The 'non-compliants', 'unwanteds' and 'hard-core' problems: refugee and migrant single mothers as assimilation 'failures' in post-WWII Australia

 

During Australia’s post-WWII migration boom (1948-1970) the associated assimilation project was deeply invested ‘in marriage, in children and in ... sentiments about domesticity [that] shaped ideas about what it was to be a citizen.’[1] Within a vast nation-wide system of government hostels for refugees and immigrants, thousands of women and children waited for husbands and fathers to return from work camps in distant parts of Australia with money to pay their hostel rent debts and move into an independent life. But for single mothers, despite pressure to relinquish children, enter employment and alternative accommodation, hostels often became a permanent home where their ongoing presence was unwelcome. These women are the focus of our paper.

Part of a larger project historicising distinctly gendered approaches to accelerating refugee and migrant assimilation within government hostels, we draw on extensive Department of Immigration archives to analyse official representations of single mothers. Reading these representations against the grain and alongside migrant women’s autobiographical accounts, we also seek to identify the dilemmas these mothers faced within the system, their coping strategies and forms of resistance. We argue both that government agencies viewed those single mothers most resistant to moving on as ‘hard core’ problems, the system’s economic and assimilation failures; and that the women themselves adopted strategies of solidarity, of compromise and of resistance to separation from each other and from their children. 

---

[1] Murphy, J., Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000.