 138). Some embarked to marry men they already knew. For example, Janet Mully’s betrothed, in service as a special constable, wrote to her employer describing how she had followed him after his relocation to NSW: ‘Her constancy and affection have been such as to leave a comfortable home and to dare the perilous voyage to this country to follow and endeavour to alleviate the misfortunes of my present degraded situation’ (Rushen 2003, 139). A small proportion (6 per cent) did marry on arrival, but this led to complaints from colonists who expected women to be available first as labourers. Men would seek prospective wives for neighbouring farmers from among the free women in Sydney. In one case: ‘He fixed on Mis V. for one and she has had two letters from the man saying that he intends to come to Sidney [sic] soon when if they approve of each other at sight, they will be directly married. If I was to give the least hint of such a thing being agreeable to me, I believe I might have the same opportunity’ (cited in Rushen 2003, 140). Migrant women (governesses and domestic servants) commonly met husbands in the workplace, with employers approving marriages between male convicts and free female employees (Rushen 2003, 140).

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As the century progressed, there were more schemes that recruited young single women from other parts of the United Kingdom, in particular Ireland and Scotland (See for example McClaughlin 1991). Recruiters sought young women from islands with a ‘disparity of sexes’ as men who were seafarers died at sea, or soldiers were killed in the war with France (Kendall 1998). Many young women came from Ireland after 1840, escaping the poverty caused by the potato famine. Other regions of Scotland and Ireland suffered sex imbalances due to men migrating to the United States, Australia and other settler colonies, in search of opportunities.

Non-British Free Migration in the Nineteenth Century As the colony expanded throughout the nineteenth century, there were new waves of free migration to Australia, in both the former penal colonies of NSW, Tasmania, and western Australia and the free settler colonies of South Australia and Victoria. Much of this migration was European and male, doing little to redress sex imbalances in the population. There were notable groups of non-British migration: Germans in South Australia; Lebanese, Italian and Greeks in Western Australia and on the east coast. A common pattern was that a man came and established a form of livelihood such as a business and then went home to seek a bride. Chinese migration to the gold rush in the 1850s provided the seed for the white Australian fear of ‘the yellow peril’ and anxiety about the need to avoid ‘cross breeding’ and ‘maintain the purity of the white race’ (Hamilton 1990, 21). From the mid-nineteenth century, cameleers collectively remembered as ‘Afghans’, were recruited especially from Pashtun, then a British possession. They came with their camels but were not allowed to bring their wives—another contingent of single male migrants. They enabled the journeys of white explorers into the ‘dead centre’ and provided transport and communications links as white settlement proceeded. As roads and railways were established, they were no longer providing their cameleer service. Many stayed in Australia. The race politics of the colony made it unlikely that they married into white society and many established families with Indigenous partners. Australia’s oldest mosques are in the outback towns of Mareeba and Alice Springs, and the ummah (congregation) are descendants of these bi-cultural unions (Scriver 2012).

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Free immigration eventually transformed the social structure of the colony, but it was a slow process. Summers (1975) asserts that the beginning of mass migration altered the gender ideology. Gradually the stereotype of ‘Damned Whores’ was counterposed with one of women as ‘God’s Police’ (Summers 1975, 276), the civilising influence on the colony. These conflicting stereotypes shackled Australian women, and defined gender politics, until they were challenged by the 1970s women’s Liberation Movement.1 The non-British/Scots/Irish migration through the nineteenth century seeded concerns about ‘racial purity’ (whiteness) that solidified with the Federation of the colonies in 1901, and the achievement of Australian nationhood. The Chinese who had flocked to the goldfields in the mid-­ nineteenth century were the principle focus of concern. One of the first acts passed in the federal parliament of the newly constituted nation of Australia was the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), the basis of the White Australia Policy designed to end non-European Immigration. Assimilation was the goal for non-British migrants, as well as for Indigenous Australians, required to accommodate to the ‘Australian way of life’ with its ‘decidedly British inheritance’ (Docker and Fischer 2000, 28–9). European migrants trickled in during the first decades of the twentieth century. Greek migration, for example, began in earnest in the early twentieth century (Appleyard et al. 2015), and the mostly single male migrants returned home to seek a spouse. By the 1920s, some were marrying by proxy (see below), marriages arranged by families and conducted in the absence of the groom.

Post-World War 2 Australia sought a new wave of labour migrants for post-war reconstruction, especially housing and construction, including the major engineering project of the time, the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme, and for opening resource extraction in remote regions. The government established a federal immigration portfolio in order to fill the gaps in labour. British migrants came on an Assisted Passage scheme (established 1945, ended in 1981), for families and single people. The provision of assisted passage underscored the utility of the immigration programme to the Australian economy, but also provided a way to limit diversity in the population. But the numbers applying were insufficient for post-war development needs. The Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, then sought

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additional blond-haired blue-eyed migrants from northern Europe, in accord with the White Australia policy implemented through the 1901 Immigration Act. When this did not produce sufficient numbers, he turned his attention to southern Europe for male labour. Europe was suffering in the post-war reconstruction years, so there were many keen to seek opportunities through emigrating. There was a mutual fit between the demands of a booming post-war Australian economy and the need for large-scale resettlement of people displaced in World War II (the ‘refugees’). This was a transitional period from the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’. A small number of southern European families came on assisted passages and had full civil and labour market rights on arrival. Single male workers were recruited from eastern and southern Europe. This latter group had reduced social citizenship including no right to family reunions and less autonomy in seeking employment. Wartime manpower regulations were left in place, allowing the state to direct the men to wherever their labour was needed. Many of these single men were required to serve out labour contracts in remote areas on resource exploitation and national infrastructure development. Many of these migrant men would either return home to marry, or marriages were arranged for them with women in appropriate kin categories. Proxy Marriage The 1958 Migration Act (the first since the infamous 1901  Act) introduced the policy tool of caps on numbers in particular visa subclasses for each year’s intake. It established the distinction of the Family (Migration) Stream and the Skilled Stream. Within the Family stream, child and partner/spousal visas could not be capped, but fiancée and parent visas were subject to capping. The large number of migrants from southern Europe arriving as single men created an anomaly in that they had difficulty in finding spouses in Australia.2 This was especially true for men who were deployed on post-­ war reconstruction projects and resource extraction in remote parts of Australia where the recruitment of single men created localised sex imbalances. During the 1950s, one response to the difficulty for single migrant men in seeking spouses was a system whereby men were married to women in their native countries by proxy: a ‘proxy’ in the home country registered

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consent to the marriage which allowed the brides to obtain visas in the uncapped family reunion category (See Wardrop 1996). Having grown up in the 1950s, I have memories of newspaper photos and newsreel images depicting beautiful young dark-haired women walking down the gangways of the ocean liners that transported Australia’s migrants in that period. Many of them were coming to a new country to join husbands they did not yet know, or barely knew. They had taken their marriage vows in churches in their home villages and towns in Europe in the absence of their husbands, but this contingent status was sufficient for them to be granted a visa. This history is captured in a recent novel, The Proxy Bride (2022) by Zoe Boccabella, who draws on her own family history.3 Proxy marriages were part of the canonical tradition of the Roman Catholic Church and were accepted by Australian immigration authorities as legitimate, giving the women rights to spousal visas. They were most common among Italian migrants and Iuliano (1999) estimates there may have been as many as 24,000 such marriages in the 1950s and 60s. They were also used by Greek, Dutch, Portuguese and Czech migrants. Proxy marriages addressed the religious and cultural barriers that prevented unmarried women travelling alone and allowed them to obtain visas. Echoing concerns of an earlier era, this marriage system also satisfied concerns expressed by religious and community leaders about the moral threat of large numbers of single men without the civilising influence of a family, and the practical question of the care needs involved in social reproduction, the provenance of the family. Asian Migration The Australian’ national imaginary’ involves a sense of threat from outside but also from within, ‘produced by increasing internationalism on the one hand and new forms of cleavage or internal differentiation on the other’ (Hamilton 1990, 16). Anti-Asian sentiment and the idea that a ‘Yellow Peril’ from the north presented a challenge to the ‘Australian way of life’ was solidified in the fight against the Japanese advance through Southeast Asia in WW2. The ban on non-white immigration continued until 1972 when it was lifted by the newly elected Whitlam Labor government. The Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby also moved official policy on migrant presence from assimilation to multiculturalism. This was a shift to official respect for

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the expression of cultural difference, and instituting policies to foster and reproduce the diverse languages and cultures of Australia as an immigrant nation. An important example of this was establishment of a state-funded multilingual media company, the special broadcasting service (SBS). Another dramatic shift occurred when Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser approved that Australia admit Vietnamese boat refugees after 1975. Australia had sent troops to Vietnam to fight alongside the USA and South Vietnam against the communist nationalists, and he perceived taking the refugees as a moral necessity. In the Australian imagination, the communist revolution in Vietnam and then the refugees jumping in small boats to seek asylum were evidence of the continuing threat from the ‘Yellow Peril’ of Asia. Popular culture representations of the ‘Yellow Peril’ are satirised in Hornage (1976). Anti-Asian sentiments rumbled in the electorate as the number of Asian, and also Middle Eastern migrants grew with refugees from Lebanon. In the mid-1990s, fear and loathing congealed in the nativist political party, One Nation, led by Pauline Hanson who raised an alarm about non-­ white migration in her maiden speech to parliament in 1996. Alarmist commentators, like historian Geoffrey Blainey predicted conflict in the ‘frontline suburbs’, those where the Vietnamese settled Australia’s major cities—but the blood in the streets did not eventuate. Australian attitudes towards Asian migration only slowly softened as the diversity of Australia’s population grew, but the beginnings were in the ‘frontline suburbs’ as people got to know their neighbours. Today, Vietnamese restaurants in small towns and suburbs have displaced the once ubiquitous Chinese restaurants as Australia’s favourites.

Spousal Migration in the ‘Mail-Order Bride’ Era (Post 1980s) ‘Mail-Order Bride’ By the early 1980s the Australian media were beginning to highlight another immigration ‘scare’ the so-called mail-order bride which was in fact response to a bride shortage among single men. Men, especially those working in remote regions, were seeking brides in the Philippines, especially through pen pal clubs, often promoted in magazines (such as The Australian Single and Australasian Post).4 For men from established

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migrant groups this represented a trend away from them seeking brides in their home countries, and a new openness to the possibility of transcultural marriage by Australians of diverse heritage. By the late 1980s, Filipinas married to Australians were disproportionately represented in remote regions. The ‘mail-order bride’ phenomenon was a response to a social need in part created by migration policy, and not merely a manifestation of sexism as presumed by many commentators in 1980s public discussions. In an era where Women’s Liberation demands were entering public debate, and the Whitlam Labor government post-1975 was making changes to Family Law that better served women’s interests, the negative view expressed from many quarters was that was men seeking Asian brides were in quest of docile and compliant spouses. (This view was also expressed in positive tones on some of the websites that later came to dominate this space, with references to ‘FemiNazis’ and other ‘anxious’ critiques of women’s rights discourse). Many of the ‘first generation’ of Australian men, who contracted marriages with Filipinas through correspondence courtship were migrant workers in remote industrial locations which had majority male populations. Seeking a ‘mail-order bride’ was their most realistic path to creating their own families (Robinson 1982). Not infrequently, the Filipina spouses of this first generation were women whose own prospects for marriage and family formation were also limited, by demographic factors specific to their situation in the Philippines. For example, they might be oldest sisters whose own marriage prospects in the Philippines had slipped away as they worked to support their natal families including younger siblings. Women we interviewed in our 2004–2006 study—among them widows, single mothers and ‘elderly virgins’—recounted that they had limited opportunities to marry in the Philippines because of gender constructions that rendered them less than desirable marriage partners for Filipino men. They reflected, for example, that age did not matter to the western men as it did to Filipinos. As one Filipina explained, ‘I am regarded as ugly by Filipinos, but my Australian boyfriend thinks I’m beautiful’; ‘The fact I have children is an impediment to marriage in the Philippines and I was surprised to find that for many of the foreign men, it is seen as an advantage because they want a wife and family’.

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Immigration Policy, Economics and Rights of Social Citizenship Public debate around immigration in Australia locates it firmly in the realm of economic policy and the development of the Australian economy. In periods of high unemployment, there are inevitably calls to cut immigration. However, Australia has long made provision for family reunion and spousal migration; rights guaranteed for citizens and Permanent Residents in the 1958 Immigration Act. The right to order personal life is an aspect of social citizenship. It also acknowledges the key role of families in welfare provisioning (as discussed below). However, anti-immigration rhetoric uses a common trope, of migrant families draining the welfare system, as well as their perceived threats to jobs. These are the ‘respectable’ anti-immigration discourses that do not revert to race. But the economic arguments are sometimes a cloak for moral panic about threats to ‘the Australian way of life’, especially where Muslim migrants are concerned in the current era. Opponents of refugee intakes also emphasise the economic ‘costs’ as well as threats to security, racial purity, and ‘the Australian way of life’.5 The negative stereotypes of ‘gold digger’ women and the suspicion that the uncapped spousal reunion category allows people to ‘rort’ the migration system reflects the underlying economic framing of migration. But fears of difference and miscegenation also come into play (Lo 2002), as well as the haunting stereotype of the ‘Damned Whores’ hypersexual marriage migrant. Migration and Family Care The geographical distribution of in-marrying Filipinas, in many small industrial and rural communities (Jackson and Flores 1989, 22) indicates the appropriate framing of the social demand that has fuelled transnational mediated marriages between Australian men and Asian women—the legitimate expectation of all Australians to marry and have a family. This is acknowledged by the guarantee of spousal visas in the 1958 Immigration Act, as well as the normative value of the family as a cornerstone of Australian culture, and the critical role families play in the provision of care, as a bedrock of the welfare system (see Baldassar and Merla 2014). As the proportion of Australia’s population who are first- and second-­ generation migrants grows, and as the large wave of post-WW2 migrants have aged, the needs of families involved in the provision of care across

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international borders has become more evident. This need is recognised in the category of the migrant intake labelled ‘Family Reunion’ which includes spouses, dependent children, and parents. In the late 1960s, a slump in migration arrivals and the return of many European migrants to their homelands led to a liberalisation of family reunion policies, but since then, this visa category has been subjected to increasing restrictions rather than expanding to recognise the social realities of Australia’s multicultural population (Baldassar and Merla 2014). The Family Reunion Policy faced criticism from opponents, that it created a stream of low-skilled migrants many of whom became dependent on the welfare system (Betts 2003), and a 1988 review of immigration (the Fitzgerald Committee) recommend that the migration programme refocus to emphasise skills. The 1988–89 programme was modified to have an increased intake in the skilled category. However, the Hawke Labor Government (elected 1986) also embraced family reunion and ethnic diversity in the migrant intake, as an aspect of multiculturalism.6 Family reunion remained a strong element of the migration intake through to the late 1990s. Sponsorship of fiancées and spouses was unrestricted until the late 1980s: an acknowledgment that choice of spouse was a right of social citizenship. However, the late 1980s saw a marked increase in ‘onshore’ migrant applications on marriage grounds. In 1989–90, 9844 spousal visas were issued: 30 per cent of applications were for existing de facto relationships, and 40 per cent of applicants were living illegally in Australia (Birrell and Rapson 1998). Ninety-five per cent of applications were approved, as there was limited time to investigate visa applications (Birrell 1995, 9). There were media allegations of rorts of the immigration system through this visa category: that many were not ‘bona fide’ marriages; and that spousal migration led to high intakes of low-skilled non-­ English speaking migrants without skills to join the labour market. This, many argued, put a strain on the taxpayer-funded welfare system (especially unemployment and health benefits). This led to a questioning of the automatic rights for spousal migration and the provision of full welfare rights to newly migrated spouses. (Australia had not limited these rights as had already been the case in the USA and Britain). In response, in 1989 the government ‘tightened up’ this uncapped category by regulating that ‘applicants illegally in Australia could no longer apply on marriage or de facto grounds if their period of illegal stay exceeded one month’ (Birrell 1995, 10). The Government moved to bar onshore

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applications altogether, but this was dropped following protest from the National Population Council and inquiries by the relevant Parliamentary Committee (Birrell 1995, 10). Further regulations in April 1991 introduced a two-year probationary period after marriage for applying for PR status, for spouses sponsored onshore by their Australian resident partners. The couple had to demonstrate that ‘their marriage (de facto or de jure) was “genuine and continuing”’ (Birrell 1995, 11) to achieve PR.  They were required to present evidence including two statutory declarations from relatives or friends with knowledge of the relationship, proof of combined financial affairs, and evidence of the extent of public presentation as a couple. Applicants were required to provide details of living and domestic arrangements over the two-year period, and letters and phone accounts that proved continuous contact. The application fee was increased from AUD360 to AUD750, and applicants were restricted in access to welfare payments other than Medicare and income support and were required to pay the overseas student rates for education if s/he was a student. Overseas applicants were not subject to these changes—they were only required to present a marriage certificate. The Immigration Department scrutinised cases that seemed dubious, however—due to a significant age gap for example—in which case the parties were interviewed. The sponsor was asked, ‘Do you and your partner intend to maintain a lasting marital relationship?’ And ‘Was your relationship/marriage contrived solely to enable your partner to enter Australia?’ These changes were followed by a significant decline in onshore spouse visa applications but there was an increase in offshore applications from 1990–1991 to 1993–1994 from 17,000 to over 19,000. The immigration programme for 1992–93 was cut sharply during a recession, with the skilled intake almost halved and a reduction in family reunion migration for relatives such as adult brothers and sisters (Betts 2003). In 1996, the newly elected Howard Liberal Government, implemented their campaign promise of restricting immigration, sharpened the program’s economic focus, through the reduction of places for family-reunion migration, and a ‘strong emphasis on skilled migration’ (Betts 2003, 187). The election had been marked by the prominence of controversial figure Pauline Hanson who led the One Nation Party on an anti-immigration platform (Docker and Fischer 2000; Ricklefs 1999). The populist nativism which her party introduced into political debate was associated with a reduction in government commitment multiculturalism as the principal

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approach to the social and cultural consequences of migration. In July 1996, it was announced that there would be capping of family categories, specifically parents (4900), fiancé(e)s (1500) and aged dependent relatives and special need relatives (1100) for the 1996–1997 year (Birrell 1996). The family reunion stream shrank from 56,700 to 32,040.7 Waiting times between application and approval have grown and can take years. The fiancé(e) cap led to an increased number of applications from people who married overseas to avoid the restriction (Birrell 1996). These changes resulted in a fall in fiancée visas from 33,550 in 1995–1996 to 24,740 in 1998–1999. A cap could not be placed on the spousal visa category due to the protection of this right in the Immigration Act, which also disallows caps on dependent children (Betts 2003). Regulations for granting onshore fiancée visas included a two-year probationary period pending establishment of a bona fide relationship, and a requirement that the sponsor be an Australian citizen (Betts 2003, 178). In 1997, legislation passed that required de facto partners to have lived together for one year (previously six months) (Khoo 2001). Currently, following changes in 2021, applications for fiancée visas must be made from overseas, need to have a sponsor who is Australian citizen or PR, and the visa grants a stay of between nine and fifteen months, and the applicant is required to marry before the visa expires.8 Internet postings report waiting times of several years for approval. The planning level for the family stream in 2008–09 was set at 56,500 visas, which represents 32.9 per cent of the total migration programme. Higher priority was given to immediate family categories such as dependent children (including children for adoption), orphan relatives, partners, and fiancé(e)s. Lower priority was given to all other family stream applicants such as carers, remaining relatives, parents, and aged dependent relatives.9 These legislative changes have impacted on the way people have been able to manage their personal and family relationships. Some couples in our study reported that they had married with what they experienced as precipitous recklessness in cases where the prospective spouse entered Australia on a fiancée visa. Marriage in the Philippines gives more time to reflect on the relationship, but also can involve pressure and anxiety. The changes to marriage migration regulations reflect the increasing importance given to immigration as an economic category by Australian governments, and a waning concern for the welfare and caring needs of citizens and families that are addressed by immigration policies. The

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transcultural couples in our study discuss the ways they order their affairs to manage these regulations. The networks of transcultural couples in our research sites provide a space in people can share information on the administrative procedures involved, and how to manage them. Combatting Abuse of Vulnerable Women I have been exploring the historical origins of negative stereotypes of the partners to correspondence marriages, and there is no doubt that some of the women suffered violence at the hands of Australian men who demanded subservient wives (Roces 2021, 116–7). ‘The migrant women are more vulnerable to domestic violence and abuse than women in general’ (Roces 2021, 131) because regulation of marriage migration ‘binds female marriage migrants’ residency and citizenship rights to their gendered role within the marital family’ (Chu and Yeo 2021, 882). Marriage migrants are especially vulnerable before they achieve PR status (Saroca 2006). Newspaper reports have focused on sensational cases, including several homicides (Saroca 2006). Roces (2021, 130) reports that ‘between 1980 and 2011, forty-four women in cross-cultural marriages were killed by their husbands in Australia’ and that Filipinas in Australia were ‘nearly six times more likely to be victims of spousal homicide than Australian women in general’ (Roces 2021, 131). From the late 1980s, activist Filipino women in Australia were bringing cases of violence and abuse to public attention, in partnerships with women’s rights groups and the Migrant Resources Centres, part of the burgeoning organisational apparatus of multiculturalism. Their research found that the negative stereotypes promoted in the media and public discourse led some men to have unreasonable expectations of their wives, resorting to violence when the women did not meet the stereotyped expectations (Roces 2021, 132). The stigma of the failed marriage also weighed heavily on the women (ibid., 138). The activists took on the challenge of altering these stereotypes as well as changing the law and regulations (Bonifacio 2009). These women campaigned successfully for legal changes, acting together with government bodies like the Ethnic Communities Council and the Women’s Advisory Council in the state of NSW and national bodies like the Office for the Status of Women. Their efforts resulted in changes to the Immigration Law (1992) which determined that women migrants would not be deported if they had left violent partners, even if the two-year residency requirement for PR had not been met. Another

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achievement was the Serial Sponsorship Law (1994) that limits the number of potential fiancées that an individual can sponsor to two, and mandates with a five-year interval between. The activists achieved increased funding for support workers and culturally appropriate domestic violence services; and the Australian Embassy in Manila joined with Philippines government bodies to provide better briefings for prospective marriage migrants, including short films made specifically to inform them of the situation in Australia, and their legal rights (Roces 2021, 140–141; Saroca 2006). The activists have set up community services and developed information resources to support Filipina marriage migrants. This is discussed further in Chap. 4, including stories of the way Australian men with Filipina wives also become involved in community care. Welfare, the Family and Immigration Policy Since the 1980s the economic driver of immigration has been the skilled migrant scheme. Australian migration is characterised by patterns of chain migration, both from migrant communities formed through assisted passage and skilled migrant streams, and refugee streams such as Vietnam and Lebanon, from which Australia had accepted refugees in the 1970s. For the Australian Government, in practice, the family, especially the unpaid labour of women in caring roles, is a cornerstone of social welfare provision. Official government rhetoric links these concepts. The first welfare payment in Australia was ‘Child Endowment’, paid directly to mothers of young children, introduced by the post-war Liberal Menzies government. Orloff (1993) comments that policy debates about the relative roles of market and state in the social provisioning of welfare do not usually include consideration of the family, which in Australia has a key role. Recruiting single adult male workers is in contradiction with the valorising of the family as a pillar of provision of care. Visas to enable entry of spouses and fiancées is an acknowledgment of this—as well as signalling multiculturalism in practice. Critical Role of the Family in Welfare Provision The concepts of ‘family’ and ‘care’ are frequently paired by the transcultural couples that we interviewed, who carried a range of caring responsibilities in Australia and in the countries of origin of the immigrant spouses. Not infrequently, the couples were middle-aged or even elderly at the time

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of their marriage with one or both spouses in second marriages. Immigrant spouses have responsibility for children, grandchildren, and elderly parents still living overseas, including children nearing adulthood or grandchildren who are still financially dependent. Filipinas married to Australians tend to have higher levels of education than women in the Australian population overall. Many had middle-class occupations prior to migrating to Australia and have high aspirations for their children. One woman noted that she put off migrating for several years after she became engaged because her children were still studying in the Philippines. She discussed the problems she had in organising for her youngest child, still a dependent student, to come to Australia. This is difficult when the children are over 18, as the parents need to demonstrate financial dependence, rather than it being assumed. Before we went through the immigration in Adelaide, they gave us a form and it states there that a dependent should be 18 years old, and Anna was, I think she was about 19 years old, I think. And so, I said, it would be hard for Anna, if we were going to get her through the skilled migration we could not get her because she newly graduated, she did not have any experience for her work, so it would be hard for us. So we kept on asking and asking until we … were able to get more information regarding how to sponsor, what do you call this, child dependent and we are … supporting her with her educations. When we went to the immigration again, oh, they asked about the supporting papers, demanding if we are really supporting her, the … money we were sending her, and it is very good ‘coz we were able to show it.

The couple was able to make a creative response to the difficulties posed by migration categories. In the end they sponsored the daughter to come on a student visa. Philippines-born spouses frequently viewed their Australian marriages as advantageous to providing for families in the Philippines. In a typical story, one woman described how she takes money when she visits. ‘Giving a little bit is also a bit of help to them. You know the life in the Philippines is quite hard, even if you are helping … in emergencies, like help to pay electrical bills and phone bills and water bills’. One of the women, still in the Philippines awaiting her visa, expressed her desire to live in Australia in order to work and earn money to educate her children. Her Australian fiancé wanted to relocate his business to the

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Philippines, however,  as he saw this as financially advantageous, and he was also supporting children in tertiary education in Australia. Many of the spouses discussed how important it was to them that their Australian spouse was supportive of their transnational caring responsibilities. One woman commented: That’s what I love about [her husband] because he plans not only for me but for the children as well—he’s concerned about the children and that made him closer to me … Filipinos are family–oriented right? And when you get to marry someone or met someone from other countries, like the US or Australia, Canada, you have a better chance of going out of the country right? And then you can help out in the family, give your family a better life, I guess. At my age, I mean 47, it is really very hard to get a job right now, but I still want to pay for my daughter’s education’.

The limitations on family reunion, including the increasingly restrictive situation regarding parental visas, does not acknowledge the responsibilities that people in transnational families have for dependent relatives in other countries, while at the same time the Australian welfare system assumes a level of care from families for family members. Issues associated with transnational care for children and ageing parents, loom large for the families in our study. Social policy takes a narrow view of the state as welfare provider and denies or understates the tandem significance of the family in everyday provision of care. The shift away from the importance of family reunion policies, including spousal migration, reflects a diminution in the rights of social citizenship. Families are integral to regimes of care, and these are increasingly constituted through transnational networks.

Conclusion The ‘mail-order bride’ phenomenon is but another iteration in a history of selective female migration to correct demographic imbalances created by policies and practices (such as convict transportation) that favoured single male migration. The family as a site of personal life and care, as well as the site for social reproduction, puts pressure on singledom as an ‘unnatural’ state; marriage and parenthood are the culturally sanctioned stages in transition to adulthood. The family/household is the principal site for social

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reproduction, a status that is recognised in welfare and taxation policies, such as tax rebates to families with children. The negative stereotype of the ‘mail-order bride’ draws on suspicion of women embodied on the ‘Damned Whores’ stereotype, a largely unreflected legacy of the transportation era. In addition, the Filipinas who were the major partners of the correspondence marriage snail mail era were coming to Australia at a critical time in the development of Australia’s late twentieth century immigration policy, in an era of globalisation and a growing awareness of our place in the word, that has increasingly encompassed Asian immigration and the dissolution of the White Australia Policy in the post-Vietnam war era. The Australian immigration intake has moved steadily towards an emphasis on skilled migration and a reduction in the possibilities for the issuing of visas based on considerations of transnational family networks. This comes at a time when Australia’s citizens are ever increasingly linked into transnational social and cultural networks, through travel, communication networks like the internet, and networks formed through historical migration. These networks are critical foundations of Australia’s multicultural society and there is a risk that the elevation of economic migration will side line forms of migration linked to personal relationships, family care and the nurturing of multiculturalism.

Notes 1. Lake (1993) identifies significant shift in sexuality and gender relations in the period after WW2 which she attributes to women moving outside the home to support the war effort; and their romantic engagements with US soldiers, who did not act towards them in terms of the ‘Damned Whores’ or ‘Gods Police’ stereotypes and acknowledged their sexuality. 2. Iuliano (1999). Reports that Italian men subject to prejudice, regarded as not suitable as potential spouses for Australian women of Anglo heritage 3. There are many other literary evocations of this era in Australian migration history. See also Patrikareas (2001). 4. The Italian newspaper La Fiamma, published in Australia since 1947, had provided a similar service for Italian men seeking Italian brides. 5. This term for the presumed lifestyle of Anglo Australians became common in national discourse in the period following Word War 2, (White 1981, 158) concurrent with the waves of organised migration from non-­ Anglophone countries.

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6. Australia’s policy in regard to its migrant population had officially shifted from Assimilation to Multiculturalism in 1978 under the Fraser Government, in accord with recommendations of the Galbally Report in the context of government programmes and services for migrants. 7. Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. 2002. Population Flows: Immigration Aspects (Canberra: Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs), 17. 8. https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-­a -­v isa/visa-­l isting/ prospective-­marriage-­300#. Updated 5 December 2023, accessed 12 December 2023 9. Department of Immigration and Citizenship. 2009 ‘Fact Sheet 37  – Processing Priorities’, produced by the National Communications Branch, Canberra, revised 1 July 2009.

Works Cited Appleyard, Reginald, Anna Amera, and John Yiannakis. 2015. Black night, white day. Greece-born women in Australia. Rydalmere NSW: Avago Books. Australian Government. 2023. Migration planning levels: Immigration and citizenship. https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-­we-­do/migration-­program-­ planning-­levels Development and Migration Commission. 1929. Australia invites the British domestic girl. Melbourne. Trove. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-­281610782/ view?partId=nla.obj-­281679423#page/n2/mode/1up. Accessed 16 June 2023. Behrendt, Larissa. 2000. Consent in a (neo)colonial society: Aboriginal women as sexual and legal ‘other’. Australian Feminist Studies 15 (33): 353–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/713611984. Baldassar, Loretta, and Laura Merla, eds. 2014. Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: Understanding mobility and absence in family life. New York: Routledge. Betts, Katharine. 2003. Immigration policy under the Howard Government. Australian The proxy bride. Harper 38 (2): 169–192. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/j.1839-­4655.2003.tb01141.x. Birrell, Bob, and Virginia Rapson. 1998. The 1998/1999 immigration program. People and Place 6 (2): 24–36. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.990100193. Birrell, Bob. 1995. Spouse migration to Australia, People and Place 3(1): 9–16. Birrell, Bob. 1996. Managing the 1996-1997 preferential family program: Implications of recent capping decisions. People and Place 4 (3): 68–70. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.970504493. Boccabella, Zoe. 2022. The proxy bride. Harper Collins.

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Bonifacio, Glenda Lynne Anne Tibe. 2009. Activism from the margins: Filipino marriage migrants in Australia. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 30 (3): 142–168. Curthoys, Ann. 1988. For and against feminism. A personal journey into feminist theory and history. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Chu, Tuen Yi, and Brenda Yeo. 2021. Marriage migration, family and citizenship in Asia. Citizenship Studies 25 (7): 879–897. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13621025.2021.1968680. Daniels, Kay, and Mary Murnane. 1989. Australia’s women: A documentary history from a selection of personal letters, diary entries, pamphlets, official records, government and police reports, speeches and radio talks. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. 2000. Population flows: Immigration aspects. Canberra: Australia. Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. 2002. Population flows: Immigration aspects. Canberra: Australia. Department of Immigration and Citizenship. 2009. Fact sheet 37: Processing priorities. Canberra: National Communications Branch. Docker, John, and Gerhard Fischer. 2000. Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: UNSW Press. Gothard, Janice. 2001. Blue China: Single female migration to colonial Australia. Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Hamilton, Annette. 1990. Fear and desire: Aborigines, Asians and the national imaginary. Australian Cultural History 9: 14–35. Hornage, Bill. 1976 [1971]. Dubbo NSW: Review Publications. Hughes, Robert. 1988. The fatal shore: A history of the transportation of convicts to Australia 1787–1868. London: Pan Books. Jackson, Richard T., and Ester Revilleza Flores. 1989. No Filipinos in Manilla: A study of Filipino migrants in Australia. Townsville: Department of Geography, James Cook University. Iuliano, Susaana. 1999. Donne Ebuoi dia paesi Tuoi. (Choose women and oxen from your home village): Italian proxy marriages in post-war Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues 34 (4): 319–335. https://doi. org/10.1002/j.1839-­4655.1999.tb01083.x. Kendall, Norah. 1998. With nought but kin behind them: The shetland of its early emigrants. Victoria: Norah Kendall. Khoo, Siew-Ean. 2001. The context of spouse migration to Australia. International Migration 39 (1): 111–132. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­2435.00137. Lake, Marilyn. 1993. A revolution in the family: The challenge and contradictions of maternal citizenship in Australia. In Mothers in a new world, ed. S. Koven and M. Sonya. London: Routledge.

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Lo, Jacqueline. 2002. Miscegenation’s dusky human consequences. Postcolonial Studies 5 (3): 297–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/1368879022000032801. McClaughlin, Trevor. 1991. Barefoot and pregnant: Irish famine orphans in Australia. Melbourne: The Genealogical Society of Victoria Inc. McKay, Deirdre. 2003. Filipinas in Canada: Deskilling as a push toward marriage. In Women in motion: Asian marriage and migration, ed. Nicola Piper and Mina Roces M, 23–52. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Orloff, Ann S. 1993. Gender and the social rights of citizenship. American Sociological Review 58 (3): 303–328. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095903. Patrikareas, Theo. 2001. The promised woman, performance by sidetrack performance group, street theatre, Canberra, 9 March. Published (2000) In Antipodean trilogy: Three Greek-Australian plays, edited by: Sophocleous, M. A. Melbourne: RMIT. Piper, Nicola, and Mina Roces, eds. 2003. Wife or worker?:Asia. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Pertierra, Raul. 2007. Introduction. In The social construction and usage of communication technologies: Asian and European experiences, ed. R. Pertierra, xiii– xxxiv. Quezon City: The University of The Philippines Press. Richards, Eric, ed. 1995. Visible women: Female immigrants in Colonial Australia. Canberra: Highlands Press. Ricklefs, Merle Calvin. 1999. Manson, Hanson and the new tribalism. Melbourne: Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Society. Roces, Mina. 2021. The Filipino migrant experience: Global agents of change. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Rowley, Charles D. 1970. The destruction of Aboriginal society: Aboriginal policy and practice. Vol. 1. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Robinson, Kathryn. 1982. Filipino brides: Slaves or marriage partners?—A comment. Australian Journal of Social Issues 17 (1): 166–170. https://doi. org/10.1002/j.1839-­4655.1982.tb00731.x. Rushen, Elizabeth A. 2003. Single & free: Female migration to Australia 1833–1837. Victoria: Anchor Books Australia. Russell, Penny, ed. 1994. For richer, for poorer: Early colonial marriages. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Saroca, Cleonicki. 2006. Filipino women, migration and violence in Australia: Lived reality and media image. Kasarinlan: Philippine. Journal of Third World Studies 21 (1): 75–110. Scriver, Peter. 2012. Mosques, ghantowns and cameleers in the settlement history of Colonial Australia. Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 13 (2): 19–41. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10331867.2004.10525182.

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Summers, Anne. 1975. Damned whores and God’s police: The colonization of women in Australia. Ringwood Vic: Penguin Books. Wardrop, Susi B. 1996. By proxy. A study of Italian proxy brides in Australia. Melbourne: Italian Historical Society. White, Richard. 1981. Inventing Australia: Images and identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Zug, Marcia A. 2016. Buying a bride. An engaging history of mail-order matches. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER 3

‘An Ocean of Fishes’: Negotiating Love Online

Abstract  Suspicion of the motives of partners seeking transnational marriages is compounded when mediated courtship moves to the space of the internet, where authenticity is in question. This chapter investigates the experiences of online courtship and the ways that those questing for romance safely navigate and make use of this expanded space for seeking global romance. Keywords  Intimacy • Courtship • Internet • Mediated marriage • Romance • Authenticity • Online dating • Masculinity • Femininity • ‘KASAL’ web site • Global inequality • Filipinas • Masculinity • Femininity • Stereotype

Finding Intimacy, Reconfiguring Gender Relations in a Virtual World Internet dating just makes it more easier If it turn out its not for real U get burn but not killed So u move on … Hey, this happens in real life too

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 K. Robinson, Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9033-7_3

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If its real, then be happy Can it be real? Why not? Time will tell you if it is … This happens in real life too … huh? Me, I found the love of my life And I pray to god everyday to bless the relationship. Posting in ‘Kasal’, a ‘Fil-West’ chat room, 44-year-old Filipina, engaged to a ‘Western’ man who she met online.

Transcultural international marriages are increasingly a feature of our globalising world. The World Wide Web (WWW) offers a space for the expansion of intimacy and interpersonal relations beyond our immediate localities, a feature of ‘time-space compression’ (Massey 1994). This chapter explores the experience of adult subjects pursue intimacy and attachment in transcultural relationships in the mediated environments of the internet. Dating, ‘hooking up’, and courtship online have become commonplace in a  networked world, but in public discourse there is still suspicion of transnational internet-mediated marriages—especially when they involve men from countries of the wealthy global North and women from poorer nations of the global South. The pejorative stereotype ‘mail-order bride’ originating in an earlier mode of correspondence courtship, is used to describe such relationships. The opprobrium deriving from the ‘mail-­ order bride’ stereotype (Robinson 2007) clings to transcultural North-­ South romantic relationships, even though, as the respondents in our study were keen to point out, meeting partners on the internet is not confined to transnational/transcultural relationships but is an increasing feature of modern life everywhere. This, of course intensified in the years of social isolation during COVID, and is a topic frequently discussed in the media—see for example Lang (2021). An (often implicit) assumption that ‘real’ intimacy, ‘real ‘relationships cannot be established in a text-based communication medium where individuals can use artifice in the presentation of self is the bedrock of negative framing: an assumption that the kind of intimacy presumed to be requisite for marriage cannot be achieved in these circumstances (see e.g., Bauman 2003).

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Discussion of intimate relationships formed in the virtual world of the internet is frequently linked to discussion of other kinds of encounters in the WWW—especially those in the realm of ‘fantasy’—with allegations that the internet is wide open to deception, fraud and hence an inappropriate place to be establishing intimate relationships. This perception is reinforced by media exposés: for example, the TV show Catfish in which tech-savvy investigators expose people who have manipulated others by performing false personas (often promising romance and relationships) online; and the news stories ‘outing’ on-line scams, including those in which women are financially and emotionally defrauded by consortia of men through online courtship of vulnerable women (see e.g., ABC 2019). This chapter addresses the ways people seek and establish intimacy in online communications, reporting on research conducted with an online community of ‘Fil-West’ heterosexual couples; and interviews with heterosexual couples conducting online courtship in Australia and the Philippines. Researcher Saroca was able to conduct participant observation on a website established for a self-acknowledged community of ‘Fil-­ West’ (Filipino/Western) couples (some courting, some already married) to which we have given the pseudonym KASAL (meaning ‘marriage’) (Saroca 2012).1 The KASAL site is a public venue with a multinational membership in which people ‘act out’ their relationship in the presence of other ‘community’ members.2 It is diligently moderated, intended as a safe space where people can interact with others who share their life goals and experiences. Membership of the virtual community of KASAL is defined by their ‘Fil-West’ relationships. Posters use signatures that announce this identity, for example Amira uses ‘can’t wait to be with each other in November.’ From this site, researcher Saroca was able to recruit a number of people willing to be interviewed, in person and online (see Appendix). Established in the USA, its active participants were also in Australia, Canada, and Europe as well as in the Philippines. According to the site moderator, about 50% of the KASAL subscribers met their partners via the internet, many from specific dating/matchmaking sites, but this was not necessarily the case. The site is now defunct, but I write in the present tense when discussing the forum and its participants to retain the sense of it as a dynamic interacting community where people engage in real time. Transcultural unions engage gendered subjectivities and gender relations, requiring their renegotiation and transformation. What are the

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constraints and possibilities for women as social agents, and for malefemale relations, in the negotiation of intimate partnerships by way of the internet? Structures of gender relations are historical assemblages, constantly shifting and realigning. RW Connell (2002, 62–65) has identified emotional attachment (or cathexis) as a critical structure of gender relations, alongside power relations, production relations, and gender symbolism. In the contemporary world, structures of gender are located within global political economy and notably in the case of transnational marriage express hierarchies among men and masculinities on a global scale. How do negotiations in regard to intimacy, marriage, and family relations in this global field engage and potentially reconfigure gender relations? Is the Internet Another Place? Is It Something Altogether Novel? The internet is a space for expansion of intimacy and interpersonal relations. While correspondence marriage is not a new phenomenon, but there is something ‘qualitatively different’ about how the internet has turned ‘correspondence into more than a method of introduction and into a community in a larger sense’ (Constable 2003, 50). The internet allows for the ‘articulation of pre-existing group identities, while it simultaneously creates opportunities for breakdown, violation or calling into question of more narrowly conceived boundaries of local groups, local communities, and nations that are replaced in turn by new expressions and imaginings of global and transnational identities’ (Constable 2003, 51). Stone (1995) asks, what is new about social networking by way of the communication technology of the post-mechanical age? She gives two answers: 1. Nothing: ‘The tools of networking are essentially the same as they have been since the telephone, which was the first electronic network prosthesis’ (1995, 15). Computers are essentially ‘engines of calculation’ that store information. 2. Everything. ‘Computers are arenas for social experience and dramatic interaction, a type of media more like public theatre, and their output is used for qualitative interactions, dialogue, and conversation. Inside the little box are other people’ (Stone 1995, 16).

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While the internet allows for new kinds of possibilities, new imaginings, and connections, it also extends existing social practices. The internet is continuous with, and embedded in, other social spaces, and mundane social relations that it may transform, but it cannot escape into self-­ enclosed cyberspace apartness. In their study of Trinidadians use of the internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2000), note ‘alignments’ and ‘elective affinities’ between internet use and what being a Trinidadian is supposed to mean. The negative ‘mail order bride‘ stereotype expresses suspicion, even ‘moral panic’, about relationships contracted in cyberspace that critics see disembodied from the ‘real social world’. I have encountered this suspicion each time I have presented this research to academic audiences, for example. These fears are also expressed by the people we interviewed, who set in place strategies for testing the ‘presentation of self’ by people they engaged with on the internet, to test that they were displaying ‘authentic’ selves (see below). However, virtuality is not just a feature of the internet (Miller and Slater 2000). As Benedict Anderson (1983) famously demonstrated, our sense of national belonging, the idea of belonging to something bigger than a face-to-face community, is ‘imagined’; and historically the idea of citizen was mediated through print. The men and women in Constable’s study of transnational marriages form ‘an imagined global community that builds on commonalities of gender and nationality, yet also crosses national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries’ (Constable 2003, 11). There is a confluence of gender and nationality in Constable’s study: most of the women are Filipina or Chinese and most of the men from the USA. In the case of the KASAL online community that is discussed here, the women are Filipina and the men are from ‘The West’. KASAL provides an imaginative space for a global community of ‘Fil-West’ unions, within which gender stereotypes, gender relations, and expectations of masculinity and femininity are negotiated.3 This imagined community, like that explored by Constable, ‘both traverses and reinforces state boundaries and definitions of citizenship’ (Constable 2003, 11).

The Internet as a Space of ‘Community’? Why does Constable (2003) see the online dating websites as communities? Chatrooms like KASAL become sources of information and support for the men and, in the case of KASAL, the women, who seek transnational marriages. They provide a space in which their questing and effort

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are not belittled or treated with suspicion, as may happen within their families or workplaces. The chatroom provided an ersatz kinship network (Constable 2003) much like the networks and organisations of Asian-­ Australian couples discussed in Chap. 4. The virtual relations blend into ‘offline’ kin and friendship networks as members endeavour to find spouses for family and friends. Members share personal and family milestones to the community. They discuss issues of expectations and adjustments in cross-cultural marriages, to ready ‘ears’ who are keen to advise and sympathise. For the people posting on KASAL, the desire to forge deeper relationships and especially the intention to marry results in the virtual world blending into face-to-face relations: people use all available means of communication, including webcam, online messaging—including using emoticons (Saroca 2012)—telephone calls, ‘snail mail’ letters and packages, as well as visits to cement their relationships. Every year there is exponential growth in social media technologies: Facebook, Instagram and similar social networking platforms as well as communication through Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, email and texting provide an ever-expanding toolbox for online communication. The internet is only part of the assemblage of modes of communication. Our interlocutors share a sense that although online communication allows for the development of a high degree of intimacy there is a need to ‘fill out’ the strands of communication, to expand the range of sensory experience of the desired subject—to see photos and live images, hear a voice, to meet in person and touch. The internet is continuous with other social spaces. Gershon (2010) provides the insight that when people communicate by way of new media forms, they draw on strategies from older forms, which she terms ‘remediation’. Online courtship using email correspondence and instant messaging and other forms of social media exhibits a continuity with the tradition of writing love letters in courtship. Gershon (2010) discusses the lack of standardisation of what she calls ‘netiquette’ as people make wrong assumptions about shared communication conventions, but this is also true of the communications our interview subjects reported from a pre-internet age. Resourcefulness in seeking out additional ways of communicating was also evident in the courtship stories of people who had conducted ‘snail mail ‘courtship: they describe expanding the repertoire of communication strategies, to sending packages and arranging landline calls before getting

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to meet face to face. For both ‘snail mail’ and internet styles of transnational courtship, the ideal trajectory involves expanding the repertoire of communication, including to ‘offline’. By contrast, Ben-Ze’ev (2004) reports that people seeking sexual encounters (rather than romance) in cyberspace express caution about whether or not to cross the line between the virtual (the realm of the imaginative) and the real, through adding telephone calls and face-to- face meetings—especially people seeking sexual encounters outside established relationships’. KASAL: Online Intimacy and Courtship/Transnational Cross-Cultural Relationships What communicative practices for the ‘the presentation of self’ have developed in this digital environment? In particular, how do posters on the KASAL site narrate their experiences of negotiating authenticity and trust, and the intimacy fundamental to adult conjugal relationships? Through postings on the KASAL site, individuals and couples explore the personal, bureaucratic, and logistic issues around their transnational, cross-cultural relationships. Posts indicate that the shared experiences generate a sense of community, that is the feeling of sharing a common fate, and a common social field. Postings are redolent with invocations of community: ‘Welcome to the forum’ is a common post to newcomers, and ‘I thank everyone here at KASAL’. Part of the site is restricted to women, where members give careful and considerate advice, exposing their own problems and how they are addressing them. ‘All of us in this section …’ captures the sense of shared female experience. People who are otherwise strangers provide personal information and advice for others. The site also leads to community -building in the offline world, to ‘face-to-face’ social relationships with Fil-West couples making contact with others who live in their area via the site. The KASAL site provides the opportunity for people seeking mediated transnational courtship to express and represent themselves. (The site was moderated, but only to prevent offensive postings.) This is in contrast to the profiles on commercial match-making sites which have been analysed by many scholars (see Chap. 1). These may be edited and doctored, or posted by third parties. Indeed, several of the people we interviewed who had used these sites reported that they did not post their own notices, or that their own texts were edited before publication.

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Posters on KASAL invite people to tell the stories of their transnational cross-cultural relationships: the experience that binds them as a community. Members draw on a common set of tropes of romance: seeking, discovery, mutual recognition, love, and intimacy. Intimacy is expressed by respondents as a feeling of being open to the other, being able to share experiences and feelings, also described as the ‘opening up’ of a shared space within which the couple came to know each other. Indeed ‘opening up’ was a common trope to describe what one woman on the site called ‘disclosing intimacy’. Men and women deploy shared narrative conventions in their love stories and in recounting romantic journeys (see below). In narrating their courtship, they engage a romantic discourse of shared tropes—to do with finding, discovery, and recognition: finding ‘The One’; the ‘spark’ that ignites feeling; questing to understand the ‘authentic’ self of the other; and finding a ‘soul mate’.

Favourite Narratives, Stories and Tropes How Do People Meet? Stories of how couples met are popular subjects for posting on KASAL. The moderator posted a survey that revealed about 50 per cent of the members are in relationships in which they met by way of the internet. Some had met through online introduction sites, including sites using ‘snail mail’ (postal services). One poster sang the praises of the Cherry Blossom site, (now Blossoms Dating https://www.blossoms.com) reputedly the oldest of the internet-based ‘catalogue’ sites for Asian women seeking relationships. The man reported that the site had proven more successful in his quest to marry than trips to the Philippines. Others met spouses through mail correspondence with women from a site called Filipinaladies.com, while another man accessed names from a site run by his church listing women from several Asian countries. This site did not publish photographs, framing the quest for a spouse in terms of the self-expressed through text and not through physical attraction evoked by a photo. The use of the internet to seek a spouse is not isolated from other ways of questing to find a life-long partner. The internet is continuous with, and embedded in, other social spaces and mundane social relations that it may transform. Many of the stories of our interlocutors show the internet extending social practices found everywhere, of friends and family seeking

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spouses for their loved ones. One KASAL member experienced oddly personalised match making: It was the day before New Year’s, my car broke down in a small town in California on vacation. While waiting for the towing service, I encountered an older Filipino woman who started a conversation with me. I was telling her about my life and where I was from and she told me, I’m going to have to send my niece after you, you’re adorable. She showed me her wallet-sized picture and I was stunned by her cuteness. I asked her if I could write to her and she gave me her address, I started writing her and things moved so fast. I just got back from Visayas and now we are engaged ‘(KASAL signature: American male, status engaged).

Relationships commonly arise out of internet-mediated connections, other than dating sites, for example in chat rooms, gaming or work-based web communication where the overt purpose is not to seek a partner. Virtuality is not the key: the online relationship is not about simulacra, disconnected from the real. One of the site moderators (an American male) told his story: I met my wife through the internet but it was not through any chat or dating/pen-pal services. She mistyped a websearch … and she simply clicked on my e-mail address and sent me an e-mail complimenting the … website. I replied and we began to correspond through e-mail then phone calls. 1 year later we met face to face and 2 years later we were married.

People engaged in internet courtship also report initial introductions through family or friends, which can be online, such as through email, with the courtship then proceeding via the internet. This is discussed further in Chap. 4. Constable (2003) found couples who met through correspondence would affect introductions for other friends and family members. Responses to ads on matchmaking sites that a woman did not wish to follow up were passed on to friends. Several women told stories of courtship that began after friends (not themselves) posted their details on a matchmaking site: a male KASAL member narrated that his (now) wife’s details had been posted by a friend, so she was surprised to receive mail from him and several other men. An American man told his story on KASAL, of spending nineteen years looking for his ‘missing Rib [sic]’. His attempts at online dating were not successful; he met some Filipinas who were ‘scammers’.

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Then a filipina friend of mine who started her own penpal site connected me with her cousin. I was reluctant at first, then she explained that her cousin had a lot of the same life experiences that I’ve had. That we had some commonalities, and we had a good chance of hitting it off together. The rest is history, and we are having our beach wedding in Cebu this October.

The optimistic conclusion, ‘The rest is history’ is a popular narrative device on KASAL, carrying the meaning that the path forward to marriage and a life together had begun. The ‘Spark’ The common elements in the narratives of romantic love provide a unifying device for the global community of KASAL. One of the most popular tropes is the ‘spark’, the moment when the other is recognised as ‘The One’. Many posters narrate writing to a number of ‘penpals’ but recognising almost immediately when they find The One. [I]… began writing snail-mail letters to some filipinas on a pen-pal site … [About two months after the first batch of letters] I made my first contact with my sweet Mina via e-mail, and the rest is history! … I can’t say what it was or what fate of ‘chemistry’ we had during our initial contacts which drew us together. But something between Mina and I definitely clicked … More do than with other Filipinas I had written to or spoken with over the phone at that time. My Mina stood out … like a searchlight in a dark forest! … I went to meet her for the first time … And to tell you frankly it wasn’t like meeting some strange woman I had never met face-to-face. It was more like meeting an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was the darnest [sic] thing that either of us had ever done in our lives. But it worked, and it’s still working’ (Herb, American, divorced).

While for Herb the ‘spark’ was ignited during online communication, for many, the ‘spark’ is related as being experienced on the first face-to-­ face meeting, the expectation built up through months of communication, through email, and other media such as instant messaging, webcam and telephone. The face-to-face meeting has a crucial role in cementing the bond in these narratives.

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Communication and Getting to Know One another Questioning the possibility of finding a ‘mate’ via the internet is not uncommon among the people interviewed in the research, or the posters on KASAL.  A debate about intimacy and love in internet romance was sparked by a KASAL-er who commented that both he and a Filipina friend, who had met her American husband at the Clark airbase, felt that: Neither of us had any good logic as to why someone would ‘actively seek’ a mate from abroad on the internet. Its obviously not realistic to think someone could fall in love with someone they’ve never met, or even consider that person a bf or gf. Maybe they could fall in love with the ‘idea’ or the ‘fantasy’, but [I feel] to have never met the person and now say they are in love is strange.

His invitation to others to comment invoked a flood of comments; most of them protesting his stance, seeing his logic as inappropriate to ‘affairs of the heart’, or at the very least, contrary to their own experience. An American man replied by asking, ‘What does it take to fall in love? Meeting someone? Touching them? Sleeping with them?’ He answers his own question, ‘It is communication’, adding that relationships that start the ‘normal way’ crash and burn ‘so who is to say what is right and what is wrong?’ A Canadian man invokes the variety of ways to get to marriage, including arranged marriages, and takes up the issue of communication: Why did I go the internet route? Well I really wanted to get to know the person ‘inside’ before I got involved too deeply in a relationship. I … found that while physical attraction is powerful, if either of us didn’t have a deep connection, the relationship stalled. With my filipina … we talk about things deeply. I have opened up to her more than anyone else I ever have. When I finally met her in person I knew that our attraction was like two lifelong friends as well as mates … having to work as hard as we do to communicate, my lady and I are now able to discuss subjects I normally would be uncomfortable with. The distance between us forces us to work even harder.

He concludes internet or foreign romances are not for everybody ‘but for those unable to find that partner who they really “connect with” … it is really a good, viable and honest option.’ (KASAL post).

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The pragmatic side of these stories are also very important to members: meeting face–to-face, negotiating engagements and marriages, and organising visas. Personal stories are often summarised in the signatures that posters employ, that note the significant dates in their romantic journeys and the path through officialdom (see below). The Internet Compared with Other Ways of Dating Posters on KASAL are enthusiastic about this way of partnering. Support for the idea of the internet providing a space for the development of deep intimacy was universal amongst couples who had courted this way. Several interviewees compared courtship by way of online chatting and email with other kinds of dating and concluded that the internet actually provides a superior or enhanced way of communicating and developing a deep relationship with someone. A common position is the assertion that intimacy developed by face-to-­ face relations with people of similar cultural background is no guarantee of success. An American man, now repartnered with a Filipina notes: ‘My first wife and I knew each other from Jr High and were together 10 years! We knew each other inside out right? Apparently not! [emoticon of sad face] After 3 years of marriage she found a bf’. Contrary to the image of speed conjured up by the motif of ‘time space compression’ in the interconnected, globalised world, many of those who have successfully partnered on the internet express appreciation of the time it allows to get to know the other person, and the opportunity to gradually build intimacy.4 ‘I have told things to my honey that I have never told anyone’, one man posted on KASAL. The slow pace of sending and response is perhaps compounded by slow download speeds in some internet cafés which many of the women use. The slow pace of getting to know someone allows space for lengthy communication and for intimate and interpersonal relations to develop. Lots of the postings discuss the time and effort people put into developing their relationships, often comparing the experience favourably with other modes of ‘partnering’. Checking for Authenticity ‘Floribeth’ posts her story on KASAL.  She discovered internet chatting while spending time in a cybercafé when she ‘ran away’ from her job for a

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few days. She enjoyed this new experience, so she then bought a personal computer. Although she enjoyed chatting, she shared the view that the WWW was a space where people were ‘inauthentic’. At first I never consider people online a[sic] real. In my mind, I thought that all people there are making and building their own world away or too different from reality. Though I met some real nice friends online (mostly girls), it never changed my opinion coz I found out that most of those people I met are ‘plastic’ (girls or boys) as in not even 50% of what they portray online or in the chat rooms, though a couple are real … a magical moment came on june 8 2002 I got an e-mail from a Midwesterner guy (my hubby now) while I was online and answered it right away. From that day onwards, we started to talk online and on phone every day…[at that time he was corresponding with 10 women but he narrates that he gave them all up within a week] but then I had doubts about it, thinking how can he have that strong feeling for me right away, and worst telling all those girls who replied not to prolong their friendship with him coz he doesn’t wanna lose me. Btw, he offered me his msn password coz he sensed my doubts … after a month we formally became bf/gf and never considered ourselves as online bf/gf. coz I realized then INTERNET RELATIONSHIP can really happen for real based on my own experience. Falling madly in love to the most sweetest and sincere person I have ever met and talked to in my entire life … after our first ‘I love you’ … he arranged for his trip here right away. Though it was his decision to meet me right away, I agreed on that though coz we had to complete the puzzle … and it can only be done by meeting the person … the big day came … first meeting at the airport—it was so touching that I almost cried with so much happiness coz once we had our first eye contact, we both knew we’re really meant for each other. From that moment, the puzzle was already complete, and the rest is history (Posted by woman, married, in Philippines).

This story exemplifies common sentiments expressed in other web postings and also in interviews with couples who met and courted on the internet: concern about trust and authenticity, and the importance of proof of trust (in this case him giving her his MSN password). But the story also exemplifies another common experience: That the internet provides a way to build a relationship slowly and at the same time, it can be a very intense experience. It illustrates the rapid development of intensity of feeling in online communication, where people frequently report that they very quickly move to spending hours each day online with a person with whom they feel ‘sympatico. Intense feelings develop in a matter of weeks.

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Meeting is seen as ‘completing the puzzle’, a commonly used trope. The first eye contact is also popular theme, a way of narrating the ‘spark’, the connection that is necessary for the relationship to develop. This woman uses the phrase common in KASAL posts, ‘the rest is history’, meaning the story goes on to conclude in marriage. The terms this woman uses to describe her husband, ‘sweetest, sincere’, are common expressions for a desired partner on the KASAL site, the antithesis of the feared ‘inauthentic’ and predatory online correspondent. Discussion about presentation of self in online chat rooms evokes contradictory views. In addition to positive expressions about the virtues of getting to know someone slowly, posters on KASAL also express anxiety that one can pretend to be anyone, that one cannot trust that you are encountering the ‘authentic self’ of the people you meet. This position draws on the popular ‘moral panic’ in regard to virtual communication. Photos are very important for some: Flordeliza says she was motivated to write to a penpal agency (a website) because she had a photo taken and it was very good. She saw the photo as representing her as desirable. Her husband said his main surprise on meeting her was how tiny she was—she had overestimated her height by an inch. KASAL posters acknowledge that the internet is recognised a space where there are risks: women speak of encountering men who are ‘perverts’, men talk about experiences of being ‘scammed’. Women acknowledge that ‘some Filipina honestly marry only for money’ (KASAL post). Many mention they have had internet encounters with people where they felt used or let down. These histories sometimes inflect the unfolding relationship, for example in creating barriers to developing trust, or at least making people aware of the need to ‘test’ the authenticity and good intentions of the other. But KASAL is also a space where people on the site share tips about how to ‘test’ authenticity and the good intentions of the other. These are some: One thing with the Internet, easy to use fake photos, but its harder to use fake photos of other people continuously and get away with it if you send actual photos like thru mail. Warning!!! Better ask the guy or gal for plenty of photos if trying to get to know by long-distance. Or if they’re not sending photos frequently, that’s a red flag!!! And if you’re getting to know someone and they won’t give out a phone number or cell number, there better be a good reason. Find out why. Call his phone number, if he lives

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alone, if a woman answers and its not his mom or sister, uh oh!! Call her cellphone, if it’s a man’s voice, look out!! … If she’s not introducing you to family members after a while, you have to wonder why. Don’t get scammed!!! If he’s not offering to introduce you to his family members, does his family not approve? Better find out why (Marikit, KASAL post).

In an interview with one of the couples in Australia involved with KASAL, both husband and wife mentioned an incident where the man was surprised to receive a call in his workplace from the woman soon after they began chatting online. She explained that she had intentionally been ‘checking up’ on him. Speaking about ‘proof of love’ or commitment, one Filipina (married to an American) commented: After corresponding with someone and deciding to meet them, you must spend several thousand dollars. Which requires a lot more commitment than meeting someone you found in the local personal [ads].… It also requires a greater emotional involvement, unless you’re wealthy. So its not unusual for men and women in these relationships to develop rather strong bonds before meeting. Whether they should fall in love at this point is another topic altogether, of course (Carmelita, KASAL).

Interpersonal communication in face-to-face encounters relies on the many cues available, such as facial expressions and body gestures, appearance, or the setting (Goffman 1956) that embellish and enrich verbal communication and verbal cues. In the online environment of email or messaging these cues are lacking—but people communicating online look for other ‘cues’ or ‘clues’ that enrich what most acknowledge is a relatively impoverished communication setting. Emoticons (of which, since the 1980s, there are an ever-increasing number) are used in posts to express emotion, in the absence of cues such as facial expression, body language, or voice in internet-based communication. But these conventions for signing emotion and of facial expression using emoticons can lead to misunderstandings. They may be useful to express the emotions that the writer wishes to communicate. However, problems arise due to the emotions they choose to conceal or those for which cannot find ways to express (see story of ‘the ring’ below).

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Strategies are shared and interpreted in the section of KASAL reserved for women. A Filipina, previously widowed and now remarried in the USA talked about taking up chatting, with both good and bad experiences. Her story relates some of the ‘cues’ that people look for, to verify that the person is authentic. Emails reveal more of the inner person. Chatting with webcam verified the identity (and the almost real-time conversation further verified that no-one else had been involved in the previous communication) without endangering myself by premature meeting in person … Physical attraction through photos was the initial step. Building trust and confidence in the person through a long period of endless e-mails and chat were another. The net KEPT ME SAFE against being a prey to men who would be itching to take advantage of a vulnerable widow … The net also gave me more option [sic]. In the Philippines, being a widow with two kids … was already a factor to lower my status, despite the status of being a doctor granted to a woman … The NET was an ocean full of fishes, and I actually learned that having children did not present as a hindrance to finding a good man worldwide; rather, it lifted my status … And because the net was a fast-paced communication tool, many things about the person could be learned in such a short time (which amazed me then). Emails presented an opportunity to see consistency, and reading between the lines also gave insightful info into the personality of the sender. Chatting provided the chance to gentle interrogation that often catches the other person off-hand. As such it has been a viable avenue for building trust and an emotional attachment so strong, it could only be fathomed by those of US WHO HAVE ACTUALLY UNDERGONE THE SAME EXPERIENCE[sic] … One thing for sure, the net is a better place to look for [a mate] than the bar (Alma, KASAL).

Some Kinds of Interpersonal Interactions Are Enhanced by Technologies Other cues that people expressed as helping to developing trust included punctuality—people being online to chat when they had promised to be— mindful of the sacrifices people made in re-ordering their lives to chat across time zones and around work commitments. In a similar vein, a study of online dating Ellison et al.( 2006) reported on ways people used textual cues; one woman stated that she would not pursue someone if their profile was poorly presented, for example with spelling mistakes.

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A man now married to a Filipina commented that his then girlfriend had told him she was a volunteer for a poverty-alleviation organisation (NGO). When chatting on webcam, he was able to see her domestic environment. Webcam, or technologies like Skype, Zoom, and Facetime potentially enable a view into the other person’s world, to what Goffman (1971) refers to as ‘the stall’—a bounded space to which the individual lays claim. In this case, the man said he could see stacked bags of rice in the room behind her, so this verified her ‘presentation of self ’. While people may be able to pretend to be someone they are not on the internet, it is acknowledged by our participants that cynical manipulations by people seeking to exploit others are an inherent danger of dating and finding partners, and are not exclusive to the internet. We heard many stories of manipulation in relationships that had ‘driven’ people to the net. And countering the anxieties about duplicity are the strong convictions expressed by many of the participants (already noted) that internet communication provides a way to get to the real or inner person, the authentic self, because of the slow pace of communication. Nonetheless there were strategies used to gauge sincerity—punctuality, the willingness to spend time and money on communication. Gerard in France posted on KASAL: But why the net? Simply because I’d looked locally and didn’t get on with who I was meeting, my time was very limited and I detest discos/night clubs etc. so I thought to use the modern age and went on the net, without any idea of a particular country, race, or age, yup I chatted with a couple of girls from other countries till I met si beth, then we talked via the beast until April this year and my first visit … I’d rate net dating as better than in-the-­ flesh local way during the early stages, all you have are words … so you have a chance to really get to know each other before ermmm [sic] ‘nature intervenes and everything goes all hormonal n sweaty (Gerard, KASAL).

In interviews with couples who had met and courted online, many mentioned the virtue of text-based communication, of chatting as you could get to know the inner person without the ‘confounder’ of sexual attraction. In this vein, I can cite Alma who met her European boyfriend in a music site when he sent her some hard-to-find MP3s. They actively avoided swapping photographs for several weeks until she had confidence in the ‘real’ nature of their feelings for each other.

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What About Stereotypes? The pervasive stereotypes, of ‘gold digger’ women and ‘loser’ men in popular discourse around Fil-West marriages haunt posters on KASAL, as well as Asian-Australian couples generally (Winarnita 2016). They express anxiety about other people’s negative perceptions of them arising from the stereotypes, but also express the need for caution because the stereotypes may be true or have been validated for some in their transnational romantic encounters. Constable (2003) found that when she first introduced herself in a chat room for men marrying Filipinas, she evinced strong reactions ranging from those who welcomed a chance to present their ‘authentic’ or real selves to counter the negative stereotypes and others who were hostile as they assumed she would only be negative about them. As discussed in Chap. 1, this stereotype draws heavily on the intersection of gender difference and global inequalities. Stereotypes impacted on responses of the families of the courting couples in both Asian and Western settings. Both men and woman were warned in terms of the negative stereotypes by concerned family members expressing negative and/or protective responses. These were typically warnings that Western men can be abusive, even violent; (See for example Saroca 2006) or that Filipinas are only seeking money, or a ‘green card’ for the USA. In some cases, concern about such reactions led the couple to conceal their relationship from family and friends. Marriage, Trust and Intimacy The dominant trope of romance in stories posted on KASAL is tempered by pragmatism in seeking a ‘life partner’ and forming a family. These goals reflect ideals of marriage that I found in arranged marriages, in which the goal of parents is the constitution of a successful household for their children—one which can be economically viable and which nurtures children (Robinson 1998). KASAL posts also express the desire for companionate marriage and intimate revelations of self to the partner. These values were evident in many of the intercultural marriages found in the Australian fieldwork, discussed in Chap. 4. For example, one Australian–Filipina couple where there was quite a large age gap had a strong companionate marriage; their intimacy was based on a shared set of political values. She was a left-wing activist in the Philippines, and he was a leftist ‘warrior’ of the trade union

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movement. In another case, which also fitted a stereotype (age gap, older incapacitated husband needing high levels of care, living in an isolated rural location) we encountered a couple bound in intimate companionship by a passion for road trips. They would plan the next one on return from the previous one—the wife driving and providing care for her disabled husband. Many of the women in the KASAL chat room narrate themselves as ‘good mothers’ as well as ‘good wives’. The postings regarding marriage, parenthood and domesticity belie the stereotype of a wholly sexualised desire by the men and a venal impulse by the women. The narratives on the KASAL site mirror the attitudes and expectations of couples interviewed in the field sites: the desire for a ‘soul mate’ is a common trope used by men and women in discussing their partners. The Greencard: Immigration as a Form of Capital The Greencard is an important trope in the romance stories involving American spouses. In the case of immigration to Australia, the equivalent is gaining Permanent Residence (PR) status which endows all the privileges of citizenship save voting in elections. Such immigration status is part of what the men can ‘offer’ and is also crucial to achieving the dreams of men and women of family formation. As we will see in Chap. 4, economic citizenship of a wealthy country and the ability to earn income is important to the women seeking western spouses. It is an important aspect of changing their economic status, even their class, and ideally that of their families. It is part of the ‘bargain’, in this form of hypergamy (see also Constable 2003). While the transnational couples may see this as a legitimate aspect of their transactions, this element creates suspicion among some citizens of nations of the North, as discussed in Chap. 2. The signatures used by the American men posting on KASAL indicate that they are pleased to be able to ‘gift’ economic citizenship to their immigrant wives. The convention on the site is listing the significant dates of achieving visa approval for their prospective spouse, a constant reminder of the power of the state that controls their social citizenship rights in choice of spouse, discussed in Chap. 2. In a typical example of a signature (where x replaces dates): Married in Hong Kong x/x/x. filed I-130 DCF [Direct Consular Filing] in Hong Kong x/x/x; received NOA1 x/x/x; [Notice of Action 1=Receipt Notice] NOA2 x/x/x; [Notice of Action 2=Approval Notice]

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interview x/x/x approved! picked up visa x/x/x; arrived in x (USA) x/x/x; received Greencard in mail x/x/x. Cultural Differences People engaging in cross-cultural relationships retain culturally specific shared meanings with kin and social networks in the offline world. The partners are simultaneously members of their own kinship networks, communities and social networks, and often experience concern and even opposition from their kin and friends when they embark on an international relationship. In most of the stories, this anxiety is only overcome when the family meets the prospective spouse. The use of English on KASAL and the conventions of expression on the internet create an illusion of a unitary cultural field, while confusion and miscommunication arise from the employment of culturally specific ‘signals’. As Gershon (2020) notes ‘netiquette’ is not a fixed set of values and practises. Cultural misunderstandings come up for discussion on the site. There are differences to be negotiated, issues of intimacy and trust, and also parenthood and family relationships. KASAL posters assist each other in interpreting social actions which express doxic practices of their respective cultures and provide tips on how to understand the ‘other’: a typical post, from an American married to a Filipina commented that failed marriages to Filipinas are due to ‘the husband’s inability to understand her culture and traits’. Cultural differences cause difficulties, but they are also part of the attraction, a cornerstone of cathexis—an aspect of what John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (2000) term ‘adventures in identity’. Notably, in the area of KASAL where Filipinas exclusively can post, the women seek information and advice about how to manage their relationships with foreign men. Cultural issues and symbolic gestures are interpreted and discussed. The discussion invokes assumptions about different expressions of masculinity, in the role of lover/fiancé/prospective partner, and related assumptions about Filipinos, and indeed Filipinas (that is, a specific expression of femininity as well as national identity). The Ring Aurora (engaged to an Australian man, Jessie) posted, ‘I need help!’— requesting assistance to understand and respond to her man. ‘Am too

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confused honestly why men act so galit [angry] when uve [sic] done small mistakes while if its them get wrong we can always easily forgive them’. Her fiancé had asked her ring size so he could buy an engagement ring. She did not know, and did not know how to find out: are sizes in the Philippines and Australia the same? She reports that he interpreted her lack of clear response as insufficient seriousness about the relationship: Me, am very happy wen [sic]he mention about it before coz that made me tinks [sic] he is really serious about us … and am so happy to know about it that me too can have my own engagement ring but I never show coz I don [sic] want either to expect too much about it then it will not come to happened … I sometimes wish he has not told me about it coz I tot its still cool if he has it for me as a surprise … mmm … pinay [Filipina] so much loves surprises.

She comments on the difficulty of not knowing how to respond: I don’t want either to have our engagement ring shop by two of us … I still prefer to have him choose it, since I feel like that the sweetest thing my men can do for me. Will anyone pls … on here help me on my situation? Coz I duno [sic] really how I can help him about it … and seems he is always in a hurry that he wants al this to be done as early as he could and bought the ring fast.

She also questions what his enquiry means: is it indication of a proposal? A number of women respond, with practical responses as to how to ascertain her ring size, but also advice like ‘Please do not expect him to know what you want if you don’t tell him or at least give some hints’. Many women reported similar misunderstandings over requests for ring sizes, that the men assumed any delay was lack of interest or even refusal. ‘I guess that’s how they think of things there’ one woman speculated. Another woman reported: My fiancé used to ask me what my ring size was. I was kinda [sic] irritated coz well, as the original poster [Aurora] said … jeez [sic] its like announcing he’s gonna propose. Helloooo? Shouldn’t it be a surprise? So … all I did was ignore him … Anyway…bottom line is … I didn’t tell him and he got perfect size. And no he didn’t think that I didn’t wanna [sic] be engaged with him.

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Several women comment on the impatience of western men, compared to their own (Filipina) patience: ‘It’s in their culture that they expect more from us. They have no patience, and they don’t accept excuses’ (woman poster, KASAL). I guess all of us have been through also with the same situation you have now. Colin and I have been riding the roller coaster in our relationship but the good thing is, we never step off the ride and we had our seat belts locked. Almost everybody here in our section [of the website] knows it … right girls (emoticon smiley with thumb up) … hehehe. The good thing is, Colin and I have learned how to control our temper and our emotion … when they want something, it mean NOW … not tomorrow but TODAY. But in fairness, they also do give effort to understand us and consider our feelings (Woman engaged, KASAL).

Another responds: ‘Yep, they want it and they want it fast’. Aurora reveals then that she and her fiancé had a fight (tampo, not talking) over the matter. Her fiancé expressed anger and used some abusive language to her. A married Filipina in the US posts: I hope you discourage him from saying mean/bad words to you whenever he is mad or pissed off. You have to tell him that it hurts your feelings. You don’t want him to be like that ‘being mean’ to you when you are already married, right? … you don’t want a man in your life who curses you whenever he gets mad.

The posts endeavour to decode and explain communication signals and symbols, and how one can read—but also misread—power. Who can get away with miscommunication in these hypergamic relationships? Through their communications, the women narrate their perception of aspects of American/Western masculinity (the men are impatient, want things to happen quickly) and expectations of behaviour by husbands and wives raising the issue of the limits of tolerance (abusive language and disrespectful treatment). They also attempt to define the trajectories of romance, but also of building long-term relationships.

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Conclusion What makes the internet a space for intimacy and a potential site for seeking a spouse? What kind of assumptions about forms of intimacy and attachment in adult relationships enable people to take this path? I described this research to some tertiary-educated young men in Southeast Sulawesi Indonesia with whom I am working. They comfortably use the internet in their working life, but to them, the idea of seeking a spouse through this medium was unthinkable, even risible. But as all our daily lives become caught up in networking on social media this is changing rapidly. In terms of these particular marriage relationships, the numerical balance is women from Southeast Asia (especially the Philippines) seeking spouses in the West, although there is also a steady stream of women from Russia and Eastern Europe seeking marriage online. In the stories of love on the site, romance is the spark—romance is a powerful narrative, a global phenomenon, carried by popular culture. Global media communications ensure that on a world-wide scale we are becoming interpellated by the trope of romance, through the consumption of media such as television soap operas, Hollywood and Bollywood movies, and popular music. Rapid social change also establishes a nostalgia for things past, as well as an embrace of what is exciting and new. In the case of gender relations, for some the Orient represents a site of nostalgia for forms of gender relations, family relationships etcetera that are fast declining in the West (Robinson 2000).(See Chap.1 The web expands repertoires of social engagement and allows people to cast widely in their quest for a partner and this says something interesting about expectations of emotional attachment. Seeking a partner on a global stage exhibits a desire for, or at least an interest in, someone not like yourself. This is a critical difference from conventional arranged marriages where the goal is to partner with a person like oneself (Robinson 1998). Building emotional attachment across national and cultural boundaries invokes an international imaginary while retaining culturally specific sets of shared meanings with kin and community networks, and these have to be negotiated with the spouse. As noted above, to issues such as intimacy and trust, but also parenthood and family relationships and romance can surprise people as different doxic practices and associated beliefs emerge. The trope of romance that configures the ‘journeys’ of these people questing partners expresses what Giddens (1992) regards as a

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‘quintessentially modern self, who seeks self- realisation through intimacy with another. In his study of people seeking sex online, Ben-Ze’Ev (2004) comments that while people express suspicion about their online encounters, they also mention advantages in this form of communication—such as fewer problems if they are rejected. New kinds of cathexis are emerging in a world of global communication—emotional attachment in adult relationships is played out on this broad stage in which gender relations are implicated in global, economic, and political hierarchy and dominance. The competing images of ‘Manila woman’ and ‘Davos man’, attributed to Samuel Huntington (2004), represent critical poles in the contemporary world; the suited bespectacled white male politician or bureaucrat without patriotic loyalty whose political and economic decisions set the global framework as opposed to the Manila women, the mobile, capable Asian woman worker who keeps the machine going. This trope expresses the playing out of economics, reproduction, and gender symbolism. The ‘Davos man’ represents the ultimate expression of hegemonic masculinity, exercising power in general. The ‘love-seeking’ practices of KASAL members and the couples that we interviewed about their courtship, differ substantially from the pleasure-­seeking web daters described by Ben-Ze’ev (2004).5 Not all purposively sought a spouse online; but no matter how they were first introduced, the web provided the platform for their courtship, through email, instant messaging and so forth. Nonetheless, the changed conditions of social relations and the expanded social universe provided by the internet produce novel ethical challenges and social/cultural dilemmas for researchers and research subjects alike, as well as novel social and cultural dilemmas  (See Boellstorff et. al.2012) Correspondence marriages depend on the web and are constrained by its boundaries. KASAL provides an imaginative space for a global community of ‘Fil-West’ unions within which gender stereotypes, expectations of masculinity and femininity and gender relations are negotiated, in the context of forming conjugal relationships and families.

Notes 1. Saroca (2012) also reports on this research. The data was collected while she was employed as Research Associate on Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP 0451491 Interpersonal and Family Relations in Transcultural/Transnational Marriages, with Kathryn Robinson as Chief

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Investigator (CI). I have used different pseudonyms from Saroca for the participants quoted, although we both use the pseudonym KASAL for the site. 2. KASAL operated between 1998 and 2006, and had over 6000 members. See Saroca 2012, p. 56. 3. Debjani Ganguly (pers comm.). In India, the internet is used as an extension of customary marriage arrangements—young people who parents see as potential spouses are given email addresses and allowed to get to know each other through the medium (mirrors the reports of people who have met through the medium of the internet. 4. Massey (1994) cautioned against accepting the assumption that this process was not spatially differentiated. 5. For example, Ben Ze’ev (2004) explores the complex challenges to monogamy and fidelity thrown up by the possibilities of online love.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books. ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 2019. Meet the Scammers. https:// www.abc.net.au/news/2019-­0 2-­1 2/meet-­t he-­s cammers/10801250. Accessed 23 Jun 2023 Bauman, Zigmunt. 2003. Liquid Love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ben-Ze’Ev, Aaron. 2004. Love online: Emotions on the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L.  Taylor, eds. 2012. Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method. Princeton and New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Catfish: The TV show. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2498968/ Connell, R.W. 2002. Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a global stage: Pen pals, virtual ethnography, and “mail order” marriages. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Docker, John, and Gerhard Fischer. 2000. Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: UNSW Press. Ellison, Nicole, Rebecca Heino, and Jennifer Gibbs. 2006. Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2): 415. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1083-­6101.2006.00020.x. Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over new media. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs and New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1956. The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. ———. 1971. Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. London and New York: Routledge. Lang, Cady. 2021. How the pandemic fueled the rise of ‘intentional’ dating. Time Magazine. https://time.com/6106565/pandemic-­dating/. Accessed 8 July 2023. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, place and gender. Oxford: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2000. The internet. An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Dead souls: The denationalization of the American elite. The National Interest. no. 75. https://nationalinterest.org/article/ dead-­souls-­the-­denationalization-­of-­the-­american-­elite-­620?page=0%2C1 Robinson, Kathryn. 1998. Love and sex in an Indonesian mining town. In Gender and power in affluent Asia, ed. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens, 63–86. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. Looking for father-right: The Asian values debate and Australian-­ Asian relations. In Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer, 158–174. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. ———. 2007. Marriage migration, gender transformations, and family values in the ‘global ecumene’. Gender Place and Culture 14 (4): 483–493. Saroca, Cleonicki. 2006. Filipino women, migration and violence in Australia: Loved reality and media image. Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 21 (1): 75–110. ———. 2012. Filipino-Australian intimacies online: Love, ‘romance and ‘naughty’ emoticons. South East Asia Research 20 (1): 53–82. Stone, Allucquère Roseanne. 1995. The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press. Winarnita, Monika Swasti. 2016. Dancing the feminine. Gender and identity performance by Indonesian migrant women. Brighton Chicago Toronto: Sussex Academic Press.

CHAPTER 4

Creating Intercultural Families

Abstract  Increased global movement. of labour and capital in the last quarter of the twentieth century are associated with many kinds of migration flows, including a trend to cosmopolitan choices of spouses, whether through face-to face meetings and courtship associated with tourism and sojourning for example, or through the ever-increasing web-based communication technologies (ICTs) in that period. This chapter explores married couples’ experiences of contracting cross-border, intercultural marriages and creating companionate marriages and family life in Australia. It reports on ethnographic research with Filipino-Australian marriages, and a small sample of Indonesian-Australian families. The increased immigration from Asia to Australia in this historical period was accompanied by often negative public debates, and the circulation of stereotypes that are demeaning and dishonest. The chapter explores the personal lives and social experience of these intercultural couples and their children, and their engagement with multicultural Australia—a story very different from the prevailing stereotypes. Keywords  Intercultural • Marriage • Matchmaking • ‘Mail-order bride’ • Household • Parenthood • Gender relations • Kinship • Family life • Community • Stereotypes • Immigration regimes • Multiculturalism • ‘Third culture’ children • Stigma • Stereotypes

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 K. Robinson, Marriage Migration, Intercultural Families and Global Intimacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9033-7_4

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Introduction Cross-cultural marriages create very personal intercultural spaces. There are potential challenges to creating conjugal bonds, harmonious households, and successful families, from the expectations and assumptions spouses bring along with them from different cultures (Robinson 1982). Key areas of potential differences in family life include gender roles and sexual division of labour, parenting, and expectations in regard to family relations and responsibilities. The stereotypes that haunt Asian-Australian unions muddy these waters. This chapter explores the daily lives and experiences of transnational, intercultural couples through interviews with forty couples across five locations in Australia, and a website community with global reach for ‘Fil-West’ partners (Appendix). The major focus is on established Filipina-Australian couples and in some instances their children and a set of mainly Filipino-Australian couples aspiring to marry through mediated courtship. One of the study locations featured Indonesian-Australian families, only some of whom had experienced mediated courtship and/or brokering. The interviews explore courtship, the constitution of a family unit, and family life as intercultural spaces, as well as the impact of stigma associated with stereotypes. Some older couples had courted through ‘snail mail’ (postal service) in a pre-internet era, while others have met and courted on-line, but relationships had been established using both mail correspondence and internet-based communication, as well as the ever-expanding possibilities offered by ICTs (information and communication technologies) as discussed in the previous chapter. The economic imbalance between ‘developed countries’ or ‘the global North’ (like Australia) and poorer nations, or the ‘global South’ (like Southeast Asian countries) is no doubt a factor in the dynamics of these mediated marriages. It can be argued that the women are engaging in hypergamy, ‘marrying up’, in finding a spouse from a wealthier nation, but this is not a new phenomenon, or something thrown up by ever increasing global connectedness. In his study of Australian families Uhlmann (2006, 38) notes that marriage is a viable strategy to convert social capital into economic capital, which he found was mostly deployed by women (see also Constable 2003). The negative stereotypes of men and women engaged in transnational intercultural courtship and marriage are in circulation in both the Philippines and Western countries into which Filipina marriage migrants (the largest category of marriage migrants in terms of global population

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flows) are marrying. Found in both popular discourse and in scholarly literature, the stereotypes presume ‘loser’ western men take advantage of their ‘cultural capital’ as westerners to lure beautiful, sexy, young Asian women; and on the other side, ‘gold digger’ women, who manipulate men to make money and/or to gain PR or citizenship status in a developed country (see Chap. 1). Such stereotypical objectifications involve ‘(mis)understanding cultures as unitary forms in contact, missing the networks of relations that comprises the intercultural dimension’ (Adams and Janover 2009, 230). This chapter directly addresses the intercultural dimension through exploring the real family relationships that are established in transcultural unions through ethnographic studies. Cleonicki Saroca, the research associate employed on this research grant conducted research with Filipina-Australian families in five field sites, three of them quasi-rural communities. She spent several weeks in each location, selected because of significant numbers of Filipino-Australian marriages, and where they had not previously been researched. Following anthropological methods of participant observation, she became involved in everyday activities with individuals and groups and conducted ethnographic interviews, in particular with men women and children in intercultural families, but also with other local actors, such as community groups and support services (See Appendix). Research was also conducted in Canberra, Australia’s ‘bush capital’, by Monika Winarnita, focusing on a community of Indonesian-Australian families. Interviews addressed the following questions: • What motivated partners to seek an intercultural/transnational relationship? • Does any critique of the practices of their own culture regarding marriage and the family, explain their quest for a partner who is ‘other’? • How are gender roles in the family (husband, wife, father, mother, but also gendered affinal and kin roles) negotiated and practiced? • Do partners have differing ideas of romantic relationships, spousal roles and duties, household economic relations and parental responsibilities? How are differences negotiated? • What issues come to the fore in navigating their futures together and in establishing households?

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• How do stereotypes impact on their expectations and practices in developing intimate relationships and forming families? Do stereotypical ideas play a role in constituting desire? • What has been their experience of the Australian immigration system? The ethnographic interviews reveal how social life is practiced in a range of families with an eye to exploring commonalities in the experiences of both parents and children. I present selected stories below, that lead into comparative analysis of the ‘cases’ in this research, and with other studies of Australian family life, in particular Asian-Australian marriages. There are not many contemporary ethnographic studies of Australian family dynamics to use in a comparative way, but I have been able to draw on an excellent and nuanced study of working-class marriage and family life in the industrial city of Newcastle, just north of Sydney (Uhlmann 2006) in order to answer the question ‘compared to what? ’ in discussing family dynamics and gender relations. The interviews yielded a treasure trove of engaging and relatable stories. These truly provide real-world lives and experiences that go beyond reductive and demeaning stereotypes. This chapter is structured around several family narratives, selected to reveal common themes in relation to the questions posed. The people interviewed have been anonymised (Appendix). I begin with Filipino-Australian families and relate the experiences of the Indonesian-Australian families in Canberra at the end of the chapter.

Meet the Families Trevor and Alma: The ‘Snail Mail’ Generation Philip, forty-seven-years-old and New Zealand born, and Alma, a forty-­ five-­year-old Filipina have been married for nineteen years and have two teenage children. Until recently, they were smallholder fruit farmers in rural South Australia but following an accident that left Trevor with injuries, they are now pursuing new careers, studying computing. ‘People ask, don’t we get bored, always doing everything together, but we always help each other—if he misses something I pick it up and vice versa,’ Alma noted. They reveal a companionate marriage, and their children represent their family life as close and loving.

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This is a ‘snail mail’ correspondence marriage. Trevor was twenty-seven and living with his invalid mother and some of his siblings from her two failed marriages. He felt overburdened by family responsibilities and had a growing yearning to ‘nest’, as he puts it. Coming across an ad in a magazine (which he describes as a ‘scandal rag’—probably the Australasian Post, discussed in Chap. 2) for Filipinas seeking ‘pen pals’ He ‘got curious’ and wrote away to connect with three women but using a pseudonym. Feeling cautious, he wrote to the man who brokered the ads, a university lecturer married to a Filipina. ‘I said: “Well I’ve heard some pretty bad things about these Filipinos” cause I said something to my mother and she put a bad spin on it, somebody had gave her some real dirt on them and I just thought I’d double check it … so I just said I heard that they were rah rah rah rah … is it true that they’re a bit hot and all this you know … Basically buying yourself a sex partner’. (His invocation of the negative stereotyped Filipina was no doubt enflamed by the placement of the ad in a ‘scandal rag’, that also had ‘pin-ups’). ‘I just made it sound as if I was a complete and utter redneck and I was after a good time you know. And he ripped into me and says, “on behalf of all the Filipino community here, dear sir you’re an ultimate scumbag” and he poured into me. And I thought “this sounds all right”’. Alma was a single mother in her mid-20s, in a conservative Christian family. Her father had abandoned her mother, who had in turn died when she was young. Hence, she was brought up by loving grandparents. Her aunt knew the man who brokered the ‘pen-pal’ ads and had filled in the forms and sent him Alma’s photos. Alma said that when she was young, she had thoughts of a foreign husband (such as dreams of blond-haired, blue-eyed babies), but she was not actually looking for a foreign husband as ‘you are meant to be a whore’. Both partners had to overcome reluctance born of the negative stereotypes. But she was unhappy in her home situation and looking for a change. Her aspiration was to find someone who would ‘love me deeply the way I am’ and it took her a while to be convinced that it lay in her correspondence relationship. The letter from Trevor arrived two years after the aunt had sent in her information. He was ready to settle down—and he also had come to the idea that marrying a Filipina would be a ‘good outcross’, that could avoid some of the health problems plaguing his family. The match-making aunt advised: ‘You write back—he doesn’t seem to be a bad person’. Family members are involved in matchmaking in many of the couples interviewed. The aunt’s assurance that he seemed a ‘good person’, meaning sincere and

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trustworthy reflects the values that I found families seek in negotiating arranged marriages in an Indonesian village (see e.g., Robinson 1998). Roces (1996) reports similar values amongst Filipinas central Queensland who had married following correspondence courtship. Alma and Trevor corresponded for twelve  months, averaging two to three letters a week. Trevor found himself getting ‘pretty serious’ and she understood from his letters that he was ‘looking for a wife’ and that he was ‘a bit old-fashioned’. He was lonely and she ‘seemed to fill a void’. He felt that they were forming a personal connection, and that through their correspondence and landline phone calls (involving complex logistics and public phones) they were providing support for each other in the difficult circumstances of their respective lives. They had to confront stereotyped expectations, in her case formed by TV and films, that ‘everyone lives in big houses and have nice furniture’. Trevor had to deal with her misconception that he was a rich businessman and try to communicate the reality of his life as a fruit farmer. He urged her to come to Australia to see if they were keen to marry. His grandparents, and some of his friends, warned him against bringing Alma to Australia, evincing stereotypes of the insincere gold digger. His grandfather even threatened to ‘disinherit’ him. The immigration official he dealt with in applying for her visa questioned his motivations, implying he fitted the negative stereotype of ‘loser’ men seeking a sex partner. Alma also received negative comments from friends in the Philippines, although her close family supported her. Her grandfather told her: ‘It’s your decision, we’ll support you’. But he advised: ‘You don’t take rubbish—stand up for your rights. Don’t let him put you down’. They both feel that their courtship was truncated by the immigration rules: she arrived on a three-month visa and would have had to leave the country if they were not married by its end. Her aim was to marry a man for the ‘rest of her life’ and she felt burdened by this external pressure to ‘jump in’ to marriage. While marrying a foreign spouse is acknowledged as a right of social citizenship, realising this right is not straightforward and in all countries, immigration regimes have to be negotiated (Chu and Yeo 2021). Both had experienced family difficulties and were strongly motivated to create a stable loving family. How did they deal with differences, including the ‘taken-for-granteds’ of cultural expectations once they were married? Trevor notes that ‘the first twelve months were hard because of the language thing’. They have successfully negotiated expectations of roles

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within the family, and this began with exchanges during their correspondence. Alma notes her husband came across as ‘a bit old-fashioned’ in his letters, as he had let her know that he was ‘looking for a wife who will look after him. He is not demanding that he wants tea on the table or clean clothes … he wants a wife that when he comes home, she is at home greeting him’. She links this to his experience with his twice-married mother, who left him in charge of the household and his younger siblings. But she speculates, perhaps because of this experience, he shares parenting responsibilities and household chores. His performance of masculinity encompasses gender equity in the division of household tasks. He explains how they divide up the chores, but that they have had to’ reorganise things’ following the accident to address his disability. Interestingly, the issues they raise do not reflect obstacles rooted only in cultural norms. Alma and Trevor are unusual in the degree of role similarity in their household and business. Just as they have worked together, they now study together. For other Filipinas in the study, like Maria (discussed next), their expression of self requires a performance of femininity with themselves as the managers of the household who care for their husbands who work outside the home as principal breadwinners, the same sensibility Uhlmann (2006) found among working-class Australian families in Newcastle. Regarding financial matters, they were business partners in the fruit farm before his accident and he has always respected her right to have her own income. He recognises that respect for women to have some financial autonomy may not always be shared by other men. There are: guys that don’t understand that if the woman wants to go out and work, most of her money is her money; I don’t see why she can’t use it to go to the [Philippines] household if she is putting a couple of nephews through school or supporting her parents. That’s it, that’s their business, if she wants to go and pack oranges … a certain amount should go to the household but if she wants to send half to the Philippines, that’s her business.

The hard physical work of fruit picking and packing in this fruit-­ growing district is a shock for many Filipinas who have married here, especially for women who have previously held urban, middle-class occupations, such as teachers, nurses, or office workers. Women in Australian farming families work alongside the male household members (Alston 1995) often engaged in hard physical work. And it is now common for women farmers to manage the business aspects of the rural enterprise.

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Both Alma and Trevor were motivated in their courtship by the desire to create a nuclear family and have children. Before they were married this was one source of difference as he wanted three and she wanted two, already having a son whom she left behind in the Philippines. Trevor has embraced responsibilities for his extended family in the Philippines, for example repairing the grandfather’s house, and sponsoring relatives to come to Australia. Indeed, for him the extended family is one of the benefits he gets from marrying into a Filipino family. In his view, European society has moved too far away from the extended family; people are too much looking out for themselves. But his nostalgia is not expressed as a desire for a subservient wife (as critics presume, see Chap. 3). ‘We hope that our kids will look after us.’ By contrast, Alma comments that for her, an advantage of a transnational marriage is that she can be independent; there is no family around to tell her what to do. ‘That’s what we enjoy, both of us.’ Her companionate marriage means she has not swapped one form of kinship-based power for another. Trevor’s sense of give and take is expressed in his view of what Filipinas get out of intercultural marriages: I think they probably give more than they get … they get a chance at probably a better lifestyle, I mean financially. But they’re very good wives, but I think they probably do put in a lot more than they perhaps get out of it. That’s hard to gauge. But they’re probably too loyal. I know a few that should walk. Some of the guys they marry a bit suss. You have to be honest and say that the ones that go looking for Asian, say Filipino wives, well why haven’t they found Australian ones? [Here he invokes the stereotype to explain the bad marriages.]

When Alma first arrived, they made contact with other Fil-West couples in the district and report that this assuaged some of her initial loneliness. Like a number of the Australian spouses, Trevor comments on the positive enjoyment he gets through the Filipino network in his town, expressing pleasure in Filipino sociality. She has since become a ‘leading light’ of the Filipino community, and they are both active in Filipino and multicultural organisations in their district. As a couple they work through their community group of Filipino-­ Australian families to assist women who have been abused by their husbands, linking up with a women’s shelter in the state capital and assisting women to leave abusive relationships.

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They see an aspect of their community work as countering the negative stereotypes with positive images of Filipinos. For example, Alma relates that she organised a dance group, and when they performed at a community event, some people expected to see pole dancing, and were surprised to see how ‘graceful, colourful [and] meaningful’ the dances were. They went in protest to a local radio station where the announcer had repeated negative stereotypes about Filipinas and were pleased to report that he has since lost his job. The Filipina marriage migrants who Roces (1996) met in Queensland also enjoyed performing at multicultural festivals. The presentations of traditional folk dancing provided ‘a link between the migrants’ past and their future’ (Roces 1996, 15). They were also active in community groups, both those serving the Filipina residents, and the service clubs found in all Australian communities, such as the Lioness club. The Indonesian women married to Australians with whom Winarnita (2016) performed with in Perth (Western Australia) also used dance as a way to represent themselves to the Australian and Indonesian communities. Countering negative stereotypes that attached to Asian women in transcultural marriages was a strong motivator for them, as well as their enjoyment of performing their culture. Establishing a family, that is, having a loving spouse and nurturing children, is the most frequent reason that interviewees gave for seeking a spouse through correspondence. Especially in cases where matchmaking is involved, women are urged to go ahead if they feel the man is deemed ‘a good person’, or their friends and family make this judgement of the man. That is, age, occupation, and looks are not the main issue in finding a spouse. This approval/evaluation of a positive masculinity based on character was also reported by women interviewed in this study when an ‘internet boyfriend’ came to meet the family. This evaluation is reiterated by Maria in the next story, in explaining her choice of spouse. Negotiating Gender Roles Australian households vary in the ways they negotiate gender roles, but the ‘resilience of the gendered division of labour’ with women assigned with responsibility for housework and childcare, and men oriented to earning and labour market is still the common Australian pattern according to Uhlmann (2006). This is revealed not only in his ethnographic study of Australian families, but he finds this pattern in official data sources,

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such as data on households from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (see also Curthoys 1988). Alma exemplifies one pattern, but May (in the next narrative) has a view of the gendered division of household tasks that is more in line with the Australian norm. Economic independence for the woman is a constant feature in these intercultural marriages. Many left professional jobs when they married. Working on farms can be a shock for urban, educated Filipinas but joint conjugal ownership and operation of farms is becoming the norm in rural Australia, and as noted above, it is common that women in farming households take responsibility for business matters. These immigrant women value the economic opportunities offered by Australia, including the hard physical work of farming for the ways they can support poor families back home (see also Roces 1996). Maria and Roy: Matchmaking Matchmaking by family and friends, as noted in Alma’s story above, is very common among the couples interviewed. Trevor and Alma recount matchmaking a widowed neighbour, Roy, with a friend of hers in the Philippines, a middle-aged widowed schoolteacher, Maria. Roy recounts eating dinner with them one night, and Alma said to him: ‘You are not taking care of yourself, you need looking after.’ She introduced him to her friend, by letter, and after several months of correspondence, he travelled to the Philippines to meet Maria. When he went to the doctor to get his ‘jabs’ for his trip to the Philippines and explained why he was going, the doctor gave him a ‘large handful of condoms’. But Maria was very conscious of her reputation and told him to not show any affection to her in front of her family or in public. He tells this courtship story as a humorous anecdote rather than a romantic narrative. After a few weeks in the Philippines, he asked, ‘Are we engaged then?’ and she replied, ‘Of course we are’. Trevor also tells a funny story, that Roy came back with his condoms and KY jelly intact. In narrating the events, Roy is bemused and confesses that he is no longer very interested in sex anyhow. But despite a lack of a romantic narrative, both Roy and Maria (thirteen years younger than him) express contentment with their ten-year marriage. ‘He is a very good man’ says Maria. She notes he has helped her children, by paying for their education and loaning money for businesses. There is a mild conflict here, as he sees her son as financially irresponsible and wants to exert more

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controls on the assistance they give. She describes how they had to negotiate financial matters when she first arrived. Having been financially independent, his control of household finances was difficult for her. After their marriage, when she applied for PR status, the local, female mayor wrote her letter of support stating how much better he was looked after. Maria comments that she does all the housework. ‘That’s what Filipinas do’, but since they have retired from farming, she thinks he could help a bit more. Roy reports a very high level of satisfaction with his marriage which he says saved him from a life of isolation and loneliness and expresses his love for his wife and his pleasure in the broad family network (in the Philippines) and the quasi-kin connections with Filipinos in his community. Matchmaking Matchmaking by family and friends figures in older ‘snail mail’ courtship as well as introductions and courtship by way of the internet. An immigration official that Saroca interviewed at the Australian Embassy in Manila expressed a favourable view towards marriages brokered by family and friends as they see the resulting marriages as less ‘risky’, evidencing the anxieties about spousal visas allowing ‘rorting the system’ discussed in Chap. 2. Family Caring For the transcultural married couples, care and caring are identified as critical features of the family in both the Philippines and Indonesia, by Asian marriage migrants and their Australian spouses. Indeed, caring, and strong family ties are frequently invoked as national characteristic of these Asian countries, expressed by one of the immigrant wives in the following terms. ‘Australians, not only Australians but people from other places marrying Filipinas they’ve got a bit of an advantage, because…we do all the household works, we really serve our husband’. The caring nature of Asian spouses and Asian families are contrasted in our interview subjects’ statements with what are perceived to be weaker Australian values in regard to family, kinship, and community. Men and women universally embraced the benefits Australian men get from marrying a caring, Filipina wife: endorsing a stereotype of Asia as a site of traditional family values, but not of the hyper-sexualised Asian woman.

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Ongoing Responsibility for Family Members Overseas Many of the Filipino wives felt ongoing responsibility for family members in the Philippines, that was their duty to shoulder. They felt responsible for children in the Philippines, even if they were now adult. The Philippines-­ born spouses retain close ties to their natal families and children, seeing their Australian marriages as advantageous to provide for them. In a typical story, one woman described how she takes money when she visits. ‘Giving a little bit is also a bit of help to them. You know the life in the Philippines is quite hard, even if you are helping … in emergencies, like help to pay electrical bills and phone bills and water bills’. It is not uncommon for Australian husbands to also accept such responsibilities. Many of the women expressed how important it was to them that their Australian spouse was supportive of these transnational caring responsibilities. One woman commented: That’s what I love about [her husband] because he plans not only for me but for the children as well—he’s concerned about the children [from her previous marriage] and that made him closer to me. Filipinos are family oriented right? And when you get to marry someone or met someone from other countries, like the US or Australia, Canada, you have a better chance of going out of the country right? And then you can help out in the family, give your family a better life, I guess. Many of the Australian spouses described taking on board practical issues to help their Philippines families, like repairing houses and funding education for younger relatives.

One of the women still in the Philippines expressed her desire to live in Australia in order to work and earn money to educate her children. Her Australian fiancée wanted to relocate his business to the Philippines as he saw this as financially advantageous, and he was also supporting children in tertiary education in Australia. The common idea that women’s caring responsibilities required them to take the major role in running the household and caring for their husbands and children did not mean they did not take on work to support the household and their families overseas. John and Medina: Meeting Via an Internet ‘Asian Bride’ Site John and Medina are one of the couples that, on the face of things, fit the negative stereotypes. Jim is a fifty-seven-year-old grandfather with two

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children from his first marriage of thirty years duration and one child (another on the way) in his second marriage to twenty-four-year-old Medina. He began looking online for a Filipina to court after his divorce. He had had an extra-marital relationship with a Filipina which led to the breakdown of his first marriage and had then written to a few women in the Philippines. He saw Medina’s photo on an internet marriage brokering site, Asian Brides, ‘and it said she was young and short and tiny, and I was too old for her and all that stuff, but I couldn’t resist the eyes’. Medina is not highly educated and worked in a small family-run café when she met John. This sets her apart from the other ‘internet’ brides in this study who tend to be well-educated and with middle class/professional jobs. Once he responded to her letter, she began emailing him, with help from a friend, as she did not yet know how to use a computer. He soon began sending her money to help pay for their courtship and to assist her family. He has child support payments to his first wife, and points out that it takes considerable investment of resources to court a Filipina. The couple have considerable debts, but she comments appreciatively that he still tries to find money to send to her family in the Philippines. She also thinks he is a’ bit tight’ with money however, and he thinks she is extravagant in how she spends They both report that they argue a lot, one of the points of conflict being that he smacks their two-year-old while she prefers other forms of discipline. He worries about their age difference in that he will likely predecease her and is concerned to provide for the future. Her goal is to get a job so she can earn money to support her family in the Philippines and buy a house in Australia for herself and her children. She is very proud of her beautiful mixed-race child. He expresses a high degree of satisfaction with his marriage, and she seems content with her family. He has been very diligent in finding other Filipinas in his area, including a religious group, and in enabling her to cement those social connections, which he also enjoys. Financial ‘Motives’: Opportunity to Earn Money to Support the Education of Their Children Financial motives and benefits are often expressed by the Filipina migrant wives—but it is not in line with the ‘gold digger’ stereotype of marrying only to exploit. Widows and single mothers in particular expressed that a strong motivation to marry a foreigner is the opportunity they will have to earn money to support the education of their children. The husband’s

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support for this endeavour is important, although the women tend to regard it as primarily their responsibility. Differences emerged between the men on economic issues, notably the woman’s control over her own earnings and the husband’s responsibilities to support their newly acquired family and kin in the Philippines. But couples seeking companionate marriage negotiate family roles and finances (see also Constable 2003). While in these families disputes can involve differences in culturally-based expectations, that is not the only factor. The ideology of male breadwinners, historically the core form and function of the Australian nuclear family, underpins some of this conflict—but this is an ideology under challenge with changes in wage structures, welfare payments and family law in recent decades (see Chap. 1; Curthoys 1988: chs. 9 and 16). June and John: Online Courtship After Matchmaking by a Friend June is a twenty-eight-year-old woman married to a fifty-two-year-old Australian, John. It is her first marriage, his second. She describes herself as a ‘stay at home wife’—her husband is supporting her and her family in the Philippines while she waits the issue of her visa. She is tertiary educated but her father was a jeepney (share taxi) driver. Once she had finished her education and had a good job, her father stopped work and she was expected to support the family—including her younger siblings. She described her husband as ‘a good person’ ‘he cares so much’. She says that he does understand her responsibility for her family. ‘That is the one thing we cleared before we entered into the relationship.’ She insisted on being very clear about this because of the stereotype that ‘Filipinas are gold diggers’. June expresses the contradictions in her situation. While she is very concerned to make sure her family is cared for, she likes the prospect of being married so she can have ‘self-fulfilment’—she feels that up to now she hasn’t ‘owned her own life’. She was ‘match made’ by a former office mate who gave John her email. She had already had a lot of experience chatting online with people all over the world, although she says none was ever regarded as a boyfriend. But she had an aspiration for ‘adventure’, and she feels marriage to a foreigner will give her that.

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Demographics—Limited Opportunities to Marry Many of the women seeking correspondence courtship were widows, single mothers and ‘elderly virgins’ who felt there were limited opportunities to marry in the Philippines because of gender constructions that rendered them less than desirable marriage partners for Filipino men. Age did not matter in the same way to the western men; ‘I am regarded as ugly by Filipinos, but my Australian boyfriend thinks I’m beautiful’. ‘The fact I have children is an impediment to marriage in the Philippines and I was surprised to find that for many of the foreign men, it is seen as an advantage because they want a wife and family’.

What Else Do Do the Case Studies Reveal–Motives/ Intentions/Opportunities/Satisfactions? These stories have been selected not only as compelling accounts of individual questing but also for the ways in which they exemplify common features of the experiences of the Filipino-Australian partners. Ideals of Family Life The interview subjects are questing for an idealised family life—not expressing what Giddens (1992) refers to as ‘plastic sexuality’—sexuality divorced from reproduction—in their transnational mediated courtships. The expressed ideal for marriage, and the everyday experience revealed, is a companionate model. Despite popular conception that marriage and the nuclear family are under threat, Uhlmann (2006) argues compellingly for the continuing centrality of the nuclear family in the reproduction of social life Australia. Individuals frequently link their marriage quest to their prior experiences of family life. Marriage breakdown—experienced either by the individuals contracting the marriages, or their own parents—figures in many of the narratives.1 The women are often widows, or single mothers desiring security for themselves and their children. The goal is creating a happy family and discussions about children (how many? parenting practices?) are common in courtship correspondence. Conflict over parenting practices, such as discipline, are not exclusive to bi-cultural couples, as Uhlmann’s study (2006) shows. The narratives frequently reflect the way that transnational marriage brokering has long been a path for men in

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demographic circumstances that limit opportunities for seeking a spouse and all that entails—companionship, care, children, adulthood for young men (see Chap. 2). The increasing proportion of Australians living in one-person and other non-nuclear-family households has led to a common presumption that the nuclear family is in decline, and that this in part reflects changes in gender relations and gender roles. However, in his study of working-class family life in-inner city Newcastle, Uhlmann (2006) argues convincingly, on the basis of demographic data as well as his own field study, that the nuclear family remains the aspirational norm for Australians today. People in single person households are most usually those whose ‘nuclear family’ households have been disrupted, by death of a spouse or divorce; and that many people living outside of a conjugal relationship or nuclear family see themselves in a ‘transitional’ state, and they aspire to move on into a conjugal relationship and nuclear family. The normative nuclear family provides a primary social context (apart from workplaces) for the performance of gendered roles and social adulthood; this explains the strong desire of single men in Australian to find a pathway to marriage. Marriage, principally heteronormative but increasingly also between same-sex partners, remains the doxic form of family formation.2 States of ‘singledom’ are usually phases in a life course, in which divorce and separation just part of the cycle, not novel life trajectories (Uhlmann 2006, 3). The aspirations and hopes of the Asian-Australian partners support this notion, and that this ideal is shared by Filipinos too. Stereotypes Like the Indonesian women married to Australians that Winarnita (2016) met in Perth, the men and women in these intercultural couples are ‘haunted ‘by the stereotypes and the suspicion among many publics of ‘inauthenticity’ on the internet. This also came up in the online dialogues between Filipinas on the KASAL site, discussed in Chap. 2. Seeking ‘Autonomy’ to Pursue Their Own Lives; Adventures in Identity Many of the interview subjects (like Alma and Trevor above) express a desire to get away from families of origin that they feel are draining them and denying them autonomy. This does not mean they want to cut links

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to families overseas; but a theme emerges of the migrant spouses enjoying the balance of pursuing a relatively autonomous life but also maintaining support for their families back home. Women feel pride in their performance of wifeliness and motherhood; many also feel they are working hard in their homes to support their families in Australia at the expense of ‘autonomy’ in their own lives. This reflects common Australian patterns of the division of labour in the household, as much as it manifests an effect of stereotyped ‘Asian brides’. The desires and satisfaction expressed in interview subjects frame the marriage partners’ questing for, and experience of an intercultural marriage as an ‘adventure in identity’ (Docker and Fischer 2000), another expression of autonomy. Difference is part of the attraction to forming bicultural relationships. A desire for remaking the self that involved seeking experience of a wider world was significant in the imaginings of Filipinas desiring husbands abroad in an ethnographic study by Bulloch and Fabinyi (2009). A common theme in interviews (also expressed by the ‘third culture’ children, discussed below) is the benefit of engaging with a different culture, and the enhanced social relations—either, for many men, with a new extended family, or for expanded social interactions with ‘erstaz kin’ relations with a local ‘Fil-West community’. Children expressed the benefit of travel to visit relatives, the ‘cultural capital’ of relatives overseas, and also, cosmopolitan subjectivities—more interesting because they could draw on differing cultural heritages.

Engaging Multiculturalism ‘Multiculturalism’, official Australian government policy since 1979 creates spaces for performance of non-Anglo identities culture, most commonly in the form of ‘folk’ dance performances or showcasing distinctive foods. Multicultural festivals are held in towns all over Australia, and the Asian immigrant spouses in our study were enthusiastic participants. Multiculturalism in Australia can be criticised as valuing circumscribed and controlled expression of difference, a ‘collection’ of ethnic diversity that helps define white Australia (see Hage 1998). But for the Filipinas living in Australian communities, it provides a framework within which migrants can contribute (Roces 1996). Performances of ‘ethnic’ dances is a popular activity, and the women feel they are contributing a distinctive cultural identity to Australia.

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Food is perhaps the most public manifestation of Australian multiculturalism, in the number and range of restaurants offering ‘ethnic cuisine’. But distinctive food is an important element that the migrant women bring to local festivals and celebrations. Ganguly (2001) notes that dishes, ingredients and cooking techniques are emblems of a shared knowledge and a communal identity and Frost (2008) describes the way cooking classes and a street festival stall proved critical to Indonesian migrant women in Sydney experiencing difficulties in finding their place in Australia. ‘Mum’s cooking’ figured strongly in children’s accounts of the pleasures of bicultural families (see below).

Negative Stereotypes and Communication Like the Indonesian women married to Australians who Winarnita (2016) met in Perth, the men and women in these intercultural couples are haunted by the stereotypes and the suspicion among many publics of ‘inauthenticity’ on the internet. This also came up in the online dialogues between Filipinas on the KASAL site, discussed in Chap. 2. It is almost universal for the negative stereotypes to raise questions in the minds of both women and men early in their courtship, and the accompanying anxieties are reinforced by comments and warnings from friends and family. ‘Good communication’ was frequently invoked by men and women as the key to their successful relationships, and many linked this to dispelling suspicions based in stereotypes. Nevertheless, negative stereotypes haunt courting couples and family members, and intrude upon expectations and practices in the intimate social space of marriage and household. The negative stereotypes lead to feelings that in certain settings they are stigmatised by their choice of marriage partner. Erving Goffman (1963, 4) notes that that stigma expresses a relationship between an ‘attribute and a stereotype’, so a stigma is a ‘mark’ or ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’, reducing the stigma-bearer ‘from a whole … person to a tainted, discounted one’ (Goffman 1963, 3). Race did not figure strongly in stigmatising discourses, although children in Asian-Australian marriages do report some experience of racist jibes (discussed below). Interestingly, the fantasy of mixed race children was noted by some women as reason for seeking a foreign spouse, and many speak proudly of the beauty of their children: a positive take on racial difference.

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We did find instances of behaviour that matched the characteristics represented in the stereotypes: a Filipina who met her Australian husband on the internet spoke critically of women that she encountered when she ran an internet café in Manila who she saw as ‘scammers’ trying to get money from Western men; some of the men reported that women they wrote to from match making sites immediately requested money; some of the men who posted on the Fil-West web site where we conducted research posted comments that reflected Orientalist stereotypes of sexy Asian beauties. In one of the field sites, there was one violent man among the Australian husbands; but as noted above, the men in the community assisted the women to escape. Needless to say, no one who behaved in accord with the stereotype responded to the invitation be part of our study. However, like many of the people interviewed by Constable (2003), a desire to counter negative stereotypes was a factor motivating some participants. ‘Quasi-Kin/Affinal’ Networks All the women we spoke to sought out and maintained relationships with other people who had migrated from the Philippines. In some cases, the matchmaking that was a prelude to marriage was from within a ‘Fil-West’ community in Australia (see above). Roces (1996) describes the way Filipinas in the mining town of Mt. Isa establish community groups for socialising and holding gatherings, for example, at Christmas. Many of the children interviewed (see below) mention involvement in these gatherings which amount to ersatz kinship, and for the families to be involved in ‘quasi-kin/affinal’ networks of Filipinos in Australia. The husbands become involved through the sociality of their wives. A few of the men had known Filipinos prior to their courtship of a Filipina, and the sociality was part of the attraction (‘adventure in identity’). Several of the Australian husbands expressed their pleasure in these social relations. The presumed caring nature of Asian spouses and Asian families are contrasted by our interview subjects’ statements with what are perceived to be weaker Australian values in regard to family, kinship, and community. One woman commented: ‘I was very lonely when I arrived, with none of my family—no children, no brothers and sisters. You know the families in the Philippines are really very, very close and that’s why it’s very difficult for us to leave there—relatives, especially of children, leaving children in the Philippines is very hard … I really miss my grandchildren who grew up with me’.

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A set of ‘quasi-affines’ are created through the local social networks that we found Indonesian and Filipino migrants established amongst themselves. While interview subjects frequently attribute the establishment and maintenance of these connection to Filipino sociality, and women mentioned the importance of these links and sociability to overcoming loneliness, the pattern of women maintaining kin and other social relations outside the household is common Australian /Western pattern societies. ‘Women generally assume the responsibility of ensuring and maintaining orderly social relationships both within and without the households’ (Uhlmann 2006, 40); this is also reported by Yanigasako (1992) in exploring contemporary kinship. Women ‘played a large role in managing and maintaining g the networks of their husbands’—for example, with their parents and their siblings (Uhlmann 2006, 41). One of the Filipina spouses reported that her husband had been estranged from his natal family and she had taken responsibility to restore those relationships. The gatherings of the Filipino community, for example celebrating major calendrical festivals like Christmas, are redolent of the practices in Australian families in which extended family networks—adult siblings and their parents; cousins aunts and uncles—on an ad hoc basis. Several of the children in the intercultural families mentioned that attending such gatherings was something they did when younger but now they are teenagers they have their own lives and don’t always attend, except at a big Christmas party. Hence the quasi- kinship groupings resemble the Australian extended family networks overlapping with ‘ceremonial kindred groupings, such as the descendants of elderly people who might get together at Christmas’ (Uhlmann 2006, 39), For some of the men, these social networks provided by the women were a lifeline. One man who had remarried a Filipina after being widowed commented: If I was here by myself I would’ve lost everybody around the place and be sitting in here…Whether you’ve been used up more than you’re using ­others I don’t know, I don’t care but I know, I just know, if I wanted something which was not too big a thing, that the Filipino group as a group would, you know, approach it’.

He went on to recount how he had fulfilled a request from a local Filipino man to accompany him and his sick daughter to the city. The

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Filipino man explained that he was anxious making the long drive alone with his sick child, in case she vomited or was needy in other ways on the journey. After the Australian man had helped in this way, the Filipino neighbour had offered to help him when he needed to move some heavy white goods back from the city’. The farmer commented, ‘It’s a big plus, it’s a big one when I’m growing old’. It is noteworthy that the Australian social welfare system relies on the delivery of caring services within families, but this is not part of the rhetoric of family reunion immigration. The Third Culture children are all of the internet generation and use the WWW to explore their identities and cosmopolitan family networks. The communities they reside in are have multicultural populations and their age mates are culturally diverse.

‘Third Culture’ Children Children are an important aspect of these marriages, both the children born to the couple and children either spouse have from previous marriages (most usually the women). Globally, there is an online presence of young people who identify as ‘Third Culture’ children, whose life experiences straddle cultures. While many who adopt this identify have experienced migrating between cultures (such as children of diplomats or workers in transnational corporations) some of the online groups provide a space for children of transcultural marriages. Mary Ida Bagus (1997) describes such members of families as engaging in ‘mutual acculturation’. We asked the children in our study to comment on the benefits of being in an intercultural family but for many, the question did not fit their framing of themselves and their lives. It is their family, their mother, father, and siblings; they do not necessarily experience it as a distinctive intercultural space. It is just Mum and Dad, and siblings. Within the families, for the children, interculturality does not seem to be something they take note of—it is just their family and that’s the way it is. The children’s lives are defined by their dealings with other family members; their school mates and activities; and involvement in sporting, entertainment and other leisure activities offered in the small towns and regions where they live. The overall picture is that they are engaged in the community in a way that can be understood as ‘the Australian way of life’. Uhlmann (2006) notes the way that, for working-class family in suburban Newcastle, relations in the nuclear family provide the node and so the model for other kin and affinal relationships. (Uhlmann’s study of

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working-­class families, their households, kinship networks is the most recent and comprehensive ethnographic account of the Australian family.) Comparing these children’s descriptions of their lives with Uhlmann’s picture of family life, it is hard to say that the dynamics of intercultural families differ markedly from those of other families. Whereas their parents link some aspects of parenting styles to cultural difference (e.g., Aussie Dad is less strict than Filipino Mum), for the children it is just the difference between Mum and Dad, a dynamic of family life, not cultural difference. Teenagers might play one parent off against the other in this regard, for example. However, Uhlmann (2006) found that it is not uncommon for this to be the salient issue distinguishing parenting styles between spouses, and he comments the difference is tolerated or accepted, but couples draw the line on other people (e.g. aunts or grandparents) disciplining their children. The children express pride in their cosmopolitan connections, and their ability to travel overseas. This extends to New Zealand for one family. Most of the children have only visited the Philippines a few times in their lives but speak with fondness of the relatives they met there and the love they were shown. They speak vividly about their experiences in the Philippines: the lively crowded streets and shopping malls, the different sights and sounds, but also universally note compassionately the poverty they observed. Some have had relatives come to visit. Especially when they have similar-­ aged cousins in the Philippines, they report that they keep in touch by email and social media. These are children who have grown up with ICT and for whom online activities ‘remain embedded within the context of the off-line spaces, and the social relations of everyday life.’ (Holloway and Valentine 2003, 10–11). Social media enables them to make and sustain social connectedness with their Filipino extended family connections and engage with aspects of Filipino culture. The ‘Third Culture’ child is able to sustain rich relationships with both sides of their heritage, not limited by physical social distance. A fourteen-year-old girl reported that she was pleased to contact other Asian teenagers in chat rooms, as a joyful affirmation of her distinctiveness. Food is the cultural element most commented on by the children—not surprising given the importance of food variety in Australian multiculturalism. All talk about how much they like their mothers’ cooking, the aspect of family difference/specificity most commented on by the young people: they really enjoy their mother’s cooking, as do their friends, and many

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comment that their mother enjoys sharing Filipino food with other people, at Filipino or wider community events (like multicultural festivals), or with the teenagers’ friends. Their mothers display their difference in a positive way, which brings pride to the family, by preparing lumpia (spring rolls). Many praised of their mothers’ cooking for school events, such as being associated with the food stall that raised the most money at a school event. In the families studied, it tended to be the mothers who engaged in dance performances showcasing their culture, but Winarnita and Tanu (2015) showcase young bicultural Indonesian-Australians who express their Asian identities in language, and in traditional Indonesian dances performed to Australian audiences. Dances express ‘body cultural knowledge’ (Winarnita and Tanu 2015, 191) learned from their parents. When pressed if they had heard negative stereotypes of Filipinas, most of the children interviewed had no knowledge. But they did volunteer some negative references in the news and in popular culture at the time, such as the racist representation in the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert, or the negative reporting on Rose Hancock, the Filipina widow of a mining boss in Western Australia. But all seemed bemused rather than deeply shocked—and did not see it as having any relevance to their families. The related question of racism yielded more recognition. Several could remember incidents in which they were subject to racist taunts, but curiously (Australia’s ‘muscle memory’ racism?) the taunts mis-recognised them as Chinese. Even in term of positive recognition, one child noted that his mother’s delicious Pinoy (Filipino) food was sold as ‘Chinese’ at an event! Religion did not emerge as a source of conflict in any of the families interviewed. However, religion emerges as a site of conflict and negotiation in a 1984 film Mail-Order Bride screened on ABC in 1984, with a screenplay by noted writer Robin Davidson (9ABC 1984) (https://www. ozmovies.com.au/movie/mail-­order-­bride). The script is a serious exploration of the issues in transcultural marriage based on research that Davidson undertook with partners in correspondence marriages. One plot line has husband Kevin, who brings his new bride to a caravan, assumes his Filipina wife Ampy will go on the pill to postpone children until they have been able to buy a house. She is a devout Catholic and for her this is a sin. The film digs deep into stereotypes and associated assumptions and misunderstandings between husband and wife and the people around them. It is in stark contrast to reporting in the mass media with sensationalised

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headlines, or to the comedic depictions of Filipinas in Australian films, played for cheap laughs. Impacts of Immigration Regimes While family reunion regulations in immigration regimes acknowledges the critical role of marriage and family as aspects of social citizenship, the limitations in those regulations denies the responsibilities that people in transnational families have for dependent relatives in other countries, while at the same time the Australian welfare system assumes a level of family care for the elderly. While the state absorbs health care costs of the elderly and provides a modest pension to those eligible, the daily care of the elderly falls to their families. Caring responsibilities within Filipino extended families are frequently invoked in interviews in our study. Not infrequently, the couples were middle- aged or even elderly at the time of their marriage and one or both spouses are in second marriages. Frequently, one of the spouses had responsibility for children, grandchildren, and elderly parents still living overseas. Many have children nearing adulthood or grandchildren—still dependent financially and emotionally. Filipinas married to Australians tend to have higher levels of education than women in the Australian population overall, and this is reflected in the middle-class occupations of many of the Filipina spouses prior to migrating to Australia. They have high aspirations for their children. One woman noted that she put off migrating for several years after she became engaged because her children were still studying in the Philippines. She discussed the problems she had in organising for her youngest child, still a dependent student, to come to Australia. Before we went through the immigration in Adelaide, they gave us a form and it stated there that a dependent should be 18 years old, and Mia was, I think she was about 19 years old, I think. And so, I said, it would be hard for Mia, if we were going to get her through the skilled migration [programme], we could not get her because she newly graduate, she did not have any experience for her work, so it would be hard for us. So we kept on asking and asking until we…were able to get more information regarding how to sponsor, what do you call this, child dependent and we are very, and we are supporting her with her education when we went to the immigration again, oh they asked about the supporting papers, demanding if we are really

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supporting her, the…money we were sending her, and it is very good cause we were able to keep it and that’s it.

The couple were able to make a creative response to the difficulties posed by migration categories and sponsored the daughter to come on a student visa.

Indonesian-Australian families Research was conducted with a group of Indonesian-Australian families in Canberra, Australia’s national capital. The people interviewed were members of an organisation, The Australia Indonesia Families Association (AIFA) for bi-national couples in which the Indonesian spouse is either a PR or citizen of Australia. This group exemplifies par excellence the kind of quasi-kin organisation discussed above for the Filipino-Australian communities. It was mentioned by husbands and wives alike as important for providing a comfortable network which was especially important if a souse had newly migrated from Indonesia and had no networks. It was important to overcome ‘loneliness’. Several members are in my circle of friends in Canberra: I have been invited to AIFA social events, like picnics and cultural celebrations, and many of them overlap with my professional academic circles, attending scholarly and cultural events on campus; or providing academic services, such as language teaching and translation. It is a warm kindly group: I recently met an AIFA group who had just had lunch at a restaurant, and the group included a recently widowed man. AIFA maintains a connection to the Indonesian Embassy: the embassy referred several of the women we interviewed to AIFA as a way of overcoming loneliness that many felt on arrival. AIFA families participate in ceremonial occasions like the celebration of Indonesia’s Independence Day on 17 August. The Embassy provides language lessons that many of the children attended, and instruction in reading the Qu’ran. Winarnita (2016) found a similar closeness between Indonesian marriage migrants in Perth, and the Indonesian consulate there. They are also active participants in multicultural festivals and other celebrations  in the Australian community, selling Indonesian food and also showcasing traditional dances. Canberra has a cosmopolitan culture associated with the Embassies and the large number of foreign students attending its many universities. Indeed, the members of the Indonesian-Australian community are most likely to have met their spouse while, for example, the Australian husband

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had an official posting (government and corporate) to Indonesia; or the partners met while studying either in Australia or Indonesia. Many of the women are highly educated and have continued their professional careers (e.g. as specialist librarian, as architect) in Australia. One young couple are the daughter of a diplomat formerly posted to Australia and her European spouse, who she met on a prior posting. They share many characteristics with Australian-Filipina families but this background to their meeting and courtship leads to some important differences. In many of the cases, the non-Indonesian spouse speaks at least some Indonesian, learned in studies or employment, and has familiarity with and enjoyment of Indonesian culture. This impacts on the way the families negotiate intercultural issues. A few younger generation couples had met in chat rooms, including one case of a couple who met through an ‘Asian brides’ web site. Indonesia has an extremely high uptake of social media (Lim 2003) and a few of the young couples reported developing their relationship through social media, especially through Friendster, a social networking site very popular in Indonesia at the time, which shut down in 2015. Older couples report ‘snail mail’ correspondence as they got to know each other before deciding to marry. Religion Most of the Indonesian women in the group are Muslim and the husbands converted to Islam before their weddings, especially if they were married in Indonesia. They mostly report being ‘Islam light’: avoiding pork and alcohol, observing fasting during Ramadan, but not being very tight with the Muslim community in Canberra. The anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia following the 2001 Bali bombings, when for example the security police (ASIO) raided a number of Indonesian households alleged to have been engaged with a radical cleric on a visit to Australia; and there was a lot of negative media coverage that led some long-term Indonesian marriage migrants to seek out a closer connection to people more conversant with trends in Indonesian Islam (from among students, the Embassy staff) as they felt they were vulnerable (Robinson 2022). One of the older women described that she was shocked when she visited Indonesia after a long break, in the early 2000s, to witness changes in public expressions of piety among the middle class (such as her old school friends adopting the head scarf). She commented that her husband was nominally Muslim, but

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he was not observant. Flicking her hand in his direction, she said ‘But look at him. He is old, you can’t teach him new tricks. But some of the husbands were very serious about their conversion and their responsibilities for religious education of their children. There are also a number of Christian women in the group, and they are active in church communities. Similarities in Experience with Filipino-Australian Families Parenting issues were raised in a number of the interviews., but it was reported as a matter between the parents, that is, one was more strict than the other, but this did not accord with cultural difference: sometimes it is the father who is said to be more ‘strict’ and sometimes the Indonesian mother. Another similarity was the articulation by several of the Indonesian women that they chose to or preferred to marry a Western husband as the marriage allowed them more autonomy and self-expression than they would have had they been married to an Indonesian. Several of the women were widowed or divorced before their marriage to an Australian, or older than the average marriage age in Indonesia. Immigration Issues Several couples reported negative experiences with Australian immigration in trying to organise visas, including a lost application: the civil servant husband said his professional knowledge helped him to retrieve it. In another case, the wife decided to take Australian citizenship, a big decision as it meant relinquishing her Indonesian citizenship, because of the problems she continually faced with immigration regimes when she travelled. Racism and Stereotypes There were some instances where they experienced the negative stereotype of ‘Asian brides’, such as a woman who feared deportation during the anti-Muslim campaigns in the early 200s, fears founded in the experience of immigration officials acting as if they assumed she was a prostitute. A neighbour asked a husband if he had a ‘mail-order bride’. In the case of Indonesian women, the haunting stereotype is the Bali holiday romance, and we met a few young couples who had met in this way, another kind of encounter in the globalised world (Dragojlòvic 2016). Some of the

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husbands were concerned about negative reactions from their families to their choice to marry an Indonesian woman. Some of the children had experienced racism, most commonly by way of comments on skin colour but no family reported racism as a major issue. Some commented that the school community had a multicultural student body. But many of the children interviewed express themselves as proud of their Indonesian culture, and this is nurtured in the AIFA social sphere. Many of the children are frequent travellers to Indonesia where they can reinforce their cultural attachments,

Conclusion The courting and married couples cannot be understood within a narrow stereotype where desire is reduced to the axes of the global economy (rich ugly men, poor beautiful women). They are seeking to form families and the work of family formation is done sincerely and through engaging difference. We tend to ‘naturalise’ family and personal life, as part of the taken-forgranted of everyday life. Partners bring unreflected assumptions to the marriage, as well as consciously held assumptions about the Other. Indeed some consciously held assumptions about difference may be part of what makes the idea of marrying a partner perceived as Other attractive—especially in those cases where the partner has been consciously sought out, e.g. by going to an internet dating site. For others, while this may not have been an incentive to consciously seek out a partner who is ‘Other’, the differentness (perceived or experienced) may have been part of what attracted them to the individual they have partnered with. In this increasingly mobile and interconnected world, the choice of a foreign spouse may often be a by-product of other life choices, for example, that many of the men in Canberra who have met Indonesian (and other non-Australian brides) met them while pursuing careers that took them overseas; or partners may meet in the course of international travel. The internet makes maintaining such connections possible. We did not find specific characteristics of the couples who had met/ courted on the internet that differentiated them substantially from the couples of the ‘snail mail’ generation. However, the ability to engage in online communities, such as KASAL (reported in Chap. 3) do make the networks and conversations more profound. Far from being a medium of obfuscation, many couples find the internet provides ways to express

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authentic selves and discover authentic selves of others. Far from being an inferior form of courtship, they find it has positive benefits. The families formed share many characteristics with all Australian families, whose daily functioning are shaped by factors relating to the gender order, such as the sex-segmented work force; the welfare system; and community expectations, all of which impact on choices households make. The s similarities extend to rates of marital breakdown. Despite media focus on violence and family breakdown, analysis of divorce statistics by Chuah et al. (1987) demonstrate that in this aspect also, Filipina-Australian marriages fit the Australian norm. The main ways that differences are manifest take shape in the multicultural landscape of modern Australia.

Notes 1. This concords with Bernard’s (1972) conclusion, that high divorce rates in the USA are evidence of the importance of marriage, not its decline. This is discussed in Chap. 1. 2. During the debate leading up to a 2017 plebiscite on legalizing same-sex unions in Australia, some of the most fervent public voices of support were parents of gay and lesbian adults that their homosexual children should have the same right to stand with in their partners and have the relationship publicly acknowledged, as their heterosexual children. I saw media interviews with parents in Ireland expressing the same views in support of legalizing same-sex unions in their country. This underscores the importance of marital union and social adulthood.

Works Cited ABC. 1984. Mail-Order Bride. https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/ mail-­order-­bride Adams, Suzi, and Michael Janover. 2009. Introduction: Theorising the intercultural. Journal of Intercultural Studies 30 (3): 227–331. https://doi. org/10.1080/07256860903003542. Alston, Margaret. 1995. Women and their work on Australian farms. Rural Sociology 60 (3): 521–532. Retrieved from https://virtual.anu.edu.au/ login/?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-­j ournals/women-­their-­ work-­on-­australian-­farms/docview/1290885090/se-­2. Bagus, Mary Ida. 1997. Sows on heat and disoriented boars - straight sex from Bali to Melbourne. Melbourne Journal of Politics, 24: 69. Gale Academic

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OneFile. link.gale.com/apps/doc/A54495222/AONE?u=anon~956253cd& sid=googleScholar&xid=b75cfd0a. Accessed 8 July 2023. Bonifacio, Glenda Lynne, and Anne Tibe. 2009. Activism from the margins: Filipino marriage migrants in Australia. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 30 (1): 142–168. Bulloch, Hannah, and Michael Fabinyi. 2009. Transnational relationships, transforming selves: Filipinas seeking husbands abroad. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 10(2): 129–142. https://www.eastasiaforum.org/tag/ cross-­border-­marriage/. Chu, Tuen Yi, and Brenda Yeo. 2021. Marriage migration, family and citizenship in Asia. Citizenship Studies 25 (7): 879–897. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13621025.2021.1968680. Chuah, Fred, et al. 1987. Does Australia have a Filipina brides problem? Australian Journal of Social Issues 22 (4): 573–583. https://doi. org/10.1002/j.1839-­4655.1987.tb00844.x. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a global stage: Penpals, virtual ethnography and “mail order”marriages. Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon: Univrsity of California Press. Curthoys, Ann. 1988. For and against feminism. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Dragojlòvic, Ana. 2016. Beyond Bali: Subaltern citizens and post-colonial intimacy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Docker, John, and Gerhard Fischer, eds. 2000. Race, colour and identity in Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: UNSW Press. Frost, Nicola. 2008. “Strange people but they sure can cook”: An Indonesian women’s groups in Sydney. Food, Culture & Society 11 (2): 173–189. https:// doi.org/10.2752/175174408X317552. Ganguly, K. 2001. States of exception: Everyday life and postcolonial identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi. org/10.5749/j.ctttsscc. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. London and New York: Routledge. Holloway, Sarah L., and Gill Valentine. 2003. Cyberkids: Children in the information age. London: Routledge Farmer. Jackson, Richard T. 1993. Recent migration to Australia from The Philippines. In Discovering Australasia: Essays on Philippine–Australian relations, ed. Reynaldo C.  Ileto and Rodney Sullivan, 136–148. Townsville: Department of History and Politics, James Cook University. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. London: Penguin Books.

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Penny, Janet, and Siew-Ean Khoo. 1996. Intermarriage study of migration an integration. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Roces, Mina. 1996. Filipino women in Central Queensland: Gender, migration and support services. Northern Radius 3 (3): 13–15. Robinson, Kathryn. 1982. Filipino brides: Slaves or marriage partners? - A comment. Australian Journal of Social Issues 17 (1): 166–170. https://doi. org/10.1002/j.1839-­4655.1982.tb00731.x. ———. 1996. Of mail–order brides and ‘boys own’ tales. Feminist Review 52 (1): 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.1996.7. ———. 1998. Love and sex in an Indonesian mining town. In Gender and power in affluent Asia, ed. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens, 63–86. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2022. Indonesian Muslims living in Australi. How did the Bali bomb impact the? New Mandala 13 October https://www.newmandala.org/ indonesian-muslims-living-in-australia-how-did-the-bali-bomb-impactthem/ Saroca, Cleonicki. 2006. Filipino women, migration and violence in Australia: Loved reality and media image. Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies 21 (1): 75–110. Uhlmann, Allon J. 2006. Family, gender and kinship in Australia: The social and cultural logic of practice and subjectivity. London: Routledge. Winarnita, Monika S. 2016. Dancing the feminine: Gender and identity performance by Indonesian migrant women. Brighton, Chicago and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press. Winarnita, Monika, and Danau Tanu. 2015. The missing link: Cultural performance and intercultural hyphenated identities of Australian-Indonesian youth. In Linking people. Connections and encounters between Australians and Indonesians, ed. Antje Missbach and Jemma Purdey. Berlin: regiospectra Verlag. Yanagisako, Sylvia. 1992. Transforming the past: Tradition and kinship among Japanese Americans. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

 Conclusion: Global Intimacy, Marriage and Mediated Courtship

Public and academic discussion of ‘mail order brides’ in Australia has featured media reports of violence and spectacular marriage failures; and more recently, exposés of the commercial ‘match making’ sites on the internet. Analysis of online sites advertising for transnational partners and exposing the terrible experiences of some marriage migrants at the hands of their husbands do not begin to touch the common experiences of transnational, cross-cultural marriage partners and the families they create. Negative framing of Asian bride migration has been amplified by activist advocates for the minority who do become victims, and they have succeeded in achieving protections for women in government policies. This book adds a new dimension to discussion of ‘mail order brides’ through the study of established families, and couples engaged in correspondence courtship by way of the internet. It is unique in focussing on family life, on  gendered and inter-generational relations in transnational, transcultural families. This book has investigated online courtship and how protagonists compare it with other ways of partnering. The experiences of families formed through correspondence courtship follow many patterns of Australian families in general. The shift in government policy from assimilation to multiculturalism has been important in framing the social context in which these families operate and their freedom to express themselves as intercultural families.

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The lives and experience of established transnational families in multicultural Australia, and that of people engaged in online courtship at the time of the study have been explored. Contrary to stereotypes, we found a common pattern of companionate marriages and commitment to addressing challenges faced by their transcultural families  situated in Australia’s ever expanding multicultural society. A theme in this book, however, has been the enduring negative stereotypes that haunt transnational, transcultural couples. Media reports negatively characterise women from poorer countries of the global South who advertise for prospective spouses from wealthier countries of the global North, promoting moral outrage against the stereotyped ‘mail-order brides’—a demeaning and cruel stereotype which no doubt fed some of the attitudes of the men in the highly publicised cases men who murdered their ‘mail-order’ spouses. Where have these stereotypes come from and what is their power? Australia is an immigrant nation and mediated or brokered bride migration has been part of its history since colonisation. From the early convict settlement which had an overwhelming preponderance of men, through successive waves and periods of immigration which selectively recruited single men to perform economically necessary work for the development of the ‘empty continent’, there have been regular waves of demographic correction, of selective importation of women to become brides. The public outrage and debate can be understood through the history of Australia as a white settler immigrant nation. The sexualised stereotype of the mailorder bride resonated with the stereotype of women as ‘Damned Whores’ from the early years of settlement. The other aspect of the stereotype, women as guardians of the domestic sphere and morality, drew on threads concerning gender relations from a later period in which women were encouraged to emigrate to the colony, as guardians of a strong domestic sphere, a civilising influence (‘God’s Police’). It is no historical accident that the 1980s iteration of brokered spousal migration, the so-called mail-order brides, predominantly settled in industrial locations where groups of single migrant men lived in sex-imbalanced communities. These migrant workers had little chance of meeting a spouse, achieving the social adulthood and personal satisfaction that Australian culture locates in the nuclear family and household. Personal life and intimacy, courtship and marriages are taking on international dimensions in the interconnected world of the ‘global ecumene’. Cheap international travel and the growth of the internet have allowed for

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expanded choices and possibilities in romance and marriage. Adventurous match seekers have pioneered exploring intimacy in mediated environments, extending the longstanding traditions of epistolary romance, the love letter. This book explores such ‘adventures in identity’ through correspondence marriages but also a set of marriages contracted between Australians and Indonesians, who meet in the social spaces of this global ecumene. While many Australians have embraced the opportunities for expanded social interactions and the rapid pace of change in the late twentieth century, others are left feeling unsettled, and worried. In Australia this period of change was characterised by shifts in the composition of immigrants, as Asianmigration flows grew with the dismantling of the White Australia policy. At the same time, the gender order was undergoing shifts that undermined male privilege as society and government accommodated to the personal politics of the women’s movement. These changes all have contributed to the development of the stereotypes. Negative characterisations of transnational correspondence courtship arise based on assumptions about what constitutes authentic courtship and marriage, ahistorical assumptions about marriage traditions that also underpinned recent arguments against legalisation of same-sex marriage. Other critics have accepted the stereotype of the compliant Asian bride as a threat to the gains the feminist movement is making in terms of women’s role in the family, in the workforce, and rights in divorce. The central role of the family and its protection by the government is accepted as a right of social citizenship, and this has been reflected in Australia’ immigration regime which, especially since the 1950s, has allowed for family reunion as a significant category, in an immigration regime that otherwise has been geared to economic development. Spousal and fiancée visas have never been ‘capped’ as the right to choose a spouse is a right of social citizenship. However, the family reunion quota for the immigration intake has been gradually reduced over time and this has impacted on waiting times for visas. Intimate relationships and social institutions that we recognise as ‘marriage’ change over time and vary between cultures. The social networks of the global ecumene contribute to possibilities for transnational, cross-­ cultural marriages and families. Far from being a threat to ‘the Australian way of life’, the intercultural families create links that enhance the growth of multiculturalism as a key aspect of the contemporary ‘Australian way of life’.

Appendix: Methodology

The ethnographic research reported in this volume was conducted in Australia, the Philippines and online, between 2004 and 2007. The main technique was participant observation in online and offline communities. Long-form interviews with guiding questions invited research participants to narrate their experiences. It was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP 0451491 Interpersonal and Family Relations in Transcultural/Transnational Marriages, with Kathryn Robinson as CI. Rural locations or small cities were deliberately chosen as research sites. The research that has been conducted on intercultural marriages in Australia has tended to be in cities whereas scholarly analysis of the 1985 Australian census showed that Filipinas married to Australians were likely to be in rural areas or small rural cities such as the industrial town of Mt Isa. An important research site was an online community of self-described ‘Fil-West’ couples (now defunct) to which we gave the pseudonym KASAL.

Ethics and Confidentiality The research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Australian National University. All interviewees were provided with information sheets including a path for complaints, and all signed consent

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forms. This process included our guaranteeing them confidentiality. Hence, all research subjects have been anonymised, in some cases by assigning pseudonyms. The pseudonym (KASAL) for the website which was also a research space also been protects the anonymity of the people engaged via that site.

Brief Description of Research Sites Fieldwork including interviews with Filipina-Australian couples was conducted in five field sites by the Research Associate in the project, Dr Cleonicki Saroca. In Canberra, Research Assistant Dr Monika Winarnita interviewed the members of the Indonesian Australian Families Association, and Dr Fiona Crockford researched historical materials ant the National Library of Australia. The fieldwork focused on couples who had met through pen-pal agencies, online and ‘face to face’ in the course of their work and leisure. The observations of the development of the intercultural space of family life rely on analysis of self-narratives collected in a process of ethnographic research where the interviewers lived in the community and participated in family and community events. In terms of developing an understanding of family life, in nine families two or more children (teenagers) were also interviewed. Field work was conducted on, one cyber site, and with twelve couples whose courtship at the time of the study was via the internet. The couples who met by way of the internet tended to be relatively new couples in an ‘aspirational’ phase of their relationships whereas in the ethnographic study of Asian Australian families, there was a range of new and old relationships. Field sites: 2004 Riverland South Australia: 7 couples: 4 children from 3 families. Hunter Valley NSW: 4 couples, 3 children from 2 of the families and 3 individual women. 2005 Darwin N.T.: 4 couples, 5 children in 3 families Mackay, Central Queensland: 4 families including 4 children; 7 individuals

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Canberra: 10 Indonesian-Australian families. ‘KASAL’ website Philippines-Australian internet couples, interviewed online, in the Philippines and in Australia: 10 couples ‘North-North’ internet couples interviewed online and in Australia: 11couples and one individual (female) In addition, there were interviews with immigration officials and service providers in the Philippines: and community activists and community service providers in South Australia and NSW.

Index1

A Abuse, 13, 30, 34, 47–48 Anderson, Benedict, 61 Asian migration, 14, 40–41, 117 Asian women, 1–7, 9, 22, 43, 64, 80, 85, 91, 93 Australia and Asia, 14 Australia Indonesia Families Association (AIFA), 107, 110 Authenticity, 63, 68–72 Autonomy, 2, 18, 39, 89, 98–99, 109 B Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, 63, 80 Bernard, Jessie, 8, 11, 12, 111n1 Birrell, Bob, 44–46 Bride migration, 28, 33–34, 115, 116

C Canberra, 85, 86, 107, 108, 110 Castells, Manuel, 14 Cayford, Emma, 34 Changing gender roles, 7, 98 Communication, 4, 16, 17, 22, 37, 51, 58–60, 62, 63, 65–73, 78–80, 84, 100–101 Community, 3, 13, 22, 40, 43, 48, 59–64, 66, 76, 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93, 99, 101–103, 105, 107–111, 116, 119–121 Connell, R. W., 10, 60 Constable, Nicole, 13, 20, 60–62, 65, 74, 75, 84, 96, 101 Convict transportation, 28–31, 33, 34, 50 Cooke, Hannah, 32

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Correspondence courtship, 1–3, 6, 9, 12, 17, 18, 20, 28, 42, 58, 88, 97, 115, 117 Courtship, 2, 3, 5–7, 17, 18, 21–22, 28, 58, 59, 62–65, 68, 80, 84, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95–97, 100, 101, 108, 111, 115–121 Cross-cultural marriages, 1–22, 47, 62, 84, 115, 117 Cultural differences, 13, 18, 41, 76–78, 104, 109 D ‘Damned Whores’ stereotype, 5, 34, 38, 43, 51, 51n1, 116 Dance, 91, 99, 105, 107 Davidson, Robin, 105 E Economic citizenship, 75 Economic independence, 92 Education, 45, 49, 50, 92, 94–96, 106, 109 Emoticons, 62, 68, 71, 78 Engels, Friedrich, 10 F Family caring responsibilities, 48, 106 Family life, 11, 18, 84, 86, 97–98, 104, 115, 120 Family reunion, 28, 39, 40, 43–46, 50, 103, 106, 117 Family values, 5, 7–9, 14, 21, 93 Female convicts, 30–33 Female immigrants, 34 Femininity, 17, 61, 76, 80, 89 Feminism, 10, 11, 22

Filipinas, 2, 4, 5, 9, 16, 18–20, 22, 42, 43, 47–49, 51, 58, 61, 65–68, 70–74, 76–78, 84, 86–93, 95, 98–102, 105, 106, 119 Filipino-Australian families, 22, 85, 86, 90, 109 Food, 30, 33, 99, 100, 104, 105, 107 Frontier Wars, 34 G Gender relations, 3, 9, 10, 12, 13, 28, 51n1, 57–61, 79, 80, 86, 98, 116 Gender roles, 7, 8, 17, 84, 85, 91–92, 98 Gershon, Ilana, 62, 76 Giddens, Anthony, 11–13, 18, 79, 97 Global inequality, 17, 74 Goffman, Erving, 16, 71, 73, 100 Goody, Jack, 10 Gray, Thomas, 34 Greencard, 75–76 H Hamilton, Roberta, 12 Hanson, Pauline, 21, 41, 45 hooks, bell, 15 Household, 10, 11, 15, 19, 22, 23n3, 30, 32, 50, 74, 84, 85, 89, 91–94, 98–100, 102, 104, 108, 111, 116 Hughes, Robert, 29–33 Huntington, Samuel, 19, 23n4, 80 I Immigration policy, 43, 46, 48, 51 Immigration regimes, 88, 106–107, 109, 117 Indigenous people, 33, 34

 INDEX 

Indonesian-Australian families, 22, 84–86, 107–110 Indonesian women, 91, 98, 100, 108, 109 Intercultural marriages, 74, 90, 92, 99, 119 Internet, 2, 3, 6, 9, 17, 20, 22, 28, 46, 51, 57–65, 67, 68, 73, 76, 79, 80, 81n3, 93–95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 110, 115, 116, 120 Interviews, 16, 18, 59, 62, 69, 71, 73, 76, 84–86, 93, 97–99, 101, 102, 106, 109, 111n2, 119, 121 Intimacy, 3, 8–12, 57–64, 67, 68, 74–76, 79, 80, 115–121 Islam, 108 K KASAL website, 61, 120, 121 Kinship, 62, 76, 93, 101, 102, 104 L Labour migrants, 38 M Mail order brides, 2, 4–6, 9, 14, 16, 21, 28, 41–51, 58, 61, 109, 115, 116 Marriage, 1–22, 28, 30–36, 38–40, 42–51, 58–62, 66–68, 70, 74–76, 79–80, 81n3, 84–88, 90–101, 103, 105–111, 111n1, 115–117, 119 Marriage migration, 3, 4, 21, 22, 28, 46, 47 Marx, Karl, 10

125

Masculinity, 5, 17, 23n4, 60, 61, 76, 78, 80, 89, 91 Matchmaking, 59, 65, 87, 91–93, 96, 101 Mediated marriage, 2, 3, 6–7, 22, 43, 84 Migration, 2, 4, 14, 19, 22, 28–51, 107, 115–117 Millett, Kate, 10 Multiculturalism, 14, 40, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52n6, 99–100, 104, 115, 117 Muslims, 43, 108 N Nader, Laura, 5, 15 Newcastle, 86, 89, 98, 103 New South Wales colony, 28 Non-British migration, 37 Non-white migration, 41 O One Nation Party, 21, 45 Online dating, 21, 61, 65, 72 P Parenthood, 12, 50, 75, 76, 79 Parenting, 8, 9, 17, 84, 89, 97, 104, 109 Pateman, Carol, 13 Patriarchy, 10, 13, 14, 20 Prior, William, 32 Proxy marriage, 39–40 R Racism, 22, 105, 109–110 Refugees, 14, 22n1, 39, 41, 43, 48

126 

INDEX

Religion, 14, 105, 108–109 Roces, Mina, 2, 5, 28, 47, 48, 88, 91, 92, 99, 101 Romance, 17, 59, 63, 64, 67, 74, 75, 78, 79, 109, 117 Romantic love, 8–13, 16, 23n3, 66 Rushen, Elizabeth A., 33–36 Russian women, 20, 21 S Said, Edward, 15 Same-sex marriage, 8, 12, 13, 117 Saroca, Cleonicki, 18, 47, 48, 59, 62, 80–81n1, 85, 93, 120 Second-wave feminism, 10, 11, 22 Settler colony, 4, 6, 37 Skilled migration, 45, 49, 51, 106 Social citizenship, 39, 43, 44, 50, 75, 88, 106, 117 Social media, 3, 6, 62, 79, 104, 108 Social networks, 76, 102, 117 Stereotypes, 1–7, 9, 13–22, 31, 33, 34, 38, 43, 47, 51, 51n1, 58, 61, 74, 75, 80, 84–88, 90, 91, 93–96, 98, 100–101, 105, 109–110, 116, 117 Stigmatisation, 16

Stone, Allucquère Roseanne, 10, 60 Summers, Anne, 5, 29–34, 38 T Tanu, Danau, 105 ‘Third Culture’ children, 22, 99, 103–107 Transnational marriage, 3, 9, 28, 60, 61, 90, 97 U Uhlmann, Allon J., 84, 86, 89, 91, 97, 98, 102–104 V Violence, 3, 11, 13, 18, 47, 48, 111, 115 W Welfare, 36, 43–46, 48–51, 96, 103, 106, 111 White Australia Policy, 14, 38, 39, 51, 117 White settler colonies, 4, 6, 28–37 Winarnita, Monika, 74, 85, 91, 98, 100, 105, 107, 120