‘Bananas, Bastards and Victims’?  Hybrid reflections on cultural belonging in intercountry adoptee narratives

Kim Gray and Ellen Jordan

Research program: Mobility and Exclusion

The highly contested domain of intercountry adoption emerged in Australia at the end of the Vietnam War with the 1975 airlift of nearly three hundred orphans known as Operation Babylift. In the contemporary context, adoptees symbolise the fragility, chaos and confusion associated with postcolonial identity construction. They are also exposed to numerous, complex and often contradictory discourses about what it may mean to be separated from birth family and ‘birth culture’, and to be racially different living in multicultural Australia. This PhD study considers the hybrid lives of a group of adolescent and adult intercountry adoptees - born in Vietnam, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Malaysia - and their families living in Australia in the last three decades of the twentieth century (and the first years of the twenty-first).