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Accepted Paper:

Making their Home in Australia: St Joseph's Anglo-Indian Rest Home  
Robyn Andrews (Massey University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the ways that one of Melbourne’s migrant groups, the Anglo-Indians, has, through the establishment of a rest home for their elderly, drawn on local opportunities to claim space of their own in Australia. Comparisons are made with Homes in Calcutta which are becoming AI bastions.

Paper long abstract:

St Joseph's Anglo-Indian rest home in Melbourne, Australia, is home to a group of elderly Anglo-Indians. This community has rapidly increased its migration out of India since 1947, the year of Indian Independence from Britain. In 1995 the Melbourne Anglo-Indian Association, displaying considerable foresight and initiative, built a rest home to care for their increasing elderly population of Anglo-Indians. To do this they drew on local funding opportunities offered by the Hawke-led government. To this date it is the only Anglo-Indian Home out of India and represents for residents and others in the community, a pocket of 'Anglo-India'. I describe the ways in which the founders seek to simulate the lives these elderly Anglo-Indians would have had if they had remained in (an unchanged) India, as well as providing care in other ways. In addition I draw on research of three Anglo-Indian Homes in Kolkata (formally known as Calcutta), India. Aspects of the Calcutta Homes appear bordered and bastion like, I suggest, because of the increasingly Hindu setting in conjunction with the decline in the population of Anglo-Indians. In both situations I examine the claims to ownership of space legally and symbolically. I also make comment on notions of placement and displacement, appropriation, mobility and transnational networks (including the electronic).

Panel P32
Rediscovering the local: migrant claims and counter-claims of ownership
  Session 1