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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.