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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Japanese-Indigenous Australian mixed descendants in Broome utilize memories of food cooked by their Japanese first-generation ancestors to support the narrative of being the product of mutual exchange relationships between Japanese migrants and local Indigenous Australians.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how food cooked by Japanese first-generation migrants to Australia is remembered and re-interpreted by their Japanese-Indigenous Australian descendants in Broome, Western Australia. From the 1880s to the 1960s Japanese migrants flowed into Broome to work in pearl-shelling and related businesses. Despite hurdles like the White Australia and anti-miscegenation policies, and internment and deportation during and after World War 2, some of them, mostly men, stayed and intermarried with local Indigenous people, resulting in mixed-heritage descendants who now live ethnically dispersed, seemingly ‘integrated’ into the multicultural society of present-day Broome. These descendants often brought up their Japanese forebears’ home-cooked food in conversation. Drawing on David Sutton’s argument that preparing and giving food are exchange processes, this paper investigates how food-related memories are utilized in this context. In particular, it highlights the utility of food-related memory in articulating a Japanese heritage in the absence of strong Japanese cultural traits reinforced by a cohesive ethnic community. Broome’s mixed-heritage descendants also use food-related memory to promote themselves as the legitimate product of mutual exchange relationships between Japanese migrants and Indigenous Australians, created through the pearl-shelling history of their hometown.